The Mastery of Love

Imagine you live on a planet where all people are affected by the same disease. Their skin is covered in open, painful, infected wounds. The disease starts when people are around three or four years old, and everyone believes that having it is completely normal. 

Sound awful? Well, this situation is actually the current state of humanity. Most people’s skin isn’t covered in wounds, of course. But the human mind, which Don Miguel refers to as the emotional body, is full of wounds. And those wounds are infected by an emotional poison we call fear. All other negative emotions –⁠ anger, sadness, envy, and so on –⁠ stem from fear. 

When children are born, they’re free of emotional poison, but it doesn’t take long to start accumulating.

The key message here is: We begin accumulating emotional wounds in childhood.

Our emotional wounds start to appear when we’re around three or four years old. Before that, we’re completely healthy. Two- and three-year-old children are unafraid to express love –⁠ most of their time is spent laughing and playing. Of course, when they experience pain or something bad happens to them, they react. But it’susually not long before they return to playing. 

This way of being is actually the normal, healthy state of the human mind. But as children grow older, they begin to learn from adults who have long been infected by emotional poison. They learn to fear punishment and seek reward. They fear not being accepted, or they fear that who they are isn’t good enough. These fears are all emotional poison.

As a result of these feelings, children begin to create images of themselves that fit what they think other people want. They create images to project at school, at home, and eventually at work. Then, when one of these images is inevitably challenged, they feel immense pain. 

For instance, picture a teenage boy whose self-image includes the notion that he’s very intelligent. One day, he participates in a debate –⁠ but another student outperforms him. Suddenly, the boy begins to feel stupid and worthless. He feels pain because there’s now a discrepancy between his internal image of himself and the image he’s trying to project. 

Each of us develops these relationships between ourselves and the world in childhood –⁠ and then the rest of our lives are ruled by them, causing us to suffer.