Ancient Toltec Wisdom: The Four Agreements
03 Aug 2020
Don Miguel Ruiz’s, The Four Agreements
We have our own inner judge who uses our book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do and we forever live under the tyranny of this judge. Anything we do against our book of law causes us fear and therefore we never challenge our beliefs - those beliefs that we didn’t even choose in the first place!
True justice is paying only once for our mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake.
The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. Once we make a mistake, our inner judge punishes us. Even if our book of Law really is Just, then Justice is served. Done. But no! - we have a powerful memory. Every time we remember our mistake, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again, and again, and again. This isn’t fair.
If we consider hell as a state of mind, then hell is all around us.
Our mind is a fog - which the Toltecs called a mitote. In India, we call the mitote, maya, which means illusion. Everything you believe about yourself and the world, all the concepts and programming you have in your mind, are all the mitote.
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 of humans.
During the process of domestication, we learned a set of agreements. Throughout life, we use our limited amount of personal power to keep these agreements. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. Ruiz says that it is only when we can see that it is our agreements that rule our own life, and we are finally ready to change our agreements - there are 4 very powerful agreements that will help us to break our old agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.
1. Be impeccable with your word.
The word is a force; it the power you have to express and communicate, to think and thereby to create the events in your life. Words create reality. We act on what we tell ourselves is real. To be impeccable with your word is to be truthful and to say things that have a positive influence on yourself and others.
Gossiping is black magic - you hook other people’s attention to spread poison about someone to make your own opinion right. Your opinion is nothing but your point of view - it comes from your beliefs, your own ego, and your own dream. When you become impeccable with your word, your mind is no longer fertile ground for words that come from black magic.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.
Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement. Not taking anything personally is to acknowledge the unique identities of other people. We respect their subjective realities, realising that their views - good or bad - do not necessarily describe us accurately.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.
We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions. These assumptions are made so fast and unconsciously most of the time because we have agreements in our book of Law 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.
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, and even then do not assume you know all there is to know about a given situation.
4. Always do your best.
Under any circumstance, always do your best, no more and no less.
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. But if you do less than your best than you are at the mercy of judgement from your internal judge. A subtle point is the recognition that our “best” will vary from moment to moment, that, in a sense, you are always doing your best. Realize this, and your inner Judge can take a permanent vacation.
The Four Agreements are a summary of the mastery of transformation, one of the masteries of the Totlec.
… the dream of the planet is transformed into your personal dream of heaven.