The Four Agreements: The Dream

As I read through Janice A. Radway's "Women Read the Romance", her section on page 69 stating reasons as to why women read romance novels, struck me with a memory of a friend involving a book he once told me of. The book is called 'The Four Agreements,' written by Don Miguel Ruiz. The statements on page 69, talk about women reading these novels to "escape" the reality of their lives or "dream" that it is their life. To quote Don Miguel Ruiz, "Every human has his or her personal dream, and just like the society dream, it is often ruled by fear. The same fears manifest in different ways for each person. All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty. We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. Our beliefs set us up for suffering. We create an image of how we should be in order to be accepted by everybody. We create this image, but this image is not real. We are never going to be perfect from this point of view. Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. We are not good enough for ourselves because we don’t fit with our own image of perfection. We feel false, frustrated, and dishonest. The result is that we feel unauthentic and wear social masks to keep others from noticing this. We are so afraid that somebody else will notice that we
are not what we pretend to be. We judge others according tour image of perfection as well, and they naturally fall short of our expectations."
Don Miguel Ruiz is so concise with his wording, it was hard to not copy the whole book here. Alas, he takes the act of living in a reality and jots it down turning it into romance novel. This shows how there are steps further to the aspect of our lives current state. Retreating to a false reality we set up in own minds is no safer than that of a the points in the short story expressed inside the book.