Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches

...you are the artist and your life is your creation. - Miguel Ruiz

Excerpt from The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace, by don Miguel Ruiz (page 143). I've been in a workshop led by Ruiz in Teotihuacan, Mexico in 2003. As best I can tell from inner knowing, he walks his talk.

"You have seen how you create a virtual reality, the dream of your life, and you know that your life is a story. Now with that awareness, the question is: Are you happy with your story? Something important to understand is that you can be whatever you want to be because you are the artist and your life is your creation. It’s your story. It’s your comedy or your drama, and if the story is changing anyway, then why not direct the change with awareness?

Now that you are an artist with awareness, you can see if you like your art, and you can practice making it better. Practice makes the master. But it’s action that makes the difference. When I discovered this, my action was to take responsibility for my art and purify my program. As an artist I started exploring the possibilities—-every action and every reaction. And by the way, this is our real nature: to explore. Explore what? Life! What else can we explore?

To change the story of life is what the Toltec call the mastery of transformation. It’s about transforming you, the storyteller, the dreamer. Life is changing so fast, and you can see that you are always transforming, but you master transformation when you no longer resist change. Instead, you take advantage of change, and you enjoy change.

To master transformation is to live in the present moment, all the time. Life is an eternal now because the force of life is creating everything right now, and it is transforming everything right now.

How are you going to change your story? Well, now you know that you are creating your story according to what you believe about yourself. The way to transform what you believe about yourself is to unlearn what you have already learned. When you unlearn, your faith returns to you, your personal power increases, and you can invest your faith in new beliefs.

If you want to know the truth, if you are ready to take your faith out of the lies, then remember: Don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anybody else. This will give you clarity about many things. But you may need a little support to stop believing the lies, and to start breaking all of the agreements that go against yourself.

The Four Agreements offer this support. They are just for you, the main character of your story. These four simple agreements can take you all the way to your integrity: Be impeccable with your word.Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best."

This is a companion blog for longer book excerpts that are cited from the main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.

Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. - Joseph Campbell

"Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.

. . . I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. . . I'd earned several thousand dollars--which was a lot in those days--and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn't make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don't ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that's the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I've had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I've had an interesting and surprising experience: I've met some magnificent people.

Money experienced as life experience is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There's a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money tha surprised me.

In the living of life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn't go.

. . . From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its associated intent to prioritize, value, attend to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?"

- from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Olson

This is a companion blog for longer excerpts to cite transcriptions from books. The main blog on inspiration, imagination, innovation, improvisation, creativity, and the Call is over at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez. Since, I mentioned Campbell in this one, you may also be interested in the art, myth and alchemy blog called Fertile Verge.