The Four Agreements

[droqen]

Re Don Miguel Ruiz'
"The Four Agreements"

[droqen]

p xix

"Everyone is a mirror," he said. He saw himself in everyone, but nobody saw him as themselves.

1
Domestication and the Dream of the Planet

p1 "What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. . . . Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake. . ."

p22 ". . . it is our agreements that rule our own life. . . [if] we don't like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements."

see my reading of The Idea of the World

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2
Be Impeccable with Your Word

p28,29 "Every human is a magician, and we can either put a spell on someone with our word or we can release someone from a spell."

We use the word to hook attention, to influence the dreams of others. We pass on poison—curses.

p33 "The power of the word is completely misused in hell. We use the word to curse, to blame, to find guilt, to destroy. . . . to spread our personal poison—to express anger, jealousy, envy, and hate."

p45 "Use the word to break all those teeny, tiny agreements that make you suffer.
     It is possible. It is possible because I did it, and I am no better than you. No, we are exactly the same. We have the same kind of brain, the same kind of bodies; we are humans."

p45,46 (end) "With the impeccability of the word you can transcend the dream of fear and live a different life. You can live in heaven in the middle of thousands of people living in hell because you are immune to that hell. You can attain the kingdom of heaven from this one agreement: Be impeccable with your word."

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3
The Second Agreement

p47 "The next three agreements are really born from the first agreement."

I'm a huge fan of things being rooted in the same point. Huge fan.

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p53 "Whatever people do, feel, think, or say, don't take it personally. If they tell you how wonderful you are, they are not saying that because of you. You know you are wonderful. It is not necessary to believe other people who tell you that you are wonderful."

p57 "Humans are addicted to suffering at different levels and to different degrees, and we support each other in maintaining these addictions. Humans agree to help each other suffer. If you have the need to be abused, you will find it easy to be abused by others. Likewise, if you are with people who need to suffer, something in you makes you abuse them."

p54,55 "Even the opinions you have about yourself are not necessarily true. . . you don't need to take whatever you hear in your own mind personally. . . . We have a choice whether or not to believe the voices we hear within our own minds, just as we have a choice of what to believe and agree with in the dream of the planet.
    The mind can also talk and listen to itself. The mind is divided as your body is divided. . . . Part of the mind is speaking, and the other part is listening."

p57 "Wherever you go you will find people lying to you, and as your awareness grows, you will notice that you also lie to yourself. Do not expect people to tell you the truth because they also lie to themselves."

p60 "As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won't need to place your trust in what others do or say. . . . You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you. . . . If you keep this agreement, you can travel around the world with your heart completely open and no one can hurt you. You can say, "I love you," without fear of being ridiculed or rejected. . . . You can choose to follow your heart always."

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4
Don't Make Assumptions

p64 "Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong."

Making assumptions about what is going on in other people's minds. Making assumptions and then making assumptions on top of those assumptions.

p68 "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're feel."

p70 "Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them. If we try to change them, this means we don't really like them."

p72 "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 about a given situation. Once you hear the answer, you will not have to make assumptions because you will know the truth."

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p69

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.

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5
Always Do Your Best

this one is so simple—impeccably simple. every person, i think, has a sense of what their best is, and whether they are doing it...

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p76-77 "Under any circumstance, always do your best, no more and no less. . .  Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good. . . ."

p78 "Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely. You are going to become productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything. But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy."

p80 ". . . 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. . . . If we like what we do, if we always do our best, then we are really enjoying life. We are having fun, we don't get bored, we don't have frustrations."

Here's where I'm so fucking mad about videogames, games, the whole ... thing. They short circuit the organic logic of the rewarding universe. I need to think on this more but I'll leave a dangling note here for now and move on.

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Returned the book.