The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

by Miguel Ruiz

he said, “and the space in-between isn’t empty.” And he knew that everything that exists is one living being, and that light is the messenger of life, because it is alive and contains all information.

This is what he discovered: Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God.

The only way to store information is by agreement. The outside dream may hook our attention, but if we don’t

agree, we don’t store that information. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith.

We have a whole concept of what a “woman” is and what a “man”

We pretend 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.

All our normal tendencies are lost in the process of domestication.

Even if the Book of Law is wrong, it makes you feel safe.

The agreement is so strong that even if we understand the concept of it not being true, we feel the blame, the guilt, and the shame that occur if we go against these rules.

If we compare the dream of human society with the description of hell that religions all around the world have promulgated, we find they are exactly the same. Religions say that hell is a place of punishment, a place of fear, pain, and suffering, a place where the fire burns you. Fire is generated by emotions that come from fear.

All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty.

Wherever we turn our heads, all we see is the truth, but with the agreements and beliefs we have stored in our mind, we have no eyes for this truth.

In your whole life nobody has ever abused you more than you have abused yourself.

If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power.

The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us to break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.

The first agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honor.

But like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you. One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell.

During our domestication, our parents and siblings gave their opinions about us without even thinking. We believed these opinions and we lived in fear over these opinions,

The girl listens, believes she is ugly, and grows up with the idea that she is ugly. It doesn’t matter how beautiful she is; as long as she has that agreement, she will believe that she is ugly. That is the spell she is under.

Sin begins with rejection of yourself. Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you commit. In religious terms self-rejection is a “mortal sin,” which leads to death. Impeccability, on the other hand, leads to life.

These types of spells are difficult to break. The only thing that can break a spell is to make a new agreement based on truth.

Gossip is black magic at its very worst because it 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; you feel happy and at peace.

Use the word in the correct way. Use the word to share your love. Use white magic, beginning with yourself. Tell yourself how wonderful you are, how great you are. Tell yourself how much you love yourself. Use the word to break all those teeny, tiny agreements that make you suffer.

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Using an earlier example, if I see you on the street and I say, “Hey, you are so stupid,” without knowing you, it’s not about you; it’s about me.

You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell. What

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum

expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything...

Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

That person tried to send poison to you and if you take it personally, then you take that poison and it becomes yours.

Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.

When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.

Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is really about me, but it is about them.

Write this agreement on paper, and put it on your refrigerator to remind you all the time: Don’t take anything personally.

You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you.

You can choose to follow your heart always.

All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.

In your mind a whole relationship begins from that. Maybe you even get married in this fantasyland. But the fantasy is in your mind, in your personal dream.

Without telling him what she wants, she makes an assumption that he knows her so well, that he knows what she wants, as if he can read her mind. She gets so upset because he fails to meet her expectations.

We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe.

If others tell us something, we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate.

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.

If you don’t understand something, it is better for you to ask and be clear, instead of making an assumption. The day you stop making assumptions you will communicate cleanly and clearly, free of emotional poison.

THE FOURTH AGREEMENT Always Do Your Best

If you try too hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and in the end your best will not be enough.

The Master replied, “You are not here to sacrifice your joy or your life. You are here to live, to be happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two hours of meditation, but you spend eight hours instead, you will only grow tired, miss the point, and you won’t enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love, and be happy.”

But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy.

Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward. Most people do exactly the opposite: They only take action when they expect a reward, and they don’t enjoy the action. And that’s the reason why they don’t do their best.

On the other hand, if you take action just for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward, you will find that you enjoy every action you do. Rewards will come, but you are not attached to the reward.