Amazon describes the book “The Four Agreements” as offering a powerful code of conduct that can
rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. The author reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering.
I describe is as the “best book per word” I have ever read. This series is on the subsequent book “The 5th Agreement.”
Where they cover and expand upon the original 4 agreements – and add new wisdom.
THE DREAM OF THE FIRST ATTENTION
From my point of view, there are billions of humans walking around in this world who are dead, but they don’t know they are dead. Yes, their bodies are alive, but they are dreaming without any awareness that they are dreaming, and this is what the Toltec call the dream of the first attention.
The dream of the first attention is the dream that we create by using our attention for the very first time. This is what I also call the ordinary dream of the humans.
We could say that it’s the dream of the victims, because we are victims of all the symbols that we create, we are victims of all the voices in our head, we are victims of all the superstitions and distortions in our knowledge.
In the dream of the victims, where most people live, we are victimized by our religion, by our government, by our entire way of thinking and believing.
When we are children, we cannot defend ourselves against all the lies that come with the whole Tree of Knowledge. As we said before, our parents, schools, religion, and our entire society hook our attention and introduce us to their opinions and beliefs.
The adults who take care of us tell us their stories, and we go to school, and we hear more stories. We learn the story of our country; we learn about all the heroes, all the wars, all the human suffering. The adults can only teach us what they know; they cannot teach us what they don’t know.
Fear is king of the underworld, and it rules our world by creating the distortions in our knowledge. And what is the biggest fear in this world? Fear of the truth. Humans are afraid of the truth because we have learned to believe so many lies.
The symbols are talking and talking inside our head. They never stop.
The voice of knowledge wants to know what everything means. It can hardly wait to interpret everything that happens in our lives. It’s telling us what to do, when to do it, where to do it, how to do it. And we don’t even know that it’s all made up. It’s all a lie
In the dream of the first attention, the world we live in is just like a reality show, hosted by the voices in our heads. And for sure we are always going to be right because we use everything that we know to justify everything in our show.
With a whole Tree of Knowledge living in our head, we no longer perceive The Truth — we only perceive our own knowledge; we only perceive lies.
It’s like how your reflection appears to be an exact copy of what is real, but the image in the mirror is the opposite of what is real; your right hand is your left hand in the mirror. The truth is always distorted by the reflection.
Little by little, you become a copy of the outside dream. You copy everything you learn from everybody and everything around you.
You copy not just beliefs but behavior, which means you copy not just what people say but what they do.
You perceive the emotional state of the people around you, and you even copy that.
You are not who you really are, because you have been possessed by that distorted image of you. And this may be a little difficult to understand, but all this time it has been you who possesses you. What is possessing you is the virtual you. It’s what you think you are; it’s what you believe you are, and that image of yourself becomes extremely powerful. All these years of practice have made you a master of pretending to be what you think you are.
Awareness is the key to coming back to life, and it’s one of the main masteries of the Toltec. It’s the awareness that ITS ALL just a made up reality – one you can make up new.
Awareness takes you out of the dream of the first attention, into the dream of the second attention, where you rebel against all the lies that are ruling your head. You rebel, and the whole dream starts changing.