The Four Agreements

According to a parable that Ruiz relates, Smokey Mirror was a student learning medicine thousands of years ago. He had a revelation in a cave that everything in the universe is made of light that radiates universal love, including himself, the stars, and God. The student decides to call himself the “Smokey Mirror” to remind himself that what people normally perceive—such as matter and many different beings in the world—is an illusion. He means that people are all connected: they are all reflections of each other and everything in the universe, but they cannot see this truth because their perception is clouded by the illusion of separation—that is, the “smoke”—between them.