68 pages • 2 hours read
Don Miguel RuizThe Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Self-Limiting Agreements Learned Through Human Domestication
The goal of the Four Agreements is to challenge the self-limiting beliefs learned through human domestication. According to Ruiz, all humans are domesticated at a young age and taught to live within the dream of the planet, which is “the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity” (2). The dream of the planet includes society’s rules and expectations, religions, governments, schools, and even holidays. Children aren’t given the opportunity to choose their own beliefs, but they’re conditioned to agree with the information that their parents, schools, and churches give them. By agreeing with this information, children form agreements, which then form belief systems. Ruiz refers to this process as human domestication.
Throughout the book, Ruiz encourages people to challenge the agreements they’ve made and create a new dream for themselves. To do this, Ruiz explains, is difficult because the Book of Law, Judge, and Victim mentality acts as a parasite, draining one’s energy and power. Ruiz defines a parasite as “a living being who lives off of other living beings, sucking their energy without any useful contribution in return, and hurting their host little by little” (101). In the dream of the planet, the Book of Law—or everyone’s internalized belief system—controls them. In this belief system, the inner Judge constantly looks to blame and punish, while the Victim accepts this punishment and pities itself. This cycle of self-punishment keeps people living in hell, where they experience fear, anger, bitterness, envy, and many other negative emotions.
The four agreements are ways to fight the parasite and rebel against domestication. First, however, people must be aware of their self-limiting agreements. In each chapter, Ruiz highlights how the agreements people have made are the root cause of all the drama and sadness in their lives. In the first of the four agreements, Be Impeccable with Your Word, Ruiz notes that the beliefs we accept during domestication inform our realities, but we can break its spell over our lives by making a new agreement and reinforcing it. Similarly, in the second and third agreement, Don’t Take Anything Personally and Don’t Make Assumptions, Ruiz demonstrates that domestication teaches children to take everything personally and to make assumptions, spreading emotional poison: “The whole war of control between humans is about making assumptions and taking things personally. Our whole dream of hell is based on that” (64). In the fourth agreement, Always Do Your Best, Ruiz challenges the Book of Law, the Judge, and the Victim: “When you do your best, you don’t give the Judge the opportunity to find you guilty or blame you” (80). Ruiz believes that by instituting the four agreements, people can live their lives completely free of the self-limiting agreements they made during their years of domestication. Understanding this theme is the first step toward living a happy life.
The Necessity of Choice in Making and Breaking Agreements
The necessity of choice is another prevalent theme throughout the book. Ruiz makes it clear that the only way to change one’s life is by choosing to do so. He warns that the choice isn’t easy and requires much willpower but adds that he knows it’s possible because he did it himself. Although children don’t have the opportunity to choose their beliefs, adults do: “You are no longer a child. Now it’s up to you to choose what to believe and what not to believe” (106). Every step of instituting the four agreements is a choice. In each chapter, Ruiz presents an opportunity to choose a different path. In Chapter 2, the choice is to be conscious of one’s words and use them to create and give life instead of spreading emotional poison with gossip. In Chapter 3, the choice is to avoid taking anything personally, even though human domestication teaches people to do exactly that. In Chapter 4, Ruiz urges people to choose not to make assumptions and to challenge the agreements that tell them that everyone sees life the way they do. Finally, in Chapter 5, Ruiz emphasizes that people can choose to make doing their best a ritual, as he did: “Doing my best has become a ritual in my life because I made the choice to make it a ritual. It’s a belief like any other belief that I choose” (83).
Ultimately, Ruiz encourages people to make one major decision: to “declare a war against the parasite, a war against the Judge and Victim, a war for the right to use our own mind and our own brain” (102-03). This decision to rebel against domestication and create a new dream for oneself requires multiple choices every day. First, one must choose to be aware of the self-limiting agreements they’ve made, which Ruiz calls the Mastery of Awareness. Next, one must choose to catalog those self-limiting agreements and replace them with positive agreements. The choice to adopt positive agreements is a declaration of war on one’s previous way of life, which was dominated by the Book of Law, Judge, and Victim mentality. Ruiz calls this the Mastery of Transformation. In addition, one must choose to live in love. Ruiz calls this the Mastery of Intent—being in union with “God,” or the living being that connects all energy.
The Four Agreements give people the opportunity to be warriors, to fight the self-limiting agreements learned through human domestication, and to create their own dream: “The dream you are living is your creation. It is your perception of reality that you can change at any time. You have the power to create hell, and you have the power to create heaven” (123). These big decisions are made through smaller, consistent decisions to change one’s way of thinking every single day. Throughout the book, Ruiz reminds people that these choices will change their life and that no matter how they feel, they do have the power to make these changes and see their new dream unfold.
Living in a State of Unconditional Love
The possibility of living a new dream, a life of bliss and unconditional love, is the driving force behind the book. Everything Ruiz writes is with this dream in mind. Ruiz explains that all humans are living in hell, the dream of the planet, but can live fully free to express themselves, love unconditionally, and enjoy their lives. Ruiz doesn’t deny the amount of effort it takes to achieve this dream but consistently emphasizes that it’s a worthwhile and achievable goal.
Ruiz first mentions the new dream in Chapter 1, where he offers a glimpse at what life can look like if one is willing to do the work:
You need a very strong will in order to adopt the Four Agreements—but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing. You will see the drama of hell disappear right before your very eyes. Instead of living in a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream—your personal dream of heaven (23).
Every time he introduces a new agreement, Ruiz gives an example of what life looks like before one fully implements that agreement and how life can look afterward. In introducing the first agreement, Be Impeccable with Your Word, Ruiz explains that most people use words to spread the emotional poison of hate, lies, and gossip, perpetuating the dream of the planet and putting people under spells. However, by being impeccable with your 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” (45-46).
In the second agreement, Don’t Take Anything Personally, Ruiz shows what life looks like when one continues to take things personally: It allows emotional poison to infect and spread, causing suffering. However, he claims that sadness will disappear when one agrees not to take anything personally: “You can choose to follow your heart always. Then you can be in the middle of hell and still experience inner peace and happiness. You can stay in your state of bliss, and hell will not affect you at all” (60-61). Similarly, when one institutes the third agreement, Don’t Make Assumptions, “magic just happens in your life” (74). By instituting the fourth agreement, Always Do Your Best, one actively starts to live one’s new dream.
Ruiz threads the theme of the new dream throughout the book to encourage people to keep challenging their old agreements because their dreams are worth it. By sprinkling examples of the new dream at the end of each chapter, Ruiz gives people a taste of the end goal. He provides a stark contrast between what life looks like before the four agreements and what it can look like afterward, showing how worthwhile the journey is. The last chapter emphasizes the value of the work and the beauty of the new dream by demonstrating a life lived in a state of bliss, without fear, judgment, control, or punishment. Ruiz writes about a life full of unconditional love for oneself and others, where respect is mutual and one isn’t afraid to be hurt. He paints a beautiful picture of what’s possible when the Four Agreements are implemented and allows people to create their own dream to work toward.
