The Four Agreements

The Man in the Cave

Three thousand years ago, somewhere in southern Mexico, a young man training to become a medicine man crawled into a cave during a new moon and looked at his own hands. What happened in the next few minutes would, much later, become a small paperback that sat on the New York Times bestseller list for over a decade, got handed to Oprah Winfrey, and then got handed to several million Americans.

He heard his own voice say something strange to him: "I am made of light; I am made of stars."

Not in the metaphorical, Carl-Sagan, we-are-stardust sense. In a sense that, when he tried to explain it to people the next morning, made them think he was God. He had realized, he said, that everything is made of light. That the space between the stars is not empty. That it's not the stars that create the light — it's the light that creates the stars. That matter is a mirror, that everything that exists is one living being, and that the world we walk around in is the smoke between the mirrors — a fog that keeps us from recognizing each other, or ourselves, as the same single living thing. He took a new name: the Smokey Mirror. Because that's what he was. Because, in this man's view, that's what you are too.

He tried to share the vision. No one understood. They thought he was an incarnation of God, which annoyed him, because the point of the vision was the opposite — not that he was God and they weren't, but that all of them were the same light, hidden from each other by the same smoke. "I am God," he said. "But you are also God. We are the same, you and I. We are images of light. We are God." It did not catch on. Mostly, people did what people do when someone says that kind of sentence in public: they backed away.