The Three Questions With Don Miguel Ruiz

The Three Questions With Don Miguel Ruiz

Everything we do is connected to an agreement we have made. This is the premise proposed by Don Miguel Ruiz, best-selling author, and renowned spiritual teacher. Ruiz has spent decades guiding people to personal freedom through his profound insights regarding the nature of human reality. 

In “The Three Questions with Don Miguel Ruiz,” we get a glimpse of how we shape our own lives, consciously and unconsciously, through our interactions with others and the promises we make to them and ourselves. This discussion gives us pause to think about what we really know versus what we have learned from others.

The youngest of 13 children, Don Miguel Ruiz was born in rural Mexico to parents who practiced ancient Toltec traditions and used their healing abilities to uplift others. After graduating from medical school in Mexico City, Ruiz began practicing neurosurgery with his older brother in Tijuana. 

Not long after, however, a near-fatal car accident completely altered his life’s course, leading him to leave his career in medicine in search of a more essential truth about life. With his mother’s guidance, steeped in traditional native teachings, he soon discovered his own path to awareness that evolved into a deep understanding of the physical universe and the virtual world of the mind. 

Ruiz’s self-discovery led him to publish a number of highly successful books, including “Toltec Wisdom Series,” “The Four Agreements,” “The Mastery of Love,” “The Voice of Knowledge,” “The Four Agreements Companion Book,” “The Circle of Fire,” and “The Fifth Agreement.” The Toltec Wisdom books have sold more than 12 million copies, and have been published in 46 languages worldwide.

Don Miguel Ruiz’s message is simple yet profound: Our lives are guided and affected by information that is passed along generationally — right or wrong. But instead of simply adhering to the ideas of others, we need to “let everything we do and say be an expression of the beauty of our heart, always based on love,” and this will lead us to happiness, fulfillment, and helping others.

In Gaia’s interview with Ruiz, he tells Lisa Garr his concept of “The Four Agreements” is a challenge to everything society would have us believe. To clarify, Ruiz explains that we learn all sorts of rules and behaviors as we develop, and we are trained to please others, which prepares us to be a part of society. 

But the problem comes when we adopt beliefs that may not be true and then apply them to ourselves. According to Ruiz, we judge ourselves and others too harshly, which leads to disharmony. We must be more discerning and authentic in what we accept as true, as well as how we treat and interact with others. He advises us to, “communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.”

If you’re interested in finding greater depth to your life and purpose, as well as how to act and react from the heart, instead of through learned behaviors and rote thoughts, Ruiz’s message is a life-changer. His message is a guide for increased awareness, a happier life, avoiding problems, and living in the moment. Life is short, he says, which is why it’s time to begin living without preconceptions and harsh judgments. 

Researchers Develop Device to Influence Direction of Your Dreams

Sleep is strange; at the end of the day we fall unconscious, our bodies become paralyzed, and we hallucinate vividly, before quickly forgetting what was just experienced. But now researchers at MIT are engineering an interface to influence this bizarre state, believing it may hold the key to our creative genius.

There is a period between wakefulness and that deep, restorative slumber, known as hypnogogia. These fleeting moments have long been considered a place where creative brilliance can be accessed.

Innovators including Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and Salvador Dali all intentionally tapped into this state for inspiration, attributing much of their inventions and masterpieces to it.

Holding a pair of steel balls as they fell asleep, they would drift into the hypnagogic state for a few seconds, before their muscles would relax, the balls would fall to the floor, and they would be jolted back awake. This brief entry into the dream state would allow them to remember the bizarre hallucinations and ingenious thoughts floating in the creative ether.

This was part and parcel to Dali’s famous paranoiac-critical method that produced his most trippy and iconic work. But instead of steel balls, Dali used a metal key and an upside-down plate for it to land on, producing a loud clang.

Dali found that not only did these micro-naps spark creativity, but they also provided a refreshed mental state, without the grogginess of a longer rest.

Taking note from these innovators, MIT researchers are developing a modernized version of the steel ball technique through a worn computer interface called Dormio. But instead of waking them, the interface influences sleepers in hypnagogia, attempting to control the direction of their semi-coherent state, and they’ve had some preliminary success.

 

dormio

Dormio interface via media.mit.edu

 

Using a glove fitted with a series of wires and biosensors, the interface tracks users’ slow descent into sleep, measuring the subtle muscle relaxations of the hand. From there, an app provides an audio cue that prevents users from going into a deeper sleep, suspending them in the hypnagogic state with a prompted word or concept to focus on.

Thus far, the words ‘fork’ and ‘rabbit’ have been used successfully as a theme for “dream content.” Users are then asked questions to capture ideas floating through their mind, without fully waking them, before they are then allowed to fall asleep.

We spend close to a third of our lives sleeping, where our minds exist in creative, fantastic hallucinatory states. Researchers on the team want to figure out how to tap into that world and potentially take advantage of it.

The unconscious mind has been the subject of study by scientists for centuries, yet we still know so little about it. It’s also been proven that we are all born creative geniuses, but through the constructs and demands of our society, our originality is constantly suppressed. Could that creativity be resurrected with hypnogogic enhancement?

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