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 rest of the agreements follow from the first agreement. The second agreement is “don’t take anything personally.” For example, if a person doesn’t know you but they call you “stupid,” that’s really about the person and not about you. You might wonder how the person knows this about you, and if everyone can see that too. When you think in that way, however, you’re agreeing with the person—or, taking it personally—and you start becoming trapped in “the dream of hell.” You get trapped because of “personal importance”: you think everything is about you.
While the first agreement focuses on how a person talks about other people, the second agreement focuses on how a person responds to comments made by others. It builds on the first agreement, as it aims to stop people from retaliating when criticized by others (when others aren’t impeccable with their word), by showing them that other people’s criticisms are never the truth.
Themes
Ruiz believes that “nothing other people do is because of you.” They do things because of their dream in their own mind, which is completely different from your dream in your mind. Even direct personal insults have nothing to do with you: they come from the other person’s agreements, their programming during domestication. Taking something personally is like taking someone else’s “emotional garbage” and making it your own. If, however, you don’t take anything personally, you’re “immune” from their “poison” and from “hell.”
Because others might be trapped in a negative (false) worldview, it’s important to remember that the negative things others say about you are not true—their opinions say nothing about you and everything about them. A negative comment really only captures another person’s false worldview, it doesn’t have anything to do with the recipient. Taking things personally thus means believing lies.
Themes
Usually, when you take something personally, you’re offended and want to defend your own—different—beliefs, which creates conflict. You feel the need to be right and for others to be wrong. But everything you believe just reflects your own agreements (or your own “dream”). Instead, Ruiz says you could do as he does, and believe that what somebody else thinks about you is not important to you. You don’t take it personally because it’s a reflection of their dream, their beliefs, and their problems—not yours. Nothing another person says is about you at all; it’s always about them, about the “movie” they play in their mind.
For Ruiz, a healthier approach to other people’s comments is to disempower those comments: they should have no power over you because they do nothing more than reflect another person’s misunderstanding of the world. Negative comments thus reflect a disagreement between the fear-based worldview that most people uphold and the love-based worldview that a person is trying to see themselves through. Since the love-based world view is what’s accurate and true, negative comments are really just irrelevant.
Themes
Ruiz believes that when you get mad at someone, hate someone, or are jealous of someone, you are really dealing with your own fear. If you’re not afraid, you won’t be jealous, or sad, or mad at anyone else because you’ll be too busy loving and feeling good. You’ll be loving everything around you because you love yourself and you’re content with who you are and how you live your life. You’ll be in a state of “bliss” in which you love “everything you perceive.”
Ruiz also includes responding with negativity to negative comments as part of taking things personally. Negative responses, however, only reflect the fear of rejection. Agreeing not to take anything personally thus means agreeing not to sink back into a fear-based world view, but to rise above it, and stay in a mindset of self-love or “bliss.”
Themes
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Even if someone says you’re wonderful, it’s not about you. You already know you’re wonderful—you don’t need to listen for others to say it and believe them when they do. The opinions you have about yourself probably came from somebody else, so don’t take those personally, either. Ruiz says that when the mind talks to itself, the voices come from what the Toltecs call “Allies” and what other people might call “Gods.” We can choose whether or not to believe—or take personally—what we tell ourselves. Similarly, we can choose whether or not to believe “the dream of the planet.”
Not taking anything personally also means that a person should also disregard positive comments that others make about them. Even though it might seem that positive comments are a good thing, what they still reflect a judgment (albeit a positive one). Ruiz wants people to cultivate a mode of perception with no judgment at all, only love and acceptance. Positive comments from others, therefore, are redundant in his worldview.
Themes
The mind has the special capability of talking to itself and listening to itself at the same time. When the many different parts of your mind are all speaking simultaneously, you experience a noisy, indecipherable marketplace of conflicting beliefs all arguing with each other. The noise is what makes us feel confused about what we want. The only way to calm this chaos, according to Ruiz, is to make an inventory of our agreements, expose the conflicts among them, and make order out of the chaos.
Ruiz believes that not taking anything personally is also important because believing what other people say is the same as agreeing to think about oneself the way other people do, which creates a lot of unnecessary agreements. His aim is to reduce the noise of all the agreements people keep, in order to let themselves have energy for other things.
Themes
Another reason not to take things personally is because it makes us suffer unnecessarily. Ruiz believes humans are hooked on suffering and agree to help each other suffer. When you are surrounded by people who lie to you, you also start lying to yourself. Ruiz cautions that you shouldn’t believe what other people tell you because they also lie to themselves—it’s better to trust yourself and choose whether or not to believe what you are told by others. When someone lies to you, it’s because they’re afraid, and if you can see them as afraid you’ll realize they’re not perfect. If you can make it a habit not to take things personally, your anger, jealousy, fear, sadness, and hatred will disappear.
Once again, Ruiz argues that there is a reciprocal relationship between what a person says to others and what a person says to themselves. A person who expresses negative comments about others likely also talks thinks negatively about themselves. This means that the person really needs compassion (rather than retaliation) because they are suffering. In other words, for Ruiz, the only appropriate response to negativity is positivity.
Themes
Practicing the second agreement makes you immune to the triggers that “trap you in the dream of hell.” It doesn’t matter what anyone (or everyone) says about you—you’ll be immune because you won’t take it personally. Ruiz thinks you should write down the second agreement and stick it on your fridge to remind you all the time to never take things personally. You’ll find that you don’t need to trust what other people say—you only need to trust yourself. You’re never responsible for other people’s actions, only for your own. You’ll also be able to walk around with your “heart open,” share love, ask for what you need, say yes, and say no without feeling guilty or judging yourself.
Once again, Ruiz shows that the second agreement pushes people away from fear and toward freedom. Instead of depleting energy on worrying what people think or doing things to appease others, a person will feel free to say and do what they want. Not taking things personally, like being impeccable with your word, entails taking a step toward personal freedom by distancing yourself from habitually acting based on the fear of judgment from other people.
Themes
