The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

by Miguel Ruiz

In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself. And the limit of your self-abuse is exactly the limit that you will tolerate from someone else. If someone abuses you a little more than you abuse yourself, you will probably walk away from that person. But if someone abuses you a little less than you abuse yourself, you will probably stay in the relationship and tolerate it endlessly.

Truth is blinding here

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. You go against yourself when you judge or blame yourself for anything. Being without sin is exactly the opposite. Being impeccable is not going against yourself. When you are impeccable, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame yourself.

Different point of view. Then when you look at 10 commandments and replace God with yourself, you begin to see it.

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.

How many times do we do this with our own children? We give them these types of opinions and our children carry that black magic for years and years. People who love us do black magic on us, but they don’t know what they do. That is why we must forgive them; they don’t know what they do.

Trying tp do this

Right now I am planting that seed in your mind. Whether or not the seed grows depends upon how fertile your mind is for the seeds of love. It is up to you to make this agreement with yourself: I am impeccable with my word. Nurture this seed, and as it grows in your mind, it will generate more seeds of love to replace the seeds of fear. This first agreement will change the kind of seeds your mind is fertile for.

First agreememt

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”

It is a big problem when a thousand parts of your mind are all speaking at the same time. This is called a mitote, remember?

If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you. If that person doesn’t walk away, you will surely endure many years of suffering with him or her. Walking away may hurt for a while, but your heart will eventually heal. Then you can choose what you really want. You will find that you don’t need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.

I wonder how this can work while building community. I don't know if i fully agree here

The third agreement is don’t make assumptions.

Making assumptions in relationships leads to a lot of fights, a lot of difficulties, a lot of misunderstandings with people we supposedly love.

Fact

These assumptions are made so fast and unconsciously most of the time because we have agreements to communicate this way. 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.

We also make assumptions about ourselves, and this creates a lot of inner conflict. “I think I am able to do this.” You make this assumption, for instance, then you discover you aren’t able to do it. You overestimate or underestimate yourself because you haven’t taken the time to ask yourself questions and to answer them. Perhaps you need to gather more facts about a particular situation. Or maybe you need to stop lying to yourself about what you truly want.

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.