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.

• You are born, you grow up, you mate, you grow old and in the end, you return to the infinite.
• The infinite, a total power, creates a program just for you, and everything you need to be who you are is in that program.
• 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 and fulfil your needs.

However, as your mind begins to mature, you start to use symbols and eventually learn language from the humans who came before us.

• 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
• All of this information is stored in our memory and becomes as agreement.
• Out of fear of being punished and not getting reward, we start to please other people.

 Our imaginations begin to develop, our curiosity grows stronger, and we start to ask and search for answers.

• Our thinking is further enhanced in schooling.
• By this time, 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.
• We spoke the truth because we lived in truth.
• 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) 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.

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 mind 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's 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's 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.

Summary

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

• However, its somewhat abstract or inhuman presentation of the concepts might work against the natural human inclination to react emotionally.

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.