Personal History

Student: There is an expression in use by Toltecs called, “erasing personal history.” What does that expression mean to you?

Barbara: Earlier we were discussing our investment in the meaning of events in our life and our interactions with individuals in our personal story, and really, “erasing personal history”, is the detaching from that investment.

It is a story. It is a story you have told over and over again so many times that you believe it, even though you never tell it quite the same way. You believe it, and you allow your emotions to be pulled by the memory of events and interactions. By seeing your belief in the story and the meaning of all these events, your personal history loses its impact. It loses its emotionally charged quality.

Erasing personal history isn’t about forgetting. It is about losing that dramatic charge, where you are convinced that events were painful and crippling; that your relationships were harmful or detrimental to your happiness.

Erasing personal history is about not believing your story, so that the present becomes exultant sensory experience, unburdened by interpretations of past history or the projections of future events.

Student: If you erase your personal history and your attachment to the story that you have told about it, that means that you have flexibility to be anything in any moment.

In old historical training that naguals would give their apprentices, they would place them in very strange circumstances and situations, like they were playacting different roles. Don Miguel has often used what he has referred to as “magical theater” in the past. What is the value in doing this type of exercise?

Barbara: Well, within the context of a group or a class, these exercises are wonderful. They reveal to us all of the possibilities of breaking away from the idea of who we are. But we can also go through this in the course of a normal day. We can refer to ourselves as someone with another name, or introduce ourselves to a stranger as someone with another vocation, who lives in a different city. This is not so much an exercise in deception. It is an exercise in breaking away from your particular and tenacious hold on who you think you are.

Ultimately, spiritual freedom comes down to not having to be you as you have defined it and described it and held to it in the course of your life. That may not seem such an inviting prospect to people who feel that their identity and personal history is their greatest treasure and possession. But when you look at it from the point of view of identity or personal history holding you to a point of reference where you can only see life or yourself as one thing, then you begin to understand that this is not freedom.

Freedom means that you can see things from any point of view, any perspective. You are not stuck in what I call this dank, stuffy place of perception which says, “I am me!” And I can support that through personal history, through my memory of personal woundings, through a very rigid belief system, and an arsenal of opinions that supports that belief system. “I am me” is of no value when we are talking about spiritual freedom and seeing from the point of view of life itself.