The Four Agreements Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

To wake up from the dream of other people, you need to become aware of the agreements your sense of reality has been build on and begin to break them. To break them, face your fears, and create new agreements that release you from the expectations of others. Ruiz offers four agreements as a starting point. First, pay attention to the words you use and only say the things you mean. Second, don’t take things personally and get to know yourself. Third, avoid making assumptions by asking questions about the things you don’t understand. Finally, always do your best in everything you do to live your life in gratitude.

About the Author

Don Miguel Ruiz was raised in rural Mexico. He attended medical school and then became a surgeon, practicing medicine for several years. After getting into a near-fatal car accident, Ruiz re-conceived his moral understanding and decided he needed to become a Toltec shaman. He moved to the United States and became the apprentice of a shaman. The Four Agreements, written based on his study of Toltec spiritual beliefs, was a New York Times bestseller for more than a decade. Since then, six books have followed. He now lectures and leads retreats in the United States.

Topics

Religion & Spirituality Psychology

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Key Insights

Drawing on the philosophies of the Toltecs, an indigenous Mexican people, Ruiz explains how we can use this ancient wisdom to improve our modern lives. He explains their fascinating conception of reality as an ongoing dream— a dream that’s in our power to change. According to the Toltecs, much of this dream is determined by the rigid expectations of our society, leaving us fearful and unhappy. To escape, we must wake up from this dream and invent new ways of seeing. To guide us on this path, he offers four mantras to see the world, and our potential, in clearer terms.

You are living in a dream, and this dream is made up of “agreements”.

A key feature of Toltec spiritual beliefs, dating back 5,000 years in Mesoamerica, was that dreaming doesn’t only occur during sleep. When people wake up, they enter a different kind of dream world: the dream of their reality.

Although the concept may seem overly mystical, Ruiz explains the sense in it. We understand the world around us with labels, concepts, and beliefs. We were taught to see the world in this way from birth, given words and rules to interpret the things we encountered. The sum of these societal constructions, says Ruiz, creates what Toltecs called “the dream of the world”.

Of course, this is how the human mind makes sense of the chaos of reality. We agree to see the world in certain ways, whether it be learning your native language or respecting the rules of your parent’s religion because it gives life structure. Ruiz defines accepting these ways of seeing as “agreements”. Ultimately, these agreements tell us how we should behave and what we should value.

In childhood, we become domesticated by our environment and take on dreams that aren’t really ours.

Agreements made life easier, but we accepted most of them in childhood without much consideration. You didn’t get to choose which first language you learned, for example. We looked to our teachers, peers, and cultures for ideas on how to act, and often learned what’s right and wrong through systems of punishment and reward— parents chastised you for acting out or schools gave good grades for studying their chosen subjects the right way.

Ruiz calls this “domestication”, or accepting agreements from our environments without having a chance to reflect on them. As we grow older, these agreements become lodged deep within us, devising an image of how we’re supposed to be. When we don’t meet this standard, we punish ourselves— maybe you scold yourself for not working hard enough or feel good about being charming enough at a party.

When we do reflect on these agreements we notice that these expectations weigh heavily on our shoulders. We subconsciously chase the brownie points we got in childhood and live in fear of the punishments. Meanwhile, the expectations of traditional success and behavior may not have been attainable, realistic, or at all well-advised.

So are we doomed to endlessly strive to meet these expectations? Even if they make us unhappy? Ruiz...