Notes on: The Four Agreements

'The Four Agreements' is a book by Don Miguel Ruiz and is published by Amber-Allen Publishing.

The Toltec

The Toltec, which means "women and men of knowledge," were a group of scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual practises of ancient times. It is a way of life that focuses on the accessibility of happiness and love.

"Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see ..."

- John Lennon

Domestication and the Dream of the Planet

The main function of the mind is to dream and it does this non-stop all day and night. When we are awake, there is a material world to guide the dreams, but when we are asleep the dreams are left to wander.

When we are children the reward we crave is the attention of our parents, which eventually also includes siblings, teachers and friends, and we wanted to avoid punishment. The reward feels good, so we continue to please others to get rewarded more, and sometimes this includes pretending to be someone we are not. Eventually we become a collection of the beliefs of those we try to please. Eventually we do not need others to get rewarded, and we are able to follow the rules and reward or punish ourselves based on the same belief system.

It takes a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs. Our belief system is the laws that we live our dream by. The Judge inside us rewards or punishes us, but we tend to punish ourselves over and over again, because our memory forces us to think about the mistake again and every time that happens we punish ourselves again.

We are blinded by all the false beliefs we have of ourself. We have a need to be right and prove others wrong and in the process we suffer.

Human beings biggest fear is not death, but the fear of being truly alive - of being our true selves. We create this ideal image of ourselves, which was built on the need to please others, but that is not who we really are. As a result of trying to be someone we are not, we do not feel good enough and we reject ourselves. We feel unauthentic and wear social masks hoping no one will notice our failures. We also tend to measure others by this ideal image and since it doesn't fit with them either we are setting everyone up for failure.

When it comes to relationships, we tend to stick with people who may punish us for not living up to expectations as long as the punishment is not bigger than how we punish ourselves. People who badly punish themselves tend to tolerate others who badly punish them too.

There are thousands of agreements you have made with other people, with your dream life, with society, but the most important are the ones you have made with yourself. Your personality is made up of the agreements you have made that tell you who you are, how you feel, your beliefs, and how to behave. The agreements that come from fear drain a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love can conserve and even create more energy.

The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word

It is through your word that you express your creative power and manifest everything. The word is a force that enables you to express yourself, communicate with others, think and these lead to creating the events in your life. When used well the word can set you free, but when not used well it can enslave you.

The human mind is like fertile ground and opinions, thoughts and ideas are the seeds that grow in it. We can prepare our mind to be fertile for the seeds of love and not for the seeds of fear.

Like a magician, our word can put a spell on others or release them of a spell. In religion, we sometimes talk about sins and sinners, but a real sin is anything that goes against yourself, and you go against yourself when you judge or blame yourself for anything. "Impeccable" means without sin, and when you are impeccable with your word, you can take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself for them. Self-rejection is the biggest sin you can commit.

When we call each other bad names, it may seem like we are using those words against others, but we are really using them against ourselves. If you love yourself, you will express that love in your interactions with others, and that action will produce a like reaction. Misuse of the word is how we keep each other in a state of fear and doubt. Only the truth will set us free.

Gossip is some of the worst use of the word, but unfortunately, it is one of the main ways we communicate and feel close to each other. We feel better when we see others suffer.

If you understand the first agreement, be impeccable with your word, you can see the way you can change how you deal with yourself and others, especially the ones you love the most. It will also protect you from receiving a negative idea because your mind will no longer be fertile for those seeds. When you are impeccable with your word, you feel good, you feel happy and at peace, and it can take fear and transfer it into joy and love.

The Second Agreement: Don't Take Anything Personally

When you take things personally it suggests you agree with what is being said and you are letting it get to you. Taking things personally is a selfish act, and suggests we think we are responsible for everything, but nothing other people do is because of you, it is because of themselves. When we take things personally, we are letting them impose their dream onto our own.

When you take things personally, you tend to feel offended, which puts you on the defence. Small things turn into big things because you feel the need to be right and prove others wrong. In the same way, whatever you think is also a projection of your own dream, which is different from other people'. It is not peoples words that hurt, it is the wounds that already exist that are being touched by the words that is hurting.

If you live without fear, and instead live with love for yourself, you have no room for those negative emotions, and if those negative emotions do not exist in you, then you will feel good and then you experience things in a positive way and everything makes you happy.

If someone says something to you that is positive, you should not take it personally. Remember, their dream is different from the one you are experiencing. You shouldn't even take the thoughts you have about yourself personally, as sometimes these thoughts were put there by another reality.

The mitote, the thousand parts of your brain talking at the same time, is the reason humans find it hard to make decisions - your thoughts are pulling you in different directions. When you make it a habit to not take things personally, you reduce the number of thoughts in your head, and certain negative emotions associated with them, like anger, jealousy and sadness will disappear. Not taking things personally gives you freedom.

The Third Agreement: Don't Make Assumptions

We tend to make assumptions often, and then we believe them to be true. Often these assumptions are about what other people are thinking or doing, and then we react to the assumptions as if they were reality and end up manifesting them with our words. Making assumptions is creating problems.

Instead of making assumptions it is better to ask questions. The mitote in our minds makes it difficult for us to make sense of things. We experience things as we want to, not as they are, and when we do not understand something, we make an assumption about the meaning that has no basis in reality. When we believe something, we sometimes destroy relationships in order to prove a point, when we could have avoided that if we had the courage to ask questions instead.

We make a lot of assumptions about ourselves as well. We overestimate and underestimate ourselves, but that is because we do not take the time to ask ourselves the right questions.

Real love is accepting the person the way they are, and the way to understand them is to ask questions, and not make assumptions. If you are unsure about something, get clarity. Asking questions eliminates the need to make assumptions because you can go straight to the source for those questions in your head.

Find the courage to ask for the things you want with clarity. At the end of the day, people are in control fo whether they want to say yes or no, but you can control asking in the first place.

When you don't make assumptions your word will be impeccable. If all humans communicated this way, we would eliminate a lot of unnecessary conflicts.

It is hard to break the habit of making assumptions, but the first step is to become aware of it and understand the importance of avoiding them, but that is not enough, we must then take action. Taking action enough times nurtures the seed that allows that habit to grow.

The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

This fourth agreement helps you to build strong habits through action that enable you to be better at the first three agreements.

Your best will change depending on the moment. Your best will be different depending on your mood: how energized or tired you are; if you are healthy of unhealthy; if you are feeling positive or negative emotions.

Your best can also change over time. As you get better and improve on the habits that drive the four agreements, you will continue to grow and become better than before.

Do not worry about the quality, just try your best. If you push yourself too far you will loose energy and become depleted and move further away from your goals. If you just do your best in any circumstance in life and avoid judging yourself, you will remove some negative emotions that could be putting you in a bad mood or state, which will enable your best to be even better.

Some people expect an award in order to do their best, but if you do your best for the sake of doing your best, you will get more joy from what you do, and the rewards will still come because you are in a positive mood / state.

You still need to be aware, learn from your mistakes, make changes and keep practicing, but always do your best and accept yourself.

You do not need to prove anything to anyone. Just be you, and you can only be you when you do your best. When you do not do your best, you are not being your true self. You do not need anything except to love yourself and others.

If you commit to always doing your best and build a strong habit out of it, then you will misuse your word less frequently, you will take things personally less, and you will make less assumptions. They will become less powerful and happen less frequently.

When you make a mistake and fail to keep an agreement, but you are still doing your best and do not judge yourself, then you will continue to feel good about yourself. Action and repetition power improvement. By continuously doing your best you will become a master of growth and change.

It takes a lot of energy and effort to succeed in these agreements, especially at the beginning, but if you accept the setbacks, learn from them, and adapt, things will become easier and easier.

The Toltec Path to Freedom: Breaking Old Agreements

All around the world people from various cultures and backgrounds are fighting for freedom, and in western cultures we tend to believe we live in a free country, but freedom depends on the human spirit so a country cannot put you in a state of feeling free, only you can.

Young kids tend to be freer than adults because they tend to live closer to their true self and they do whatever they want. Toddlers are not afraid to explore the world, and they may react negatively when some of their needs are not met, but they tend not to judge themselves or worry too much about the past, or the future, they just live in the present moment. They are also not afraid to express how they feel and show love.

The real you is the you when you were a child. Sometimes that version of you comes out when you are truly having fun or your are expressing yourself positively and creatively. The freedom you are looking for is the freedom to be yourself and express yourself.

In order to become free it is first important to be aware that most of us are not truly free. Unless you aware nothing is going to change.

In order to become Toltecs, people must become masters of these three things:

1. Mastery of Awareness. This is to be aware of who you truly are with all your possibilities and limitations.

2. Mastery of Transformation. This is how to change and how to be free from negative external influence.

3. Mastery of Intent. For Toltecs, intent is what makes transformation possible, it is unconditional love and it is life itself. The Mastery of Intent is therefore the Mastery of Love.

The main function of the brain is to dream and part of how it does this is by transforming material energy into emotional energy. The Toltecs believe that judging, victimizing, and this belief system is like a parasite and our job is to act like warriors and fight back. We may not win every battle with the parasite, but as long as we continue to fight and not give up.

The parasite is like a monster with lots of heads and each head represents our fears. There are three ways to destroy the parasite and be free:

1. Attack each head one by one. This is a slow process but it is effective and with each fear we face we become more free.

2. Stop feeding the parasite. You can kill it by not giving it any food, which will make it weaker and weaker. This is done by avoiding fuelling emotions that come from fear.

3. Initiation of the dead. This tradition is common in many cultures and it is a symbolic death of the parasite, which doesn't actually harm the physical body. This is faster than the first two options, but is the hardest to accomplish.

The first step is to focus on the agreements you already have and giving them attention and understanding them. Then you can begin to rewrite those agreements and create a new dream. Once you realize that your current dream is based on your old beliefs and your old beliefs do not exist, then you can change them. You have to truly understand each which agreements you want to change before you change them.

The next step is to become aware of all the beliefs that are based in fear, limit you, and make you unhappy, and through this process you begin to change them. This is what the Toltecs referred to as Mastery of Transformation. You reach mastery when you have transformed each agreement that made you unhappy and reestablished a new belief of your own. One way you can do this is base your new belief on the Four Agreements.

With each agreement you break, you gain more power. If you start small, you can build more power that will enable you to face the bigger agreements that are much harder to break. With each agreement that you break, you need to replace it with a new agreement that makes you happy and this will prevent the old agreement from being able to come back.

In order to become a warrior and start fighting the parasite, you will need to develop the following characteristics:

• Awareness. A warrior is aware they are are at war and has the discipline to be themselves and reject external influence.

• Control. A warrior realizes they cannot control others, but they have control over their own emotions and self. A victim will repress negative emotions, whereas a warrior refrains from letting them take control, and to express them at the right moment. Warriors are impeccable because they have control over their emotions and behaviour.

For the Initiation of the Dead, the first step is to become aware that we can die at any moment, and to be alive, we have to be present. Death can remind us to live each day as if it were the last day of our lives. When we survive the initiation we experience a resurrection, and experience what is like to be a child again, but this time we are free with wisdom as opposed to innocence.

The Toltecs believed that if we accept the angel of death we will be happy forever. Death serves to take away the past so that we can live in the present.

The New Dream: Heaven on Earth

Forget everything you have learned and begin living your new dream. You have the power to use your imagination and create your own dream, one that you choose to live all the time. You can love for the sake of loving, because it brings you happiness, and no other reason is needed. This will give you inner peace and change your perception on everything.