You Gotta Let That Girl Boogy Woogy

     “What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”  During the period of our education or our domestication, we learn to take everything personally.  We think we are responsible for everything. Me me, me, always me!”   “The Four Agreements” Don Miguel Ruiz

      I read  “The Four Agreements” on a plane back from Cooperstown, New York.  (Yay, Baseball Hall of Fame!)  I had to force myself to finish reading this book.  I bought this book on recommendation of a dear friend of mine and started reading it a few years ago.  I got a couple of chapters in and then put it down because I found it to be too pedestrian for learned lofty me.  It turned me off because I like very thick, heavy, philosophical texts.  Stuff by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and Khetsun Sangpo Rinpoche really fascinates me and takes my mind places I used to call “beyond God” when I was a teenager.

     The various Buddhist texts I have read and studied contain the same concepts that I read in “The Four Agreements” and I’m not sure that I could have understood don Miguel’s simple and beautiful message if my brain had not been short-circuited by the above Venerable Rinpoches.  I am so glad I decided to come down off my high horse and read this book.  I read it twice as I found it to be so deep and full. 

      “Nothing other people do is because of you.  It is because of them. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world for the one we live in.  When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world and we try to impose our world on their world.”  Don Miguel Ruiz

      This concept is not new to me. I totally believe that all the people and situations in my life are a fantasy, a reflection of what’s going on in me.  I create my life.  I have kick ass days and not so fun times as Creator.  I first realized this several months ago while lying next to someone in bed.  He was telling me about qualities he knew I possessed and things he thought about me and what kind of person I was.  As I was lying there, I realized this was coming from someone who didn’t even know me.  It was at that moment I knew that all of us do that to everyone around us.  We don’t necessarily project, but we have ideas, fantasies about who the people around us are.  It was weird and sad to me when I realized that.  Weird because I couldn’t understand why I would create so much difficulty for myself and sad, because it made me feel alone.  I don’t think it’s sad now, but weird for sure.  

     While driving around in the mountains and quaint towns of New York I was thinking about the chapter in the book that I have quoted here.  Taking things personally – how often do I do that.  I thought it was funny how I hardly ever take things my clients, family or friends do personally, but with strangers I do all the time!  People driving stupid or putting their seat all the way back on the plane or talking on their cell phones in the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum or stirring their ice tea too loudly and too long or a restaurant not serving hot chocolate in the winter or the person next to me in the meditation hall who is constantly fidgeting, Continental not giving me my luggage after a long flight!  Those people, those businesses – I know all that they do is because they are trying to annoy me, upset me, disturb me, deprive me, they all must hate me!   Of course that is ludicrous and when I put it in perspective it’s all fine.  My selfishness and self-centeredness is impressive!

      Another thing that smacked me in the head was realizing that people I’m dating really do  take my actions personally.  That freaks me out when I think of that because most of what I do has nothing to do with them.  It was very liberating for me when I saw how I have been hesitant to do or say certain things out of the fear of hurting someone and I then realized that what I was doing had nothing to do with them.  My decisions to publish this blog or move to another city or start a new career or study Vodou or not or Buddhism or not has nothing to with ANYONE.