What if I told you that you have a parasite in your mind? That’s what the Toltecs believe, and they see it as the root of all human suffering.
It’s not so difficult to believe when you think about it. As John Milton wrote:
“The mind its a place of itself and can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.”
Almost all the great wisdom traditions teach that the secret to a life of freedom is learning to tame the mind. Modern psychologists concur that mindset is everything.
It’s not life that makes or breaks you. It’s your own mind.
That’s why liberation begins and ends at the level of the mind. To free the mind, you have to understand how the mind works, why there’s part of it that seems predilected to self-sabotage, and how you can break free of all self-imposed limitations.
This article is for anyone who has ever struggled with a negative self-image, low self-esteem and a nagging sense of never feeling quite good enough.
It’s inspired by one of the most insightful books I have ever read: ‘The Four Agreements’ by Don Miguel Ruiz. As cliched as it sounds, I had a huge ‘aha’ moment as I read the opening chapter and my life was never the same again.
I’m going to share the essence of what I learned and how it can change your life too. I’m advocating war–a war for control of your mind and an end to thought-created suffering.
The Problem is Not Out There
Most of us spend our lives searching for external solutions for our problems. We always assume that the problem is ‘out there’, and that if we could just get our life to measure up to how we think it should be, we’d finally be happy and free.
This enormous delusion leads to a lifetime of perpetual frustration and misery.
That’s because the problem is not ‘your life’.
It’s not that you aren’t earing a six-figure salary, or that you’re single, or don’t have the ideal house or a beach-ready body. None of that has any bearing on the real problem.
The real problem is not your life. It’s you.
That’s the bad news. No one ever wants to hear that they’re the source of their own misery. But the good news is that if you are the problem, you are also the solution.
To be more specific, the problem is the way you’ve been conditioned to think about yourself.
Courtesy of societal conditioning, you’ve created an idea in your mind of who you think you should be. Subsequently, everything you’ve ever done in life has been in a bid to measure up to this illusory image of perfection.
Life being what it is, perfection is unattainable. There’s always a gulf between who you are (your self-concept) and who you want to be (your self-ideal). The greater this gulf, the more that you suffer.
Sometimes other people punish you for not measuring up in their eyes or the eyes of ‘society’. But most of the time, the person that punishes you most is you.
You’ve punished yourself in the worst ways imaginable for the crime of not being perfect. Your mind has turned on itself, becoming both its own Judge and Victim. You’ve relentlessly abused and rejected yourself for failing to measure up to an externally imposed standard of perfection.
The result? A lifelong sense of lack and inadequacy that manifests in any number of unhealthy ways. This includes depression, anxiety, anger, addiction and any number of self-destructive behaviours.
You’ve spent a lifetime chained–not outwardly, but inwardly. The only bars around you are the ones in your head, and like everything in your mind, they are simply the result of bad thinking–a bad dream, if you will.
If you’ve suffered enough, it’s time to wake up.
How do you do that?
With knowledge.
The only way to wake up is to recognise that you’re dreaming; to realise that what you’ve always assumed to be true is an illusion of thought; a way of thinking that has become harmful and self-destructive. Only then can you commit to a new and better vision for your life– a vision of freedom.
A Distorted View of Reality
According to Ruiz, our essential nature is “light”, or awareness. “Everything is made of light,” Ruiz writes in “The Four Agreements”. “Everything that exists is one living being. Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God.”
Toltecs see the world of matter as a kind of mirror; a mirror capable of reflecting light. However, a thick fog or smoke obscures us, preventing us from seeing things as they are. This creates a whole realm of illusion: an illusion of separation and ignorance.
This obscuring ‘smoke’ is the same as the Vedantic concept of maya. Maya is the power by which the phenomenal universe is created and which makes things appear to be other than they are. This fundamental ignorance locks us into identifying with our bodies, minds and thoughts.
Lost in this dream of form, we no longer see who we truly are. We become oblivious to our true nature as awareness. This is the root of all human suffering. We suffer because we don’t know who we are.
By identifying with the body, mind, and ego, we adopt their limitations. We become finite, mortal and subject to loss, limitation, disease and death.
Part of the process of ‘losing ourselves’ in the fog of maya is to become immersed in what Toltecs call the ‘Mitote’, or the collective dream of humankind.
Toltecs believe that we don’t just dream when we’re asleep at night. We’re dreaming all the time. While there is an objective reality — the tangible world of objects as perceived by everyone — human beings also inhabit another, subjective reality.
This subjective reality exists in our minds. It consists of all our thoughts, beliefs, interpretations and judgements about ourselves and life. This mental world has the nature of a dream, and by superimposing it on the external reality, we confuse the two.
Instead of seeing something as it is, we see it as we think it is. Our interpretation of reality is mistaken for reality, when in fact it’s a dream. We’re literally getting dreams and reality mixed up all the time.
When we live this way, we no longer have a clear and objective view of reality. Of the seven billion people on planet Earth, each inhabits a different subjective reality. Ask seven billion people what life is about, and you’ll get seven billion different answers. We all live in the same world, of course, but we each inhabit a different reality.
Mitote: The Collective Dream
Our personal reality–our own unique experience of life–is driven by our own particular likes and dislikes, experiences and expectations. This, however, is moulded to a large extent moulded by what Toltecs call the Mitote.
The Mitote (pronounced ‘me-toe-tay’) is the collective dream of the society or planet. It includes all of the rules of society, its beliefs, laws, values, worldview, its cultural and social norms and historical narrative.
We’re all born with the capacity to dream. But our dreams are co-opted from a young age. Instead of expressing our own vision of who we are, we’re trained to adopt the dream of society.
Our parents, teachers, media, religions and social institutions train us to think, behave and act in a certain way. That’s how the collective dream perpetuates and sustains itself.
The Mitote comprises the thousands of voices in your mind all telling you what you are and what you should be. It’s the voices of your parents, culture, teachers, government and all authorities. Ruiz says, “Everything that you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the Mitote.”
Unfortunately, the collective dream of mankind is not a dream of happiness and freedom. It’s one of separateness, scarcity, lack, competition, fear, injustice and suffering. This is the vision of reality that the human mind has created and passed down from generation to generation.
Ruiz talks about what he calls the ‘domestication of human beings’. In much the same way as animals are domesticated, human beings are trained to think, believe, behave and react in certain ways. We’re taught how we should live, what kind of behaviour is and isn’t acceptable and what we’re supposed to be as human beings.
As we grow up, the unwritten Rulebook of Life is imposed upon us. We’re taught concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’. At such a young age, we lack the ability to question these things for ourselves. We simply accept whatever we’re told on the authority of others.
We learn that to be loved and accepted, we have to conform to the Rulebook. That’s how rules are generally reinforced; through a system of reward and punishment. When we play by the rules, we’re rewarded. Failure to play by the rules invariably results in punishment of some kind.
We learn from a young age that we have to be a certain way and behave in a certain away to be ‘good enough’. We have to modify ourselves and pretend to be something we’re not in order to please others and receive validation.
Implicit in this is the realisation that what we already are isn’t quite good enough.
This is the tragic moment when we begin to lose touch with our essential self; the pure, authentic expression of consciousness that we were born to be.
Instead, we begin to adopt the succession of masks that comprise our social self. The social self is the person we want to present ourselves to the world as. It isn’t our authentic self. It’s a fabrication and a manipulation. It’s an attempt to be ‘good enough’ by playing by the rules and moulding ourselves into what we’re expected to be.
A Basic Sense of Lack
The feeling that deep within we are lacking, inadequate and insufficient lies at the core of human suffering. In the East, it’s called samsara: the belief that happiness is dependent on being, having, or doing certain things.
Unfortunately, like chasing rainbows, this happiness is always in sight just over the horizon. No matter how fast and how far we pursue it, we can never get to it.
It’s from this basic sense of lack and insufficiency that all our fears and desires arise. Because we don’t feel whole in ourselves, we seek wholeness outside of ourselves, in the world of external objects. Every subsequent action in our life is motivated by the desire to overcome this sense of not being good enough in our own eyes and the eyes of the world.
As Swami Dayananda says, “Every desire is an expression of this sense of limitation.”
There’s a big problem with relying upon the external world to be happy.
Such happiness is always precarious. Why? Because it depends on the successful fulfilment of your desires. Life will be a succession of ups and downs because, no matter how hard you try, your desires are as likely to be obstructed as they are to be fulfilled. For every up there’s a down, for every win, there’s a loss and for every success, there’s a failure.
If your self-worth depends upon the successful fulfilment of your desires, then your life is a train-wreck waiting to happen. Even if you attain some victories, life being what it is, there will be just as many–if not more–defeats.
When your desires aren’t met, you suffer. The greater your desire and attachment, the greater you suffer.
Unfortunately, controlling life in order to be happy doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because you’re not in control of life! As the Bhagavad Gita states, although you have the freedom to perform action, you’re not in control of the results of that action. That’s up to Life. The results will be determined by innumerable factors outside of your control.
All along, what you’ve been trying to do is protect and enhance your self-image. Your self-image is who you think you are in contrast to the Mitote’s vision of who you think you should be. Again, you’re trying to measure up to some unattainable ideal of perfection.
The main purpose of the mind is to keep us safe, to help us navigate our environment and to move us toward our goals. What we want above all else is to be good enough, to feel whole, loved, accepted and validated. Because we grew up believing that we had to follow the Rulebook of the Mitote in order to do that, everything revolves around protecting and enhancing our self-image.
Check any social media site and what you’ll see is people trying to cultivate and present an image of perfection. That’s what’s behind all those pouty selfies and carefully curated social media feeds. People are trying to be acceptable to themselves and the world around them because deep down, whether consciously or unconsciously, they feel a tremendous sense of lack and incompleteness.
The Judge and Victim
The mind attempts to keep us on track by playing the dual role of Judge and Victim. According to Ruiz, the inner Judge takes the Rulebook of the Mitote–the collective dream imposed on us as we grew up–and judges everything we do and don’t do, and everything that we are and are not.
Nothing is exempt from the scrutiny of this Judge. It will pass judgement on your body, your mind, your intelligence, your life circumstances, your perceived level of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ and weighs it according to the Mitote Rulebook.
Every time something fails to measure up or goes against that Rulebook, the Judge deems you guilty.
The mind essentially turns on itself. Your internal mental dialogue is generally focused on appraisal of yourself in relation to others and the past and present. In other words, you’re constantly comparing yourself to others and to what you think you should be, and forever ruminating about the past and projecting into the future.
The mind then assumes the role of Victim. As Ruiz says:
“The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame. It is the part of us that says, ‘Poor me, I’m not good enough. I’m not intelligent enough, I’m not attractive enough, I’m not worthy of love, poor me.” The big Judge then agrees and says, ‘Yes, you are not good enough.'”
The Toltecs refer to this mechanism of the mind–the Judge, Victim and belief system they’re based around–as the parasite. It’s part of the mind that feeds off thoughts and emotions, and which has turned on the host, causing immense suffering.
As much as we fear the abuse of others, no one abuses us more than we do ourselves. This abuse happens every single day, every moment, with the judgements we make about ourselves and our perceived value or worth.
So we experience a neverending war in our own mind and it all hinges on the notion that who we are isn’t good enough.
Our basic problem is one of self-rejection. We’ve judged ourselves and found ourselves to be lacking.
Our attempts to make ourselves whole, to find happiness and worth by attaining certain goals and desires is problematic because we’re always at the mercy of factors outside our control.
Even if we do succeed in attaining every desire and whim, we’re still in danger because everything in life is constantly changing. Success can turn to failure in the blink of an eye. Fortune can turn to bankruptcy, The happiest marriage can end in divorce. If your happiness is dependent on these factors, misery will never be far around the corner and the Judge and Victim will continue their unwavering crusade against you.
There’s no solution out there. The solution, therefore, has to be within.
To defeat the parasite and reclaim the happiness and freedom that is your birthright, you have to declare a war of independence. You have to become a warrior.
How to Become a Warrior
All beings seek freedom. Freedom is the ultimate goal of life. Behind every single action and desire is the desire to be free. You want freedom from unhappiness, freedom from fear, freedom from lack, and above all the freedom to unapologetically be who and what you are.
In a roundabout way, the parasite is trying to keep us free. We’re all hard-wired to want to the love, approval and validation of other people. We want to fit in.
Since we learned at a young age that this means following the Rules, the mind tries to keep us safe by adhering to those Rules as best we can. The inner Judge and Victim want to keep us free from what it perceives as failure and rejection.
Unfortunately, it’s going about it the wrong way. To keep us free from the rejection of others, we spend a lifetime rejecting ourselves.
What’s worse is that its idea of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ is based upon the Mitote: the standards and values that others have imposed on us.
We’re living someone else’s dream instead of our own. We’re judging ourselves according to the standards of others, which may or may not be applicable to who we are and who we were born to be.
Some of the things we’re taught as we grow up are good and necessary. We learn the basics of dharma; how to treat others, to avoid injury, and to be truthful. These things, however, are part of an innate, natural dharma. Even thieves, for instance, know it’s not right to steal because they, in turn, don’t want to be stolen from. Similarly, liars know it’s wrong to lie because they don’t like being lied to!
However, a lot of the mitote conditioning is not as helpful. We’re trained to unquestioningly adopt certain beliefs and values that may not be conducive to our well-being and to the well-being of society or the planet. We’re conditioned from a young age to be consumers; to covet wealth, possessions and to strive for some materialistic notion of ‘success’ in which we put monetary gain and status above all else, including the welfare of others and the planet.
A warped value system creates warped people. Distorted, harmful beliefs create more suffering than anything else. Our beliefs and values inform our thoughts and our thoughts shape our behaviour. Our behaviour then determines our destiny on both an individual and societal level.
Again, freedom is the core value of all human beings. We’ve been looking for freedom in all the wrong places.
Freedom is impossible so long as our mind is in the grip of the parasite and driven by secondhand, outdated and harmful beliefs, values and worldview. To be free we have to break free of the Mitote and to do that we have to become warriors.
When the parasite is running our mind, freedom is impossible. Once we recognise that the real problem is our own mind, we declare war. This is a war for the control of our mind.
Ruiz says:
“The dream of the planet is just a dream. It is not even real. If you go into the dream and start challenging your beliefs, you will find that most of the beliefs are not even true. You will find that you suffered all those years of drama for nothing. Why? Because the belief system that was put inside your mind is based on lies.”
The Toltec warrior is fighting a war of independence; independence from the tyranny of one’s own mind. This is a war for the right to use our own mind as we see fit. Our intent is to root out all the harmful beliefs and thoughts that have chained us to suffering. Our goal is to create our OWN vision of life, and not desperately try to fit in with the secondhand, distorted vision of the collective dream.
How do you fight this war? You do it one thought at a time, every single day until you no longer have to.
It’s thought that generates your experience. You think a thought, and that thought creates a reality for you. You experience that thought as it if were real. Any kind of psychological suffering can be traced back to thought. You focus on what makes you feel bad; what disempowers and chains you. You cast judgements. You judge others, you judge situations, and most of all, you judge yourself.
Judgements of any kind have to go. You make peace with your past by accepting and learning to reframe situations and events. Instead of taking things personally, you take an objective and impersonal view of life.
The way others have treated you is not personal. It was based upon ignorance, for virtually everyone you’ll ever meet is also caught up in the Mitote; the collective dream of humankind, with all of its ignorance and erroneous values and notions.
Taking life personally is a self-defeating indulgence. Accepting everything that’s ever happened to you doesn’t mean condoning anything. It doesn’t imply fatalism. It is simply an invitation to let go of the past and future and to relinquish the inner resistance to life that has kept you chained, and kept the Judge and Victim in the driving seat.
This creates immense freedom; the freedom to choose differently. Rather than blindly and accepting all the Rules, you realise that you are free to create your own rules.
It’s not until you learn that you can create our own rules and shape your OWN dream, that you begin to taste freedom.
Society teaches us to be successful and happy we have to look a certain way, have a certain amount of wealth or material goods. We’re taught that we aren’t complete unless we have a partner, a family, a big house and car. This is success through the lens of materialism.
But what is success for you? Rather than judging yourself for your perceived lacks, why not create your own definition of success?
I, for instance, have no interest in materialism. Success, for me, is having a peaceful and happy mind and knowing that I am whole and complete in myself. Success is waking up every day and enjoying every blessing life has to offer, from dewdrops on the grass to the feel of sunlight or raindrops on my skin. I don’t need anything more than that to be wealthy.
Fight the Good Fight
This is an invitation to take back control of your mind. Resist the parasite! Question all the Rules that have been programmed into you! Create your own vision of what constitutes a happy and successful life, in keeping with what you value and what you love.
That’s what true freedom is. Never beat yourself up for failing to live up to external standards of ‘perfection’, when those standards are a lie in the first place.
Only YOU get to determine what makes you happy, who you should be, how you should live your life and contribute back to the world.
Only YOU get to decide what makes you attractive and valued, and what makes your life worthwhile and purposeful.
Only YOU.
It’s time to smash the Mitote; this collective dream that has chained the human mind for so long. It’s time to create a new dream; a dream of happiness, wholeness and freedom.
You may have to battle the parasite for a considerable time. You can be sure it’ll throw all kinds of doubts, fears and insecurities your way. That’s how it stays in control. Don’t accept and buy into whatever nonsense is spewing through your mind. Think with objectivity and discriminate what is true and what is false. Bear in mind that truth tastes of freedom, because the truth alone sets you free.
Keep on fighting. Learn to dismiss all thoughts, beliefs and feelings that bind you to suffering and limitation. Pick up the sword of discrimination and cut through whatever garbage the mind throws at you. Keep doing this until you experience freedom.
Dare to question. Dare to dream. Dare to be free!
Here’s to a victorious war of independence.
