The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

Ruiz writes that everything humans experience is a dream because dreaming is the mind’s “main function.” He writes that all humans are dreaming all the time, whether they’re awake or asleep. Before a human is born, the previous generation created a dream that exists outside of individuals, called the dream of the planet. Within this big, outside dream are smaller, personal dreams of family, society, and humanity, including society’s laws, religions, cultures, and governments. Children are born with the ability to dream, and adults teach them how.

Ruiz then writes about attention, the ability to focus on what one wants to perceive while letting other things fade into the background. Adults constantly try to direct children’s attention by teaching through repetition to engrain the dream of the planet in them. By capturing and maintaining children’s attention, parents, siblings, schoolteachers, and religious leaders teach them how to believe and behave. Everyone is fighting for others’ attention, so children learn to compete for the attention of others.

Children store information by making agreements within themselves. They don’t have the chance to choose their beliefs for themselves; they instead agree with the information adults give them. Together, an agreements and information form beliefs, which in time form a belief system and way of life.

Ruiz calls this process of agreeing to information the domestication of humans. Through domestication, adults teach children the dream of the planet, which forms their personal dreams and their entire belief system. Children are domesticated just like animals—through positive reinforcement and rewards for good behavior, and punishment for bad behavior. To avoid punishment and receive a reward, children pretend to be what the authorities in their lives want them to be. The fear of punishment and rejection becomes the fear of not being good enough. Although children want to be themselves, they grow afraid of doing something wrong and receiving punishment.

After years of domestication, children no longer need anyone else to impose these fears on them; they’ve learned to do it to themselves. They create what Ruiz calls a Book of Law—their reference to unquestionable truth. All their judgments are based on this Book of Law, regardless of whether it agrees with their inner nature. All the agreements a child makes about what’s good, bad, right, wrong, etc., are written in their Book of Law and rule their personal dream and lived experiences.

Ruiz writes that all people have an inner Judge who uses the Book of Law to judge everything inside and around them. Every time individuals do something that disagrees with the Book of Law, their Judge tells them that they’re guilty and must be punished. Another side of a person, called the Victim, receives guilt and punishment from the Judge and believes itself unworthy of love and goodness.

This inner Judge and Victim cycle is based on a belief system from the dream of the planet, not a belief system that individuals choose for themselves; the dream of the planet controls their lives. Whenever individuals resist the beliefs in the Book of Law, they feel a deep fear because they believe that whatever is in their Book of Law is true—and anything that challenges those truths must be unsafe. This is why Ruiz emphasizes that it takes great courage to challenge beliefs.

Although people may not have chosen the beliefs in their Book of Law, they agreed to them at some point. These agreements are so strong that challenging them often produces guilt and shame, which controls their internal dream. Most people’s internal dream consists of the Judge punishing the Victim multiple times for any one mistake. While this feels like justice, true justice is paying once—not multiple times—for a mistake. Therefore, Ruiz writes, the Judge is wrong because the learned belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong—and the Book of Law is wrong because the dream of the planet designed it.

During domestication, individuals form an image of perfection that they believe makes them acceptable to everyone and therefore good enough. However, it’s an unattainable image, which is why people can’t accept themselves or others the way they are instead of what they think they should be. When people believe they’re imperfect, they hide and pretend to be something they’re not, afraid that someone else will notice that they’re not what they pretend to be. They judge themselves and others for not living up to this unattainable standard of perfection.

Therefore, the Book of Law, Judge, and Victim mindset makes people dishonor and punish themselves so that others accept them. People stay in abusive situations because their abuser still treats them better than they treat themselves, so they convince themselves that they deserve the punishment they receive. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, which stems from not meeting the unattainable standard of perfection.

The image of perfection is another false agreement in the mind. It’s part of the illusion, which the Toltecs call mitote. Mitote is a condition of the mind like confusion wherein one can’t see who one really is. Self-perception is made of the self-limiting beliefs and programs that one holds in one’s Book of Law.

The entire dream of the planet is based on fear, suffering, and violence. Ruiz compares the dream of the planet to many religions’ versions of hell, a place of torment and fear. Although the outside dream is a nightmare of hell, Ruiz refers to creating a new, pleasant dream for oneself. To do this, one must break the fear-based, limiting agreements that one has with oneself. These fear-based agreements drain energy, but love-based agreements give energy.

Prelude to a New Dream

In this subsection, Ruiz writes that to change one’s dream, or perception of reality, one must change one’s agreements. This requires a strong will because the initial agreements one makes are strong. However, every time someone breaks a fear-based agreement, the energy it took to maintain that agreement returns to them. Ruiz believes that the four agreements he introduces in the book can create enough power for anyone to change one’s entire system of agreements and therefore create a new dream for one’s life.