Don Miguel Ruiz: The Four Agreements

A friend visited me while I was bedridden a few months ago, and noticed that I was reading The Celestine Prophecy. She suggested that this book was a nice follow up to that one and mailed it to me. Jane is, by the way, the sort of person who follows up on things she says. So I started reading it and, sure enough, there was a remarkable confluence between the messages of the two books. I was, therefore, expecting to enjoy The Four Agreements as much as I did The Celestine Prophecy. No such luck.

To distill my experience into one phrase, my overall impression was that of listening to a string of vaguely memorable semi-aphorisms mumbled in no particular order by a mildly retarded hillbilly. The author claims to be a master of Toltec wisdom, a fact which reduces my respect for the Toltecs considerably. In fact, it almost feels like he was actually a Los Angeles native who claims to be a Toltec so that his otherwise less than memorable book will have some sort of mystical allure.

Which is a shame, because if the book was reduced to a list of its chapter titles, it would actually be greatly useful. The four agreements themselves are a great distillation of functional living. The problem is that Ruiz goes into such painfully rambling detail about what each of the agreements means. I choose, therefore, to take away from this book the names of the four agreements, and to discard the rest.

Keep Your Word
It's Not About You
Don't Make Shit Up
Do Your Best