UCBerkleyPostop posted a topic containing a link to a PDF by Frumi Rachel Barr, MBA, PhD on Don Miguel Ruiz and his book, 'The Four Agreements'. It's a really good outline and I recommend everyone read it so I am posting it again here ---->
http://www.frumi.com/images/uploads/thefouragreements.pdfI didn't want to detract from Berkley's thread so I thought I would post a new one.
It is easy to see how who we are, what we believe and what we consider "reality" can be (and almost always is) handed down to us in the form of a "belief system".
Mother comes home from a job she hates, she is stressed out over a million different things including finances and her relationship with her unfaithful husband. Her daughter is singing a song she learned in school. The mother screams, "Would you please shut up, you are annoying me with the noise you are making!" The daughter who desires to please her mother hears her mother saying, "It's your fault I am upset because you have an annoying singing voice, please shut up you sound terrible."
So the daughter believes that she has a terrible voice and from that day forward she no longer sings. In class when required to sing she mumbles and moves her lips to trick the teacher into thinking she is singing but she will never sing again.
That is one way a belief can be passed to us and usually we go through life collecting our "truths" from experiences like that. Sometimes someone will tell us what we cannot do based on his or her own experience of failure and instead of succeeding where they failed we carry on the legacy of their failure and make it generational.
Everything in our lives tends to be this way. Our religious beliefs, our beliefs about life, love, the government, our beliefs about ourselves, others, same sex marriage, relationships, morality and reality. Most American's go about their lives deciding what is possible, what is reasonable and what is acceptable without ever allowing themselves the experiences that would otherwise expose their belief system as the sham that it is.
One of the most amazing experiences I ever had was when I kept my mouth shut and went with the flow. I was in a hotel room with a man who had just assumed I had been born female. I had just assumed he knew I was trans. I was of the belief that trans women were trans women, a neo vagina was a neo vagina. A woman was a woman and a real vagina was something I would never have, let alone a real female life. I believed that acceptance was something I would always need from other people.
Well I stumbled into the 'Uncertainty Factor' and I realized that all my computations were off. Not only was I flat-out wrong, I began to understand that in life, trying to pin everything down to a definable formula or a predetermined set of rules caused the one doing to math or the rule-making to be more likely to be wrong. The more the individual tried to determine what was true or the specifics of any "reality" the more likely it was that the person doing the determination would be wrong. However the other side of the coin was that most people never realize they are wrong because they go about their lives obeying the rules they have created for themselves.
Going about life, obeying my own rules was exactly what I was trying to do but due to dumb-luck I somehow slipped through a crack and realized that my entire reality was a fabrication. So here I was, some guy was demanding to know if I was on birth control, saying that if I got pregnant and tried to ruin his life that he would literally kill me.
It has been said that there is nothing either good nor bad, but rather thinking something is bad makes it bad and thinking something is good makes it good. I began to realize that deciding whether something was good or bad was flawed. That experience would have been very bad according to my parents and my church could have found a thousand sins in it. But what it really was was an epiphany. It was a singular moment when 'being' was somehow able to overcome me and my rules, my ideas, my "reality". I realized in that moment that being a woman wasn't an idea. Being a woman wasn't what I thought it was. Being a woman wasn't what people told me it was. Being a woman was exactly that, a state of being. Being a woman was an experience and while certain things had to be accomplished in order to have that experience it was the experience it self that changed who and what I was, it was that experience that allowed me to pass into a new world where being a woman after transition was possible. Not a woman who had to make excuses and apologies for her past. Not a woman who had to seek acceptance from people but a woman just like other women.
And the truth is that the only thing that has ever stood in my way (post transition) of being that woman are other people's ideas. So why would I educate my oppressors?
Another false belief was that just 'being' a woman depends on a dirty little word called "stealth".
It helps a lot when people don't believe that you are less than what you really are. People who know we transitioned tend to think of us as, "That poor deluded man who so desperately wants to become a woman." Whenever people know our past they have to process us, with their beliefs, with their "reality", with their sense of "morality" or what is right or wrong. 99% of the population will never even begin to understand what that is like whereas we may convince ourselves that it is normal and reasonable to have to seek acceptance just for being who we are.
Being a woman does not depend upon a dirty little secret called "stealth" rather being a woman depends upon remaining true to who and what you are. Often that is much easier around people who don't know or think of you as a man who wants to be a woman but ultimately it depends upon you speaking your truth and sticking to your truth. A confession indicates guilt. If you confess to being anything other than what you are then you have blasphemed against yourself and the people you confessed to will simply repeat what you said about yourself and believe what you obviously believe about yourself. Only you have the power to 'accept' yourself, no one else has that power. Only you have the power to forgive you for being you but why do you need to forgive you for being true to yourself?
QuoteIn quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be simultaneously known. The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principleMost people spend their lives determining what plus what = life or what plus what equals reality or what plus what equals what. They never find the answers to any of their questions because mom and dad gave them their equations and told them the answers so instead of learning the answers to life and instead of finding out what is possible or what is right, they spend their lives trying to compress life into the math that was handed down to them.
A transsexual woman may feel like she is breaking all the rules by transitioning. But the reality is probably more like she is beating herself up for going against what her mother and father might have told her is reasonable. She may feel like a rebel for transitioning but if she was okay with being female why the sense of rebelling? Why the continued conflict? And the fact that she is still living under the rules and the reality that was handed to her by her family, church and Society will show itself in little ways. She will confess to not being a real woman and seek forgiveness for her sins from someone who will never have the power to absolve her. And without confession she will allow the weight of her sins to cause her to struggle, like someone carrying a very heavy burden, she will always look for the shortest path with the fewest obstacles, the smoothest and easiest path but something worth doing is seldom easy. Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Only you can accept you. And until you accept you no one else will, not really because people don't have that kind of power over you, they seldom even have any power over their own lives let alone the ability to "accept" you. Asking someone for acceptance is like tossing a Rubik's cube to a blind person. If you are seeking acceptance from other people you are living in an imaginary world where interactions are rehearsed and pretend and that tends to be enough for most people and it can be (and has been) compared to the Matrix from the movie with the same name.
The Uncertainty Principle is where it's all at. The Uncertainty Principle was the Rabbit Hole for me (Alice in Wonderland) and I fell down it purely by chance or by destiny, I followed someone into it not knowing where I was headed because I never would have found it by looking. It never would have been where I would have imagined it to be.
I am sorry this got so long and rambling... But what I wanted to say was that sometimes in order to find the truth we have to somehow overcome everything we "know" and "believe" and it is not within most of us to ever achieve that goal. It wasn't in me to find it - and given the opportunity the harder I tried and the more time I spent in pursuit of the truth the farther away from it I would have become.
Can any of what I said possibly mean anything to someone who has never had a similar experience?
There is only one way that I know of to begin to experience and Real-ize or make real what I am saying and it is through Zazen meditation. Words don't mean anything. Words and ideas will fill up your head, uselessly. The more words and ideas you absorb the less able you will be to see the truth because those words and ideas are their own truth and you will become their slave and you will end up trying to fit your life into a philosophy or a morality or a doctrine or a so-called "reality".
Life is not defined. Life does not depend upon rules. Neither does being a woman or a man.
If you should ever experience successful mindful awareness through Zazen Meditation you will experience something amazing. You will realize that without thoughts or ideas you continue to exist and you may find that by practicing this state of being on a regular basis that you will come to experience life and being on a level that far surpasses anything you ever dreamed of.
Most of us need to quit trying to fit our lives into our ideas about life but for most people what I am saying will never amount to anything except words.
