part0021

THE FIRST TIME THAT WE LEARN HOW TO DREAM, there are many things that we don’t like, that we are against, but we just accept the dream as it is. Then, for whatever reason, we become aware that we don’t like the way we are living our lives; we become aware of what we are dreaming, and we don’t want that dream. Now we try to use the attention a second time to change our dream, to create a second dream. This is what the Toltec call the dream of the second attention , or the dream of the warriors , because now we declare a war against all the lies in our knowledge.

In the dream of the second attention, we begin to doubt: “Maybe everything I learned is not the truth.” We begin to challenge what we believe; we start to question all the opinions that we learned. We know there is something in our head that makes us do many things that perhaps we don’t want to do — something that has complete control of our mind — and we don’t like it. And because we don’t like it, at a certain point we begin to rebel.

In that rebellion, we try to recover our authenticity, what I call the integrit y of the self, or the totality of what we are. In the dream of the first attention, the authentic self has no chance; it’s a complete victim. We don’t rebel; we don’t even try. But now we no longer want to be the victim, and we try to change our world. We try to recover our personal freedom — the freedom to be who we really are, the freedom to do what we really want to do. The world of the warriors is the world of trying. We try to change the world that we don’t like, and we keep trying, and trying, and trying, and the war looks endless.

In the dream of the warriors, we are in a war, but that war is not against other people. It has nothing to do with the outside dream. The whole thing is happening inside our mind. It’s a war against the part of our mind that makes all the choices that guide us into our personal hell. It’s a war between the authentic self and what we call the tyrant , the big judge , the book of law , the belief system . It’s a war between ideas, between opinions, between beliefs. I also call it the war of the gods because all these ideas fight for dominion of the human mind. And just like the gods of antiquity, they claim a human sacrifice.

Yes, the human sacrifice we offer to the gods is still happening, even if we claim that we don’t believe in human sacrifice anymore. Of course, we change the names of the gods; we change the meaning of all those symbols that we call god . Perhaps we no longer believe in Apollo, we no longer believe in Zeus, we no longer believe in Osiris; but we believe in justice, we believe in liberty, we believe in democracy. These are the names of the new gods. We give our power to these symbols, we take them to the realm of the gods, and we sacrifice our lives in the name of these gods.

Human sacrifice is happening all the time, all around the world, and we can see the result: We see violence, we see crime, we see jails full of people, we see war, we see the dream of hell in humanity because we believe in so many superstitions and distortions in our knowledge. Humans create wars, and we send our young to be sacrificed in those wars. Many times they don’t even know what they are fighting for.

We see a war of gangs in any large city. Young people sacrifice themselves and kill one another in the name of pride, in the name of profit, in the name of whatever god they believe in. They fight for their pride, they fight for control of a piece of land, they fight for a symbol that’s in their heads and on their jackets, and they sacrifice themselves. From the smallest barrio to the largest nations around the planet, we see groups of people fighting and defending their gods for something that doesn’t exist. The war is raging inside their heads, but the problem is that they send the war outside of themselves and kill one another.

Perhaps we no longer believe in human sacrifice, but right now there are people who say, “I will be the one who sacrifices. Give me a gun, and I will kill as many people as I can before they kill me.” And this is not a judgment; it’s just the way it is. I will not say that human sacrifice is wrong. It just exists, and we cannot deny that it exists because we see it every day in many different cultures around the world. We see it, and we also participate in it. If someone makes a mistake and is caught breaking a rule, what do we do? Let’s crucify him, let’s judge him, let’s gossip about him. That’s another form of human sacrifice. Yes, there are rules, and maybe it’s the biggest sin to go against those rules, and maybe some of those rules are completely unnatural. But we create the rules, we agree to live by those rules, and we will follow those rules until we no longer need them, and right now we need them.

Humans believe in so many lies that even the smallest thing becomes a big demon that makes us suffer. Usually it’s just a judgment, and mainly it’s a self-judgment: “Poor me. Look what happened to me when I was nine years old. Look what happened to me last night!” Well, whatever happened in your past is not truth anymore. It could be the most horrible thing, but right now it’s not truth, because right now is the only truth you live in. Whatever happened in your past is in the virtual reality, and whatever happened to your body was healed long ago, but the mind can make you suffer and live in shame for years.

Humans carry our past, our history, around with us, and it’s just like we’re carrying a heavy corpse. For some it’s not that heavy, but for the majority of people that corpse is very heavy. And it’s not just heavy; it smells very bad. What many of us do is keep our corpse to share with the ones we love. With the powerful memory we have, we bring it to life in the present moment and relive our experiences again, and again, and again. Every time we remember those experiences, we punish ourselves and everybody else again, and again, and again.

Humans are the only animals on earth who punish themselves a thousand times or more for the same mistake, and who punish everybody else a thousand times or more for the same mistake. How can we talk about injustice in the rest of the world when there is no justice in the world inside our own head? The entire universe is ruled by justice, but by true justice, not by the distortion of justice that we artists have created. True justice is facing what I call action-reaction . We live in a world of consequences; for every action there’s a reaction. True justice is to pay one time for every mistake we make. And how many times do we pay for every mistake? Obviously, this is not justice.

Let’s say that you’re living with guilt and shame for a mistake that you made ten years ago. The excuse for your suffering is “I made a terrible mistake,” and you think you’re still suffering for something that happened ten years ago, but the truth is that you’re suffering from something that happened ten seconds ago. You judged yourself again for the same mistake, and of course the big judge says, “You need to be punished.” It’s simple action-reaction. The action is self-judgment; the reaction is self-punishment in the form of guilt and shame. All your life you repeat the same action, hoping to have a different reaction, and it never happens. The only way to change your life is to change the action, and then the reaction will change.

Can you see how you, knowledge, are hurting you, the human? You’re thinking and judging with all those symbols that you learned. You’re creating a story that’s abusing the human. Whenever the human is abused, the normal reaction is anger, hate, jealousy, or any of the emotions that make us suffer. Our nervous system is a factory of emotions, and the emotions we experience depend on what we perceive. Well, we perceive our own judgments, our own belief system, our own voice of knowledge. And with the judge, the victim, and the belief system ruling our virtual world, the emotions we generate are fear, anger, jealousy, guilt, shame. What else can we expect to create? Love? Of course not, though sometimes we do.

The word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of that force, the expression of the word, which is your own life. The way to measure the impeccability of your word is by your emotional reaction. Are you happy or are you suffering? If you’re enjoying your dream or suffering your dream, it’s because you’re creating it that way. Yes, your parents, your religion, the schools, the government, the entire society helped you to create your dream, and it’s true that you never had a choice. But now you have a choice. You can create heaven, or you can create hell. Remember, both are states of mind that exist within you.

Do you like to be happy? Then be happy and enjoy your happiness. Do you like to suffer? Great; then why not enjoy your suffering? If you choose to create hell, good for you. Cry, have pain, make a masterpiece of art with your pain. But if you have awareness, there is no way you are going to choose hell; you are going to choose heaven. And the way to choose heaven is by being impeccable with your word.

If you’re impeccable with your word, how can you judge yourself? How can you blame yourself? How can you carry guilt or shame? When you are not creating all those emotions, you feel wonderful! Now you smile again, and it’s completely authentic. You don’t have to pretend to be a certain way. You don’t try to be what you are not. Whatever you are is what you will be in that moment. In that moment, you accept yourself just the way you are. You like yourself; you enjoy being with yourself. You no longer abuse yourself by using the symbols against yourself.

That’s why I have to repeat that it’s so important to be aware. The tyranny of the symbols is extremely powerful. In the dream of the second attention, the warrior tries to find out how the symbols took power over the human. The whole war of the warrior is against the symbols, against our own creation, and it’s not because we hate the symbols. The symbols are a masterful creation; they’re our art, and it’s convenient for us to use all those symbols to communicate. But when we give all our power to those symbols, we become powerless, and we need to be rescued. We need a savior because we don’t have the power to make it on our own.

Then we look outside ourselves and say, “Oh God, please save me.” But it’s not up to God or Jesus or Buddha or Moses or Muhammed or any master, shaman, or guru to save us. We can’t blame them if they don’t save us. Nobody can save us, because nobody else is responsible for whatever happens in our virtual world. The priest, the minister, the rabbi, the shaman, or the guru cannot change our world; our husband or our wife, our children, or our friends cannot change it. No one else can change our world, because that world only lives in our head.

Many people say that Jesus died for us, to save us from our sins. Well, it’s a wonderful story, but Jesus doesn’t make the choices in our lives. Instead of saving us, Jesus told us what to do. You need help? Okay, you need to follow the truth. You need to forgive. Love one another. He gave us all the tools, but we say, “No. I cannot forgive. I prefer to live with my emotional poison, with my pride, with my anger and my jealousy.” If we are fighting with the people we love, if we’re creating a lot of resistance around us, remember, we live in a world of consequences. We have to let go of that first, we have to forgive, because forgiveness is the only way to clear our emotional body of emotional poison.

All of us have emotional poison because all of us have emotional wounds. It happens. Just as it’s normal for our body to hurt when we have a cut, or when we fall and break a bone, it’s normal for the emotional body to hurt because we are alive, because we are surrounded by predators, and we are predators also. But there’s no one to blame; it’s just the way it is. If we blame, it’s our emotional poison that makes us blame. Instead of blaming, we can take responsibility for our own healing.

If you’re waiting for someone to come and save you, well, you have to save yourself. You are your own savior, but there are teachers who give you tools to help you recover awareness and win your personal war. There are artists who can show you how to create a masterpiece of heaven with your art.

Let’s say that you’re a good artist, but then a master artist comes along and says, “I like you. I want you to be my apprentice. Come; I will teach you. The first and most important tool for you to become a master artist is be impeccable with your word . It’s something so simple. You write your own story, and you don’t want to write the story against yourself. Second, don’t take anything personally . That will help you a lot; most of the drama goes away if you just agree with that. Third, don’t make assumptions . Don’t create your own hell; stop believing in superstitions and lies. And fourth, always do your best . Take action. Practice makes the master. Very simple.”

Then the moment comes when you start to see your whole creation from another point of view. You start to realize that you are the artistic creator of your life. You are the one who creates the canvas, the paint, the paintbrush, and the art. You are the one who gives meaning to every stroke on the canvas of your life. You are the one who invests all your faith in your art. And you say, “The story I’m creating is beautiful, but I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t believe my story or anybody else’s story. I can see that it’s just art.” Great. That’s the fifth agreement. Come back to common sense, to the truth, to the real you. Be skeptical, but learn to listen .

In the dream of the second attention, you need tools to win the war and change your world, and that’s what these agreements are all about. These are the tools for transforming your dream, for mastering your dream, and it’s up to you what you do with these tools. These five simple agreements have the power to plant a seed of doubt in all those limiting, fear-based agreements you made your whole life. The only chance you have to unlearn the lies in your knowledge is by use of the attention. You use the attention to put your first dream together, and you use the attention to unlearn that dream.

The Four Agreements are the tools for using your attention a second time to create your personal heaven, and the fifth agreement is the tool to win the war against the tyranny of the symbols. The Four Agreements are tools for your personal transformation, and the fifth agreement is the end of personal transformation and the beginning of giving yourself the greatest gift that you can give yourself: the gift of doubt .

We have said that it was doubt that made us fall out of Paradise. Well, coming back to Paradise is once again about doubt. Doubt is the tool we use to recover our faith, to take our power back from every lie and superstition we believe in, and return that power to ourselves. Of course, we can also use the power of doubt against ourselves by doubting ourselves, by doubting the truth. In the story of Adam and Eve, when we doubt that we are God, that doubt opens the door to another doubt, and then another, and another. When we doubt the truth, we start to believe in lies. Soon we believe in so many lies that we no longer see the truth, and we fall from the dream of heaven.

Doubt is a great creation we made for going into hell or getting out of hell. Either way, doubt opens the door to be possessed by symbols, or doubt closes the door to stop the possession. If we doubt ourselves, if we doubt the truth, the whole Tree of Knowledge — all the mythology that controlled our attention our entire lives — starts coming back to us. The voice of knowledge starts possessing us again, and we begin to feel the anger, the jealousy, the injustice that come with all the symbols, with all the assumptions, with all that thinking .

Then instead of doubting yourself, have faith in yourself. Instead of doubting the truth, doubt the lies. Be skeptical, but learn to listen . The fifth agreement opens the door to heaven, and the rest is up to you. This agreement is about being in heaven and heaven being in you. It’s about letting go of your attachment to symbols, even your own name, and merging with the infinite — to become authentic, to believe in yourself without a doubt, because even a little doubt can end the experience of heaven.

When you have faith in yourself, you follow every instinct that you were born with. You have no doubt about what you are, and you return to common sense. You have all the power of your authenticity; you trust yourself, you trust life . You trust that everything is going to be just fine, and life becomes extremely easy. The mind no longer needs to understand everything; it doesn’t need to know . You know something or you don’t know it, but you don’t have any doubt if you know or not. If you don’t know, you accept that you don’t know. You’re not going to make it up. When you are completely authentic, you speak the truth to yourself, without any doubt: “I like it; I don’t like it. I want it; I don’t want it.” You don’t have to do what you don’t like to do. You enjoy your life doing exactly what you like to do.

We make life difficult when we try to sacrifice ourselves for somebody else. Surely, you are not here to sacrifice yourself for anybody. You are not here to satisfy other people’s opinions or points of view. In the dream of the second attention , one of the first challenges is the fear of being yourself — your real self. If you have the courage to face this challenge, you find out that all the reasons you were afraid don’t even exist. Then you find out that it’s much easier to be yourself than to try to be what you are not. The whole dream of hell makes you tired because it takes energy to uphold an image, to wear a social mask. You’re tired of faking it; you’re tired of not being you . Just being authentic is the best thing you can do. When you’re authentic, you can do whatever you want to do; you can believe whatever you want to believe, and that includes believing in yourself.

How difficult can it be to have faith in yourself, to believe in you instead of believing in symbols? You can put your faith in scientific theories, in so many religions, opinions, and points of view, but this is not real faith. Faith in yourself is the real faith. Real faith is to trust yourself unconditionally, because you know what you really are, and what you really are is the truth.

Once you recover awareness of what you are, the war in your head is over. It’s obvious that you are the one who creates all the symbols. And because it’s obvious where the power of your word comes from, your word has power, and nothing can stop the power of your word. Your word becomes impeccable, and it’s impeccable because you have power over the symbols instead of the symbols having power over you. Once your word is impeccable, you base every choice of your life on the truth, and you win the war against the tyrant. The words are there, ready to be used at your command, but the words only have meaning when you use them to communicate, to have a direct connection with someone. After you stop using the words, they have no meaning again.

By the end of the dream of the second attention, the human form starts to break apart, and your reality changes once again. It changes because you no longer perceive the world through a rigid structure of beliefs. The war is over because your faith is not invested in lies. Even though lies still exist, you no longer believe . As you know, the truth just is; you don’t have to believe the truth. You don’t believe anything anymore, but you can see, and what you can see is the truth. The truth is right here; it’s unique, and it’s perfect. Maybe not the way you interpret it, maybe not the way you use the word to gossip about yourself or to gossip about other people, but once you see the truth, who cares what other people are dreaming? It’s not important what other people around you are dreaming. What’s important is your own experience — to use all the tools you have to face what you believe, to see the truth, to win your personal war.

You don’t need to compete with anybody; you don’t need to compare yourself with anybody. You just need to be what you are, to be love, but real love, not the kind of love that possesses you and makes you believe in love. Not the love that makes you become jealous and possessive of others, and puts you directly in hell with all the tortures and punishments of hell. Not the love that makes you sacrifice in the name of love, or makes you hurt yourself and hurt others in the name of love. The symbol of love has become so distorted. Real love is what you were born with. Real love is what you are.

You were born with everything you need to make it. If you face your fears today, tomorrow you will see the dream of the second attention, the world of the warriors. But just because you win against fear today, it doesn’t mean that you have won the war. No, the war isn’t over; the war has just begun. You are still judging; you still have all those issues. You think it’s done, and boom! Your tyrant is back. Oh yes, again, and again, and again. And it’s not just the tyrant in you; it’s the tyrant in everybody around you, and there are some that are worse than others. But even if you have been at war for many years, at least you can defend yourself. As a warrior, you may win the war or you may lose the war, but once you have awareness, you are no longer a victim; you are at war, and that’s where the majority of people are right now, until the war is over.

In the dream of the second attention, you begin to create your personal heaven on earth. You begin to put your faith in agreements that support life , that add to your joy, to your happiness, to your freedom. But this is just one step of your evolution. There’s much more than that. The moment is coming when you master awareness, which means you master the truth. And by the way, you also master transformation; you master love, intent, or faith, because by that time, you believe in yourself.

The result of this transformation is the creation of another reality that has the same frame as the first two dreams, but in this other reality you no longer believe what you used to believe. You no longer believe the lies that you learned; you don’t even believe the words that you learned. You have no doubt about what you experience, about what you are.

The next dream, the dream of the third attention, is not that far away. But first you have to win the war in your head, and now you have the tools to do it. Then why not do it? Take the action, but don’t try anymore. If you try, you will die trying, and I can assure you that millions of warriors have died trying. There are very few warriors who ever win the war that’s happening in the human mind, but those who win the war by using their attention a second time recreate their entire world.