Whole Life Times: Between Truth and Lies

October 2004

Between Truth and Lies

The author of The Four Agreements shines a light through the fog of rhetoric

by Catherine Ryan

It was a weak voice that answered the phone, barely audible at first. Hello? Hello? ... Was he still with us?

Don Miguel Ruiz, the mega-best-selling author of The Four Agreements, had just suffered a serious car crash. He was out of the hospital, recovering at home.

We’d called to talk politics, of all things—not something Ruiz is particularly known for. With the presidential election looming and the ongoing war at the forefront of our consciousness, we were seeking a fresh voice of clarity to help bridge the divide between spirituality and the politics of the day.

Should we talk another time?

Ruiz was in considerable pain; conversation was difficult. But he said he was happy to chat, and he proved generous with his time—prepared to find wisdom in the chaos, even at a time like this.

Politics was no longer the hottest topic on the agenda.

“It makes all the difference in the world, just to be alive,” Ruiz offered, speaking ever so faintly, but with increasing passion as the conversation progressed. “Anything can happen to anybody. If we learn to change as fast as life changes, we can take advantage of every opportunity that comes from life. But if we resist, if we live in scarcity, we will always suffer.”

Eerily, it had been another major car wreck, three decades earlier in his native Mexico, which had led to Ruiz’s transformation from surgeon to spiritual teacher.

He described a brief, “enlightened,” out-of-body experience that occurred during that near-fatality. From that day on, Ruiz said, his deceased grandfather, a Toltec spiritualist, began to teach him in his dreams. Ruiz’s mother, a traditional healer, provided him with further answers to the questions that flooded his mind. Later, he wandered the Sonoran desert as the apprentice of a Mexican shaman.

Finally, in 1986, Ruiz quit his practice as a surgeon, deciding to devote his life to teaching the principles of the Toltecs, the Nahuatl-speaking people of central and southern Mexico whose empire flourished from the 10th century until the 12th century invasion of the Aztecs.

Ruiz described his Toltec forebears as spiritual scholars who strove to live simply and to see what is, rather than what society conditions a person to perceive. He said the Toltecs practiced “seeing beyond the mitote”—the fog of voices and opinions that surrounds the mind and heart, obscuring truth.

In The Four Agreements, raved about by Oprah Winfrey and cited as a significant inspiration by former President Clinton, Ruiz distilled Toltec wisdom and conveyed it to millions of readers in the simplest terms:

1) Be impeccable with your word;

2) Don’t take anything personally;

3) Don’t make assumptions;

4) Always do your best.

We asked Ruiz what Toltec guidance he could offer, post-accident, to help us all learn to so seamlessly convert life’s “misfortunes” into blessings.

“Life is like dancing,” Ruiz replied. “There are people who like certain rhythms, but when they hear another rhythm, they stop dancing. There are people who are afraid to dance. There are people who gossip about others who dance differently. There are people who hardly know how to dance, but have the courage to try. Then there are experts in dancing. The experts can change to any kind of rhythm. Life is that kind of rhythm; it’s changing all the time. We need to learn how to adapt to the changes of life, instead of resisting the changes of life.”

Ruiz followed The Four Agreements with two additional Toltec Wisdom Books, The Mastery of Love, and, new this year, The Voice of Knowledge. In all his writings, Ruiz offers simple, fundamental concepts presented in inspiring detail.

In The Voice of Knowledge, Ruiz proposed that all suffering comes from believing in lies. When lies no longer control us, he explained, we return to love and live in happiness again, as we did as children—before our understanding of simple truth became clouded by the mitote of our educational indoctrinations and the opinions of others.

“If we return to the beginning,” Ruiz told us, “when we still had an awareness of truth, and when we compare that truth with every single lie in our heads, we find out that the lies can no longer survive—they disappear right in front of you. The truth is always the truth. The sun will come every single day. The earth is round. We are the only ones who can release ourselves from lies, by simply experiencing the truth.”

This seemed the perfect segue to the question we’d originally set out to ask. With so much geo-political confusion, we wanted to know what wisdom Ruiz might impart to our elected officials if given the opportunity. How might The Four Agreements help the world’s leaders best fulfill their sacred trust?

“We can make it so easy, once again,” Ruiz said. “The only problem in the world is the conflict that exists in the human mind. And that conflict is between truth and lies. Everybody wants to be right. What is true is that the war is killing people. It is true that people are dying of starvation. It is true that the economy is a little more difficult than it was a few years ago. And it’s true that all this has come because we believe in so many lies.

“To resolve that, we have to return to the truth. Maybe that seems impossible, but I don’t believe it is. If we look back in history, we have grown so fast in so many ways—for example, in terms of technology. But our psychology, our minds, now need to grow up too.”

Still listening closely to Ruiz’s faint voice, a final question begged answering. Did Ruiz’s most recent brush with death foretell yet a new path on his horizon?

He didn’t seem to think so. He spoke instead of a massive heart attack, two years ago, which had indeed re-charted his course:

“It was a great experience for me,” Ruiz said, finding the silver lining. “After the heart attack, I changed my life completely. Each year my schedule had been completely full. Now I have just a few lectures still remaining to perform. I consider myself retired from the Toltec teachings.”

Now 52, the wildly successful and sought-after Ruiz, perhaps surprisingly, has left his longtime home and gathering place in Southern California, taking quiet refuge on the 19th floor of an apartment high-rise, far above the noise and glitter of the Las Vegas Strip. Is he enjoying the anonymity Las Vegas offers? Does he like it there?

“I love it. I have my little heaven here. A really private little heaven.”

Meanwhile, Ruiz is really not so retired, it seems. He’s hard at work, in fact, writing his next book, The War of the Gods.

Don Miguel Ruiz is scheduled to speak at Celebrate Your Life in Scottsdale, Arizona, 11/5-7. For more information visit CelebrateYourLife.com or call 480.970.8543.

Catherine Ryan serves as editor-in-chief of Novica.com, a world arts and cultures Web site affiliated with National Geographic. This freelance assignment— the opportunity to seek advice from Don Miguel Ruiz—came, “as everything does for all of us,” at the “perfect time” in her life.

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