The Five Levels of Attachment

Theatre of the Mind

Do you control knowledge or does knowledge control you?

Don Miguel Ruiz, Jr. is a Toltec Master of Transformation and the son of Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements discusses how we have unwittingly made agreements about how we choose to live our lives and that these agreements are actually attachments -- limiting filters on who we think we are.

According to Ruiz, "When we believe in something so strongly that we lose awareness of our authentic self within the stories and comments of our internal narrators, we are allowing our preconceptions to make decisions for us. Therefore, it is important to be aware of where we are on the scale of attachment with any particular belief. With awareness we can regain the power to make our own decisions." He explains that our attachments can be divided into five levels -- The Authentic Self, Preference, Identity, Internalization, and Fanaticism and discusses how we can re-evaluate these potentially harmful attachments.