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.
THE POWER OF BELIEF
There was a time in your life when you completely owned the power of your belief, but when you were educated to be a part of humanity.
The power of your belief went into all those symbols that you learned, and at a certain point the symbols gained power over you. In truth, the power of your belief went into everything that you know, and since then everything that you know has ruled your life.
Obviously, when we are little children, we are overcome by the power of everyone else’s beliefs. The symbols are a wonderful invention, but we are introduced to the symbols with the opinions and beliefs already there. We ingest every opinion without questioning if it’s truth or not. And the problem is that by the time we master a language with all the opinions that we hear growing up, the symbols – and the ‘definition’ of what they mean is programmed in.
This isn’t good or bad or right or wrong. It’s just the way it is, and it happens to all of us.
If you’re asking yourself why you’re so miserable at times, it’s because you’re telling yourself a story that isn’t true, but you believe it.
The world of the symbols is extremely powerful because we make every symbol powerful with that force that comes from deep inside us — that force that we call life, faith, or intent. We don’t even realize that it’s happening, but together all of the symbols form a whole structure made by agreements, and we call it a belief system.
The belief system gives form and structure to our virtual reality, and with every agreement we make, the structure grows stronger and gains more power until it becomes nearly as rigid as a brick building.
If we imagine every symbol,
every concept, every agreement as a brick,
then our faith is the mortar that holds the bricks together.
As we continue to learn throughout our lives, we mix the symbols in many directions, and the concepts interact with themselves to create more complex concepts. Until we have a totality of everything that we know.
This structure is what the Toltec call the human form. The human form is not the form of the physical body; it’s the form that our mind takes. It’s the structure of our beliefs about ourselves, about everything that helps us make sense of our dream.
The human form gives us our identity, but it’s not the same as the frame of the dream. The frame of the dream is the material world as it is, which is truth. The human form is the belief system with all the elements of judgment. We judge everything according to those beliefs, even if those beliefs go against our own inner nature.
In the process of growing/learning, the belief system becomes the book of law that rules our lives.
When we follow the rules according to our book of law, we reward ourselves; when we don’t follow the rules, we punish ourselves. The belief system becomes The Big Judge in our mind, and also the greatest victim because first it judges us, then it punishes us.
