Amazon describes the book “The Four Agreements” as offering a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. The author reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering.
I describe is as the “best book per word” I have ever read. This series is on the subsequent book “The 5th Agreement.” Where they cover and expand upon the original 4 agreements – and add new wisdom.
SYMBOLS AND AGREEMENTS
The Art of Humans
During all the years that we grow up, we make countless agreements with ourselves, with society, with everybody around us. But the most important agreements are the ones we make with ourselves by understanding the symbols we learned. The symbols are telling us what we believe about ourselves; they’re telling us what we are and what we are not, what is possible and what is not possible. The voice of knowledge is telling us everything that we know, but who tells us if what we know is the truth?
We are taught languages and symbiology. We are taught an common, mutual, agreed upon meaning of most of these symbols. Though this is not necessarily The Truth. We are NOT taught Truth.
If we focus our attention on the way any word is created, we find that whatever meaning we give to a word is there for no real reason. We put words together from nowhere; we make them up. Humans invent every sound, every letter, every graphic symbol. We hear a sound like “A” and we say, “This is the symbol for that sound.” We draw a symbol to represent the sound, we put the symbol and the sound together, and we give it a meaning. Then every word in our mind has a meaning, but not because it’s real, not because it’s truth. It’s just an agreement with ourselves, and with everybody else who learns the same symbology.
The truth is that all of our knowledge, 100 percent of it, is nothing more than symbolism or words that we invent for the need to understand and express what we perceive. Every word in our mind and on this page is just a symbol, but every word has the power of our faith because we believe in its meaning without a doubt.
It’s like two sides of the same coin: We can say that one side is pure perception, what Adam perceives; the other side is the meaning that Adam gives to whatever he perceives. The fact that the coin exists is Truth. The value and meaning of the coin is entirely made up. The monetary system it plays a part in, and it’s value within it are completely a construct
All humans are programmed to perceive the truth, and we don’t need a language to do this. But in order to express the truth, we need to use a language, and that expression is our art. It’s no longer the truth because words are symbols, and symbols can only represent or “symbolize” the truth. For example, we can see a tree even if we don’t know the symbol “tree.” Without the symbol, we just see an object. The object is real, it is truth, and we perceive it. Once we call it a tree, we are using art to express a point of view.
