Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Four Agreements, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judgment and Fear
Beliefs, Agreements, and Transformative Happiness
Human Perception, Reality, and Universal Love
Childhood, Adulthood, and Freedom
Summary
Analysis
The “first agreement” Ruiz believes to be necessary is both simple and powerful: “be impeccable with your word.” Ruiz thinks this is the most challenging of the four agreements to uphold—but if you can uphold it, it’s enough to turn your reality into “heaven on earth.” Ruiz believes that you express your creative power through “your word.” Everything you believe about what you are, what you dream, and what you feel is conjured by your word. Your word is a magical “force” that creates your reality—it can create a beautiful dream (when you’re “impeccable” with it) or an ugly dream (when you misuse it).
For Ruiz, the way a person talks to themselves (in their head) and to others (out loud) is incredibly powerful because language is how people shape their own realities and influence other people’s experiences. His first piece of advice, therefore, centers on changing the way a person talks, or uses their “word,” by curbing the tendency to speak negatively about others.
Themes
Ruiz compares words to magic that can put us under a spell or release us from a spell. For example, if you are told you are stupid during your domestication, you will always believe that, or be under that spell. All it takes to break the spell is somebody to “hook your attention” and tell you that you’re not stupid, which enables you to make a new agreement. On the other hand, if you are surrounded by people who say you are stupid, the original agreement is reinforced and grows stronger and harder to break.
Ruiz explains why words are so important: if a person is told something about themself by lots of people (say, that they are stupid) they tend to believe it. In other words, they agree to uphold the same belief that other people have agreed to uphold. Therefore, Ruiz believes that talking to people in a certain way is a central part of why people have the damaging beliefs they do.
Themes
The word “impeccable” means not going against yourself. For example, if someone call you stupid, the person is not just harming you—they’re also harming themselves, because the person is sending toxic judgment, or “emotional poison” out, which encourages you to judge the person in return. If, however, a person love themselves, they will express that love toward others and they will receive love in return. For Ruiz, being “impeccable with your word” means always using your words to generate “truth and love for yourself.” It’s a very difficult agreement to uphold because we are indoctrinated to use words in the opposite way: to judge, to blame, to hate, and to create divisions between people, families, races, and nations. These misuses of words create fear and reinforce the “dream of hell.”
Ruiz uses “impeccable” to mean only using words that express or manifest love and positivity (which is the opposite of how society usually trains people to talk). Agreeing to be “impeccable with your word,” therefore, means agreeing not to say anything negative, divisive, or judgmental. A person who says judgmental things about others invites judgment back, so talking negatively about others also manifests self-hatred: it implies that’s it’s okay for them to judge people and for people to judge them, which reinforces their tendency to judge themselves.
Themes
Misusing words is “black magic” that puts us under fear-driven spells. For example, a mother may come home from work with a headache to an energetic daughter who’s happy and singing. The mother can’t tolerate the noise so she snaps and says, “Shut up! You have an ugly voice,” The mother’s misuse of words in this instance has the power to cast a spell on the girl that spirals into her becoming afraid to use her voice and developing a complex about the way she sounds. This could cause the girl to become shy and withdrawn, lack self-confidence, and so on. Because the mother misuses words (uses “black magic”), her daughter makes an agreement not to express herself in order to be accepted and loved. Ruiz says that we often use “black magic” on people we love without realizing it.
Ruiz uses the terms “black magic” and “misusing words” to mean lying: distance from love is distance from the truth (because, according to the Ruiz, everyone is made of love), so talking negatively to somebody is like lying to them. Talking to anybody in a way that is judgmental, critical, or negative also reinforces that person’s own inner “Judge” and inner “Victim.” It makes those voices stronger, which distances that person from self-acceptance and self-love.
Themes
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The worst kind of “black magic” is gossip. If the human mind is like a computer, then gossip is a computer virus that warps the way the computer functions. Ruiz says to imagine that you’re excited about a new class but that you bump into a student who says the professor is a “jerk” without explaining why (maybe the student just want revenge for a bad grade, for example). The other student’s comments affect the way you see the professor, which in turn makes you hate the class and spread similar gossip about the professor. If you imagine this kind of misinformation going on all the time, humans are getting a warped version of reality or functioning as if they have a virus that crowds their computer systems (minds) with “the chaos of a thousand different voices.”
The computer virus is a symbol for negative talk about other people, which Ruiz calls gossip. Negative talk about another person (say, the professor in Ruiz’s example) encourages others to see the other person negatively: it spreads and takes control of a person’s perception the way a virus takes control of a computer, altering what the user sees. This is ultimately damaging to the “user” (or the person who spreads gossip, in Ruiz’s example) because it limits their ability to use the “computer”—to use their mind in a clear, focused, and productive way.
Themes
Ruiz challenges you to think about how many times you misinform yourself by telling yourself how imperfect you are—say, by thinking about how fat, ugly, stupid, or old you are. Then think about how often you gossip about the people you love to justify your opinions. Ruiz thinks that if you become “impeccable with your words,” your tendency to gossip will eventually be eradicated and your mind will no longer be “fertile ground” for “black magic.” You can measure how impeccable you are with your word by how much self-love you have, which makes you feel “happy and at peace.”
Gossip, or negative talk about others, is also problematic because seeing others in a negative way tends to have a rebound effect: it makes a person see lots of things negatively, including themselves. When a person starts love and accept themselves instead of criticizing and rejecting themselves, it means the agreement to speak impeccably is changing their worldview— the person starts to believe that there is love in the world, and therefore that there’s also something worthy of love within themselves.
Themes
Ruiz is planting the seed for you to accept the first agreement in your mind. He believes that if you nurture it—by using the word to share love, or by using “white magic”—you can transcend “hell.” It starts with telling yourself how wonderful you are and how much you love yourself, which will start to break the agreements that make you suffer. It’s possible, Ruiz says, because he did it, and he’s “no better than you.” He really believes that the first agreement, if you can accept it, will manifest freedom and transform your existence from “hell” to “heaven on earth.”
Ruiz believes that the first agreement helps a person to experience freedom because people are often afraid to do things because they fear of what people will say about them (and how they might berate themselves in their own heads). Freedom, therefore, means freedom from fear—the freedom to act out of love without fear of rejection.
Themes
