The Fifth Agreement

Introduction

The book The Four Agreements helps us break self-limiting agreements and replace them with four new ones that bring us personal freedom, happiness and love.

With practice, these four simple agreements help you become what you truly are, not what you pretend to be.

Written by don Miguel Ruiz and his son don Jose Ruiz, The Fifth Agreement takes us on a deeper journey to see our entire reality with the eyes of truth, leading to complete acceptance of yourself and everyone else just the way you are and they are.

In the Beginning

From the moment you are born, you deliver a message: you are the presence of an angel, a messenger from the infinite in a human body.

The infinite, a total power, creates a program just for you, and everything you need to be who you are is in that program.
You are born, you grow up, you mate, you grow old and in the end, you return to the infinite.
As a very young child, you instinctively follow its wisdom, knowing clearly what you like and dislike. You follow what you like and avoid what you do not. These instincts guide you to be happy, enjoy life, play, love and fulfil your needs.

However, as your mind begins to mature, you start to use symbols (like random sounds) and eventually learn language to deliver messages.

Once we learn to speak, the humans who take care of us teach us what they know, programming us with knowledge, including the social, religious and moral rules of their culture.
In truth, they hook our attention and domesticate us with the rules and values of family and society through a system of punishment and reward.
Out of fear of being punished and not getting reward, we start to please other people.
All of this information that we agree is stored in our memory and becomes as agreement.

Very soon, our attention is hooked on listening to what our knowledge says.

This voice of knowledge is not real; it is our own creation, but it feels real because it has our faith without a doubt.
Soon, the opinions of the humans around us (e.g. parents, siblings, teachers, friends) start taking over our mind, telling us who we are, and modifying our self-image and behaviour.
Out of fear of being rejected or not being good enough, we form an image of perfection, a way we wish to be that we know we are not.
We then begin to judge ourselves according to this image and feel we are no longer good enough.

Surprisingly, we do not even notice that we have learned to use symbols to reject ourselves.

Before domestication, we did not care what we were or what we looked like.
We were wild and free to explore, to express creativity, to seek pleasure and to avoid pain.
Our attention was in the moment; we were not afraid of the future or ashamed of the past.

In summary, all of our normal human tendencies (e.g. freedom, happiness, beauty, love, truth) are lost in the process of domestication, and we begin to search for what we have lost.

Symbols and Agreement

During all the years that we grow up, we make countless agreements with ourselves, society and everyone around us.

But the most important agreements are the ones we make with ourselves by understanding the symbols we have learned.
The voice of knowledge that we acquired through symbols is the only truth we agree upon, but it is not necessarily the genuine truth.

We make agreements with these symbols based on where we were born and what languages we have learned.

Any languague symbols only have value because we assign them value and agree to their meaning.
For example, the word tree is meaningful for people who speak English, but it may mean nothing to others.
The same applies to beliefs, rituals and mythologies, which may be totally different from what we learned when we encounter a foreign place or culture.
When we learn a new language, religion or philosophy, it may actually create an internal conflict with what we learned before, causing us to question: What is truly right and wrong? Is what I learned before still true?

The truth is that all of our knowledge is nothing more than symbolism or words that we invent for the need to understand and express what we perceive.

Humans construct an entire belief system and body of knowledge made up of these symbols, and we believe it faithfully without a doubt.
We first explain to ourselves, and then to everybody around us, the way we perceive the entire universe, which explain why there are different ways of thinking, mythologies, religions and philosophies around the world.
These symbols that we use to construct what we know are only true because we say so.

The objective truth is universally real and constant, but the way we interpret it is subjective.

This subjective interpretation, which includes emotional reactions, is a reflection of the truth, hence creating a virtual reality within our minds.
This virtual reality, or pure perception, is what we believe or wish it to be.

Self-mastery is all about awareness: learning to differentiate what is virtual (which we can change) from what is real (which is universally constant despite our changing beliefs).

Humans are born to perceive the truth, but the knowledge we accumulate has often made us blind and caused us to deny what we perceive.
We have also learned to use our words - a form of pure magic - against ourselves and others.

NOTE: Similarly, the first step in books like The Power of Now and other self-help literature that involves change is awareness. Only with awareness can we know how and what to change.

The Story of You

All around the world, humans make great effort to understand the universe, nature, and mainly human nature.

However, along the journey, we also make many assumptions, thereby creating entire philosophies, religions and superstitions.
We are also constantly using the words we have learned to create stories, form opinions, and express our point of view.
Ultimately, you create mainly the story of you, and then a story about everything you perceive (e.g. family, community, country, humanity and the entire world). This forms an entire virtual reality in your mind, which you then live in.

You make the assumption that the one talking in your head is you.

However, it is the virtual you (knowledge) formed from the opinions and stories of others that is telling the physical you about what you are.
The virtual you is constantly judging you - for being too short or too tall, too heavy or too thin - against the way it thinks you should be, and based on everything it knows.
That is when you become the good human, the bad human, the guilty one, the crazy one, the powerful one, the weak one, the beautiful one, or the ugly one, rather than just you.

Using awareness, you will see that everything you believe determines how you live your life, creating the story and emotions you experience.

The word is a powerful tool for the creation of your virtual reality, which is why we should be impeccable with it.
The word holds the magic and power of creation to reproduce an image, idea, feeling or story in your imagination.

Being impeccable with your word means never using the power of the word against yourself.

Therefore, when you are impeccable with words, you will not use your knowledge to create a self-judging and self-rejecting story - to judge yourself, find yourself guilty, and punish yourself.
When angry, you will also not use words to send emotional poison to someone else. If you insult someone, that person may harm you physically in response.
You will also avoid gossip about other people because you are well aware that gossip represents people's points of view and is not the real truth.
On the other hand, you will use your word in the direction of truth and self-love.

Every Mind Is A World

From the Toltec point of view, our entire life is a dream because the brain is programmed to dream 24 hours a day.

Depending on how we dream, we see and hear things in our own imagination that others do not see or hear. In other words, these images exist only in our mind, our personal dream.

The virtual reality in our mind is like a copy of reality that you see reflected in a mirror.

The millions of objects you see with your eyes are merely light being reflected off those objects.
Everything you perceive is a reflection of what is real, just like reflections in a mirror, except for one important difference.
Behind the mirror there is nothing, but behind your eyes is a brain that tries to make sense of everything.
Your brain is interpreting what you perceive according to the knowledge programmed in your mind, which includes your personal belief system.

Light reproduces a perfect image of what is real, but we can distort that image by creating a story using all the symbols and opinions we have learned.

We dream about it with our imagination and think it is the absolute truth, when our dream is just a relative truth, distorted by all the knowledge stored in our memory.
More importantly, the world we think we see outside of us is actually inside of us; it is simply images in our imagination.

When we are not aware that our mind is always dreaming, it is easy to blame everyone and everything outside of us for all the distortions inside our personal dream, and for anything that makes us suffer in life.

Simply by becoming aware that we are living in a dream that we, as artists, are creating, we can take responsibility for our creation: enjoy it if it is wonderful, or change it if it is a nightmare.
In fact, every time you talk about your story, it changes depending on who you are telling it to, your physical and emotional state at the time, and your beliefs at the time. Even if you try to tell the same story, your story is always changing.
At a certain point, you find out that it is nothing more than a story.

In the dream of the planet, everyone's attention is focused on their own stories, not yours.

In everyone's story, they are the main character, while others are merely secondary characters.
The way we project ourselves into other people's stories may be completely different from the way we are perceived by others in different stories.
You may have invested all your faith in your story and acted it out your whole life, but that story remains true only for you because no one perceives the story the way you do. Hence, it is just a relative truth.

Through this awareness, you should understand the simple logic of "don't take anything personally".

You do not have to concern yourself with other people's points of view.
You do not even have to defend your own point of view, just let the dogs bark.

Truth of Fiction

For centuries, humans have believed that a conflict exists in the mind - that of good and evil.

This is not true. Good and evil are merely the results of the conflict, because the real conflict is between truth and lies.
Perhaps we should say that all conflict is the result of lies, because the truth contains no conflict at all.
The truth does not need to prove itself; it exists whether we believe in it or not.
Lies only exist if we create them, and they only survive if we believe in them.

Lies are simply a distorted virtual reality in the human mind.

To illustrate, centuries ago, people believed that the earth was flat, but this false belief did not make it true.
Similarly, while we might associate certain objects with evil due to superstitions, that association only affects those who believe it.
The truth is that everything in creation is perfect, including humans. However, if we hold the belief that nobody is perfect, we will constantly judge ourselves against an impossible image of perfection.
In today's world, the people in control of the media tell us what to believe, how to dress, and what to eat, manipulating humans like puppets in whatever way they desire.

When we are domesticated, we accumulate a lot of knowledge, but all that knowledge is just like a wall of fog that does not allow us to perceive the truth.

We only see what we want to see; we only hear what we want to hear. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe.
Worse, we make the assumption that what we believe is the absolute truth, and we never stop to consider that our truth is a relative truth.

Making assumptions is just looking for trouble, because most assumptions are not the truth; they are fiction.

Using awareness, we can see how easy it is for humans to use their powerful imagination and symbols to create stories about what others are doing, thinking, and saying about us.
We invent a whole story that is only true for us, but we believe it.
One assumption leads to another assumption; we jump to conclusions, and we take our story very personally, which then creates a big drama of possibilities for nothing.

Remember, assumptions are nothing more than lies that we are telling ourselves.

It is always better to ask questions and be clear.
If we do not make assumptions, we can focus our attention on the truth, not on what we think is the truth.
Then, we see life the way it is, not the way we want to see it.

The Power of Belief

When you were educated to be part of humanity, the power of your belief went into all the symbols you learned, and at a certain point, the symbols gained power over you and have ruled your life.

Without questioning if they were true or not, we ingested every opinion and belief, structuring our whole belief system based on everything we were told, which sometimes included innocent lies.
As we continue to learn throughout our lives, the symbols are mixed in many directions to create more complex concepts. The abstract mind becomes organized in a more complicated way, growing until we have a totality of everything that we know.
Nonetheless, given that our belief system is sometimes constructed based on false lies, the concepts we learn are often contradictory, and they can potentially annul the power of our word.

In the process of domestication, the Book of Law rules our lives, judging and punishing us, which pushes us toward self-judgment, self-rejection, guilt, and shame.

By becoming aware that the Book of Law is just our own creation, we understand that these beliefs are active in our mind only because we give them all the power of our faith, attention, and life force. Without us, these ideas could not exist, and the whole structure would collapse.
Now, if we are aware that we invest our personal power in everything we believe, it will be easy to take our power back from the symbols and recover faith in ourselves.
Once the structure of our belief system is no longer there, we become flexible to create anything we want and do anything we want to do.
If we stop believing in all that we know that makes us suffer, our suffering disappears just like magic.

Practice Makes The Master

When you are ready to change your agreements, the most important thing is awareness.

You canot change your agreements if you are not even aware of what you like and don't like, or what you want to change.
However, it is practice that will make a difference, because mere awareness does not change your life.

Change is the result of action, and practice makes the master.

Everything you have ever learned - like talking, walking, writing, or your belief system - you learned through repetition and practice.
Therefore, practicing something new to change what you believe will transform your entire life.
Practicing the first three agreements will allow you to break away from the "dream of hell" to become your authentic self, rather than the chosen image you thought you were.

Always do your best, no more and no less, is the agreement that everybody can adopt.

Your "best" is always changing, subject to whether you are physically tired or refreshed, or how you are feeling emotionally.
This fourth agreement allows the first three agreements to become deeply ingrained habits.
However, do not expect to master these agreements right away, but you must recommit to the agreement after each failure.
Keep practicing and practicing; each day will become easier, and eventually all four agreements will become a habit.

The Four Agreements are actually a summary of the mastery of transformation, which is the process of unlearning what you have already learned to regain the power of faith in yourself.

When facing what you believe, the tool to unlearn is doubt.
With the power of doubt, you challenge every message you deliver and receive, and most importantly, the beliefs in your Book of Law.

The Power of Doubt

The fifth agreement is be skeptical, but learn to listen.

Be skeptical because most of what you hear is not true; symbols are only the truth because we agree they are, not because they are inherently real.
When you learn to listen, you understand others' stories, and improved communication will clear up confusion.

Being skeptical means using the power of doubt to discern the truth from the messages you deliver and receive: Is it truth, or a virtual reality?

By not believing every message, you put your faith back into yourself, away from the symbols.
You do not judge what someone says or call that person a liar, but you show respect by listening to the way other people tell their stories from their point of view (their virtual reality and wants), and you do not take them personally.

Importantly, you should learn to listen to understand what the other person is trying to share with you, rather than jumping to conclusions based on your own dream.
Otherwise, the moment the same message is passed from one mind to yours, the message is already altered in a completely different way, based on your point of view.
Afterall, I am responsible for what I say, but I am no responsible for what you understand.
After listening and understanding completely, you then make your own choices: to agree or disagree, to react or ignore, or to take whatever works to modify your dream.

Moreover, being skeptical does not just mean not believing others; it means especially not believing yourself.

After all, most of what you learned is not the truth; your whole reality is nothing but symbols.
Use the power of doubt to challenge every message you deliver to yourself: Is it really true that I am ugly or not good enough?
Nobody judges you more than you judge yourself, and some people try to escape this inner Judge by overeating, taking drugs, abusing alcohol, and becoming addicted to various substances and behaviors.

The truth does not come with words, but is silent.

It is something that you just know and feel without words, and it is called "silent knoweldge".
Silent knowledge is what you know before you invest your faith in symbols.
Once you realize that the entire symbology used to communicate creates false beliefs based on lies and causes us to suffer in hell, we should now unlearn these lies from the "dream of the planet," and relearn to follow the truth by following your own heart.

Once you have recovered all the faith you previously invested in symbols, you do not believe every thought that comes into your head.

Recognizing the difference between reality and the virtual reality, you now know that you can trust the reality and do not have to trust the virtual reality, but you can still enjoy both what is (reality) and what you create (story).
You can now use your imagination to create the most beautiful story - your personal heaven - to guide your life.

The Dream of the First Attention

In the story of Adam and Eve in Paradise, God told them they could eat whatever they wanted except for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The day they ate the fruit of this tree, they would die.

Well, they ate it, and they died.
In Toltec philosophy, the dream of the first attention is the ordinary dream of humans, where we are the victims of the knowledge in our minds (e.g., the mitote, superstitions and distortions of the truth).
Since we were young, our attention has been hooked by parents, schools, religion and society to learn to live with their opinions and beliefs.
All these years of practice have made you a master of pretending to be what you think you are, instead of living life as your real self.
We are now "dead," living in the dream of hell - a place of judgment, guilt, punishment, and fear.

The biggest fear in this world is the fear of the truth.

We are afraid of the truth because we have learned to believe so many lies.
Whether truth or fiction, just having knowledge makes us feel safe, but then we suffer because much of what we know is not true.
What we know is just a point of view, but we believe it and deliver the same distorted message to our own children, causing the whole chain to repeat itself.
When we no longer perceive truth, but only lies, our attention becomes trapped in the dream of hell.
The virtual reality we all agree upon is that life is a valley of tears, and we come here to suffer.

Every human is a magician; they are casting dark magic everywhere by misusing the word, by taking everything personally, by distorting everything we perceive with assumptions, by gossiping, and by spreading emotional poison with the word.

Authority is the power a human has to control other humans (including both children and and adults) to make them obey.
The more authority we have, the more powerful the spells we cast.

To resurrect and come back to life, we have to recover awareness to unlearn the lies from the world of illusion, allowing us to become the real you in the dream of second attention.

The Dream of the Second Attention

In the first dream, we accept the dream as it is, even if we dislike it or it goes against our nature.

For whatever reason, we eventually start to dislike and doubt the way we are living our lives and try to use attention a second time to change our dream.
In the dream of second attention, we are warriors, rebelling and challenging all the lies that are ruling our minds (e.g., the Judge, the Book of Law, the belief system).
In that rebellion, we try to recover our authenticity, or the totality of what we are - the personal freedom to be who we really are and do what we really want to do.
In the world of the warrior, we constantly try to change our inside dream, and the war seems endless.

The human sacrifice we offer to the "gods" is still happening.

We change the names of the gods from Apollo, Zeus or Osiris to justice, liberty and democracy.
We are willing to sacrifice ourselves and kill each other in the name of pride, profit or something that does not even exist. In real war, the young are sacrificed for causes they do not even know what they are fighting for.
Judging and gossiping about a human who breaks our beliefs is another form of human sacrifice.

Right now is the only truth you live in.

Whatever happened in your past is no longer true; it is a virtual reality. Yet, many of us carry the past and history around with us.
With our powerful memory, we relive our past experiences and punish ourselves again and again for the same mistake.
In true justice, we should only pay one time for every mistake—an action-reaction. In our distorted judgment, the action is self-judgment, and the reaction is self-punishment in the form of guilt and shame.
The only way to change your life is to change the action, and then the reaction will change.

The word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of that force.

The expression of the word can be used to create a heaven or a hell dream, up to your choice.
Hence, with awareness, you will choose to be impeccable with your word to avoid the self-judgment that creates emotional poisons, and accept yourself just the way you are.
Remember, no one (priest, shaman or guru) can save you from the virtual reality except yourself. Teachers can only give you tools (e.g., The Four Agreements) to recover awareness and win the personal war.

As powerful as doubt is as a tool for skepticism toward virtual reality and taking back our faith in every lie, doubting the truth may cause us to start believing in lies and fall from the dream of heaven.

Have faith in yourself to follow every instinct that you were born with!
In the dream of the second attention, one of the first challenges is the fear of being your real self.
However, the truth is all the reasons you were afraid do not exist, and it is much easier to be yourself than to try to be what you are not.
The whole dream of hell makes you tired because it takes energy to uphold an image, to wear a social mask.

By the end of the dream of the second attention, your reality changes once again.

You no longer perceive the world through a rigid structure of beliefs. Even though lies still exist, you no longer believe them.
You can now see the truth, which is unique and perfect, or even different from the way you interpret it.

The Dream of the Third Attention

The Dream of the Second Attention ends when the last judgement happens in our life.

This is the very last time we judge ourselves and everybody else; the war in our heads is over, and the Dream of the Third Attention begins.
By winning our personal war and achieving peace, we now live in the dream of the masters - a dream of truth, respect, love, and joy.

In Toltec philosophy, intent is the only living being that exists, and it is that force that is moving everything.

Intent is what the author calls life, the infinite or God.
In other words, we are all manifestations of God, but we manifest in billions of frequencies of light. This concurs with the scientific argument that everything is made up of energy.
Every living being is protected by the force that we call the soul.
The infinite creates everything in existence, and when the cycle is over, everything returns to the infinite.

In every philosophy and mythology, we find that people have divided everything into three worlds, but they have called them by different names and have used different symbols to describe them.

In Toltec, these three worlds are known as the dream of the first attention, the dream of the second attention and the dream of the third attention.
In Greece and Egypt, they were known as the underworld, the world and the upper world.
In the Christian tradition, they are known as hell, purgatory and paradise.

I am what I am, and that's all I am.

Becoming A Seer

Knowing the truth will set you free of all the distortions in knowledge and all the emotional drama that result from believing in lies.

The symbols you learned are no longer ruling your world. It is not about being a winner or a loser, being young, beautiful, or ugly; all that is over. It is nothing but symbols.
You know that you are totally free when you no longer have to be the "you" that you pretend to be.
The freedom to be your real self is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Imagine living your life without trying to please your own or others' points of view, without fear, judgment, blame, guilt and shame, but only with gratitude, love, loyalty and justice.

When you let go of knowledge and go beyond symbols, at a certain point in your life, you start to become a seer.

A seer is a dreamer who has mastered the dream - someone who has learned to see and rewrite their story.
They first let go of everything that is not the truth, but a superstition or a lie.
Then, they finally see themself through the eyes of truth: the magnificence and perfection in them, realizing that they are light, that they are life, and accepting their own divinity.
Then, they realize that they are here to enjoy life, not to suffer over personal drama or importance.

When you become a seer, you see what is behind the stories of other people, but your point of view is impersonal. There is no longer a judge and a victim in stories; there is just a story.

We accept everything - yourself, other people, the animals, the oceans, the atmosphere, the Earth - just the way it is.
You have the right to live your own life, in your own way, and there is no wrong way. The "wrong way" is just another judgment that we create.
Instead of helping other artists to write their stories, you allow them to write their own.
Because you accept everything as it is, everything that has happened in life was meant to happen. Even what you consider your worst mistakes were meant to happen because they have led you to greater awareness and will push you to grow.

What is the worst thing that can happen to any of us? To die?

We are all going to die, and there is nothing we can do.
We can enjoy the ride, or resist it and suffer. Resistance, however, is futile.
What's more, life is eternal, but your dream only exists while you live in the physical body. Whatever you did here, you will not take with you.

The Three Languagues

The word Angel is a Greek word meaning "messenger".

We are all angels with no wings, constantly delivering information and messages.
The fifth agreement, to be skeptical, but learn to listen, helps us become aware of the kind of messages we are delivering in this world.

From the Toltec point of view, there are only three primary languagues humans speak.

The language of gossip

This is the language of hell, made purely of lies.
We use words to create misunderstandings and distortions of the truth, often leading to self-judgment and the punishment of the victim within us.

The language of the warrior

Depending on our awareness, we sometimes speak the truth and sometimes speak lies.
The symbols still hold power over our beliefs, causing us to jump from dream to dream - sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell.

The language of truth

There are no more lies, because we have mastered the awareness that the symbols we use are our own creation.
We hardly speak, instead communicating by feeling without words.
We know that we give meaning to all those symbols to communicate with our kind, and we use those symbols with impeccability, doing the best we can to deliver our message.

In the mastery of awareness, simply have the awareness of:

The kind of messages that you have delivered your entire life, and
The kind of messages that you received your entire life.

Only then will you clearly see the effect of your words, the effect of your actions, and the effect of your presence.

Epilogue

If you choose to become a messenger of truth and love, then the author invites you to participate in a new dream for humanity, where all of us can live in harmony, truth, and love.

If the truth behind The Five Agreements resonates with you, then let's make one more agreement: Help me to change the world.

The answer to changing the world begins with changing the virtual world that exists in your head.

By practicing the five agreements, you will change the world by loving yourself, enjoying life, and making your personal world a dream of heaven.
When you change the main character of your story (that is, you), all the secondary characters (e.g., your partner, children and friends) will also start to change because of the new message you deliver to them.
Happiness is contagious; when you are happy, the people around you are happy too, and it inspires them to change their own world.

Let's enjoy this world and love one another.

Stop believing the lies that our differences make us superior or inferior to one another.
It is time to end all the lies and superstitions that are not helping anybody, and return to the truth.
The "how" could involve millions of different ways of doing what you love, but the mission of your life is to enjoy every single moment of your life.
We know that sooner or later our physical body will no longer exist. We only have a few sunrises, a few sunsets, and a few full moons that we can enjoy.

Summary

The Fifth Agreement offers a more logical, in-depth, and nuanced discussion of the original four agreements.

However, its somewhat abstract presentation of the concepts might work against the natural human inclination to react emotionally.
The messages require time for reflection and digestion, but the core message remains that we need to be skeptical of the knowledge we have spent years accumulating.
We are the artists of our own stories; to live freely is to reclaim the power (faith) to repaint the story the way we want - a dream of heaven.

In contrast, The Four Agreements is arguably a more effective masterpiece of Toltec wisdom for newcomers because it uses highly emotional and relatable real-life events as examples.

This approach makes it far more convincing and accessible to readers.

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