Book Club Friday's (#25) - The Four Agreements

eldergill (52)in #bookclub • 6 years ago

Every once in a while comes along a book, a movie or a quote which shakes up your life and really makes you look at things in a different way. I love these moments, because that's what life is all about, learning, questioning and re-learning every aspect of your life and society in general. In 138 pages, The Four Agreements is a book that has inspired me to look at things in a different way and to continue to further better myself in life.

Let's first talk about the author...

Don Miguel Ruiz

Was born into a family of healers, and raised in rural Mexico by a curandera(healer) mother and a nagual(shaman) grandfather. Growing up in this environment his family expected Don to go on and embrace centuries-old legacies of healing and teaching and carry forward the esoteric Toltec knowledge.
But instead, distracted by the distractions of modern life Ruiz went on to study at medical school and become a surgeon.
Everything changed in a moment in the 1970s when he had a near-death experience of a car crash and everything since then changed as he describes the moment where he was not in his physical body as he watched himself pull his two friends to safety. After this, he went into a self-searching and began to question everything he knows and thought he knew. Studying with his mother and completing an apprenticeship with a powerful Shaman in the Mexican desert he has now devoted his life to promoting the guiding principles in his book.

A little bit about the Book

I heard about this book after listening to a podcast from Tim Ferris where he interviewed the 25-year-old Model Karlie Kloss. The book came up after Ferris asking Karlie Kloss what book has inspired her the most/what book she has gifted the most and she mentioned that The Four Agreements was this book. It is also interesting to note that Tom Brady, the famous QuarterBack for the New England Patriots has also praised the book and credited it for a lot of his success and his approach to everyday life.

This is important because these are very influential people in society, who many people look up too and they have reached their heights and levels of influence through a lot of hard work and forward thinking.

The Four Agreements is basically a 'practical guide to personal freedom.'
It is a really easy read and basically describes that throughout life we think that we are free but really we aren't. Since the day we are born we are exposed to other people's ideas and beliefs. Mostly our parents, this becomes problematic for our development if our parents themselves didn't break themselves from the constraints of a controlled society because we then are exposed to strict rules that could be argued to be unnecessary. Even our schooling destroys our personal freedom and creativity due to its structure. It grows and nurtures us to be ready and graduate to move into a 9-to-5 job where our lives are 'structured'. Society is built like this and not many people actually understand this and therefore it is important to question your whole thinking process and what you want to make of yourself. Only you can grant yourself freedom. It takes a change of thinking, the desire to be the like-self of ourselves when we were 5 years old and didn't care about what others thought about us. The structure given in society is good to an extent, but do you control the extent of it?

The four agreements in brief are:

Be impeccable with your word
Don't take anything personally
Don't make assumptions
Always do your best

It needs to be noted that I do not agree with many people's promotion of shamanic experimentation with DMT contained plants or others such as ayahuasca as they can be extremely dangerous. You have to ask yourself if you really need to experiment with something like this at this point in your life. Do you need to do this? Or is it completely out of boredom and curiosity. I think that many people are desperate for a real wake-up and change in their life. But we also have the power of our mind to think differently and to know that you don't need an external stimulus to allow you to discover whatever you would deem your purpose or 'the truth'. This is our freedom to choose.

Though the book will not give you all the answers to personal happiness, if you read it at the right time in your life it will definitely help you on your journey to finding that.

Thanks for reading my review,

and please buy the book! It is fantastic.

Adam x