This is a remarkable book and it is exactly what it says it is: a practical guide to personal freedom. When we hear the word freedom, we might think it is about having more choices, or doing whatever one feels like. However, the idea of freedom in this book is much deeper: that of being free of the prison of our thoughts that bind us and prevent us from living authentically. It is concerned with the freedom to be, and to act.
In this age of self-help, where we are inundated with titles that suggest five steps or seven ways to do this or that, and we see a book with four agreements in its title, we might initially think it seems to fit that mold. However, this book is not prescriptive, it does not tell you what you should or should not do. It simply opens us up to how we constantly undermine ourselves and describes a different pathway – one in which we may live powerfully and in freedom.
The four agreements are:
- Be impeccable with your word
- Don’t take anything personally
- Don’t make assumptions
- Always do your best
These are not prescriptive commandments but invitations to discover the “warrior’s way,” to see what happens when you try them on.
The core difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man views everything as a blessing or a curse.
– Carlos Castaneda
In other words, ordinarily, we are swayed this way and that, as the uncertain winds of life blow at us, with nothing to anchor us. We feel like the jetsam and flotsam that thrash around on the ocean’s surface when life’s unexpected events catch us unprepared. We try to cope and do our best; some do a better job of it than others.
There is an alternate path to coping and making do, and that is the path of a warrior:
A “warrior” is distinguished from an “ordinary man” by their focus on infinity, detachment, and a life lived by acting rather than dwelling on thoughts, while ordinary people are grounded in daily life and self-concern.
– Carlos Castaneda
So, in the spirit of living the life of a warrior, what does it mean to make these four agreements?
Be impeccable with your word
In another blog post – The Way of Integrity – I had written about the first agreement – how being impeccable with one’s word is aligned with a life of integrity. This is not just about keeping promises though. It is about the power of the word itself. As Ruiz says early in the book:
The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human; it is the tool of magic.
Given its magical quality, “the word can set you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know.”
Those of us familiar with the ways of modern-day therapy might recall the process where we were taken on a journey back to our childhood to revisit pivotal moments when we were told something negative about ourselves, and in turn, we made an agreement with ourselves that we were not good enough. That agreement made by a child, turns out to be the source of much anguish for years after, impacting our relationships as adults. That is the power of a misused word.
Once the negative message has been internalized, we self-punish and then struggle. The way out, as suggested here in the book, is not to go railing against one’s parents or whoever else might have cast that slur which we took to be true, but to become impeccable with our word.
When Ruiz uses the word impeccability, he means “without sin” and the definition of sin here is not moral or religious.
A sin is anything you do which goes against yourself. […] 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. […] Being impeccable with your word is not using the word against yourself.
Uff! Do you see how hard that is to do? But then it is so worth learning to do!
What is implied here is much deeper and wider than merely keeping one’s promises or being honest in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a transformation of the primary relationship upon which all other relationships are built.
I have been working on this aspect through a seminar on Integrity over the past few weeks, and I have discovered that when I am focused on being impeccable with my word, the world is not as scary as I had thought it to be. It is what it is, and it is quite alright. My existential fear subsides and there is freedom to be, and to act. I am confident because I am not using my word against myself.
Don’t take anything personally
Having established our primary relationship through the first agreement, we can see how we are often at the mercy of other people’s thoughts and opinions, and the impact these have on us. A harsh word can send us spinning for hours if not days.
What causes us to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”
And then Ruiz speaks of the nature of our experiences:
All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the world 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.
So the key to our freedom lies in the recognition that there is no “my” life. There is just life and we have one perspective of the whole but not the whole.
The above quote makes a reference to a deeper understanding of the nature of reality itself, that we may have a mistaken model of the world as being objectively real and that we are separate entities within this world. In the book You are the Happiness You Seek, Rupert Spira explores this materialistic model in-depth and suggests that we have perhaps gotten our model of reality entirely upside down, or inside out – that the truth of the matter is that unitary consciousness is primary and all that there is. Okay, that might take some unpacking, so go read the book. My understanding is as follows:
We each seem to have a view of a slice of this single infinite consciousness through our own seemingly separate and private minds where we have our thoughts and feelings, distinct from others. Because we don’t experience the whole, we feel fragmented and threatened, and set about defending ourselves against the seeming threat of others’ opinions.
The second agreement gives a way to break through this conflict-based way of living by recognizing that nothing that happens or does not happen is personal. Our error in taking things personally traps us into being right and making others wrong. From there on, all the drama of our life plays out.
For those of us who have struggled with people-pleasing, as I have, this is one of those moments when you can throw your head back and laugh at the utter idiocy of it all. The interesting thing is that it works both ways – praise and criticism. It doesn’t matter if the opinions are positive or negative. Neither has anything to do with you. If you don’t take it personally, you are free of both seeking validation and defending yourself.
Don’t make assumptions
The third agreement to not make assumptions has been the hardest for me. Hmm, yeah even harder than the second one – taking things personally had become my second nature, I was so easily offended. Lol. But assumptions are hard to discover because they are beliefs – you are blind to them until they are exposed and you see them, and then they are not assumptions anymore unless you give them the false status of truth.
The third agreement has a close link to the second one because if I make assumptions, I am just a sitting duck for taking things personally. Everything offends! The interesting way out is to ask questions, to be curious and then we discover that what was causing us so much anguish was a fabrication of our own making! Lol. Really! So much of it is just laughable once you step out of it and look at it.
All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.
Just take a moment to think about the implications of that. What a mess we have created and continue to create because of this single error.
We only want to see what we want to see, and we hear what we want to hear. We don’t perceive things the way they are.
If this is understood, then there is humility that one’s view is merely a slice of the whole and we might learn more about the fuller picture by asking questions – not to determine who is right or wrong but as a recognition of our limited faculties of perception.
The need to make assumptions arises from our deep desire to feel safe. We need to know in order to feel safe, and an assumption gives us a false sense of certainty. The mind doesn’t care if it is true or not as long as it makes one feel safe. However, because we know deep down that we are not entirely certain, any other contrary opinion becomes a threat; we then want to defend our assumptions and seek others who corroborate them. After all, without our assumptions (or beliefs), what are we?
Always do your best
This last one is about taking action. It is what actualizes the other three agreements into our daily lives and makes them into ingrained habits.
I love it because it feels like the easiest of the four. Lol. Nah. I am a master of doing my “best” or at least convincing myself that I am doing so! It is so easy to fly under the radar or be mediocre, set low expectations, and get by.
So no, it is not the easiest. It is the hardest because this is action, and action is always harder than thinking about something. Writing a blog post about this book is better than thinking of writing a blog post. But even that action is once removed. They are still words. What happens when I turn up for work tomorrow and meet others? That’s where this gets tested.
We act when we decide to stop being spectators of our own lives and step down into the court of life where the action is.
Action is about living fully. Inaction is the way that we deny life. Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years because you are afraid to be alive and to take the risk of expressing what you are. Expressing what you are is taking action.
So here is to taking action in our lives and expressing what we are. After all, that is the primary force of life – creation – and we are life itself. In not hiding ourselves away, in expressing ourselves authentically, we allow life to do what it is designed to do: create infinitely! And we get to partake in this unfolding mystery!
Oh man, what an amazing universe and what a bounteous life!
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