This is a wonderful book on personal development, making this planet a heaven and a happy & blissful life. It provides a solution to overcome unfounded beliefs and values that acquires while living in this world. The book is written by Don Miguel Ruiz, who is a Toltec master, which is a group of learned men and women who preserve wisdom acquired over centuries and live in South Mexico. They are masters of traditional wisdom, useful for making people happy and living a better life. The book starts with a person who has attained enlightenment and points out that everything on this planet is made of God, there is nothing else that exists other than God in this world. When we see each other then it is just light or love seeing the light or love from others. The person explains this to others but people fail to understand this. People can not understand this as dense fog in the form of beliefs, norms and customs surrounds human beings on account of which they can not see the reality. Over sometime for centuries, we have developed our beliefs, values and are passed on to the new babies or generations from the time of their birth. These rules and norms guide the life of individuals. They are told to perform better than others. These judgments are like a rule book for an individual, which guides him. Individuals evaluate everything like he/she is beautiful or ugly, slim or fatty and so on by these rules. The world we see is nothing more than a dream or maya. So individuals are highly domesticated and every time we live in these dreams and judge our successes or failures on their realization. This is far from reality as these dreams are not our dreams and are away from reality and consequently, we witness a lot of frustration, fear, anxiety, hate etc in our daily lives. We consider these norms, beliefs as agreements. To overcome this, the author suggests four agreements , which will help us to overcome our fears and make the world blissful. First, be impeccable with your words. The author says words are very powerful and hence should be used with caution and judiciously. If we use wrongful words for others then these will ultimately harm us and not the other person against whom these bad words are used. The author says we should become White Magicians, who create better things in this world instead of becoming black magicians, who only are harmful to others.
Second, do not take anything personally – good or bad . Whenever anyone say anything to us , he or she says this based on his/her beliefs , values, circumstances , therefore these are not related to us . I am what I am and is happy with that. Author says human mind has unlimited potential to listen to voices of this world and of the other world i.e God . One must learn to listen to these voices. Another unimaginable power of human mind is that it listen as well as speak. On account of so many conflicting agreements in our mind , human mind is confused and find difficult to distinguish between right and wrong. We are encircled with deep fog of so many conflicting thoughts and views and therefore human mind is so confused . When we don’t take things personally, we start getting the feeling of freedom and whatever one may say it will not affect us. No one can better understand us than we ourself.
Third, do not make assumptions . All misery or sadness is on account of our assumptions about ourselves and for others. We do not want to listen to others and only like to listen to things from our own perspective. We think our friends or family members know us and therefore can not go against us or harm us.But reality is that they live in their own world and can not understand us . No one can change others , a person can only change oneself. We have to accept others as such.
Fourth, always do your best . As circumstances will always change , we have to do our best accordingly . We are on this earth to live and so live with happiness and love. Nurture good thoughts , take care of your health and happiness . Respect yourself , start loving yourself as by doing so you will love God . By doing things in the best way , we will be able to implement the earlier mentioned three agreements and by doing things so, we will bring a lot of happiness to ourselves and to this planet . Forget the past , future and live in the present just like a child , focus on yourself and think of the purpose of life . Try to work on implementing these four agreements , which is a new dream.
Author, suggested the path to get rid of old agreements for which human beings have been domesticated for centuries to the path of freedom ie. how to liberate ourselves from so many beliefs , thoughts , old agreements , which have developed the feeling of being victim, have fear and made us judgemental.This domestication works like a parasite , which sucks our energy and converts our energy which we derive from food into negativity . This parasite is a multi headed monster having manifestation in fear, greed, anger, hatredness,etc. The way suggested to overcome these and have freedom is – 1 awareness 2 transformation 3 determination . The negativity which we observe around us makes us mentally wounded and ill. We ourselves are responsible for this . Author suggests following these four agreements: close your eyes, feel calmness , and when open your eyes enjoy the beauty of sky , animals , rivers , birds, and life around us . This is the way for having blissful life and the planet, heaven and most happiest place to live.
Review by : Prof. Raj Kumar Mittal , Member , UGC
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