This is ancient Toltec wisdom on how to live life. I read this book many years ago and it made amazing sense then. I even tried to practice the four agreements as much as I can. This time when I readit, I found certain phrases catching my attention - the one where he says that we are made of light. Of stars. That we are one being. That light is the meaning of life and contains all the information we need. He says what created harmony and space is life or intent. Miguel Ruiz talks about how when he realised it he saw himself in everything, he saw himself as pure love, pure light. He says everyone is a mirror. The mirror is you. The smoke is the dream. Everything is a dream.
As I do with classics, I have picked up lines which resonated most and have reproduced them as they are so the essence is not lost.
"All humans search for beauty, truth and justice. All humans vie for attention. Attention is the ability to focus only on that which we want to perceive. Using attention, we can hold whatever we want to perceive in the foreground of our mind. To be attentive is the biggest fear humans have. To express what we really are. Since we are taught that we are not perfect, we reject our own image of perfection. And, we live in fear.
Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement. The only way we store information is by agreement. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith. To have faith is to believe unconditionally.
We punish ourselves when we don't follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the 'good boy' or 'good girl' Our belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind.
There is something in our mind that judges everybody and everything, The inner judge uses what is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do or don't do. Everything lives under the tyranny of this judge. Every time we break the rules the judge says we are guilty and must be punished.
There is another part of us that receives judgements - the Victim. He carries the blame, guilt and shame. Beliefs like "I am not good enough, I am not worthy" are based on a belief system we never chose to believe. Every time you go against the rules you feel fear. It opens our emotional wounds and we react and create emotional poison. Even if the Book is wrong, we feel safe with it. It needs a lot of courage to challenge these beliefs. Ninety five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because of these lies.
To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. 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 we have. We reject ourselves for not being perfect. We are afraid of being found out that we are not who we are pretending to be. Nobody abuses us more than ourselves and it is the Judge, the Victim and the belief system that make us do this.
The limit of our self-abuse is exactly the limit that we will tolerate from others. A little more and we will walk away from that person, and a little less we will stay with them and suffer endlessly. The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect. Our image of perfection is why we reject ourselves, why we don't accept ourselves as we are and others as they are.
We all have many false agreements that make us suffer and fail in life. We spend all our personal power to create all these agreements and then to keep them. He urges us to break these which are fear-based and which claim our power.
Make these four new agreements and your life will take on new meaning. You will go past the smoke screen."
Be Impeccable with your Word
"The word is our power to create. Through it we express our creative power, manifest things. It is a force, the most powerful tool we have as humans, a tool of magic. We can create a beautiful dream or destroy everything. We are magicians and can put a spell on others with our word or we can release someone from a spell. By hooking our attention, a word can enter our mind and change a whole belief for better or worse.
Impeccable means 'without sin'. 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. Being impeccable is not going against yourself. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions but do not judge or blame yourself. Sin begins with rejection of yourself. Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you commit. Being impeccable is not using the word against yourself. If I get angry and send my word and all that emotional poison to someone, I'm using the word against myself. Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of energy, it means you are using your energy in the direction of truth and love. Gossip is pure poison.
You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love. How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself are directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word. When you are impeccable with your word, you feel good. Use the word to share your love. Tell yourself how much you love yourself. Impeccability of the word can lead you to personal freedom, to huge success and abundance.
By being impeccable with your word you can see all the changes that can happen in your life. First in the way you deal with yourself and then with others in your life.
This is the first agreement which leads to the others. Use words impeccably.
Don't Take Anything Personally
Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally. You take it personally because you agree with whatever is said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance or taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness because everything is about 'me'.
Nothing anyone does is for you, they do it for themselves. Everyone is in their own dream. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. That person tried to send poison to you and if you take it personally, then you take the poison and it becomes yours. You eat all their emotional garbage and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally you are immune in the middle of hell.
When you take things personally, then you feel offended and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You also try hard to be right by giving them your opinions. Be done with the need to be accepted.
Even when people say 'you are hurting me, we must not take it personally. It is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I said. You are hurting yourself. The way you see your movie is according to the agreements you made with your life. You get mad because you are afraid, you are dealing with fear. If you are not afraid there is no way you will get mad at me. If you are not afraid there is no way you will hate me, be jealous or sad.
If you love there is no place for emotions. In that state of bliss you are making love all the time with everything that you perceive.
By taking things personally you set yourself up to suffer for nothing. For causing suffering as an addiction. If you can keep this agreement you can travel around the world with an open heart and nothing can hurt you. You can say I love you without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. You can ask for what you need - Yes, No without guilt or judgement.
If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you. You don't need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.
There is a huge amount of personal freedom that comes to you when you don't take things personally. The whole world can gossip about you and if you don't take it personally, you are immune. When you don't take that emotional poison, it becomes even worse in the sender, not you.
As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won't need to place your trust in what others do or say. You only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are responsible only for yours. That's all. "
Don't make assumptions
"The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We make assumptions, we misunderstand, we take it personally and we end up creating a big drama for nothing. All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally. Because we are afraid to ask for clarifications, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about our assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong.
We assume everyone thinks like us, about them, about ourselves. They do not. Often we made the assumption that our partners know what we think and that we don't have to say what we want. If they don't do what we assume they should do, we feel so hurt and say 'You should have known.' Making assumptions in relationships leads to a lot of fights, a lot of difficulties, a lot of misunderstandings with people we supposedly love.
We have the need to justify everything and understand everything in order to feel safe. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions. We have agreed that it is not safe to ask questions, we have agreed that if people love us they should know what we want or how we feel. When we believe something, we assume we are right about it to the point that we will destroy relationships in order to defend our position.
The biggest assumption we make is that everyone sees life the way we do - and this is why we have the fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimised us, abuse and blame us, as we do ourselves. So even before others reject us, we reject ourselves.
We don't need to justify love; it is there or not there. Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them. If we try to change them that means we do not really like them. Find someone whom you don't have to change at all.
The day you stop making assumptions with everyone in your life, your way of communication will change completely. Your relationships will no longer suffer from conflicts created by mistaken assumptions.
The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. Make sure the communication is clear. If you don't understand, ask. Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be. When you stop making assumptions you will communicate cleanly and clearly. Without making assumptions, your word becomes impeccable.
When you transform your dream, magic happens. What you need comes to you easily because the spirit moves freely through you. This is the mastery of intent, of spirit, of love, of gratitude, of life. The path to personal freedom."
Always do your best
"Under all circumstances, always do your best, no more, no less. Your best is never going to be the same. It will change. Don't overdo, don't underdo. Regardless of the quality, keep doing your best - no more and no less than your best. If you try too hard to do more than your best you will spend more energy than needed and your best will not be enough. You deplete your body and go against yourself and it takes longer to achieve your goal. When you do less than your best, you subject yourself to frustrations, self-judgement, guilt and regret.
If you always do your best, there is no way you judge yourself. If you don't judge yourself you won't suffer from guilt, blame and self-punishment.
You are here to live, to be happy, love. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because of a reward. When you do your best you can accept yourself, work will not feel like work.
Action is about living fully. Inaction is about denying life. Take the ride, go out and express your dream. Everything is a ritual. Behappy, love, share your love.
You were born with the right to be happy, to love, to enjoy and share your love. We don't need to know or prove anything. Just to be, take a risk and enjoy your life is all that matters."
...
Practice the four agreements. If you fail, don't judge. Try again, this time, some more. Feel the freedom to be yourself. Love your own truth. When you practice these four agreements you attain mastery - Mastery of awareness, of all possibilities. Mastery of transformation, of change, Mastery of intent which makes transformation possible. And Mastery of love.
These are the simplest ways to a magical life. No two ways about it. But its all about practice, not about knowing. If you don't own a copy, buy it.
