“The Fifth Agreement” by Don Miguel Ruiz is wonderful. If you have read the book ” The Four Agreements”, this is an expansion of that book. Don Miguel and his son co-authored the book. It is very down to earth, easy to read and makes it simple to see his point of view that we should question everything, including his writing. He says we know the truth in our hearts, but often we block that truth when we accept what other people have to say to us.
Don Miguel asks us to question what we believe, are told to believe and focus on our heart energy our truth. When we are aligned with our heart energy, our authentic self is allowed to create our life rather than the voices outside ourselves. Those voices come from our parents, teachers, even friends or co-workers. They tell us how to behave, what to believe, what not to believe, and we are taught from the time of our birth. They tell us if we are smart, dumb, good at something, not good at something, friendly, difficult, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or agnostic.
The four agreements are: 1. Be impeccable in your word 2. don’t take anything personally 3. don’t make assumptions 4. always do your best.

Be impeccable in your word is one of the most difficult agreements. I find it difficult to monitor my habit of gossiping with family and friends. And when you gossip, you may not take things personally but you often end up making assumptions. We judge other people by what we think is right. For example, we tend to judge the way people raise their children, or to spend their money, or work by our values of what is the right way to do it. So I am working on always doing my best and realizing that other people may have perfectly happy lives even if they do not live the way I think is acceptable.

So the fifth agreement is questioning the thoughts we have about what we believe is true. He explains that our life is an illusion because we believe we know what other people think about themselves, about us, about that moment. It is all a movie of our own creation.

I highly recommend this book. I would love to hear what you think of it.