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.
EVERY MIND IS A WORLD
The Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally
When we are born, there are no symbols in our mind.
Imagine that you are looking into a mirror. Inside the mirror is a whole world of objects, but you know that what you see is just a reflection of what is real. It looks like it’s real, it looks like the truth, but it’s not real and it’s not the truth. If you try to touch the objects inside the mirror, you only touch the surface of the mirror.
What you see inside the mirror is just an image of reality, which means it’s a virtual reality; it’s a dream.
And it’s the same kind of dream that humans dream with the brain awake. Why? Because what you see inside the mirror is a copy of reality that you create with the capacity of your eyes and your brain. It’s an image of the world that you construct within your mind, which means it’s how your own mind perceives reality.
Everything you perceive is a reflection of what is real, just like the reflections in a mirror, except for one important difference. Behind the mirror there is nothing, but behind your eyes is a brain that tries to make sense of everything.
Your brain is interpreting everything you perceive according to the meaning you give to every symbol, according to the structure of your language, according to all of the knowledge that was programmed in your mind.
Everything you perceive is being filtered through your entire belief system. And the result of interpreting everything you perceive by using everything you believe is your personal dream. This is how you create an entire virtual reality in your mind.
We dream about it with our imagination, and by agreement we think that our dream is the absolute truth, when the real truth is that our dream is a relative truth, a reflection of the truth that is always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.
The world we think we see outside of us is actually inside of us. It’s just images in our imagination. It’s a dream.
When we become aware that we are living in a dream that we artists are creating, we take a big step in our own evolution because now we can take responsibility for our creation. To realize that our mind is always dreaming gives us the key to changing our dream if we’re not enjoying it.
Who is dreaming/writing the story of your life? You are. If you don’t like your life, if you don’t like what you believe about yourself, you are the only one who can change it. It’s your world; it’s your dream.
If your dream is a nightmare, if there’s drama and suffering, and you’re not enjoying your creation, then you can change it.
Every time you talk about your story, it changes depending on who you’re telling the story to, depending on your physical and emotional state at the time, depending on your beliefs at the time.
At a certain point, you find out that it’s nothing but a story. It isn’t reality; it’s a virtual reality. It’s nothing but a dream.
