The Four Agreements
Welcome to Thinks™ on Books, where I share the golden lines from the books I believe hold invaluable insights for the world today.
This time we are doing the book called “The Four Agreements.”
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz
I have read "The Four Agreements" twice, once in epub and again in paperback. I first came across the book while researching personal development books.
And one of its Amazon reviews piqued my interest, and I believe I saved it somewhere, but I can not find it right now.
I will update this article if I find the review later, but first, let us go over my golden lines for this book:
…what created the harmony and space between the two is Life or Intent.
Once he knew what he really was, he looked around at other humans and the rest of nature, and he was amazed at what he saw. He saw himself in everything — in every human, in every animal, in every tree, in the water, in the rain, in the clouds, in the earth.
WHAT YOU ARE SEEING AND HEARING RIHGT NOW IS nothing but a dream.
Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays.
We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams.
The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. This is the way we learned everything we know.
By using our attention we learned a whole reality, a whole dream. We learned how to behave in society: what to believe and what not to believe; what is acceptable and what is not acceptable; what is good and what is bad; what is beautiful and what is ugly; what is right and what is wrong.
We didn’t choose these beliefs, and we may have rebelled against them, but we were not strong enough to win the rebellion. The result is surrender to the beliefs with our agreement.
I call this process the domestication of humans.
We soon develop a need to hook other people’s attention in order to get the reward.
The reward feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward. With the fear of being punished and that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.
We pretended to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected.
The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of not being good enough. Eventually we become someone that we are not.
We become a copy of Mamma’s beliefs, Daddy’s beliefs, society’s beliefs and religion’s beliefs.
We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator.
Every time we do something that goes against the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we should be ashamed. This happens many times a day, day after day, for all the year of our lives.
True justice is paying only once for each mistakes. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake.
How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is thousands of times.
The Judge in the mind is wrong because the belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong. The whole dream is based on false law. Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.
If we look at human society we see a place so difficult to live in because it is ruled by fear.
All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty. We are on an eternal search for the truth because we only believe in the lies we have stored in our mind.
We are searching for justice because in the belief system we have, there is no justice.
We don’t see the truth because we are blind.
Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other.
Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.
We know we are not what we believe we are supposed to be and so we feel false, frustrated, and dishonest.
They wish to be a certain way, but they are not, and for this they carry shame and guilt. Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be.
The way we judge ourselves is the worse judge that ever existed.
But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself.
A sin is anything that you do which goes against yourself. Everything you feel or believe or say that goes against yourself is a sin.
When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself.
Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society.
You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said.
Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.“
Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.
This voice may have come from another reality in which there are living beings very similar to the human mind.
The Toltecs called these beings Allies.
Humans are addicted to suffering at different levels and to different degrees, and we support each other in maintaining these addictions.
They are lying to you because they are afraid.
We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do.
And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimize us, abuse us, and blame us as we do ourselves.
Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward.
From the Toltec point of view, all humans who are domesticated are sick.
The food for parasite is the negative emotions that come from fear.
So the next step is to develop awareness of all the self-limiting, fear-based beliefs that make you unhappy.
We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear.
We must forgive those we feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because we love ourselves so much we don’t want to keep paying for the injustice.
Forgiveness is the only way to heal.
Once you forgive yourself, the self-rejection in your mind is over.
It is the emotions that control the behavior of the human, not the human who controls the emotions.
Not the discipline from outside to tell us what to do and what not to do, but the discipline to be ourselves, no matter what.
I want you to see yourself living a new life, a new dream, a life where you don’t need to justify your existence and you are free to be who you really are.
The end.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it. What resonated with you? Share your thoughts in the comments.