The Four Agreements
16 Dec 2025 - 29 Oct 2026
- A self-help book by Don Miguel Ruiz. Recommended to me by a UCSF therapist, I never would have picked it up on my own because I'm too cool for something that was featured on Oprah, but OTOH take wisdom where you find it. Works for me as a shordurpersav if nothing else.
Terminology
- mitote: the endless scripts that play out in your mind. Mental fog, maya, samsara
- agreement: A stance we take towards our own beliefs. We may not choose them, but we agree with them
- I could have sworn I drew up a list of alternative agreements, things that were at roughly the same sort of level of abstraction as those in Ruiz. But I can't find it now. See Personal Constitution which comes close. Also Stances, a Catalog
Intro
- We live inside a dream – ok 100%
- need for attention
- domestication of humans
- the Judge
the inner Judge uses what is in our book of Law to judge everything we do and don't do, everything we think and don't think, everything we feel and don't feel. Everything lives under the tyranny of the Judge. (p9)
Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltecs called a mitote. Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other.
Not being perfect, we reject ourselves. And the level of self-rejection depends on how effective the adults were in breaking our integrity. (p18)
- ok here I start to argue back, do I believe in this primordial integrity (and if I don't, is that part of my false programming?)
(1) Be impeccable with your word
- Jeeze dude have you been on the internet?
- >. Your word is the power you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God...all the magic you posess is based on your word. Your word is pure magic, and misuse of your word is black magic. (p26-7)
- Word as a sword, with an edge that can create and an edge that can destroy. The first is what "impeccable" points to.
- "Impeccable" means without sin, in this case it means without sin against yourself, meaning, do not blame yourself for anything. Take responsibility but not blame.
- Hm. Some stuff to argue with here. Is that really what "sin" means? Guess I don't care if it matches up with Xian idea of sin, still seems like a good heuristic.
- This is about the same as Sasha Chapin's "stop punching yourself in the face"
- Anti-gossip. Heh, and I was looking on social media for negative gossip about the authr, almost reflexively, as a defense against liking him too much. Man – pretty sick isn't it, I must agree.
(2) Don't take things personally
- Almost too common-sensical, but OK, good advice and something to keep in mind.
- isomorphic, more or less, to "don't get angry". Focusing on a different aspect.
- Ah, BUT quite explicitally including positive things as well. Praise as well as criticism should not be taken as personal affronts or reinforcements (or whatever the opposite of an affront is )
- Isomorphic to egolessness, sort of kind of.
(3) Don't make assumptions
- This seems either boring or wrong (in the sense that all cognition involves assumptions, it's basic to thought). If you change it to "don't assume your assumptions are true, always keep them tentative" – that's more precise and actionable. But as-is it's like asking a fish not to get wet.
- One very specific assumption: that other people know what we think or want. Yeah OK. But again I don't think you can help make assumptions, you just need to be good at it.
(4) Always do your best
- Sounds like it comes from the Boy Scout Manual – which, I hasten to add, doesn't make it wrong, bad, or worthless. Just a bit square!
- OK what this really means is more like, do things because of their intrinsic motivation, not some external imposed goal. This is something I've thought about a lot, see WorkPlay and no doubt elsewhere. gDo things with a playful, improvisatory spirit, and in such a way that nobody can judge you – because you in fact did your best.
- The goal (I guess) is to avoid endless self-recrimination.
The scientific nature of the ordinary man Is to go on out and do the best you can
- – John Prine, Humidity Built the Snowman
Agreement as a concept
- Just what is an "agreement" and what is special about these? As a concept, seems like a cousin to stance. They are fundamental aspects or modes of our relationship to the world, to each other, to self. Social and cultural life is a tangle of agreements, to some extent we are constituted by our agreements.
- A theory of agreements
- An agreement consists of
- a conceptual scheme – an ontology
- a set of commitments
- I know I'm overdoing it with the protocol stuff, but agreement is sort of like a protocolized value system.
We call this a page in a book, the word page is an agreement that we understand.
- Agreement as basically any bit of culture that we are trained in.
The only way to store infomation is by agreement
- domesticaltion of humans by their agreements.
Inadequacies
- Doesn't really stand up to 200-proof nihilism. But what does. Actually no, I think it does answer that, not intellectually (which doesn't work) but in stance terms. These agreements are ways to connect with your actual existing integrity, something that is beyond the reach of nihilistic despair.
- Doesn't address purpose and purposelessness. If you are an ordinary schmo trying to get through a workday, sure, it has good heuristics, but if you are a lost intellectual like me, it doesn't have much to say.
- Doesn't address self-pity, at least, not directly. Also doesn't address envy and other terrible emotions which are triggered by circumstances (that is, things you can't just agree yourself out of).
Jan 23rd, 2026
- Have been sort of idly trying to apply these agreements. I think basically its telling you to stop shitting on yourself, or punching yourself in the face as Sasha Chapin put it. A subtle adjustment of stance so that you are, in fact, blameless – you are not a saint, but a person doing his best.
- Not sure how much practical practices it provides, but I'm figuring stuff out. Just realized how I use Chapman mostly to shit on myself (not his fault or desire of course) and I should stop. But it's part of a whole complex of stuff, so not that easy.