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
Ruiz tells you to close your eyes and feel all the love emanating from you. Focus on your lungs and feel the pleasure of breathing. The air is love. Feel the pleasure of being alive. Ruiz recites a “prayer for freedom,” addressed to the universe’s creator. He says he knows the creator’s name is “Love.” Ruiz asks for help to love the way the creator does and to accept himself without judgment. He asks the creator to clean his heart of “emotional poison” and gives thanks for the freedom to be who he really is.
Ruiz calls the universe’s creator “Love” because he believes that all existence (including God, the universe, the planet, and human beings) are united as one being made of light that shines universal love. Thus, the prayer is an expression of intent to act in a way that aligns with this truth, rather than acting out of fear (which fuels a person’s judging and self-rejecting tendencies, or “emotional poison”).
Themes
Ruiz recites a second prayer “for love.” He says you are going to share a dream with him, in which you’re walking on a warm, sunny day. You see a kind old man with light coming out of his head. The old man explains that his teacher took a flame from his heart and put it in the old man’s heart. The flame grew into a big fire of love and touched his whole body and his mind, along with everything on Earth, the sun, the stars, and the moon. All of these things loved the old man back, and he saw himself in everything. The old man takes a fire out of his chest and puts it in your heart. Now you are radiant with the same light.
Ruiz symbolizes the nature of reality with a flame that grows and engulfs everything. For Ruiz, everything is made of light that shines universal love. When the old man sees the flame in every object in the universe, he recognizes that he is the same as everything else there is. Everything is not separate—it is all connected, not made of matter but light, and is one and the same expression of universal love, as is the reader.
Themes
