Toltec wisdom on love and the nature of life
Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Mastery of Love is a spiritual book about our experience of love (familial, platonic, and romantic), and how it gets distorted by society and our expectations. But it also shows us how to re-orient our approach and perception of love. At just over 200 pages, The Mastery of Love is a quick but valuable read.
While the book is explained in simple terms, some ideas are abstract and difficult to understand. I’ve set out the overarching messages below, but will spend the remainder of this blog walking through what each means.
Overarching messages:
Our perception of the world and reality gets distorted by negative conditioning.
Our mind mistakenly thinks it’s the body, and thus creates false needs which cause us to suffer.
Love underlies everything; it’s just masked by a fog of pain and fear that we’ve been conditioned to feel.
A successful relationship requires both parties to accept each other as they are and realize each person is responsible for their own happiness and needs.
Our capacity to love is what makes us happy.
Who are the Toltecs?
Ruiz describes The Mastery of Love as a “Toltec Wisdom Book.” The Toltecs were a society of scientists and artists who preceded the Aztecs and lived in southern Mexico from the mid-10th to 12th century. In the book’s introduction, Ruiz notes that Toltec isn’t a religion, but a way of life that’s centered around happiness and love. He notes:
“A Toltec is an artist of Love, an artist of the Spirit, someone who is creating every moment, every second, the most beautiful art—the Art of Dreaming.”
Ruiz also shares that he’s responsible for passing down the Toltecs’ spiritual knowledge.
Our natural state is love
Ruiz begins The Mastery of Love by describing our natural state, which is best reflected at birth. He notes that we’re perfect when we first enter this world: full of curiosity, love, and excitement. And as children, our defult state is happiness and play, which allows us to give love to everything around us. He writes:
“The happiest moments in our lives are when we are playing just like children, when we are singing and dancing, when we are exploring and creating just for fun.”
But, we’re born into a world of fear.
This state of love gets corrupted by fear
Ruiz describes how society and our parents condition us to fear instead of love, which leads to emotional wounds. For example, when we’re punished by our parents or teachers (usually for their problems, worries, and emotions), our love for them starts to fade. Ruiz writes:
“We domesticate humans the same way we domesticate a dog or any other animal: with punishment and reward.”
We become angry, resentful, or fearful and lash out at the person punishing us or bottle up our emotions until we can release them onto someone else:
“Usually in a normal relationship in hell, it’s about payment for an injustice; it’s about getting even.”
When we release this emotional poison into the world, a vicious cycle of anger, retaliation, and suffering ensues. We fear being hurt, and because our minds are so powerful, we create a false depiction of reality where we’ve been wronged and where people will hurt us—essentially, our mind creates Hell on earth.
Once we’ve accepted this world of negativity and fear, we also create false images of ourselves to meet the image of perfection society creates. The larger the discrepancy between who we genuinely are and who we think society wants us to be (or even who we think we are), the greater we suffer. In reality, we are perfect as we are.
Our bodies and minds become disconnected, which creates false needs
Fear isn’t the only thing that takes us from our natural state of love. Ruiz explains there’s a bigger issue at play: the disconnect between the body and the mind. Everything the body needs is valid. The body indicating that it’s hungry or cold is a legitimate need.
Problems arise when the mind intervenes—the mind doesn’t know who it is, so it thinks it’s the body and tries to interpret the body’s needs. Ruiz notes:
“When the mind believes it is the body, the needs are only illusions, and they cannot be fulfilled.”
The body either misinterprets these needs or fills them with emotional wounds; we eat even though we’re not hungry. It’s important not to repress our physical instincts or to allow our minds to judge them.
On the other hand, the needs of the mind are usually false and fear-based. Our minds can be detrimental because they try to answer the question “who or what am I?” But the mind doesn’t have an identity and, according to Ruiz, it doesn’t realize that it is actually a force that is common to and underlies every living being.
To remedy this, we must split our needs into two categories and prevent the mind from interpreting the body’s needs: “these are the needs of the body. These are the needs of the mind.” And we must love and appreciate our bodies:
“If you look at your body, you will find billions of living beings who depend on you. Every cell in your body is a living being that depends on you. You are responsible for all of those beings.”
Expectations sabotage our relationships
In reality, love is always one-sided; either it’s not reciprocated, or one person loves the other more. And so the person who loves the other more feels wronged because their love isn’t reciprocated to the same extent, which leads to hurt, fear, and retaliation.
But Ruiz says the mistake is in expecting to be loved back. We can’t expect to be loved back in a relationship because only love for ourselves can fulfill us. If we respect and love ourselves, we don’t need others’ love.
He describes the main reasons relationships fail:
We try to change our partner
One of the reasons relationships suffer is that we try to change our partners to match our false perceptions of who they are—false because we can never genuinely understand them or their dreams.
“It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.”
Instead, we need to accept others (and ourselves) exactly as they are, because we can’t change them and if we tried, this would mask who they really are.
On a practical level, because we can’t change our partner, we should seek out someone who already has qualities that align with our preferences:
“Someone who wants to go in the same direction as you do, someone who is compatible with your views and your values—emotionally, physically, economically, spiritually.”
We don’t accept responsible for our own happiness
Relationships also fail because we think our partner should be responsible for our happiness. Our partner can’t be responsible for our happiness or fulfill our needs because they can never truly understand our needs, experiences, and dreams.
We have to solve our problems and heal our emotional wounds on our own—our partners won’t be able to solve them for us, and we shouldn’t suck them down into our misery. A good relationship requires respect, trust, finding our voices, and stating our needs—without the expectation that the other person will fulfill them.
How to reverse our suffering
The solution to our suffering and straying from our natural state of love lies in its source: the mind. Ruiz describes how our minds are extremely powerful. We have the power to heal ourselves and create heaven on earth.
We control our lives because everything we perceive is due to the mind’s volition. Nothing can exist without us, so just as we create Hell with our minds, we can destroy it with our minds. Ruiz shares the solution:
“That is the healing. Three simple points: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love.”
To start reversing our suffering, we have to first take responsibility for our lives, including how we think and see the world—what we believe and how we judge or victimize ourselves. We suffer because everything in the world is deeply interconnected—the force of life underlies everything.
So, when we suffer, feel bad about ourselves, and lash out, we impact many others in a domino effect. If we can control our reactions, we can avoid suffering and inflicting suffering onto others:
“Your reactions are the key to having a wonderful life. If you can learn to control your own reactions, then you can change your routines, and you can change your life.”
We must rewire our reactions and thought patterns one at a time. Then to heal our emotional wounds, we need to see the truth—not lies built by society and conditioned into us, like notions of right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, or the false images we project about ourselves.
The nature of every living being is perfect, so anything to the contrary is a departure from the truth. Truth allows us to see things as they are, not as we want them to be—like how when someone lashes out, it’s from their emotional wounds and not from our shortcomings. Recognizing this allows us to forgive them. Finally, healing requires us to love ourselves.
Our capacity to love is the ultimate solution
Ultimately, love is what heals us—our emotional wounds, our warped perceptions and reactions. It’s what allows us to return to that childlike state of excitement and curiosity and happiness. But crucially, it’s not someone else’s love that will heal us—but our own capacity to love:
“What makes you happy is love coming out of you […] Love comes from the inside. It lives inside us and is always there, but with that wall of fog, we don’t feel it.”
By loving ourselves deeply, we begin to love everyone and everything around us. It’s just up to us to uncover it.