The Five Agreements

I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people who missed one or more of the parts of this series, so I’m putting them all up here. Enjoy them, and then go get the book, “The Fifth Agreement”, by don Miguel Ruiz and don Jose Ruiz, and study it. There’s so much more than I could cover in my short newsletter.

The First Agreement

“The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word.”

I love the word “impeccable.” It has a unique quality of careful detailed perfection about it. When we are impeccable with our words, we choose them carefully.

Our minds are marvelous in that they have taken in everything we have learned since infancy and used those things to create stories. We have stories about ourselves, our families, friends, the world, and anything you can think of. Most of these stories aren’t true. They are either the passed down stories of others, or the stories our mind made up based on bits and pieces of data.

The stories that can do us the most damage are the stories that we believe about ourselves. You know, the stories about what we are, and what we aren’t. We’re too slow, not smart, middle class, getting old, made lots of mistakes, and so forth. You know what your stories are.

The main point to remember about the 1st agreement is that to be impeccable with our word we have to only state the Truth about ourselves, not the stories. The Truth is – we’re a perfect creation just as we are. So is everyone else.

Can you go through a full day without voicing any of the old stories about yourself or others? Just affirming the Truth instead? If so, you’re way ahead of me, but I’m working on it.

Just remember to question every opinion that your mind serves up by recognizing that it’s mostly a story. Be willing to see things in a new way. Make up positive stories that serve you instead.

The Second Agreement

“The second agreement is to not take anything personally.”

Yesterday we started this series by explaining that we all create stories in our mind out of our experiences. Every other person in our life is a character in our stories somewhere. And note this carefully: we are a character in their stories!

Now Ruiz points out that if we were to watch a movie of any other person’s story we would notice three things. First, they are the main character and we are only a supporting character of some sort. Next we would realize that the way that person is depicted in their own movie is very different than the way we depict them in our movie! And then we would realize that the way we are depicted in their movie is not the way we think we are at all!

We would yell, “Stop! You’ve got it all wrong!” But that isn’t true. Their movie is just their story, we can understand that. But our movie is just our story, too, and that’s harder for us to accept. We believe with all our heart that our view of ourselves and others is TRUE! But it’s just the story we’ve concocted over the years.

So this is what leads to the 2nd agreement. We don’t take things personally because what people do is really about themselves, not about us. It’s about their movie and our character role in their movie, not about the truth of us. When we see others as beautiful people struggling with their stories, we can love them in spite of what they might say or do. Because it’s really not about us at all.

Try it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but it’s worth it.

The Third Agreement

“Humans have a need to explain and justify everything. We have a need for knowledge and we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know.”

We’ve discussed the first two agreements – being impeccable with our word, and not taking anything personally. In the 3rd agreement we deal with another human trait that can be very helpful if used correctly, but for most of us just causes all sorts of problems.

Our mind is designed to answer questions and solve problems. That can be very helpful when we have a problem to solve. But this part of our mind won’t stop at that. My wife and I have made a joke out of it. When we’re driving somewhere and we see something out of the ordinary we immediately begin to make up stories about it to explain it. And we laugh at ourselves.

A car parked by the side of the highway. Why? Well, we come up with all kinds of reasons. But it’s just a car parked by the highway.

In reality that’s what our mind does all the time. It doesn’t like unanswered questions. If someone does something, we can’t just notice that they did something and leave it at that. No, we have to make up a story about why they did it. And here’s the important point – our explanation comes out of our movie in our mind and has nothing whatsoever to do with reality!

So that’s the 3rd agreement. We don’t make assumptions. Whatever happens, we don’t make up a story about it, we just note that it happened. Now you can listen to your mind make up a story, because it will, but you see the joke and can enjoy it. You know it’s just a story. Don’t make assumptions.

The Fourth Agreement

“The way you are living your life right now is the result of many years of practice. Change is the result of action; it’s the result of practice.”

We’ve discussed the first three agreements – being impeccable with our word, not taking anything personally, and not making assumptions. Now if you’ve started to practice these agreements you may have noticed something.

They’re not easy! They’re simple, but we have so many years of practice doing things another way that changing our habits is difficult. So the natural thing to do, as the delightful humans that we are, is to label ourselves a failure and give up. We know it’s easy for other people, but not for us. Can you hear your internal story making machine at work?

Here’s why it’s tough to change. Our subconscious mind has a job to do – keep our beliefs and our experience of life in harmony. In other words, our internal story is reflected back to us by our experience. This makes our mind happy!

When we begin to practice the agreements, we disrupt this internal harmony. So our subconscious will make us uncomfortable and try to keep us doing the old behaviors. We want to change, but it won’t happen easily and we need to be kind to ourselves in the process.

That’s why there’s a 4th agreement that makes that possible. It’s simple. Always do your best.

Your best is always changing because you’re always changing, and what’s going on is always changing. So your best is really just the best you can do in that moment. You can look at any event and since you know that what you did was the best you could do in that moment, there’s no reason to be critical of yourself.

Simply focus on doing your best in the next moment. And the next. Always do your best.

The Fifth Agreement

“Once you realize that hardly anything that you know through symbols is true, then ‘be skeptical’ has a much bigger meaning. ‘Be skeptical’ is masterful because it uses the power of doubt to discern the truth.”

We’ve covered the first four agreements, being impeccable with our word, not taking anything personally, not making assumptions, and always doing our best. The 5th agreement carries us on through life in a way that allows us to grow. Like the other agreements, it sounds simple.

Be skeptical, but learn to listen.

As Ruiz says, be skeptical is powerful because it encourages us to question everything. Since we are learning that most of what we know isn’t true, we need to be skeptical. But it’s possible to be so skeptical that we deny everything and learn nothing. That’s just another way to live our life in an unreal movie.

So the second part says that we learn to listen. Why do we need to learn? Isn’t listening something that’s almost automatic?

Yes it is, and that’s the problem. Part of listening is hearing the words, and that’s automatic. The other part of listening is applying meaning to the words, and that can be automatic, too. When we allow the meaning to arise automatically, we allow our movie to take over and we’re not hearing what was communicated, we’re hearing what our movie has conditioned us to expect.

So learning to listen means to listen without expectations. Listen with the intent to understand the message with no preconceived ideas. it becomes easier to do that when we apply the 2nd agreement and don’t take anything personally, and the 3rd where we don’t make assumptions.

So be skeptical, but learn to listen. You’ll be grateful you did!

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Tagged as: life, mind