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The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is an amazing book that offers four powerful agreements from the ancient Toltec philosophy to positively transform lives. To know more about the book summary, book review, and the author read the article below.
About the Author
Don Miguel Ruiz is a Mexican spiritual author. His work focuses on the spiritual teachings of the ancient Toltecs. Ruiz is listed in Watkins’s 100 most spiritually influential living people of the year 2018. Until now Ruiz has published more than thirteen books. The Four Agreements was his first book and was first published in 1997. It has been translated into more than 46 languages and is a New York Times bestseller for 10 years. Don Ruiz has spent three decades teaching people a way to personal freedom and happiness from his insight into the nature of human reality and ancient spiritual knowledge.
Book Summary of The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Thousands of years ago Toltec were known as “women and Men of knowledge” throughout southern Mexico. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz discusses this deep knowledge of Toltec in detail in this book.
What we see and hear at any moment is nothing but a dream.
Dreaming is the main work of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake and also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material frame that makes us linearly identify things. When we go to sleep, we do not have a frame, and dreams have the power to change continuously as written in the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
To change our dreams we have to follow The Four Agreements.
What are the four agreements and what do they mean?
The First Agreement- Be Impeccable with your words
The first agreement is the most essential one and is difficult to follow. The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. Although it seems simple it is the most powerful.
“Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God” as per the author Don Miguel Ruiz in the book The Four Agreements.
Words are the power through which we express, communicate, and think to create new events in our lives.
Words are the most powerful tools that we humans are blessed with. Words can create magic.
Words can create the most beautiful dream or destroy everything around you. This depends on how you use the words.
“All the magic you possess is based on your word. Your word is pure magic, and misuse of your word is black magic” as per The Four Agreements book. The word is so powerful that one word can change or end the lives of millions of people.
The human mind is the productive field where seeds are continuously sown. These seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. The word is like a seed and the human mind is highly fertile.
But the only problem is that often it is fertile for the seeds of fear. Words enter our minds by hooking our attention and transforming our belief systems for the better or worse.
“Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself”
When you agree to be impeccable with your word, the truth will be manifested cleaning all the poison that exists inside you.
The power of the word is mostly misused to curse, blame or destroy. We create a lot of chaos through words in everyday life.
Whenever we hear an opinion from other people we agree, and it becomes part of our belief system.
For years we received spells from words used by others and also from words that we use for ourselves. We constantly talk to ourselves by using words against us.
Start using The First Agreement- Be Impeccable with your words to see the positive changes in your life.
Impeccability with your words will make you immune to the negative spells of other people.
“You can measure the impeccability of your word by the level of your self-love. How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your words, you feel good; you feel happy and at peace” as described in the book The Four Agreements.
Be Impeccable with your words is the first agreement that you should make with yourself to become free and happy.
With the impeccability of words, you can become free from fear and live a good life.
The Second Agreement- Don’t Take Anything Personally
The Second Agreement is don’t take anything personally. The next three agreements are born out of the first three agreements.
The second agreement says whatever happens around you don’t take it personally. You take things personally because you agree with whatever is said to you. When you agree, the poison goes into your mind, and you get trapped in a dream of hell.
What makes you get trapped is called personal importance. Personal importance is the maximum expression of selfishness because we guess that everything around us is about “me”.
People around you do nothing because of you. All they do is because of them.
Most people live in their dreams, in their minds: they have a completely different scenario from the one we have in our minds. When we take things personally we believe that they understand our situation and unknowingly we try to impose our world on their world as described by author Don Miguel Ruiz in the book The Four Agreements.
Even when the situation looks very personal, even if another person insults you to your face, it has nothing to do with you. Whatever they say, is according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from the programming they receive from people or situations around them.
Author Don Miguel Ruiz suggests not to take things personally when people say the worst things about you. Because other people are going to share their opinion according to their belief system, so nothing that they tell is about you, it is about them.
“Don’t take things personally because by taking things personally you set yourself up to suffer for nothing.” As described in the book The Four Agreements.
Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, as your awareness grows you will start noticing that you lie to yourself. Don’t expect other people to tell you the truth because they lied to themselves.
When we start accepting people as they are without adding our personal opinion, we never get hurt by their words or deeds.
When other people lie to you, it is because they are afraid that you will discover their imperfections.
When you make a strong habit of not taking things personally, you avoid many upsets in life. Your anger, envy, jealousy, and your sadness will go away.
When you put the second agreement into practice you will find yourself in heaven. Big freedom will knock on your door when you stop taking things personally.
The Third Agreement- Don’t Make Assumptions
The third agreement is Don’t Make Assumptions as described in the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
We all tend to make assumptions about everything we see and experience around us. The biggest problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are true.
We make assumptions about what others are doing and thinking. Most of the time we take it personally and react to them by sending poison through our words. So, whenever we make assumptions we take things personally, and end up creating a big scene for something very small.
Most of the time we only see things the way we want to see, and hear what we love to hear. We don’t recognize things the way they are. When we don’t understand things, we make assumptions about the meaning. When reality comes out, we ultimately come face to face with reality. This reality is different from our initial assumptions.
In any kind of relationship, we assume that the other person knows about our feelings and requirements. They are going to behave as per our wishes. When they fail to do so, we get hurt and create a big drama in our brains.
Real love is accepting people open-mindedly without trying to change them.
Imagine a day when you stop making assumptions about your loved ones and all the people around you. Your relationship will never suffer due to mistaken assumptions.
The Third Agreement sounds easy but it’s way more difficult to follow. Most of the time, we do exactly the opposite.
Only Action can make it easy. Taking action, again and again, will establish a solid foundation for the new habit to grow.
The Fourth Agreement-Always Do Your Best
The Fourth Agreement –always do your best will allow the other three agreements to become deeply ingrained habits.
The fourth agreement is about putting the first three into action. Do your best in every situation. But always keep in mind that your best is going to be different in every new moment.
Everything around us is alive and changing continuously all the time, so at one time your best will be of high quality, and at other times it will not be as good.
Your best will be at its best in the morning when you are full of energy compared to when you are tired at night.
Your best will change according to your emotional situation. Like you will perform better when you are feeling happy compared to when you are angry or upset.
Your best will change with time. As you start following the fourth agreement your best will become better than it used to be.
Do your best in every situation of your life. When you do your best, you will never judge yourself, and when you never judge yourself, you will never suffer from guilt, blame, or self-punishment.
“By doing your best you are going to live your life intensely. You are going to be productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything. But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy. When you do your best, you take action.” As described in the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
Most people do their best because they are expecting a reward. Because of that, they don’t enjoy actions and this is the reason why they don’t do their best.
When you give your best you learn to accept yourself. But you have to learn from your mistakes. Learning from mistakes will help you to improve and also increase awareness.
“Whatever life takes away from you, let it go when you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive at the moment. Letting go of the past means you can enjoy the dreams that are happening right now.”
The first three agreements will only work when you follow the fourth agreement consciously.
When you continuously give your best again and again you will become a master of transformation. Whatever we learned we learned through repetition. In short, practice makes the master. By doing your best in every situation you will become a master.
When you follow the fourth agreement together, you will come out of hell.
The four agreements are a summary of one of the masteries of Toltec. The four agreements are very simple and logical. It is very easy to follow them.
But to follow them you will need a strong will. Because we find lots of obstacles in our path. We need to use our full power to follow these four agreements honestly and consciously.
Always do your best while following these agreements and soon it will be easy for you.
The Toltec Path of Freedom- Breaking Old Agreements
All of us want freedom. Are we really free? Who stops us? Why can’t we just be ourselves?
When you see a child of three or four years old you will find a free human.
Why do we find children carefree?
Because he or she does whatever that child loves to do. Because very young children are fearless and express their feelings freely. But what happens to grown-up adults? Why are we different from our younger versions?
We are no longer accessible because the belief system doesn’t allow us to be who we are.
Since our minds have been programmed during our growing years with all the useless beliefs, we are no longer fearless and happy like our younger versions.
For this, there is no need to blame your parents, guides, or people who abused you, including yourself. But, it is the time to be free.
“The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be ourselves, to express ourselves. But if we look at our lives, we will see that most of the time we do things just to please others, just to be accepted by others, rather than living our lives to please ourselves. That is what happened to our freedom.”
The harsh truth is most of us are not even aware that we are not free.
The first step toward freedom is self-awareness. Because if you are not aware, you can’t change anything. Once you look back you will find that you suffered all those years for nothing.
According to Toltecs, you need to master your dream.
“Your life is the manifestation of your dream.”
You can change your life anytime if you are not enjoying the dream.
Three masteries lead people to become Toltecs.
· Mastery of Awareness
· Mastery of Transformation
· Mastery of Intent
The decision to follow four agreements is a declaration of war to get your freedom. The four agreements offer an opportunity to end emotional pain which can open the door for you to enjoy your life and start a new dream.
Many self-beliefs will stop you from following the four agreements. That is why you need to be patient with yourself because this is a slow process.
The New Dream- Heaven on Earth
“There is no reason to suffer. The only reason you suffer is you choose to suffer. The same is true for happiness. The only reason you are happy is that you choose to be happy. Happiness is a choice and so is suffering” as mentioned in the book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
Maybe we cannot escape from our destiny but we have a choice whether to suffer or enjoy our destiny.
Think wisely before making your choice.
Book Review of The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is an amazing spiritual self-help book. The author talked about the self-limiting beliefs that hinder us from living a happy life, based on ancient Toltec wisdom.
Toltec were scientists and artists who came together to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the past. Toltec knowledge arises from the same unity of truth that is followed by all the sacred deep mystics around the world.
It is most accurately described as a way of life, characterized by an openness for love and happiness.
I will recommend you to read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. This short read book will absorb all your fears, doubts, and worries. By following the ideas mentioned by the author you will feel light and happy.
Also Read: What to Say When You Talk to Yourself by Shad Helmstetter