Book Title: The Four Agreements (a Toltec Wisdom Book).

Author: DON MIGUEL RUIZ

Pre-amble: As children, we did not have the opportunity to choose our own beliefs, but we simply agreed with the information that was passed on to us by other humans; parents, teachers, churches society etc. The only way to store information is by agreement. The result is surrender to the beliefs with our agreement. Blackmail, reward and punishment were used in most cases to make us conform. Soon we lost our normal selves and became someone that we are not and become a copy of the beliefs of mummy, daddy, society and religion.

This process is called domestication of humans and our whole belief system is created on it. For example, we learn the concepts of what it is to be a “man”, or a “woman” is and also learn to judge ourselves, other people and our neighbours.

We trust everything that we belief in and this sets us up for suffering. Our whole mind is a fog (called mitote by the toltecs).

Everything we believe about ourselves and the world, all concepts and programming we have in our minds, are all the mitote. You cannot see who we truly are; we cannot see that we are not free. That is why we resist life.

Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We live our lives according to other people’s demands, their points of view because of fear of not being accepted and not being good enough for someone else. We create an image of what perfection is in order to be accepted by everybody, particularly those we love and unfortunately, we are never going to be perfect from this point of view. NEVER!

The Fourth Agreement

• This Fourth Agreement allows the First Three to become deeply ingrained habits.
• Under any circumstances, always do your best, no more and no less. Remember though that your best is never going to be the same from one movement to the n Everything is alive and changing all the time, from high quality to low quality.
• Your best differs whether you wake up refreshed and energised in the morning, it will be highly quality, and not as good when you are tired at night. Your best will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick, sober as opposed to drunk. Your Best will depend on whether to are feeling wonderful and happy, or upset, angry or jealous. As you build the habit of the Four Agreements, your best will become better than it used to be.
• Regardless Of the quality keep doing your best. No more and no less than your best. Trying hard to do more than your best, you will spend more energy than is needed and, in the end, your best will not be Overdoing results in depletion of your body and go against yourself, and it will take longer to accomplish your goal. However, if you do less than your best, you subject yourself to frustration, self-judgement, guilt, and regrets.
• Under all circumstances just do your best. By always doing your best, you will break a big spell that you have been under. Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely; be productive, be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community to everything and it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy and above all taking action because you love it and not because you are not expecting a reward.
• For example, most people go to work every day just thinking of pay day and the money they will get from the work they are doing. They cannot wait for payday and can take some time off. Working for the rewards results in them resisting the work. By trying to avoid the action makes it more difficult and therefore they don’t do their best.
• They suffer through their work, suffering the action, not because they like to, but because they must pay the rent, because they support their family.
• After having all that frustration, they are still unhappy up on receiving their money. They have two days to rest to do what they want to do and try to escape by getting themselves drunk because they don’t like themselves and their lives.
• On the other hand, if you take action for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward you will find that you enjoy every action that you do. Rewards will come but you are not attached to the reward, you can get even more than you would have imagined for yourself without expecting a reward.
• Therefore, if we like what we do, we always do our best, then we are really enjoying life, having fun and not having boredom and no frustrations.
• When you do your best, you do not feel guilty or blame yourself. There are no regrets You did your best; that is why we always do our best.
• When you do your best, you learn to accept yourself. It is important to learn from your mistakes, practise and prepare better, look honestly at yourself, and keep practising will increase your awareness.
• Doing your best should become second nature because you enjoy what you do and it is not to please anyone.
• If you take action because you have to then you are not going to do your best, perhaps it is not better off not to do it.
• Doing your best all the time makes you happy. Action is about living fully.
• Doing your best is a great habit to have. Make it a ritual as taking a shower for example when you feel and enjoy the water on your body and do your best to fulfil the needs of your body, so you do your best to give to your body and to receive what your body gives you.
• Also, what is important is letting go of the past so you can enjoy the dream of what is happening now. So be in the new.

• You can only be you when you do your best. You don’t need the acceptance of others. You express your own divinity by being alive and by loving yourself and others.
• The first three agreements will only worth if you do your best.

• Don’t expect that you will always be able to be impeccable with your word. Your routine habits are too strong and firmly rooted in your mind. But you can do your best. Don’t expect that you will not take anything personally, just do your best, don’t expect that you will ever make another assumption, but you can certainly do your best.
• Doing your best will gradually stop the habits of misusing your word, taking things personally, making assumptions and you will not need to judge yourself, feel guilty or punish yourself if you do not keep these agreements.
• Practice each day to keep the Four Agreements and you will be surprised of the way your life has been transformed.
• Do not be concerned about the future, keep your attention on today and stay in the present moment, just live one day at a time, always do your best to keep this agreement and soon it be easy for you.

TODAY IS THE BEGINNING OF A NEW DREAM .