The Four Agreements

“I’m the Smokey mirror, because I am looking at myself in all of you, but we don’t recognise each other because of the smoke in-between us. That smoke is the Dream, and the mirror is you, the dreamer.”

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As humans, we make many agreements with the world, with ourselves, formal/ informal agreements, knowingly or unknowingly. I am not good at this so, I can’t do that, the most common agreement. We dream of becoming something/someone. The idea of the dream of the world is not new. We all live in a dream. We assume everything against that dream is wrong. Who decides?

Mitote, a fog, what Toltec used to call the whole mind. Our dream is like a fog, which blinds us from seeing the truth. Which makes our living life a living hell. We suffer a lot simply because we don’t know who we are! Instead of finding the reality, we fill the gaps with a dream, which can never be completed. To make all of this suffering go, we need to make a few agreements. In The Four Agreements, author Don Miguel Ruiz walks us through those four agreements that we have to make to clear out this Mitote.

1) Be impeccable with your word.

“you don’t deserve it”, “you are an idiot!”, ”you are not good”. We are all sinners of these words. Somewhere, to someone (Mostly, to ourselves), we have thrown these words unintentionally. We are unaware of the consequences. Words can kill someone. Given the world we live in, words can kill us.

The first agreement is to be impeccable with your words. Simply, don’t use your words against yourself.

Telling someone you are not good at this can affect their mental state, most of the time, in a negative way. You have to be very careful with your words. Sure, you might be right, he/she is actually not good at that. But you mustn’t have to hurt them for that. Instead, explain to them your perspective, and explain how your right is different from theirs. Who knows what is right and what is wrong anyway? 

We hurt others when we want to hurt ourselves when we are not happy with our own. When we suffer from something personal, we become a poison for ourselves and others. Instead of using your words like a sword, use them as a precise scalpel, not to hurt but to look inside others, inside ourselves.

2) Don’t take anything personally!

If the first agreement is about avoiding becoming poison, the second agreement is about being immune to the poison. Don’t take anything personally! When life doesn’t happen the way you want it to, you don’t have to take it personally. When someone tells you, you are not good enough, don’t take it personally! You already know who you are, where you are going, and how are you going there.

Not just negative, you have to be immune to positive (super positive) stuff as well. 

We live in an ‘Instagram’ world where we depend on validation from others, and that is not wrong. We are social animals. The problem starts when it becomes too much. 

It is okay to get rejected, you are who you are. It is just you, not a bad/ good person, just you. People simply don’t know who you are, so clearly, you must not get affected by what they say about you. Don’t take it personally!

3) Don’t make assumptions

Assuming things about others is a virus that our brain has. It makes us blind to the actual fact. If we look around, we realise we don’t really know many things about our life. We just assume them to be the way they are. Think about the last person you fought with. Do you really know the reason why they behaved like that? Do you really understand why they uttered those words, did those things? Most probably not. Because for our mind, it is easier to assume things and fill the gaps than find the truth.

Don’t assume things, ask people what they really meant, clear all the blurry thoughts.

And it works the opposite way as well. If you never really made any clear point about how you think, what you think about something and just assume others to understand it (without saying). Then you just can’t complain that the world never understands me. How can anyone understand you if you never talked?

Make a clear point, put your thinking into the words, and tell others what you want to say. Don’t just assume that they will understand you. You have to make efforts to express yourself.

4) Always do your best

It starts with action! Only action makes all the difference. You just have to do your best each time.

It doesn’t matter what the situation is, how good or bad, you have to give your best. If you do your best each time, you won’t have to feel regretful. You won’t take anything personally. Because you would know, you already have done your best. When you do your best, you have a clear understanding of things. You will be impeccable with your words, and when you are impeccable with your words, your thoughts, your language will be clear, people won’t have to assume you. And in return, you won’t have to assume what they say.

You might have felt some gaps here, and that’s totally true. I can’t fill those gaps for you, the book explains it well. You should read it. 

But my point is if we are gonna live here for a finite amount of time, why should we be unknown to ourselves? These four agreements are hard to implement. But what they are really telling us is we have to be aware of ourselves, perhaps to achieve Nirvana!

read the book: