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The Mastery of Love

Don Miguel Ruiz

53 · –

  • We are afraid to be punished, but later we are also afraid of not getting the reward, of not being good enough for Mom or Dad, sibling or teacher. The need to be accepted is born
    #267•
  • The fear of not being good enough for someone else is what makes us try to change, what makes us create an image. Then we try to project that image according to what they want us to be, just to be accepted, just to have the reward. We learn to pretend to be what we are not, and we practice trying to be someone else, just to be good enough for Mom, for Dad, for the teacher, for our religion, for whatever. We practice and practice, and we master how to be what we are not.
    #295•
  • Between the image he pretends to be and the inner image when he is alone are lies and more lies. Both images are completely out of touch with reality; they are false, but he doesn’t see that. Maybe someone else can see that, but he is completely blind. His denial system tries to protect the wounds, but the wounds are real, and he is hurting because he is trying so hard to defend an image.
    #263•
  • The people of power abuse the people who have less power because they need to release their emotional poison. We have the need to release the poison, and sometimes we don’t want justice; we just want to release, we want peace. That is why humans are hunting power all the time, because the more powerful we are, the easier it is to release the poison to the ones who cannot defend themselves.
    #243•
  • You have a limit to the amount of abuse you will accept, but no one in the whole world abuses you more than you abuse yourself.
    #297•
  • The limit of your self-abuse is the limit you will tolerate from other people. If someone abuses you more than you abuse yourself, you walk away, you run, you escape. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, perhaps you stay longer.
    #299•
  • Love has no obligations. Fear is full of obligations. In the track of fear, whatever we do is because we have to do it, and we expect other people to do something because they have to do it. We have the obligation, and as soon we have to, we resist it. The more resistance we have, the more we suffer. Sooner or later, we try to escape our obligations. On the other hand, love has no resistance. Whatever we do is because we want to do it. It becomes a pleasure; it’s like a game, and we have fun with it.
    #308•
  • Love has no expectations. Fear is full of expectations. With fear we do things because we expect that we have to, and we expect that others are going to do the same. That is why fear hurts and love doesn’t hurt.
    #322•
  • Love is based on respect. Fear doesn’t respect anything, including itself. If I feel sorry for you, it means I don’t respect you. You cannot make your own choices. When I have to make the choices for you, at that point I don’t respect you. If I don’t respect you, then I try to control you.
    #248•
  • Fear is full of pity; it feels sorry for everyone. You feel sorry for me when you don’t respect me, when you don’t think I am strong enough to make it.
    #265•
  • In the track of love, there is no if; there are no conditions. I love you for no reason, with no justification. I love you the way you are, and you are free to be the way you are. If I don’t like the way you are, then I’d better be with someone who is the way I like her to be. We don’t have the right to change anyone else, and no one else has the right to change us. If we are going to change, it is because we want to change, because we don’t want to suffer any longer.
    #250•
  • If you have the expectation that I have to be a certain way, then I feel the obligation to be that way. The truth is I am not what you want me to be. When I am honest and I am what I am, you are already hurt, you are mad. Then I lie to you, because I am afraid of your judgment. I am afraid you are going to blame me, find me guilty, and punish me.
    #275•
  • No matter how much the woman loved him, she could never make him happy because she could never know what he had in his mind. She could never know what his expectations were, because she could not know his dreams. If you take your happiness and put it in someone’s hands, sooner or later, she is going to break it. If you give your happiness to someone else, she can always take it away. Then if happiness can only come from inside of you and is the result of your love, you are responsible for your happiness.
    #253•
  • Love is based on respect. Fear doesn’t respect anything, including itself. If I feel sorry for you, it means I don’t respect you. You cannot make your own choices. When I have to make the choices for you, at that point I don’t respect you. If I don’t respect you, then I try to control you.
    #315•
  • Love is ruthless; it doesn’t feel sorry for anyone, but it does have compassion. Fear is full of pity; it feels sorry for everyone. You feel sorry for me when you don’t respect me, when you don’t think I am strong enough to make it. On the other hand, love respects. I love you; I know you can make it. I know you are strong enough, intelligent enough, good enough that you can make your own choices. I don’t have to make your choices for you. You can make it. If you fall, I can give you my hand, I can help you to stand up. I can say, “You can do it, go ahead.” That is compassion, but it is not the same as feeling sorry. Compassion comes from respect and from love; feeling sorry comes from a lack of respect and from fear.
    #274•
  • Love is always kind. Fear is always unkind. With fear we are full of obligations, full of expectations, with no respect, avoiding responsibility, and feeling sorry. How can we feel good when we are suffering from so much fear? We feel victimized by everything; we feel angry or sad or jealous or betrayed.
    #249•
  • In the track of love, there is justice. If you make a mistake, you pay only once for that mistake, and if you truly love yourself, you learn from that mistake. In the track of fear, there is no justice. You make yourself pay a thousand times for the same mistake. You make your partner or your friend pay a thousand times for the same mistake.
    #285•
  • When we have no respect there is a war of control because each person feels responsible for the other.
    #288•
  • It’s not that I am better than you; it’s because I love beauty. I love to laugh; I love to have fun; I love to love. It’s not that I am selfish, I just don’t need a big victim near me. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, but I cannot take responsibility for your dream.
    #287•
  • The only way to master love is to practice love. You don’t need to justify your love, you don’t need to explain your love; you just need to practice your love. Practice creates the master.
    #255•
  • We are so selfish that we want the person with whom we are sharing our life to be as needy as we are. We want “someone who needs me” in order to justify our existence, in order to feel that we have a reason to be alive.
    #298•
  • We are so afraid to love because it isn’t safe to love. The fear of rejection frightens us. We have to pretend to be what we are not; we try to be accepted by our partner when we don’t accept ourselves
    #244•
  • She doesn’t have to be responsible for you; she can trust that you are going to be what you claim you are, what you project you are. She can be as honest as possible and project to you what she is. She will not come to you pretending to be something that you later discover she is not. The one who loves you, loves you just the way you are. Because if someone wants to change you, it means you are not what that person wants.
    #303•
  • The dog will not feel hurt that you don’t want to play, because it doesn’t take it personally. Once the dog celebrates your arrival and finds out you don’t want to play, the dog goes and plays by itself. The dog doesn’t stay there and insist that you be happy.
    #316•
  • If you don’t feel like being happy, and you only want to be quiet, it’s nothing personal. It has nothing to do with your partner. Perhaps you have a problem and you need to be quiet. But that silence can cause your partner to make a lot of assumptions: “What did I do now? It’s because of me.” It has nothing to do with your partner; it’s nothing personal.
    #293•
  • Take the risk and take the responsibility to make a new agreement with your partner — not an agreement that you read in a book, but an agreement that works for you. If it doesn’t work, change that agreement and create a new one.
    #273•
  • When you inhibit your partner’s freedom, you inhibit your own because you have to be there to see what your partner is doing or not doing.
    #300•
  • If you cannot love your partner the way she is, someone else can love her just as she is.
    #264•
  • You don’t have to accept your partner’s anger at all, but you can allow her to be angry. There is no need to argue; just allow her to be what she is, allow her to heal without intervening.
    #270•
  • You are happy to be alone, and to share is also fun.
    #310•
  • If we look for a partner, it is because we want to play, we want to be happy and enjoy what we are
    #326•
  • Your mind and your body have completely different needs, but your mind has control of your body. Your body has needs that you cannot avoid; you have to fulfill the need for food, the need for water, shelter, sleep, sex. All those needs of your body are completely normal, and it’s so easy to satisfy the needs of the body. The problem is that the mind says these are my needs. In the mind we create a whole picture in this bubble of illusion, and the mind takes responsibility for everything. The mind thinks it has the need for food, for water, for shelter, for clothing, for sex. But the mind has no needs at all, no physical needs. The mind doesn’t need food, doesn’t need oxygen, doesn’t need water, doesn’t need sex at all. How do we know this is true? When your mind says, “I need food,” you eat, and the body is completely satisfied, but your mind still thinks it needs food. You keep eating and eating and eating, and you cannot satisfy your mind with food, because that need is not real.
    #261•
  • The mind confuses the needs of the body with its own needs because the mind needs to know: What am I? We live in this world of illusion, and we have no idea what we are. The mind creates all these questions. What am I? becomes the biggest mystery, and any answer satisfies the need to feel safe. The mind says, “I am the body. I am what I see; I am what I think; I am what I feel. I am hurting; I am bleeding.”
    #324•
  • The affinity between the mind and the body is so close that the mind believes, “I am the body.” The body has a need, and the mind says, “I need.” The mind takes everything about the body personally because it tries to understand What am I? So it is completely normal that the mind starts to gain control of the body at a certain point. And you live your life until something happens that shakes you and allows you to see what you are not.
    #290•
  • To capture the love inside yourself, you have to surrender to yourself as the hunter and the prey. Inside your own mind, there is the hunter and there is also the prey.
    #318•
  • You are the victim, and if you judge yourself and find yourself guilty, for how many years will you punish yourself by not enjoying something that is one of the most beautiful things in the world?
    #323•
  • The truth is relative in this world; it’s changing all the time because we live in a world of illusions. What is true right now is not true later. Then it could be true again.
    #257•
  • Don’t believe me. You don’t have to believe me, but think, and make choices. Believe what you want to believe according to what I say, but only if it makes sense for you, if it makes you happy
    #286•
  • Rule number two is more difficult: Don’t believe yourself. Don’t believe all the lies you tell yourself — all those lies that you never chose to believe, but were programmed to believe.
    #242•
  • Rule number three is: Don’t believe anyone else. Don’t believe other people because they are lying all the time anyway.
    #313•
  • What is right now, maybe in a few moments is not. What is not right now, maybe in a few moments will be. Everything is changing so fast, but if you are aware, you can see the change
    #307•
  • Because our personal importance grows when we don’t forgive. It makes our opinion more important when we can say, “Whatever she does, I will not forgive her. What she did is unforgivable.”
    #254•
  • The concept of karma is true only because we believe it is true. Because of our beliefs about being good and bad, we feel ashamed about what we believe is bad. We find ourselves guilty, we believe we deserve to be punished, and we punish ourselves. We have the belief that what we create is so dirty that it needs to be cleaned.
    #291•
  • You cannot share what you do not have. If you do not love yourself, you cannot love anyone else either. But you can have a need for love, and if there’s someone who needs you, that’s what humans call love. That is not love. That is possessiveness, that is selfishness, that is control with no respect.
    #306•
  • You don’t need to justify what is true; you don’t need to explain it. What is true doesn’t need anyone’s support.
    #304•
  • We choose to suffer because we learned to suffer. If we continue to make the same choices, we will continue to suffer.
    #311•
  • Wherever knowledge comes from, it is only real from one point of perception. Once you shift the perception, it is no longer real. We are never going to find ourselves with our knowledge
    #284•
  • It isn’t knowledge that will lead us to ourselves; it is wisdom. We have to make a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, because they are not the same. The main way to use knowledge is to communicate with each other, to agree on what we perceive. Knowledge is the only tool we have to communicate, because humans hardly communicate heart to heart.
    #325•
  • Wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge; it has to do with freedom. When you are wise, you are free to use your own mind and run your own life.
    #282•
  • When you become wise, life becomes easy, because you become who you really are. It’s difficult to try to be what you are not, to try to convince yourself and everyone else that you are what you are not. Trying to be what you are not expends all your energy. Being what you are doesn’t require any effort.
    #294•
  • When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head. You no longer sabotage yourself, your own happiness, or your own love. You no longer carry all that guilt and blame; you no longer have all those judgments against yourself, and you no longer judge anyone else. From that moment on, all the beliefs that make you unhappy, that push you to struggle in life, that make your life difficult, just vanish.
    #301•
  • Perhaps you wonder, “If we are truly Life or God, why don’t we know it?” Because we are programmed not to know. We are taught: “You are a human; these are your limitations.” Then we limit our possibilities by our own fears. You are what you believe you are. Humans are powerful magicians. When you believe you are what you are, then that is what you are.
    #259•
  • That is our situation. Humans create their own boundaries, their own limitations. We say what is humanly possible, and what is not possible. Then just because we believe it, it becomes truth for us.
    #281•
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