The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World (Toltec Mastery Series)

by Miguel Ruiz Jr.

We call ourselves Toltecs not just because of our lineage, but because we are artists. Life is the canvas of our art, and the work of our tradition is to teach the life lessons that will help us create our masterpiece.

The whole point of all this work is to be happy, to enjoy life, and to enjoy the relationships with the people we love the most, starting with oneself.

If you are looking through life and translating it as it goes along, you will miss out on living it. But if you learn to listen to life, you will always be able to express the words as they come.

Instead of taking an experience for what it is, we create a story to make it fit our beliefs.

Whatever we become attached to can begin to shape our future experiences and limit our perception of what exists outside our vocabulary.

The stronger our level of attachment, the less we can see.

Knowledge and the information we perceive are distorted and corrupted by our narrators—the voices of our thoughts that debate the rightness or wrongness of every action we take and every thought we have.

This list of self-definitions is my reflection, and when I really look at myself, I can hear the narration of my agreements and the conditions that have become my model for self-acceptance. My thoughts are the narrators of my attachments, my belief system.

I project onto the image of myself the values and attributes that reflect my beliefs. The more attached I am to my beliefs, the more difficult it becomes to see myself for who I am at this moment, and the less freedom I have to see life from a fresh perspective and perhaps choose a different path.

What gives these attachments their strength is conditional love. When you look in the mirror, instead of accepting yourself for who you are at this very moment, you likely start telling yourself why you are unacceptable in your current form, and what you need to do to be able to accept yourself: I must meet this expectation to be worthy of my own love.

I begin to judge and evaluate myself according to the standards of my agreements, which have turned into the conditions for self-acceptance. I implement a system of reward and punishment to train myself to reach that archetypal model; this is known in the Toltec tradition as domestication.

The primary tool used to domesticate oneself is self-judgment.

Self-judgment resides where self-acceptance wishes to be. Our attachment to these negative beliefs and self-judgments can become so normal that we don't even recognize them as condemnations anymore; we accept them as a part of who we are. But at a very basic level, our self-judgments are all consequences of what we believe about ourselves at our core—whether we accept or reject ourselves.

Let go of the attachment that you must obtain some image of perfection in order to be happy.

But at the very core of it, there is no one to blame, because a commercial, like self-judgment, has no power over us unless we agree with its message.

When you no longer believe in a self-judgment, it will no longer have any power over you.

From this point of view, you may still choose to make some life changes; but now the motivation to change is not because you hope to someday love yourself but because you already do love yourself. When the reflection is viewed from this angle, change flows in synchronicity with the trajectory of your life, and the possibilities are limitless. Suffering only occurs when we forget that.

It's not easy to just wake up one day and say you,'re perfect and actually believe it. It requires desire and commitment. First, you leave behind any false ideals of perfection—you release your attachment to what you believe it means to be the perfect you. In order to learn this lesson, I needed to stop judging myself for not meeting my own expectations and accept myself for who I am at this very moment. I began at the beginning, learning to love myself and giving gratitude every morning for being alive.

Second, you view life through the eyes of an artist and accept that everything is a work in progress, a never-ending masterpiece.

I spent many years trying to live up to those images I created of myself before discovering that this is who I am—no story needed. It's really me. I am perfect at this very moment, and that is all I need to enjoy my life. Once I learned this, I could change my life in any direction I saw fit at any given moment.

This is what freedom is: the ability to enjoy and be exactly who you are without suppressing yourself in the form of judgment.

But if we accept ourselves for who we are at this very moment, we change because we want to grow and evolve with life; love is no longer the condition for change, it is the starting point for change. This is the true meaning of unconditional love.

Our mind's main job is to dream—to perceive and project information onto a linear reality framed by matter when we are awake, and onto a nonlinear reality without a material frame when we are asleep or daydreaming.

the Dream of the Planet can be as small as a dream shared between just two individuals or it can be as large as a dream shared amongst everyone in existence—and anywhere in between.

The Dream of the Planet is constructed by our collective choices; is the manifestation of our shared intention.

The person I am right now is the accumulation of my yeses and nos over the course of my life, and that is true for each and every one of us.

Harmony exists when we engage one another with respect, honoring each other's yeses and nos as we construct the dream of us.

Both the Personal Dream and the Dream of the Planet are built on knowledge. This is the tool by which we are able to survive in the world.

Symbols are representations that allow us to understand one another's experience of life.

Since knowledge is the bridge that allows us to understand one another, it is an instrument by which we can create the dream or the reality in which we want to live.

When we place ourselves in a safety zone where we feel comfortable and secure, and we are firmly entrenched in the this-is-who-I-am mindset, the worst thing imaginable is that it will all go away.

I look at all the things I have placed my sense of self in, I will find that my identity is placed in it. Fear comes when these things are threatened, because through my attachment I have interpreted these as being a part of myself; thus, an attachment is created to resist the possibility of that loss.

If we can see ourselves as perfect just the way we are because we are alive at this moment, we are free. Our attachments no longer define us. Instead, the knowledge we gather becomes a tool that can help us decide how we want to engage in dreams—the personal and collective—and how we choose to act is the manifestation of our intention.

“Is knowledge controlling you, or are you controlling knowledge?”

The Authentic Self is always present, and it is only our attachments that keep us from remembering who we really are.

There is a moment when the Authentic Self becomes no longer an abstract term, but an experience.

It's the moment when judgment stops and pure harmony takes over.

I use knowledge as the tool by which I engage my preferences in life.

At Level Two, we have the awareness that knowledge is a tool that provides us with the information we need to make choices about where we wish to place our attention and take action. But at this level we don't distort the information we perceive, and we are using it to engage only in this moment.

In the Toltec tradition, this is called controlled folly—the awareness and honoring of self as we engage the people around us who project an image, or mask, onto us. Our awareness allows us to see the temptation to become attached to that projected mask, but we maintain clarity. At this level of attachment we don't forget we are playing a game, which makes it easier for us to detach once the game is over.

Our relationship with knowledge allows us to engage life as it is; we are able to make choices with our reason as we perceive the difference between truth and distortion, and knowledge is a clean and perfect reflection of life.

From the Toltec standpoint, this is the clean mirror— we see every situation as it is, unclouded by smoke.

We have the awareness that the act of engaging in life is an act of love, and because we are choosing the direction in which we want to go and how we want to live, this ...

By approaching our lives as a work of art based on our own self-love, this allows us to unconditionally love the people in our lives for who they are without needing...

Respect for the manifestation of our loved ones' own individual dreams, whether or not we agree with their choices, is always present at this level of attachment. Our love for self allows us to give love to the commun...

Every thought and idea that forms our belief system has power only through our agreement in the form of yes or no; and it is our preference of how we want ...

The word Toltec means “artist” in English, and life is the canvas for a Toltec's art. I am aware that knowledge is an instrument by which I am able to interact with the world, and my yeses and n...

Our attention gives direction to the bridge that allows us to express and share with one another our knowledge of life—the agreements by which we construct our relationships, as well as express our preferences.

I identify myself with my knowledge, although I use it to see and understand the world.

From the stance of knowledge, identity is the grounding sense of self that allows us to have our place in the Dream of the Planet; it gives us a point of reference by which we identify and engage with one another.