The Four Agreements

If It Works, It Works

If you like this book and feel it has been helpful in your life, don’t read the rest of this review.

I will always preface everything I have to say about life advice or self-help or spirituality with the caveat that if it works for you, you don’t need me or anyone else to approve it. I don’t know you or your life’s circumstances. I don’t know what works or doesn’t for you.

This review is for the people it didn’t work for, because they might still be looking for something that does, and understanding why this didn’t work can be helpful. I’ll tell you why it doesn’t work for me, and why I find it an issue that this book is so widely celebrated as a spiritual reading in addiction and mental health recovery programs.

This is also not an article. In fact, I will mention multiple times that YOU SHOULD NOT TREAT THIS AS AN ACADEMIC SOURCE OR A WIKIPEDIA SUBSTITUTE. This blog contains my personal research notes (accompanied by narrativized ranting) that I think can be a useful starting point into subjects that should receive more attention. I’m shooting from the hip. It is a living document that will be edited and updated without any kind of edit history, so this is a warning entirely for your benefit so you can adjust your expectations. There is no ancient wisdom from secret magicians preserved here.

Take what works, leave what doesn’t. One person’s trash is another’s treasure. Diversity is good.

You Can Judge This One By Its Cover

Bluntly, I consider this just another one of the many pop psych books out there turning a profit by appropriating the aesthetics and philosophies unfamiliar to mainstream Western discourse in order to market itself as battle-tested ancient wisdom. I say this as someone whose family’s oral storytelling traditions would date us back to Proto-Indo European groups, who noticed Deepak Chopra of all people quoted on the back cover. To many of us in the Hindu community, he’s comparable to a televangelist or a daytime TV doctor. I know they say not to judge a book by its cover, but this book is literally asking you to judge it based on the people associated with the cover. I will do commentary on Deepak Chopra’s works eventually. His latest personal controversies make him less of a figure people might look to in the future.

But okay, let’s set this aside and not just assume Don Miguel Ruiz is a Mexican or Toltec parallel to Deepak Chopra. Perhaps Ruiz genuinely does appreciate Chopra’s works, or was unfamiliar with his controversies, or just thought a big author delivering an endorsement would help him raise awareness for a book he believed was worth distributing. It’s not fair to totally condemn an author based on who endorses them, even if the author publicly appreciates the endorsement enough to attach it to their work. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt they clearly don’t deserve. What else do we see?

The book’s cover says “A Toltec Wisdom Book.” I grew up in the American public school system, so naturally I had no idea when the Toltecs were around. If you asked me if they came before or after the Aztecs, it would be a 50/50 toss-up from my side. Luckily, I can still read, so I did some reading. The Toltec empire arose in what would be Central Mexico today from the 10th to 12th century, but its capital city was looted by Aztecs after it fell to the Chitimecs and other groups. It has been a long time since they’ve been around, and most of what we know seems to come from other peoples and cultures that took note of them as well as archaeological evidence. They don’t have much in the way of written works we can reference to understand them on their own terms.

Zuzana Marie Kosticova is a Czech scholar at Charles University in Prague who specializes in contemporary spirituality derived from Mesoamerican traditions. She published a paper funded by the Czech Science Foundation which traces the historical development of contemporary Toltec spirituality:

On the basis of his most celebrated bestsellers, Carlos Castaneda has usually been analyzed as a precursor of the emerging pre-Harnerian Neo-Shamanism, one that was chiefly inspired by the cultures of the so-called Oasisamerica and the spirituality of the Great Plains. Nevertheless, in his transitional period (the 1970s and the early 1980s), Castaneda also explored ancient Mesoamerican symbolism. The fruit of this new inspiration mainly consists of three concepts – the Tonal/Nagual, the symbolism of the cardinal points, and the Toltec. The term “Nagual” as well as “Toltec” persisted long after Castaneda’s death and proved to be one of the most popular traits of the author’s doctrine. Such contemporary celebrity authors as Miguel Ruiz owe their idea of the Toltec to Castaneda.

The term itself acquired new meanings – “Toltec” now tends to be translated as “shaman”, “wise man”, “sorcerer”, “sage”, etc. At the same time, the link to the actual Toltec archaeological culture that flourished a thousand years ago in Central Mexico gradually weakened. Toltec spirituality thus became a fully postmodern, contemporary phenomenon; its original Mesoamerican core (if there ever was one) was interpreted and re-interpreted to suit the needs of humankind in the present, with its exhausting lifestyle and constant search for awe-inspiring spiritual experience

So she straightforwardly rejects the notion that Ruiz is invoking a tradition that goes back thousands of years. In fact she very explicitly lays out that “Toltec” in reference to spirituality has been “re-interpreted to suit the needs of humankind in the present.” A harsher critic might say that Toltec has become a buzzword to invoke spiritual aesthetics detached from our available evidence about the actual populations called Toltec. “If there ever was one” implies we have never known enough to even conclude that a single Toltec culture or “essence” is a coherent construct.

Kosticova traces the modern reinterpretations of Toltec to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society. She wrote that the Toltecs were part of an ancient continent called Atlantis which was technically and intellectually advanced until it collapsed due to abuses of the elites and European imperialism. The indigenous communities in the Americas were remnants of those who fled while the supposedly superior white Aryan race now dominated the planet. Blavatsky’s claims were never adopted into mainstream historical academia, and early Mesoamerican scholars who tried to find evidence for her claims didn’t get far. The interest that was ignited into Mesoamerican cultures was primarily archaeological, so Carlos Castaneda took up the public-facing spiritual side.

Castaneda’s works have been the subject of lots of scholarship, and there’s a consensus that contemporary ideas of Toltec spirituality can be traced strongly back to his conceptions of indigenous American spiritual traditions and aesthetics. Ruiz has claimed his father was a Nagual; the term has mostly been associated with Castaneda’s popularization of Toltec spirituality and speaks to the influence Castaneda had on Ruiz’s premises. Aside from Kosticova making passing references to Ruiz as the most vocal part of Castaneda’s legacy, it seems Mesoamerican historians and anthropologists have not really commented on The Four Agreements in an expert’s capacity, which is itself significant. You can find articles written by mental health professionals that will say the book is a good primer for those seeking to explore or supplement the ideas behind Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but they express skepticism regarding the connection to ancient Toltec wisdom. Articles written by others with Mesoamerican heritage who have engaged in public discourse routinely condemn Ruiz for taking concepts out of context for the purposes of adding the aesthetics of mysticism. Academics simply do not think the book presents serious enough claims to merit a response except to comment on the virality of it as a downstream consequence of someone else’s works.

“In the tradition of Castaneda, Ruiz distills essential Toltec wisdom, expressing with clarity and impeccability what it means for men and women to live as peaceful warriors in the modern world.” — Dan Millman, Author, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

But let’s be fair: Ruiz says he’s drawing on his own heritage and his familial oral traditions, not making a claim intended to be evaluated by academics or necessarily describing Mesoamerican culture aside from his little corner of it. It is absolutely possible that his family has real heritage they trace back to the Toltec Empire, and we do have evidence of continuous cultural and religious traditions that have survived for thousands of years. Even if the exact details don’t conform to the standards of evidence we use in science and academia, ideas like values, principles, and philosophies can persist in new forms that have evolved for new circumstances.

Consider a family recipe. We might not have evidence to say that any particular recipe existed in that form a thousand years ago, but we also might not want to challenge our grandmothers on cultural authenticity. Every family might do something differently, and we will never have the evidence to capture all the variation in human lifestyles and experiences. I would be a hypocrite myself if I said I checked my family’s oral histories against the academic archaeological and anthropological evidence available before sharing or acting on them. There’s plenty of very good reasons to be skeptical of perspectives shaped by limited or skewed evidence, such as the asymmetry of evidence preserved in European state archives by destroying other records they didn’t understand or care about.

Also, you might just not care about whether it’s verifiably authentic or not. It’s fair to apply a “death of the author” approach to take Ruiz entirely out of the picture and consider what lies between the covers on their own merits. Maybe the details don’t matter at all as long as the core truths and patterns are successfully conveyed. After all, we’re presumably interested in how to navigate life going forward where the details will never align 1-to-1 with any previous situation, and we as people also have notoriously unreliable memories that are very easily swayed through suggestions and context switches. When we get to the actual Four Agreements, we will dive into that, but I’m not done exploring the premises yet.

Opening the Book

Okay, I’m going to be a little bit petty and nitpicky here. He advertises one book called The Fifth Agreement and another called The Four Agreements Companion Book before the first page. My copy of The Four Agreements is less than 100 pages. I’m just saying, there’s room for consolidation here.

The Toltec

Anthropologists have spoken of the Toltec as a nation or a race, but, in fact, the Toltec were scientists and artists who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones. They came together as masters (naguals) and students at Teotihuacan, the ancient city of pyramids outside Mexico City known as the place where “Man Becomes God.”

It’s true that anthropologists have historically framed the Toltecs as an empire based around Tula, though they seem to be more nuanced now with the understanding that Toltec as a term was used also to refer to an idealized ancestor or a title for skilled masters. There isn’t really evidence to support the idea that the Toltecs were anything like an academic or intellectual network dedicated to preserving old knowledge. It’s not clear either what scientist or artist mean here. Astronomers and artisans were certainly present in Mesoamerican cultures, but we don’t have evidence to support something like a Platonic Academy or chapter of the Templars at Tula with people dedicated to an exploration of philosophy and knowledge. So Naguals as a term for an official master who teaches students, like a guru, also doesn’t seem to hold up. It would be one thing if Ruiz had said “according to my family’s traditions,” but he takes direct aim at serious academics to contradict a consensus.

Also, Teotihuacan as a city was thriving from 100 BCE - 550 CE. The Toltecs were thriving from 900 CE - 1150 CE. That’s a gap of about 400 years. If we give the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible that Ruiz is referring to some settlement that survived where Teotihuacan was before or the ancestry of the Toltecs. In family traditions, it wouldn’t be uncommon for these details to blur.

Over the millennia, the naguals were forced to conceal the ancestral wisdom and maintain its existence in obscurity. European conquest, coupled with rampant misuse of personal power by a few of the apprentices, made it necessary to shield the knowledge from those who were not prepared to use it wisely or who might intentionally misuse it for personal gain.

Toltec knowledge arises from the same essential unity of truth as all the sacred esoteric traditions found around the world.

Though it is not a religion, it honors all the spiritual masters who have taught on the earth.

It is true that European invasions destroyed a lot of culture, and many Mesoamerican communities went underground with their practices and records to avoid targeting. But the rest of it is a very standard archetype found in spiritual communities claiming esoteric knowledge. I mean, he openly says as much. He applies perennialism, or the idea that within all religions and spiritual traditions are recurring patterns that point to universal truths.

You can find lots of New Age “spirit science” type authors and content creators using this formula: ancient esoteric knowledge from a lost group allows one to achieve unique powers, but it can be abused both by insiders and outsiders, so a special class of insiders preserved it away from the institutions that are responsible for your current suffering. Now, these special insiders believe that the present moment is the ideal time to reintroduced this esoteric knowledge an power in a way that won’t be abused. In this case, 21st century America - after the European conquerors they were hiding from consolidated even more precise control over the world. And invented nuclear weapons and drone warfare and mass media platforms. But hey, I’m not a Nagual, so perhaps they work in mysterious ways beyond my understanding, and there’s a good reason to bring back this esoteric knowledge at this moment in a short self-help book that has gone mostly unnoticed by those who dedicated their life to the study of Mesoamerican cultures and peoples.

When I discuss Hinduism and sects that have been around for thousands of years, I very intentionally try to demystify it and avoid the term “esoteric”. These are traditions that have evolved across thousands of years through lived experiences, not in some secret cave or ashram even if that’s where the founding myths go. Different generations adapt concepts for different sociopolitical circumstances. Hindu belief systems are not ancient esoteric wisdom; just a different formulation of life than Western Eurocentric Abrahamic perspectives that have held international hegemonies for the last few centuries and counting. The lack of a central canon or authority in Hinduism makes it seem indecipherably complex, but if you just start with one sect and make an honest attempt to internalize it, you can start to understand the other branches in terms of the differences. You just need to start with one sect to acquire the vocabulary. I might even recommend starting with Buddhism as an easier way to unlearn assumptions from an Abrahamic culture.

Lots of ancient Hindu discourses are written as critical commentaries that pick at specific verses of older texts and dialogues between a teacher and a student, with the teacher often being very forward about the limitations of their own knowledge at the time so that the student may choose their next step. Gurus and religious leaders may exercise political authority in an area, but there’s no Pope who delivers a final word or determines the heretics to be excommunicated are. In many stories, you can find a deity or wise sage remark that it’s improper for someone to explain their own history and background. There should be others who will be your historians.

There’s a noticeable instinct in the West to take the perennialist stance because it supports the idea that there are some common denominators in the belief systems of cultures around the world that can be operationalized by existing Western institutions. The binaries like Heaven and Hell, good and evil, angels and demons, God and Satan, etc., are aspirationally seen as universal. That frames the West as having a kind of liberalized operating system that can accommodate every other system because it exists transcendentally above other systems as the ultimate rational discourse. After all, if you admit you don’t have the knowledge or background to understand something, how could you hope to control it? I think there’s an element of denial that the Western American way is not THE way of progress that the world must or should follow, even if we love what America has been and want to preserve it.

Perennialism is nothing new though. It predates the West in any way we know it now. Early Christian scholars in the first few centuries AD were doing the same thing with Christianity and Greek philosophy in order to argue for greater legitimacy in elite circles. Some made arguments that Plato’s conception of a divine madness or guidance, including the daemon Socrates claimed he had as a voice that would intuitively guide him away from bad decisions, was an incomplete observation of the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Bible is reasoned to be a way for God to introduce these lost truths to humanity. Renaissance elites and scholars like Leibniz took a renewed interest in this line of reasoning when seeking to reinterpret classical Greek and Roman works on new human-centric terms.

However, the current strain of perennialism that’s common in Western nations stems back to American transcendentalism, and the perception among American authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau that the “Oriental” cultures of the East held ancient spiritual insight that was lost to a radically material and rational Western society. This isn’t really about understanding Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, or any other tradition at all but reinforcing the image of the West as suffering from the success of their own hyperrationality and scientific materialism. An alternative interpretation would have been recognizing that these Eastern traditions have very sophisticated logical and scientific philosophies of their own that are closely interwoven with ideas from spiritual traditions.

As a result, they flattened the “Oriental” or “Asiatic” schools of thought into a set of “Oriental” stereotypes that focused on direct experience and personal awakenings through mysticism rather than rationality. I would argue these ideas are actually quite close to Protestant revivalism traditions of experiencing some kind of conversion as a result of an encounter with God or Jesus, and that this framework was imposed on a diverse set of traditions that do include spiritual awakenings, but also a lot more. Many traditions have very nuanced and regimented approaches to meditation, rituals, prayer, yoga, contemplation, inquiry, tutelage under predecessors, and the proper time and space to internalize these concepts into experience. Logic, religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc are not necessarily separable into disciplines or institutional authorities the way the West has imagined it.

The American transcendentalists may have engaged in Orientalism to construct an Other out of the East, but it was out of ignorance rather than malice or deliberate condescension. Where it became a problem is, as we discussed above, Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. She actually began articulating a system of ideas behind perennialism. Weird ideas though.

Blavatsky proposed a cosmology for humanity that inspired a lot of pseudoscientific beliefs about races. Specifically, she proposed that humans involved out of a set of root races. The first two were the Polarian and Hyperborean races that had no physical form. The third were the Lemurians who were giants that existed alongside the dinosaurs. The fourth were the Atlanteans who sank into the ocean, including the Toltecs, because they were technically and scientifically advanced with psychic powers but suffered spiritual corruption. The fifth are the Aryans who represented the peak intellectual and physical development of the human species so far with a new spark for higher understanding. The term “Aryan” was really referring to the family of languages associated with Indo-European groups, where my own family links its heritage according to oral storytelling tradition and records as far back as we can tell. You can still find people in India, especially elders, who will use the term “Aryan” to describe their origin. Blavatsky repurposed it as a singular race, and existing indigenous non-European communities across the world were leftovers of the “half-animal” races that came before.

During the 1960s with countercultural New Age movements, the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda claimed to have received apprenticeship under a Yaqui shaman and began reintroducing Mesoamerican concepts into the alternative spirituality scene. Castaneda has inspired actual interest from academics, not for his claims about Toltecs but for introducing the contemporary conception of Toltecs as a mystical society rather than just an ethnicity or name for a network of peoples around a particular polity. If anything, archaeological evidence suggests the Toltecs were highly militaristic in their expansion.

The closest comparison I can think of to this situation is Sparta. The Spartans were militaristic in their expansion over the Greek city-states as well, and they weren’t very interested in creating a body of literature as a legacy. Most of what we know comes from others who encountered them, and those others always had some kind of an incentive to promote a certain picture. A historian who was critical of Athenian democracy might play up the efficiency of Spartan hierarchies and militarism; a historian who favors Athenian democracy and diversity might play up the rumors about barbaric practices in Spartan training systems. Sparta itself enjoyed leaning into the reputation that they were trained as children to be fearless warriors who would die in a battle before they ever surrendered, even though most Spartan citizens were landed gentry with a slave underclass through Helots. The Toltecs seemed to have undergone a distortion in the other direction: they’re seen as the stewards of ancient wisdom and truths rather than the brutal expansionist empire represented by Spartans.

Castaneda encouraged his followers to “erase their personal history” as a means of freeing themselves from the attachments that hold back warriors from living entirely in the present without the definitions or restrictions of a society around them. This ironically enough includes family history. In the early 1970s, Castaneda achieved celebrity status and subsequently, celebrity scrutiny. His claims of being born into a high status Brazilian family was challenged by records showing he was a Peruvian immigrant who left a family behind and changed his name. His response to these contradictions in the claims about his background: “to ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and turns us all into milestones.” Like many New Age movements, Castaneda eventually used his ideas about erasing your identity to convince a small group of women to completely cut off their “energy vampire” families, legally change their names, and burn all identifying documents. When Castaneda died in 1998, these women drove into Death Valley and, based on the remains found, appeared to have committed mass suicide.

Ruiz has framed himself as a contemporary peer of Castaneda, a “great teacher” he credits for introducing the “Toltec wisdom” of their shared oral storytelling traditions to Western discourse. But as we saw above, the actual Mesoamerican scholar Kosticova has very explicitly said Ruiz’s conception of the Toltecs and use of the term Nagual implies he was directly borrowing from Castaneda. We can at least say that his New Age characterization of the Toltecs is incomplete at best if it doesn’t make any mention of their militarism or any archaeological evidence we do have. In fact, some critics argue that there’s a kind of commodification of culture happening that allows profit to be made from “exoticized” aesthetics or a sanitized version of history without any of the substantive engagement with the “European conquest” that drove it underground. Erasing the past is certainly a very convenient framework for those who may not want to take accountability for their past.

Ruiz claimed he was a Western medical doctor and neurosurgeon who had an out-of-body near-death experience during a car crash in the 1970s, after which he began a new journey to understand his family’s Toltec history and spirituality. It seems that journalists who tried to check his medical degree, residency paperwork, or hospital affiliations did not find evidence that he was a practicing neurosurgeon. Nevertheless, he charged tourists thousands of dollars to take them on a “Power Journey” through Teotihuacan over the objections of actual residents and elders who feel their sacred architecture is being commodified. In 2002, after a heart attack, Ruiz indicated his sons would be taking over as Toltec guides to manage his businesses under the claim that they were uniquely qualified because of the family’s oral tradition. Setting aside that he had indicated others like Castaneda existed who carried the same oral traditions, there have been criticisms that his sons have lived mostly Westernized lives. To put it crudely, if Castaneda was like Steve Jobs, Ruiz is like Jeff Bezos; less of a cult based on a personality, more of an efficient corporate structure that can be handed off.

So if all Ruiz wanted to do is share his own family’s oral traditions and the wisdom from it, this review wouldn’t exist and a lot of skeptics challenging it would probably be far less critical. But he’s making historical and philosophical claims about other peoples and cultures in the process. That’s hard to look past, especially given how commonly the book shows up in mental health and recovery spaces that have been underserved by traditional institutions that fail to address complex health conditions, and the lack of academic engagement with anything in the book aside from a nod to its celebrity status. That leaves a very wide space for unfalsifiable or unverifiable literature to opportunistically fill in the gaps. Many Hindus would put Deepak Chopra in the same class of opportunists.

Smoke and Mirrors

Three thousand years ago

Yes, there’s a problem already. Again, the archaeological evidence we have suggests the Toltecs emerged around 900 CE, about 1100 years ago. So we’re going back 2000 years prior to the existence of the Toltecs, closer to the era in which the Sanskrit Vedas were composed and distributed.

The Vedas actually were transmitted orally through family lineages for centuries with an extremely rigorous set of practices and rituals ensuring its transmissions. Contrary to what many expect, successful oral storytelling is a sign that a culture has allocated a lot of time and effort to ensuring knowledge would be transmitted. It takes a group of experts who would study everything from mnemonics, hand gestures and choreography, grammar, vocabulary, music, fashion, natural resources, performance spaces, and much more with a cohesive goal of preserving a set of values and norms. For centuries, there were rules against trying to write down the Vedas to establish a canon outside of a group of experts who could verify it and its transmission to others. Eventually the Vedas would form the foundation for universities that attracted people from many different communities to participate in the preservation and development of this knowledge.

So I have no problem following some of the esoteric formulaic beats of Ruiz’s narrative, but we might reasonably expect to see archaeological evidence of an effort to preserve these traditions from a culture this old and once-powerful. We’ve observed them from other cultures. Oral storytelling does not just mean telling stories at night to your kids or showing up to a festival once a month where the community’s youth prepare a dance.

The only way a Toltec society could have existed 3000 years ago is if you adopt the timeline proposed by Blavatsky about the hierarchy of Atlantean races and its survivors.

One day, as he slept in a cave, he dreamed that he saw his own body sleeping. He came out of the cave on the night of a new moon. The sky was clear, and he could see millions of stars. Then something happened inside of him that transformed his life forever. He looked at his hands, he felt his body, and he heard his own voice say, “I am made of light; I am made of stars… Everything is made of light… and the space in-between isn’t empty.”

Then he realized that although he was made of stars, he was not those stars. “I am in-between the stars,” he thought. So he called the stars the tonal and the light between the stars the nagual, and he knew that what created the harmony and space between the two is Life or Intent. Without Life, the tonal and the nagual could not exist.

Apparently, that’s not what tonal and nagual mean outside of Castaneda’s repurposed usages.

Remember that The Four Agreements is not a peer-reviewed academic book that has had Mesoamerican scholars review his usage of these terms. It was published by Amber-Allen Publishing, which grew steadily in the 1970s after acquiring the rights to publish The Seth Material by Jane Roberts. Roberts said she would become possessed by a spirit named Seth who told her to tell humans “you create your own reality” not limited by a measurable material world. In 1994, the company published a hit with a small 100 page book called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by a physician named Deepak Chopra. Well, that might help us answer how Chopra’s glowing recommendation ended up on the back cover of Ruiz’s book. Just two years later, the company’s owner Janet Mills met Ruiz through a friend and attended one of his “Power Journey” tours. She helped streamline the beliefs that Ruiz held into something closer to Chopra’s hit book.

At the same time, in the celebrity Hollywood world, Ellen DeGeneres had been blacklisted after coming out as gay. She got involved in the Southern California spiritual healing communities where Ruiz was building his business with Amber-Allen’s growing network. She and her circle eventually endorsed the book avidly on her own show, then brokered a deal with Oprah to interview Ruiz for a magazine. This catapulted the book into popular culture, but at no point did it seem to get a stamp of approval from anyone with subject matter authority over Mesoamerican cultures. Terms like tonal and nagual became associated with Ruiz’s definitions, borrowed from Castaneda’s repurposed terminology, and bypassed the understanding we have from other evidence.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1577) and Fray Alonso de Molina’s Vocabulario (1571) both precede Castaneda by several centuries in their use of tonalli and nahualli, both of which are specific terms in the classic Aztec language (or language group) Nahuatl. Tonalli refers to a kind of force of human vitality granted by creator deities in utero, linked to the heat of the sun through a link with an animal companion based on the solar calendar. Nahualli seemed to refer to a class of magic practitioners who could detach their soul to shapeshift their bodies into animals, although European friars often translated this just to “witch” or “necromancer.”

Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything. This is what he discovered: Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God.

Ruiz seems to use these words to mean that there is a material world and an energy that holds that material world together. He uses tonal to mean the first and nagual to mean the second, but also that Intent or Life is the the substrate that connects both. This initially appears to be a kind of non-dualism that suggests the interconnectedness of all things. On the surface, this sounds a bit like Spinoza: “Deus sive Natura” (God or Nature) is how he referred to the universe. Many Hindu non-dualist belief systems, including the ones I lean on, make a similar framing for a single consciousness pervading the universe of which matter and space are both made. Thus, the mind (immaterial) and body (material) dualistic system are different expressions of the same single mode of a transcendental substance. In this case, the material tonal and immaterial nagual are bound together with Intent or Life, and all of these things are considered to be of Deus sive Natura.

As we go forward, we’ll see that this is actually just window dressing for an extremely radical dualism. A critical perspective might argue that he wants the aesthetics of non-dualism that is more common to non-Western conventions and traditions, but he doesn’t want to actually change the radical dualism and individualism that forms the basis of “mind over matter” arguments.

Let’s throw an olive branch out here though. As long as people are tapping into their empathy to try and see parts of themselves in others, it’s arguably a net improvement to someone’s approach or worldview, The ins and outs of dualism or non-dualism are perhaps just academic details for philosophy majors and religious scholars to quibble over. It still encourages people to relate to each other rather than make another Other, right? To a point. Because right away Ruiz writes:

In those few moments he comprehended everything. He was very excited, and his heart was filled with peace. He could hardly wait to tell his people what he had discovered. But there were no words to explain it. He tried to tell the others, but they could not understand. They could see that he had changed, that something beautiful was radiating from his eyes and his voice. They noticed that he no longer had judgment about anything or anyone. He was no longer like anyone else.

He immediately sets up a justification to tune others out. If you have some moment of enlightenment through which you learned something you have difficulty explaining to someone, you can just declare them to be in a dream state while you have unique awareness. After all, if you’re God, you can declare your own truths for the universe. You can define cause and effect any way you want. So this starts with the notion of unity and universality as is common for post-New Age perennialist spiritual movements, and then quickly proposes that you adopt a system of knowledge that insulates itself from challenge and dialogue.

For contrast, I’ll share a parable from many Hindu sects that grapple with the same core themes about recognizing your nature as a divine impermanent Self and communicating knowledge acquired through experience that can’t be distilled into something articulable.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, both the king of Devas and the king of Asuras sought the truth of the Self from their father and creator Prajapati, who said to know the Self was to have all your desires satisfied. Devas and Asuras get mapped to gods and demons, but that’s forcing it onto a moralistic Abrahamic duality. Instead, the Devas were born of Aditi, associated with the order of the infinite cosmos, and the Asuras were born of Diti, associated with the limitations of material reality. Both are required in order to keep the universe in a state of constant evolution; when the Asuras challenge the Devas for control of the cosmic order, the Asuras are forced to evolve their administration of that order to counter a new challenge.

When the kings of both factions met their father, for 32 years he said absolutely nothing to them. The kings instead presumed the role of students and performed chores until Prajapati chose to ask why they visited him. When they asked to learn how to find their true Self, he instructed them to look into a pan of water with their own reflection, and he said that is the Self (I’m simplifying a much longer and more poetic dialogue). The king of the Asuras interpreted this as the Self being the material form looking back at him, and so those who are materialistic and chase the manipulation of material form are said to have an Asuric disposition of the Self. Faith, charity, and insights into the infinite nature of reality are lost on the materialist Self. He was satisfied with his answer and returned to share his answers with the other Asuras.

Indra, king of the Devas, began his return to his faction until he was struck with doubt. With this materialist conception of the Self, the Self changes and dies alongside the body. But if knowing the Self is to have all desires in all worlds, then a mortal material Self is too finite to be the complete Self. So, unsatisfied, Indra returned and raised his objection to Prajapati, who was happy that Indra observed this and instructed him to stay another 32 years with him. This time, Prajapati said that the Self that moves about in dreams is the immortal and permanent. Indra once again began his return to the Devas only to doubt the answer again on his way. The dream-Self still suffers from pain, from fear, from distress. It too cannot be the complete answer to understanding the Self. Indra returned and spent another 32 years in austere contemplation.

Now after a total of 96 years, Prajapati said the Self that is completely asleep with no dreams or experiences is the true immortal and permanent Self. And yet again Indra walks away to have doubts that lure him back. The Self that is completely asleep is indistinguishable from total annihilation. There is no awareness, which an immortal and infinite Self should have of its Self. This answer still did not satisfy Indra, who returned to the instruction of only a 5 year wait this time. After 101 years, the king of Devas was finally shown the complete answer: the real Self is the Silent Witness - pure consciousness that only dwells inside a body for a while to observe its infinite nature from a finite one. When this Self no longer identifies with the body, it no longer identifies with the suffering of the body. Life will still involve pain and sorrow, but the psychological suffering that comes from identifying with the body can be eased. The anxiety, the shame, the resentment, the stress of maintaining an image or reputation, the self-blame for mistakes or bad choices, etc. can all be eased by identifying with the Self in its infinite capacity and separating oneself from the impermanent finite ego. From there, even pain is an opportunity to experience healing and develop empathy for more people. As is often said in Buddhist-inspired recovery groups, great pain does not erase goodness but informs it.

My interpretation of Shaivism as a result is not about removing storms from your life. It’s about recognizing that an immortal Self sits in the eye of the hurricane while you weather it. The identity of the observer and the observed collapse into the same continuous reality. Intense emotions like grief, love, anger, and sorrow are instances of the universe contracting itself from its immortal Self to create an experience that only a finite Self could have. Even something as painful and awful as the grief of losing a child to illness or accident is a deliberate creative design to produce a new experience. Creation is not an act of generosity nor punishment. It doesn’t confer authority to the creator. It is pure creative expression detached from the outcome, mischeivous and reckless, awesome and awful. I pursue meditation with the goal of internalizing this awareness.

These are not necessarily easy concepts to absorb, even if the practice to absorb them is simple. But that’s the point: even the kings of deities must repeatedly pursue the truth with a singular focus in order to understand it and the Self. The parable is a guide to what you should do if you want to internalize complex and difficult ideas. It is a call to humble yourself in pursuit of knowledge. It is not a distillation of truth about God and human nature that has just been established to be inarticulable into four cliches that are shorter than a middle school textbook. It is not a promise of “Heaven on Earth” or “control of your life 100%” that Ruiz literally promises later on. It took Indra 101 years to understand his own nature while humbling himself to a student who scrubs floors and waits patiently and silently for the master to share wisdom, and the opportunity to discover one’s nature was available to the Asuras as well. There are none who are included or excluded from knowledge on the basis of any essentialist concept you might extract from an impermanent world.

So when someone claims to have uncovered their true nature in a single dream in an exotic cave or bright light induced by hallucinogens but can’t actually articulate what they actually went through to anyone else, I am skeptical that this is meaningful universal insight instead of a cool personal experience. When there is no discourse or evidence of discourse that relates at all to claims about an oral storytelling tradition going back millennia and the actual vocabulary in the story appears only decades ago, I have to remind myself to keep an open mind because there was a lot of chaos introduced into the intellectual traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican communities. When scholars of the community that this oral storytelling tradition comes from either completely disregard it as celebrity authorship from a New Age publishing company or point out that the other prominent author claiming this oral storytelling tradition formed a mass suicide harem, both my eyebrows are very much raised while I squeeze out the last drops of charitability I’m capable of. When the author has a profitable company that sells trips to sacred sites with the promise of experiencing a similar recognition of your nature as his Smokey Mirror parable over the objection of actual residents, and that he seems to have set up his sons to inherit that business and keep it going, I would start firmly identifying as a skeptic of every claim this person makes given their undeniable conflicts of interest. When I see that the path to its popularity went through celebrities like Ellen and Oprah and that the New Age publishing company behind it just happens to do most of its business in Southern California communities known for picking up celebrities with mental health struggles, I think we have a lot of dots that we can start connnecting about the motivations behind this book.

The story I shared also sets a precedent for transmitting knowledge through experiences that cannot be articulated easily: the master-student relationship. Many 10th century Shaivist sects I enjoy following discussed their spiritual philosophies in private within their own homes in a small circle of peers or family rather than isolated monasteries. The master’s role was not just to impart knowledge or guide experiences, but to evaluate the psychology of their students as well. Sometimes there were standard initiation phases which still included something resembling a spiritual awakening and virtue-building tasks that make one of service to their community. If a master felt that a student was learning to feel superior to others or used their knowledge for materialist or egoistic reasons, they would withhold further knowledge until their behavior and attitude were adjusted. Much of these characteristics are shared by some Zen Buddhist traditions where monks in initiation ceremonies would go through a rigorous interview over a koan. If they recited a prepared answer rather than engaging fully with original argumentation about the koan, they could be ferociously reprimanded. To maintain this kind of personalization and ensure the passage of knowledge to someone emotionally and mentally equipped to pass it on themselves, a small cohort or individual relationships would be necessary. Scaling it through lectures and textbooks would be impossible. People might just take whatever they need to rationalize their whims without experiencing a real challenge that forces them to question themselves and change.

So, this is a long way to say: esoteric traditions that discuss passing on the knowledge stemming from direct experience or spiritual awakenings do exist. They existed at the same time as the Toltecs even according to Ruiz’s unverified timeline. They were also driven underground by not just European invaders but a whole host of occupying forces from around the world, both competing regional powers and distant invading empires. This is a problem that has had many solutions in many places, and we have evidence of how they attempted to address it. We have no such thing for the Toltecs, save for Ruiz’s claim to an oral tradition that was also Castaneda’s oral tradition. The parable Ruiz shares is much closer to the radical individualism of modern Western institutional premises than the ideas we might expect for societies like the actual Toltecs and their Mesoamerican successors. Militaristic societies might be more likely to preach about collectively sacrificing for the greater good rather than encouraging everyone to pursue their own dreams as if in some free flowing utopian commune.

But like I mentioned before, maybe this is of absolutely no interest to you as someone who follows the “death of the author” approach. You just care about the practical advice given in it. Let’s move onto that then.

We Live Inside a Dream, But Who is the Dreamer?

What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake.

The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams… The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays…

We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child’s attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream…

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive… The adults around us hooked our attention and put information into our minds through repetition. That is the way we learned everything we know…

There are some good claims and some radical claims here that set up the rest of the book. Ruiz argues that objective reality is really composed of individual subjective interpretations that he calls “dreams”, which seems like stretching the term to encompass opinions, beliefs, sensory perceptions, inferences, information, knowledge, justification, preferences, and imagination all at once. It sounds like he’s sharing a mystical “outsider” perspective, but he’s actually proposing a very radical theory of knowledge.

Insofar as Ruiz is asserting that many of our behaviors and concepts are conditioned into us by others since we were children, this is a fine assertion. I could not agree more that we have institutionalized and operationalized so much of our lives that children are taught to conform and memorize rules rather than engage with the world with their own faculties. Children know this too, which is why so many will resist the idea of sitting in a classroom for 8 hours with strange adults who grade them like livestock when ChatGPT can produce the work assigned faster. We routinely fail to educate our children on the value of education. They just learn the rules they individually need to follow in order to avoid consequences in the institutions they find. We incentivize them this way, and they react accordingly. They are conditioned to our conditions.

That’s not the only way we learn things though, or else every generation would look the same as the last. Doesn’t the The Four Agreements itself rely on the premise that it has knowledge that will cut through these conditioned rules, like Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot? How else could the first humans have learned anything to pass down through traditions of knowledge? And what about rebellions and radical uprisings? Certainly the American Revolution or Civil War or World Wars or any of the many coups throughout history were not the product of rules and conditioning. People are obviously capable of having unique thoughts as the result of processing a unique environment through a unique brain. You might have agency over what you do once have those thoughts, but those thoughts emerge because our brains are active inference organs that constantly filter and synthesize inputs. You can choose actions no one else has and experience a reward or punishment all on your own. You’re not a computer program with hardcoded instructions based on your childhood.

Perhaps this is only a critique of Western institutions from a specific Toltec perspective, so this rhetoric is exaggeration intended to establish a contrast, but the sweeping nature of these claims is a problem. Again, if this was just a personal entry about family history, this would not be an issue. Ruiz is making claims about history and knowledge themselves with the goal of having millions of people apply it who are looking for alternative approaches to life than what they grew up with. It is wrong at best to broadly claim “That’s the way we learned everything we know.” He doesn’t just say this once here, it’s a foundational premise he returns to (and contradicts) throughout the book.

In fact this already contradicts the Smokey Mirror parable he told just a couple pages ago. That person received a dream in which they received a spiritual awakening and new knowledge he could not transmit (nor could anyone else until Ruiz apparently). So he both acquired knowledge independently and then failed to hook the attention of others into understanding it, even though this knowledge made him see his nature and everyone’s nature as God. The only implication I can think of that doesn’t lead to a contradiction is the premise that only some people are capable of receiving awakenings from their dreams to realize their nature’s relation to God while others are, to borrow some language that might sound familiar, constitutionally incapable unfortunates. That has a certain predestination quality to it too.

The outside dream hooks our attention and teaches us what to believe, beginning with the language that we speak. Language is the code for understanding and communication between humans. Every letter, every word in each language is an agreement. We call this a page in a book; the word page is an agreement that we understand. Once we understand the code, our attention is hooked and the energy is transferred from one person to another.

It was not your choice to speak English. You didn’t choose your religion or your moral values — they were already there before you were born. We never had the opportunity to choose what to believe or what not to believe. We never chose even the smallest of these agreements. We didn’t even choose our own name.

As children, we didn’t have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet via other humans.

The only way to store information is by agreement. The outside dream may hook our attention, but if we don’t agree, we don’t store that information. As soon as we agree, we believe it, and this is called faith. To have faith is to believe unconditionally.

That’s how we learn as children. Children believe everything adults say.

This is approaching advocacy for a framework called Doxastic Voluntarism, which assumes humans have complete control of what they choose to believe or hold as information. This is not at all a consensus among experts. Let’s take a walk down the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

We have versions of this argument dating back to Epictetus of the Roman Stoic movements who framed opinions as a type of agreement to an impression that is given to us. Aristotle sharply disagreed, reasoning that our imagination is limitless but our opinions are forced into subjective decisions about how true a statement is likely to be, and that subjectivity depends on our prior beliefs.

Early Christian writers like Clement of Alexandria and St. Augustine of Hippo began interpreting voluntarism very differently with a moralistic component; you had to have the courage to choose to believe in God before you could come to an understanding of reality. It also meant that maintaining faith was a more important goal than having the literacy to interpret the Bible. As Anselm of Canterbury said: “I believe so that I may understand.” Some medieval era writers like St. Thomas Aquinas argued that all belief is voluntary and entirely separate from knowledge. Others completely disagreed. Robert Holcot pointed out that it’s actually quite unreasonable to expect a human to deny all their sensory experiences and evidence-based reasoning skills in favor of one side of a contradictory belief system, especially if both seem open for questioning:

I argue that it is not in the power of man to make something appear to be in reality completely as a proposition denotes. Therefore, it is not in the power of man to make a proposition appear to him true; nor, as a consequence, that he believes that to be true. For man cannot believe some proposition to be true unless it appears to him true; nor something appear to him true unless it appears to him, thus, to be just as that proposition denotes. If, therefore, it would be in the power of man to believe a proposition proposed to him, for which, also, he does not have a compelling reason, it would be in man’s power to make a thing appear to him just as he wants. And, thus, there is a contradiction: I believe that this proposition is true, and that proposition does not appear to me to be true.

Or to put it bluntly, voluntarists might say “you can’t know anything until you first take a leap of faith towards the truth of the first cause,” and involuntarists might reply “I find it hard to make myself believe I’m not on fire when it seems I am on fire.”

The entire field of epistemology would be dramatically simplified if doxastic voluntarism was the only mechanism through which the human brain assembled a model of reality. I would argue this is an incredibly radical position. Motivated by the work over Plato’s Theaetetus, Western epistemologists have commonly used the concept of a “Justified True Belief” (JTB) as a starting point to frame knowledge. So for any proposition of knowledge P:

• you must (B)elieve it so that your internal psychological state is aligned with the proposition
• the proposition must be aligned with T(rue) external reality
• you must have (J)ustification for accepting the proposition as a True Belief, which in theory excludes luck

Gettier argued in 1963 that you can have a Justified True Belief that still does not count as knowledge if you arrive at the truth through lucky guesses. If you have a True Belief and a Justification, but the Justification was tied to luck or an unverifiable mechanism, then it’s possible to be correct with a JTB but not actually operate on knowledge.

Ruiz has radically rejected the parts about Truth or Justification here, arguing solely that an Agreement (forged out of attention and repetition) to a Belief constitutes Dreams which constitutes Reality as the Dream of the Planet. This is not as a result of rejecting Westernized radical materialism or anti-mysticism, which I would have a lot of sympathy for. It’s radical in a way that aligns with Western hyperindividualism. Look again at Hinduism and Buddhism to see alternative epistemological frameworks.

The Nyaya school of logic, which might be considered “orthodox” Hindu sects in contrast to the “esoteric” Shaivist sects I lean on, fully embraces the notion that an understanding of objective reality is possible but dependent on the integrity of instruments through which information is obtained. This is often called Causal Reliabilism, which argues that we can ascertain knowledge of causes if our instruments of knowledge are reliable. A parable that’s often told to illustrate this point goes something like this:

There are four children in a room with a boiling pot above a fire. An elder tells them not to touch it or else they will be in great pain.

One child listens to the instruction. They acquired knowledge through Shabda, or expert testimony.

One child ignores the instruction, sticks their hand directly into the fire, and burns themselves. He acquired knowledge through Pratyaksha, or direct sense perceptions.

One child was undecided about the instruction, but they observe the burn and decide not to stick their hand in the fire. He acquired knowledge through Anumana, or the logical inference that a burn came after exposure to fire, and Upamana, or the analogous reasoning capacity that their hand is similar enough to the other child’s so they would also be burned.

One child ignores the instruction, observes the burn, concludes “I’m built different, I don’t agree that I’m the same”, sticks their hand in the fire, and burns themselves. “I don’t agree that the fire is always going to burn me” they declare. They stick their other hand in the fire and burn that one as well.

Some Buddhist epistemologists were radical pragmatists who argued that true knowledge, which they also referred to as Pramana, is defined by Casual Efficacy or Arthakriya. Under this view, you can’t know if someone else is living in a dream of their own or what that dream would look like through an examination of a static set of claims. You can reason though that every time a person sticks their hand in fire, it burns them extremely consistently. For as long that cause-and-effect remains true, you have true knowledge without needing to understand the mechanisms as if they were permanent.

In fact, the Buddhist logician Dignaga made arguments quite close to the idea of language as a shared construct and sought knowledge without the use of language. His successor Dharmakirti and the Yogacara-Sautrantika school ran with the premise of a constantly impermanent world in which language, beliefs, truth, and justification cannot exist statically. Instead, they leaned entirely on the capacity to produce an effect, however impermanent, as the determinant of reality. A small child incapable of articulating a belief, a standard for the truth, or a justification beyond their feelings can still learn quickly that putting their hand in the fire burns them. The effect of the burn is the reality of the fire. Whatever words or constructs they learn afterward to communicate about the fire doesn’t change the reality they experienced. If an elder told them fire is cold, a child can learn pretty quickly to discount that elder’s advice.

I know this seems like a very long rant in response to a short excerpt, but it’s because a lot of this book will be repeating these ideas in different shapes. It’s easier to just post the rant and reference it later.

Domestication

I call this process the domestication of humans. And through this domestication we learn how to live and how to dream. In human domestication, the information from the outside dream is conveyed to the inside dream, creating our whole belief system. First the child is taught the names of things: Mom, Dad, milk, bottle. Day by day, at home, at school, at church, and from television, we are told how to live, what kind of behavior is acceptable. The outside dream teaches us how to be a human. We have a whole concept of what a “woman” is and what a “man” is. And we also learn to judge: We judge ourselves, judge other people, judge the neighbors. Children are domesticated the same way that we domesticate a dog, a cat, or any other animal. In order to teach a dog we punish the dog and we give it rewards. We train our children whom we love so much the same way that we train any domesticated animal: with a system of punishment and reward. We are told, “You’re a good boy,” or “You’re a good girl,” when we do what Mom and Dad want us to do. When we don’t, we are “a bad girl” or “a bad boy.”

Here, Ruiz seems to transition away from proposing his own epistemological framework and towards describing concepts from psychology and sociology. He references the idea of operant conditioning from BF Skinner where positive reinforcement can lead to long-term habits, although modern psychologists have also noticed an overjustification effect where an actor is solely focused on the reward of the outcome without internalizing any reward from doing the action itself. Without the reward, the behavior also collapses.

There’s also another interesting human tendency that throws a wrench in this from Anthony Giddens’ Theory of Structuration, which proposes an agency-structure duality where the structure can be likened to the way Ruiz describes the Dream of the Planet, but it leaves agency on the table. To Giddens, humans are inherently knowledgeable and structures exist as a result of humans making the individual choice to replicate or modify the society they’re in. If every human agreed tomorrow to abolish their government, in a formal institutional sense, we wouldn’t have governments anymore. Dogs can do no such thing.

So while Ruiz proposes The Four Agreements as a path to liberating yourself from previous agreements we were domesticated into, Giddens argues we have always had agency. We have always been bending, breaking, questioning, renegotiating, iterating, and reaffirming every aspect of society in every moment we’re in. We even observe a tendency in people who suspect their agency is being engineered to choose the opposite of the optimal suggestion from the system as a form of restoring their control. That’s often why teenagers will deliberately choose to make a situation worse when given an out; they’re suspicious about whether they really even rebelled if the out allowed them to act rebellious without consequences. It’s not rebellious to have a drink when you’re a teen if your dad gives you a beer. It’s rebellious to sneak one to your younger siblings behind his back. It’s the second that actually might allow the teen to feel independent, even if the first allows the teen to feel more mature. (Talk To Me does a really good job depicting a mom whose parenting philosophy relies on this, I have an article about that movie coming up).

Nuances of psychology aside, Ruiz also contradicts himself. Agreeing with the information given by others is a different instrument of knowledge than conditioning. The Nyaya school of logic would say this conflates Shabda, testimony from a trusted expert like a child would trust an adult, with Pratyaksha, or the sensory perceptions that would give us a feeling of pleasure or pain. You can definitely combine them, but remember Ruiz said that agreeing with information is how we “learned everything that we know.” This book suffers immensely from trying to sensationalize its claims.

The domestication is so strong that at a certain point in our lives we no longer need anyone to domesticate us. We don’t need Mom or Dad, the school or the church to domesticate us. We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator. We are an autodomesticated animal. We can now domesticate ourselves according to the same belief system we were given, and using the same system of punishment and reward. We punish ourselves when we don’t follow the rules according to our belief system; we reward ourselves when we are the “good boy” or “good girl.” The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind. Without question, whatever is in that Book of Law, is our truth. We base all of our judgments according to the Book of Law, even if these judgments go against our own inner nature. Even moral laws like the Ten Commandments are programmed into our mind in the process of domestication. One by one, all these agreements go into the Book of Law, and these agreements rule our dream.

Ruiz really wants us to think in terms of “domestication.” As my own opinions have made clear, I certainly think we treat children like we do livestock on factory farms, but Ruiz uses this loosely enough that it blurs the line with “socialization.” That’s a far more neutral term than “domestication”, which has the implication of changing a fundamental nature of a thing for a domestic purpose. You can use both terms in the same breath for sure, but you then have to delineate domestication from socialization in the acquisition and sharing of knowledge.

Let’s refer to the parables I shared before. Indra was not “domesticated” by his father Prajapati. The children were not “domesticated” by their experience with the fire. In both cases, gaining knowledge happened through different methods but was ultimately empowering, and we even outlined how a child might learn to distrust an elder who gives advice they can immediately dispel. You don’t even have to sleep in a cave and change your name to a metaphor for your spiritual awakening.

The belief system is like a Book of Law that rules our mind. Without question, whatever is in that Book of Law, is our truth. We base all of our judgments according to the Book of Law, even if these judgments go against our own inner nature. Even moral laws like the Ten Commandments are programmed into our mind in the process of domestication. One by one, all these agreements go into the Book of Law, and these agreements rule our dream.

Ruiz is kind of reinventing Freud’s superego with the Book of Law, down to the way parental authority becomes an internal guiding authority that continues self-surveillance. The guilt and shame given by parents for violating the norms of society eventually become internalized as a part governing our own sense of social morals and ethics. Set aside what you think of the merits of Freud’s work for a moment; we can hopefully appreciate that Freud spent a lot of time writing and researching his case for the id-ego-superego trinity, as well as cultural variations, neuroses, and edge cases. We have ample record of his clinical work. We don’t have anything like that from Ruiz except an appeal to our intuition from a position of vibes.

There is something in our minds that judges everybody and everything, including the weather, the dog, the cat — everything. The inner Judge uses what is in our Book of Law to judge everything we do and don’t do, everything we think and don’t think, and everything we feel and don’t feel. Everything lives under the tyranny of this Judge. Every time we do something that goes against the Book of Law, the Judge says we are guilty, we need to be punished, we should be ashamed. This happens many times a day, day after day, for all the years of our lives. There is another part of us that receives the judgments, and this part is called the Victim. The Victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame

There are modern therapeutic approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS) which absolutely involve conceptualizing the mind as a system of parts with a core Self, as if there are multiple subpersonalities that might conflict or cooperate in complex ways that can be difficult to describe without the family system model. The typical model categorizes these parts into Exiles (suppressed wounded parts that hold overwhelming emotions like shame or guilt), Managers (protective parts that try to maintain functional control to keep exiles from surfacing), and Firefighters (reactive parts that try to counteract surfacing exiles even through maladaptive mechanisms like substance abuse). These parts are all assumed to have positive intent but lack the ability to work together productively on strategies. Studies so far seem to indicate that it helps with self-compassion and emotional regulation.

What Ruiz proposes here with the Judge and the Victim as parts of ourselves is not lacking in merit at a surface level, but attempting to map his model to IFS can reveal some interesting objections. The Book of Laws might function as a Manager working to develop strategies to comply with rules, the Judge might function as a Manager using self-criticism to ensure that one won’t be rejected by the people around them, and the Victim might be an Exile holding onto powerful feelings associated with rejection or abandonment that could lead to fears of falling into complete dysfunction if surfaced.

Rather than see these parts as inherently limiting or destructive, we might try to see them with the positive intent to dynamically respond to the environment in a way that they think keeps you safe. If you suddenly learn about a different culture with different norms, the system of your Book of Laws, the Judge, and the Victim might all be working overtime to make sure you didn’t do something offensive The Book of Laws might be rapidly indexing the environment in a way that feels like overthinking or hypervigilance, The Judge is trying to make sure you conform to the standards or norms you’ve picked up on, and The Exile might replicate the safety mechanisms associated with avoiding punishment in the past like withdrawing into mutism or reflexively apologizing. These might actually help you in a new place, but they would just be exhausting in a familiar environment where you know what you have to do but your parts won’t stop.

The reason a distinction like this matters is because Ruiz then goes on to say:

Just as the government has a book of laws that rule the society’s dream, our belief system is the Book of Laws that rules our personal dream. All these laws exist in our mind, we believe them, and the Judge inside us bases everything on these rules. The Judge decrees, and the Victim suffers the guilt and punishment. But who says there is justice in this dream? True justice is paying only once for each mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake.

Every time we remember the mistake, we blame them again and send them all the emotional poison we feel at the injustice, and then we make them pay again for the same mistake. Is that justice? The Judge in the mind is wrong because the belief system, the Book of Law, is wrong. The whole dream is based on false law.

The Judge, the Book of Laws, and the Victim are framed inherently as problems to be addressed. There is barely even discussion of how an adaptive strategy became maladaptive, much less acknowledging the possibility of positive intent. It is all domestication introduced by society into our brains. Yet, “No Bad Parts” is a very fundamental premise of IFS so that one is not in a civil war with oneself and suppressing the information being conveyed from parts. The core Self is assumed to be non-judgmental and compassionate, so in order to fight against one part, another is needed. If a Judge and an Anti-Judge part are fighting, it can lead to the Judge doubling down. If a Manager part sees itself as a critical survival mechanism, it might register the impulses from an opposing part as an existential threat to the whole system.

Ninety-five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies.

95% of the beliefs we have are lies? If I were to say this book was 95% incoherent rambling, I would have more evidence presented for that than Ruiz has presented for this claim. Even sensationalist clickbait at least bothers to cherry pick a study to mislead or misinform with.

This is literally “trust me bro, I saw it in my dreams, and my mom said I’m right” territory. And what if you’ve read the book before and put its advice into practice? Does that drop to 85% or is it still 95% but a less harmful set of false beliefs? It’s irresponsible to throw out numbers like that because it gives people a pass to dismiss uncomfortable thoughts from themselves and feedback from others by thinking “well that’s just one of those 95% beliefs that are lies.” The intention to rhetorically exaggerate is not innocent; it leaves the audience with impressions they will apply, because that’s how beliefs are actually learned and updated.

and we suffer because we believe all these lies.

This is a RADICAL claim about suffering on top of an already radical set of ideas about identity, knowledge, and existence. Ruiz is not saying this is just one way in which we suffer, this is the primary thesis he drives throughout the book without nuance. I really tried to be charitable, but the best I can say is that an intelligent reader will look for the kernel of truth underneath all the attempts at showmanship.

Let’s just throw this idea at one of the most common and severe factors involved in suffering in the world: racism. If we were to both believe that believing lies is the primary cause of suffering, but also that racial disparities in the outcomes of systemic processes are real, the combination of these two ideas would necessarily lead us to conclude that people are agreeing to racism or the treatment from racist systems. Those people simply have a “victim mindset” one might say. They simply don’t want to agree to a system without racism in which they would have less suffering. Their parents and their grandparents conditioned them into agreeing with racism. I hope I don’t need to explain how profoundly ignorant this perspective is.

Would you go back in time before the Civil War and try to resolve it by convincing abolitionist coalitions that a fight for material exchanges of resources and a radical reset to labor conditions was not necessary? That they and the slaves simply had to find The Book of Law, The Judge, and the Victim within themselves that their owners conditioned them to reduce 95% of their suffering? Would you say that the institutions of slavery are simply an outside dream and the key to reducing suffering is for slaves to focus on what their personal dream looks like?

I would say the way to reduce suffering is to stop the people who are insane enough to think people are property or racism is good, and if they declare war on you over such a thing, then respond in kind. The Gita is unambiguous about the value of fighting a Civil War if the ones in power have strayed into systemic evil so long as your own cause is aligned with dharma rather than materialist conditions. You are not supposed to detach yourself from the reasons to fight the war; you are supposed to detach yourself from the outcome of winning or losing. You are supposed to detach yourself from the ego within that clings to memories, status, identity, pleasures, relationships, and material belongings. Abandoning this path is what leads to unnecessary suffering, not merely clinging to static propositions with questionable falsifiability.

Even the actual archaeological evidence we have of ancient Mesoamerican cultures doesn’t align with Ruiz’s characterization of the origins of suffering. The Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs viewed themselves as the successors to the Toltecs, and they believed in a pantheistic monism comparable to Hindu metaphysics with a central dynamic and self-causing energy called Teotl (similar to Brahman as formless substance). From Teotl come binaries like light and dark, hot and cold, pleasure and pain. Suffering was a structural part of the universe just as decaying organic material becomes fertilizer for new life to grow in. Hindu sects that elevate Shiva similarly argue that destruction sets the stage for creation, and that creation is in the past while destruction is the future for all things that exist. To predict the future is to understand the end of the things that exist now so that new things may exist later. Sacrifice isn’t necessarily seen as a loss, but an exchange.

Sahagun’s Florentine Codex and the Huehuetlatolli recount many instances of accepting that suffering is part of the world and aiming not for happiness, but for Neltiliztli (translated better as “rootedness” than “truth” but pointing in a similar direction). To be rooted is to be like a great tree on a mountaintop between two abysses. You should aim to have roots that keep you balanced between the many chasms in life. Does rootedness really sound compatible with the world being a dream where you can simply agree to a different reality? Or does that sound like having no roots at all so that you float to the most comfortable option for yourself like a greedy algorithm?

But okay, this is a practical advice book, so let’s evaluate the advice by ancient Mesoamerican standards. Would the Aztecs, who saw the Toltecs as idealized ancestors, agree on the idea of challenging your internal Judge, Victim, or Book of Laws as a way to navigate life? There is no reason to think so. What Ruiz calls “domestication” resembles the process called Ixtlamachiliztl which educates and socializes a child into a functional part of their community with roots to endure the forces of the world. A child without these imprinted norms, or an adult who loses it, collapses into Atlacatl, or a “none-man” who acts like an animal rather than a “true self” embodying rootedness. Similar to the presumption made by IFS modes about No Bad Parts, the Aztecs saw the norms and rules as the roots that help you stay steady using the proven methods of your ancestors who lived long enough to produce you.

Remember that Ruiz opened his book by outright dismissing the work of modern anthropologists as having mischaracterized Toltecs, and Mesoamerican scholars outright dismiss Ruiz as more than a celebrity author tied to other New Age celebrity authors with infamous cult associations.

If we compare the dream of human society with the description of hell that religions all around the world have promulgated, we find they are exactly the same. Religions say that hell is a place of punishment, a place of fear, pain, and suffering, a place where the fire burns you. Fire is generated by emotions that come from fear. Whenever we feel the emotions of anger, jealousy, envy, or hate, we experience a fire burning within us. We are living in a dream of hell

Uh, no. This is offensively wrong, and it’s one of the reasons this book does NOT honor all the spiritual masters of the Earth despite its claim to. If you did not know this, you are actually allowed to say “that’s marketing to promote itself and doesn’t actually stand as a claim with evidence” in response to marketing that makes you skeptical. Ironically you have been “domesticated” not to because every institution engages in marketing and has a bias against encouraging challenges to its own legitimacy. The Good Place was far more respectful to different concepts of an afterlife.

Ruiz is referring to a concept out of Gnosticism that assumes the world, which he calls “hell” or “The Outside Dream”, is a set of illusions made by a non-benevolent entity referred to as the Demiurge which keeps humans confined in suffering. Except Gnostic sects are often arguing that matter (materialism) itself is the problem to be addressed and transcended. To simply change your mindset to avoid making a personal dream worse than the outside dream would be handing the Demiurge the ultimate victory: you are content in the finite prison of matter that gives you suffering. It is a surrender to the conditions of suffering.

Instead, these sects advocate for something similar to what many Hindu sects advocate for: recognize your true nature as more than matter, and commit your life to ascetic study that keeps you from falling back into the cycles of materialism and suffering. Some sects did so by reasoning that if the universe was a simulation from the Demiurge, then breaking all norms and rules considered to be moral laws was the way of preserving your independent divinity. This recognition, called Gnosis, would protect the soul after death when external forces called Archons would try to send it back to material reality on Earth to continue suffering. It is a whole philosophy about breaking domestication that is almost as old as Christianity itself. Also, Satanism.

To be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine to have this “hell-on-Earth” framework in mind for yourself. Maybe this is the Bad Place, and maybe we are the baddies. I personally agree a lot with the idea that suffering is structurally a part of the world that can strike irrespective of anything you’ve done. My problem is that Ruiz tries to universalize this by saying religions around the world conceive of hell as “exactly the same.” He doesn’t say “there are interesting similarities” which is contestable enough.

First, hell is not hot in every religion. Buddhism has Cold Hells where your soul might go after death, Norse mythology talks about Helheim and the goddess Hel as a cold place, classic Greek mythology and early Judaism both had versions of an afterlife that was more like a big shadowy cave where ghost-like spirits linger, even Mesoamerican cultures had the concept of Mictlan where everyone’s soul would have to go through levels of dangerous trials in order to reach a final resting place. These are not fiery pits of damnation.

Second, within the sects of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Judaism, we find that pain in the afterlife is temporary. Often, you are just burning off the sins or negative karma your soul accumulated in life before you can move on, but the goal is rehabilitation, not damnation. “Hell” is being forced into these religions as a concept that really does not fit into cultures focused on rehabilitation and impermanence rather than permanent judgment and punishment. It necessarily creates the concept of a space to escape from or cope with rather than a space to transform through one’s own effort and agency. That matters because he then links emotional and mental states to these. Emotions are treated as a punishment for being human rather than information about navigating the world.

There’s a lot in this book that can be chalked up to a cultural misunderstanding, a super narrow interpretation of certain words, exaggeration or oversimplification for a lay audience, a zealous editor thinking about page and word counts, or just a good faith mistake. There’s also a lot that can’t. The claim Ruiz has put forward about how all religions have exactly the same conception of hell is so blatantly wrong, one wonders if he spoke to literally any person outside of his own cultural background before making this claim. The cynical part of me wants to suggest that he knew it was wrong, but it would work in a spiritually impoverished culture long enough to make profit.

All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty. We are on an eternal search for the truth because we only believe in the lies we have stored in our mind. We are searching for justice because in the belief system we have, there is no justice. We search for beauty because it doesn’t matter how beautiful a person is, we don’t believe that person has beauty. We keep searching and searching, when everything is already within us. There is no truth to find. Wherever we turn our heads, all we see is the truth, but with the agreements and beliefs we have stored in our mind, we have no eyes for this truth.

This sounds like Jacques Lacan’s formulation of lack-of-being, or the idea that we seek things because we think we lack them. Lacan argued we all have an unfillable void that will always drive us to explore something we think we might lack. He never argued for seeing the lack as illusory or socially-induced, however. Instead, he would say we have to accept the lack will always be there as a structural part of the human condition, and we should live our lives in conscious acceptance of this fact. You should not stop making art just because you feel something lacking in yourself that the art is trying to fill. You should accept that making the art will not fill nor erase the void, and in doing so you can have a reasonable handle on what pleasure you actually will get out of your work while avoiding disappointment. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Gilles Deleuze throws out the concept of lack altogether. He claims desires are creative factories that consume, produce, and experiment with the world. In fact, Deleuze was very critical about the idea of “lack” or “missing” as a social tool that convinces someone they are fundamentally flawed and require a particular solution. Modern advertising is basically built on this idea; you can be convinced you need something you didn’t even know existed and that it’s so scarce so you have to trade something valuable for it. We seek out things like truth, justice, and beauty because we have creative desires that wish to consume and produce those things.

As a simple example, do you only eat because you’re hungry and lack food in your stomach? Do you seek new recipes just because you feel you lack recipes, and then you stop searching as soon as you have enough recipes for subsistence? Or are you exercising a basic human impulse to be creative? Have you ever craved novelty and diversity for its own sake? Have you ever tried to put your own spin on recipes or tried a fusion just because you had a stroke of inspiration? If you won the lottery, would you spend it on the same food every day, or would you use it to try a new meal from a new chef everyday? I don’t think you lack something if you choose the second option.

You can definitely find Buddhists who take the approach that we suffer because we believe we lack things that are essential for us. We attach ourselves to impermanent things that might claim to have truth, beauty, and justice, but will eventually fade away. Ruiz seems to be saying that if we step back from these attachments and realize we have these within ourselves, we reduce our suffering by unleashing our true suppressed Self. A more Buddhist-aligned argument would be that there is no permanent Self to begin with, so searching for truth, justice, and beauty as permanent parts of ourselves is just transferring the direction of your attachment, not letting it go.

Ruiz does outline a method of control when he brings up the Book of Laws that condition our behavior, but ironically, he himself is proposing the lack rather than criticizing it as part of our current social institutions. We could very easily argue (and later on, I will) that he’s just proposing a new form of domestication that tells you to hide inside your own dream while others accumulate power over the world. Just don’t agree to oppression, and you won’t be oppressed! Just don’t agree to abuse, and you won’t be abused! Your current agreements to be oppressed and abused are actually blinding you from the truth that you’re making a dream of hell on earth for yourself! To argue that we search externally for justice only because we have an internal belief that an injustice has occurred is very helpful for exploitative institutions and abusive individuals. There is no reason we cannot release our attachment to a just outcome internally while continuing to pursue it externally. The Gita is explicit about showing this distinction: fight against a corrupt institution but without the expectation of victory.

We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering. It is as if we live in the middle of a fog that doesn’t let us see any further than our own nose. We live in a fog that is not even real. This fog is a dream, your personal dream of life — what you believe, all the concepts you have about what you are, all the agreements you have made with others, with yourself, and even with God.

Immanuel Kant described the noumenon as the objective world that exists, which we can never perceive directly because our physical body has to process it into the world of phenomenon. Psychologists often use the concept of a schema that organizes information processing while composed of multiple cognitive frameworks, and it filters out almost all information as noise so you can focus on signals like food or people. You don’t necessarily need to track every shift in wrinkles while you’re lying in bed, but you might catch a stain that inspires you to swiftly try and remove it.

Ruiz’s idea of living in a fog kind of maps to these ideas, except that the fog isn’t necessarily “unreal” just because it’s a shadow of objective reality. It may not be completely true or completely real, but it’s not random information either. As we saw above, some Buddhists take the radical stance that practical predictive power is the limit of human knowledge of reality anyways. There’s predictive power behind the fog we live in, shaped by risk and reward over time, or else we couldn’t function at all. It is true though that humans can show a tendency to prefer being factually wrong than socially exiled or internally destabilized. Challenging someone’s core beliefs can invoke a reaction from the same parts of the brain that spike in activity in response to a physical threat to us.

In other words, just because something isn’t provably objectively real doesn’t mean we should reject it completely from our brains and lives. In fact in many of these frameworks, it’s never possible to not live in the fog, and trying to destroy it by breaking agreements that your brain perceives as survival mechanisms is as self-destructive as one part of an IFS model attacking another. The goal instead is to just be aware of the fog, the same way we should be mindful enough to remember the impermanence in our daily lives, so that we make decisions from a more informed and aware position. There’s a reason you can’t just dump 95% of your beliefs as easy as clearing out the fridge or clearing out a memory cache like a computer. Our brains spend a lot of time committing the stuff that works to memory.

Your whole mind is a fog which the Toltecs called a mitote (pronounced MIH-TOE-TAY). Your mind is a dream where a thousand people talk at the same time, and nobody understands each other. This is the condition of the human mind — a big mitote, and with that big mitote you cannot see what you really are.

Conceptually, the idea of a fragmented mind rings more true than the idea of a single narrator in our heads, but the idea that no one understands each other is erasing the complexity of cooperative cognitive processes that we pointed out earlier on this page. It’s also not clear how we are intended to make or break agreements if we have so many parts that never communicate. Actually, it contradicts the earlier idea that The Book of Laws, The Judge, and The Victim are in a destructive cycle of communication within our minds. This is one of the reasons I’m so critical about the ambiguity and lack of internal consistency with this work. He blurs the lines between what he intends us to treat as exaggeration, metaphor, a personal approach to life, ancient wisdom, philosophical truths, and claims about psychology. It’s conveniently sloppy at best and deliberately ambiguous at worst.

In India they call the mitote maya, which means illusion. It is the personality’s notion of “I am.”

No, no it does not. Maya doesn’t even have one meaning in Hinduism. It’s not at all a concept originating in components of the personality. The meaning depends what sect or practice you’re talking about, and it’s still context-dependent after that. I’m making broad statements about Hindu sects here, but it should still establish the lack of basic research on Ruiz’s behalf.

In some of the oldest uses going back to Vedic literature, maya refers to something like an immense creative power or skilled craftsmanship that deities possess to shape the nature of reality. The Sanskrit root comes closest to meaning “to measure,” so that the manifested world is a finite reality measured out of the infinite one. It’s not an illusion any more than you would say a meal is an illusion hiding its ingredients or a painting is an illusion because it’s only an arrangement of paints we interpret as a painting. Schools like Visistadvaita Vedanta use this sense of the term.

Within Advaita Vedanta, the world isn’t illusory. Maya refers to the flawed human perception that reality is composed of separate objects rather than one unified whole. As a concept, it exists to explain how things can seem different if they’re made of the same stuff. It’s not just a cognitive distortion that leads to accepting a false proposition, but a condition of finite existence. Consider walking into a dark room where you mistake a rope for a snake. The rope is real, your perception of the rope as a snake is real, but there’s an error in interpretation stemming from ignorance rather than a harmful cognitive distortion. There is a property assumed about the snake that isn’t true. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing if you make that mistake. You might open doors more cautiously going forward if you live somewhere with a lot of snakes, or you might be better at discerning rope from snake in the future. The term anirvacaniya exists to describe this state of being neither technically real nor unreal. “Illusion” as Ruiz uses it implies untrue and unhelpful. It is certainly reductive.

Dvaita Vedanta holds that all things are real, so as an objection to Advaita Vedanta, it aggressively reframes maya in several ways. It can refer to the creative will used by Vishnu, to the primal substance of matter that makes up the physical world, or to a veil of ignorance imposed by Vishnu onto humans as finite manifestations - in which case it’s not something to be dispelled but acknowledged.

Within Kashmir Shaivism, we might argue that maya is the principle used by Shiva to contract an infinite consciousness in order to have finite experiences. An infinite being couldn’t experience a game or a story that relies on a linear perception of time, or experience what it’s like to love something with the knowledge it won’t be around forever. Maya is the tool through which ignorance is crafted so that the finite being can exist. What Ruiz then calls a fog is the deliberate human condition which should be appreciated on its own terms. IF you’ve seen the Watchmen HBO Show, you can refer to Dr. Manhattan. No spoilers.

Just for the hell of it, let’s look at the etymology of mitote. It seems to have come from Nahuatl words mihtotiah, meaning to dance, or mitotiliztli, usually referring to a highly organized ritual dance. When Spanish conquistadors observed these dances, they failed to see the complex geometric patterns of the dances that were designed after the harmony of the universe. To them it was just chaotic paganistic noise, so they began using mitote as a pejorative term for gatherings of any indigenous peoples. It eventually became a general slang term for drama, fuss, or a commotion. Castaneda seems to have used it when describing a fictional peyote ceremony, and Ruiz seems to have diluted it further into a chaotic fog that obscures reality.

That is why humans resist life. To be alive is the biggest fear humans have. Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our lives trying to satisfy other people’s demands. We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

Just to be petty (again; I am petty often), I googled the actual top fears Americans reported in 2025: https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/research-centers/babbie-center/_files/2025/Key-Findings-Survey-of-America-Fears-2025.pdf.

1. Corrupt Government Officials
2. People I Love Becoming Seriously Ill
3. Economic/Financial Collapse
4. Cyber-Terrorism
5. People I Love Dying
6. U.S. Becoming Involved In Another World War
7. Pollution of Drinking Water
8. Russia Using Nuclear Weapons
9. Pollution of Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes
10. Government Tracking of Personal Data

It seems Americans are generally afraid that the risks they take to protect their loved ones’ lives will not be enough in the face of authoritarianism, nuclear weapons, and climate disasters. These are fears reflecting the capacity to take risks that make a meaningful difference in their lives, not the mindset to take risks. To be honest, I would assume you live a very privileged life if your biggest fear is taking the risk to feel alive as an independent individual.

We have learned to live by other people’s points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else.

This is not the same as taking the risk to express yourself at the expense of embarassment or insults. The fear of being totally rejected from society is the fear of being exiled to the margins of the community where survival becomes tenuous. People care about what others think because material sources and real assets are gatekept by certain people who might enforce rules that favor them through violence without a justification beyond “finders keepers” and “bad vibes.” It becomes very easy to stop caring what others think of you when you and your family’s survival is no longer being threatened.

If you come from a marginalized background, you are constantly negotiating your legitimacy and footing in every single space you’re in. You have to know what the current stereotypes about you are, historically what the stereotypes have been that still linger, the stereotypes from people who think they’re moving past the stereotypes only to end up at new ones, the flexibility of institutions in accommodating differences until they start blaming you for being too difficult, the way others with a similar background are reacting, the winds of the sociopolitical climate, the way education and media changes cultural representation, etc. The slower a system is to change, the bigger the disparity between people’s unique lived experiences and institutional standards.

That’s really the core critique of the book I’m making that recurs as a theme across this page: it’s a one-size-fits-all solution that might work for the privileged who endorsed it and less so for everyone else. It’s incumbent on those others who didn’t design the solution and who it doesn’t work for to consistently bend themselves into the shape of the solution. If you do, it’s used as evidence that the one-size-fits-all solution does actually work as a universal solution. Those who it doesn’t work for are considered to have failed to apply the Agreements prescribed consistently enough or with enough commitment to make it work. It’s an unfalsifiable framework. I could copy-paste Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group, because it is a shockingly applicable parallel of being disgusted at someone’s appropriation of really nuanced ideas that are supposed to inspire collective action, not a hyperindividualist peace of mind that borders on nihilism for the privileged.

If this description of how perfectionism arises for you works, like I said at the very top: good for you. Take the book if it works for you, and leave this review if it doesn’t. I am not proposing another universal framework to counter Ruiz’s attempt at one. I take issue with the universalization itself. Like literally every single recovery meeting style says, AA or Recovery Dharma or SMART, use “I” statements because you truly have no idea what’s happening in someone else’s life and you will step repeatedly in disastrous interpersonal minefields if you rely on assumptions.

It’s ironic that one of the agreements is to not make assumptions when this entire section is assuming a profile of the reader through projection from the author.

We dishonor ourselves just to please other people. We even do harm to our physical bodies just to be accepted by others. You see teenagers taking drugs just to avoid being rejected by other teenagers. They are not aware that the problem is that they don’t accept themselves. They reject themselves because they are not what they pretend to be. They wish to be a certain way, but they are not, and for this they carry shame and guilt. Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. They become very self-abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well

No, teenagers do not take drugs just to avoid being rejected. That is incomplete at best and outdated “Just Say No” logic at worst. Any time Ruiz points towards one reason all humans do something, assume he’s speaking with the same authority as a phrenologist.

Teens do not have adult brains. They also do not have “underdeveloped” versions of adult brains, which might imply they work like an adult brain but with less knowledge or more impulsivity. Teens have teen brains, which are doing exactly what they’re supposed to for their stage of development: becoming more responsive to rewards, novelty, and social experiences so they can assess how they will fit into their community with their actual cohort of peers. They might reasonably believe that their value within a community is justified by what they have to offer rather than an unconditional appreciation for the sanctity of human life. They’re trying to build an identity that is independent enough to be distinct but cooperative enough to fit in.

Jungian psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja discusses drug use among teens as an archetypal transcendental initiation ritual which is distinct from a simple fear of rejection. There is a genuine desire among teens, as among people of any age, to experience something more than the material reality they can touch and feel in the search for meaning, and then be able to share that with others. You can go back to Ancient Greece and the Eleusynian Mysteries to see that. Doing drugs in a group becomes a shared transcendental experience that no one outside the group can relate to. It becomes a way of developing intimate networks and discovering subcultures that they will remain connected to even as they learn evolving social codes.

Talk to Me is an excellent depiction of how teen drug use can spiral into tragic endings, and it’s far more nuanced than “not accepting yourself.” A teen experiencing trauma without healthy adults to teach them coping methods and instill a sense of support from fellow humans can very easily begin self-medicating with drugs after being introduced to it through other teens. It’s no different than the child who sticks their hand in the fire; they can obviously learn an association between taking drugs and addressing an underlying mental health condition. Depression, trauma, anxiety, undiagnosed personality or attention disorders, and other holistic health issues can’t just be brushed under the carpet of “not accepting yourself.” They’re serious red flags that something has failed in their community’s ability to raise healthy children. It’s almost offensively stereotypical to assume self-medicating with drugs is rooted in low self-esteem rather than feelings of intolerable pain regardless of self-esteem. You can love yourself and still feel like shit.

I love that movie. I will reference it many times whenever the concept of underage drug use comes up, so get used to it.

But nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves, and it is the Judge, the Victim, and the belief system that make us do this. True, we find people who say their husband or wife, or mother or father, abused them, but you know that we abuse ourselves much more than that. The way we judge ourselves is the worst judge that ever existed. If we make a mistake in front of people, we try to deny the mistake and cover it up. But as soon as we are alone, the Judge becomes so strong, the guilt is so strong, and we feel so stupid, or so bad, or so unworthy.

Respectfully, this is beyond fucking stupid. You would not get a single objection from me if you wanted to argue this is gaslighting that minimizes the realities of abuse and is incredibly dangerous to hand off to a population that is disproportionately likely to have trauma that interferes with their daily life.

When a child experiences abuse at the hands of caretakers, they generally will struggle a lot with the idea that their caregivers are cruel, incompetent, or neglectful. In the desire to understand how to be safe in that world, children will often learn to blame themselves so that the world still seems fair and so they still feel agency over the abuse. They can easily internalize the critical voices of their caregivers as a guide to avoiding future suffering. In IFS terms, the Book of Laws is figuring out the rules to avoid abuse that can feel life-threatening, the Judge can emerge as that critical voice trying to help the child survive, and the Victim can surface as a mechanism to seem compliant to an abuser and avoid drawing attention.

To say that these parts are the true source of suffering rather than the reason they exist as they do, to call the mechanisms that evolved to survive abuse more harmful than the abuse itself, is an incredible act of bravery. It also warrants burning this book. This is not how you help victims of trauma feel safe enough to challenge those mechanisms. I have encountered several people whose mental health crises and relapses can be directly linked to returning to an environment with abusers because it made a lot of sense to them that they were just abusing themselves, failing to apply coping mechanisms, or had a cognitive distortion about their abuser’s reactions. Because of course that’s what they would think if they’ve repeatedly feared serious harm or struggled to preserve a sense of reality. It’s repeating exactly what their abusers say and shifting the blame onto victims.

If you’ve suffered from abuse or have abusers in your life, and you actually find this passage empowering, once again: good for you. I’m glad you feel you can reclaim agency over your life that you didn’t feel you could do before. But this is not a standard message that should be generally distributed to people in a mental or spiritual crisis. The standard IFS line of “No Bad Parts” will do far more to help people see themselves as survivors with a toolkit that is safe to update, at least if they actually aren’t in an unstable or unsafe environment anymore. It makes me very concerned to see people in abusive relationships, particularly young women, say they feel this book was helpful.

You need a very strong will in order to adopt The Four Agreements — but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing. You will see the drama of hell disappear right before your very eyes. Instead of living in a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream — your personal dream of heaven.

I’ve met quite a few people struggling with a past of severe trauma who liked this book. I have yet to hear any of them describe their life as heaven. A few are dead, so maybe they’re in actual heaven and just can’t tell us about it. Maybe they just didn’t agree hard enough to the Four Agreements. Maybe they were “constitutionally unequipped” to follow them, as 12-step literature says. Let’s dig in and see where they went wrong.

The First Agreement

The first agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call heaven on earth.

Well I appreciate the warning to keep low expectations about the rest of the book. I’m not sure why you even need the other three if this one will get you into heaven on earth. Maybe if you have a skill issue with this one, you can compensate with the others?

The first agreement is to be impeccable with your word. It sounds very simple, but it is very, very powerful. Why your word? Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. The Gospel of John in the Bible, speaking of the creation of the universe, says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word is God.” Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.

First, I didn’t know the ancient Toltecs were fans of the Bible. That’s interesting since the Bible doesn’t seem to have been translated into Nahuatl until Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century, centuries after the Toltecs were gone.

Second, that’s not what the Gospel of John is saying. Here’s what follows John 1:1-5, 14-15 for context:

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”

The Word is not literally referring to words. From early ancient Greek and Christian Stoic philosophy, Logos did not refer to words or logical argumentation. It would be better translated as the principle or force of universal reason that lays out the patterns everything in the cosmos follows. It’s a reference to Jesus Christ coming into a manifested human form as the son of God to lay out the reason of the universe for humans to follow. At no point is the passage suggesting you should see yourself as a God who can speak your own Logos into existence. That actually seems blasphemous. John is very explicit about how eternal Jesus as Logos is, which is uniquely a divine quality outside of human experience. Logos commands you; you do not command reality through the intent you imbue into a word.

But okay, this isn’t a Christian book and Ruiz isn’t a Christian theologist, maybe he just took a cool quote at face value. Maybe he’s really just referring to a kind of positive mindset that can lead to manifesting positive things. Maybe you say I’m not Christian and have no right to quote or interpret scripture. Fair enough. Moving on.

The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth. Depending upon how it is used, the word can set you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know. All the magic you possess is based on your word. Your word is pure magic, and misuse of your word is black magic.

Notice that Ruiz still hasn’t clarified what he means by “impeccable”. Also, a lot of religious people would take a lot of issue at the idea that humans have magic powers they can tap into through their words. Even as a metaphor, it’s a bit of whiplash.

The word is so powerful that one word can change a life or destroy the lives of millions of people. Some years ago one man in Germany, by the use of the word, manipulated a whole country of the most intelligent people. He led them into a world war with just the power of his word. He convinced others to commit the most atrocious acts of violence. He activated people’s fear with the word, and like a big explosion, there was killing and war all around the world. All over the world humans destroyed other humans because they were afraid of each other. Hitler’s word, based on fear generated beliefs and agreements, will be remembered for centuries.

Take the example of Hitler: He sent out all those seeds of fear, and they grew very strong and beautifully achieved massive destruction. Seeing the awesome power of the word, we must understand what power comes out of our mouths. One fear or doubt planted in our mind can create an endless drama of events. One word is like a spell, and humans use the word like black magicians, thoughtlessly putting spells on each other.

No.

Nazis did not come to power and do the Holocaust because Adolf Hitler was a black magician who cast a spell on the world.

No.

Here’s a quick experiment: go find Hitler’s speeches on YouTube. Listen to them. Then ask yourself if you feel more genocidal afterwards. My guess is your first reaction will be “I don’t understand German,” which is the point. Words don’t have magic powers. They have meanings in context. You will not become a Nazi just because of words.

I could have led the book with this part just to show you how deeply unserious it is, but I wanted to really give it a chance. Because it’s very hard to take it seriously if you already have this part on your mind. This is one of the most radical interpretations of Great Man theory I’ve ever seen.

Every human is a magician, and we can either put a spell on someone with our word or we can release someone from a spell. We cast spells all the time with our opinions. An example: I see a friend and give him an opinion that just popped into my mind. I say, “Hmmm! I see that kind of color in your face in people who are going to get cancer.” If he listens to the word, and if he agrees, he will have cancer in less than one year. That is the power of the word.

This is as fucking weird and unhinged as it sounds.

You are not missing some profound allegorical insight.

You are not missing context that even implies this is just rhetorical exaggeration.

There is no preface where he says that the ancient Toltecs recognized diseases like cancer (I’m unsure how they would have identified cancer as a group of illnesses) were connected to magic words as a supernatural aspect to a shamanistic belief system passed down through his family.

There is no study that he’s misinterpreting that connects stress to cancer.

This is just what he said out of the blue.

I would argue that the “if he agrees” part is especially disgusting. This comes down in part to how you see suffering. As we saw above, if you accept suffering is a structural part of the world and the human condition, then you can hopefully see that suffering can happen independently of any choices you make. Your agency comes in afterward when deciding how to deal with the suffering you have. Remember that this was the way Aztecs and many other Mesoamerican cultures saw the world. In many Christian interpretations, suffering is the means by which God’s glory can be observed. Jesus restores a blind man’s vision, but others continue to doubt the miracle and reveal themselves to be truly blind to the truth of God.

Ruiz’s framing is incredibly moralistic in a way that is not a necessary implication of any religious framework he’s mentioned so far. It shifts the blame for an illness on the individual. Cancer is not something you agree to or not.

It would be good to recall what I said earlier about this book and its ideas being very convenient for institutions currently in power. If you spent a couple centuries performing genocides and expanding the enterprise of slavery around the world and recklessly destroying the natural environment humans lived in for thousands of years, you might like the idea that you can use the Judge and Victim dynamic to frame an aggrieved party as having a disempowering victim mindset from their inner critic. If you’ve abused someone in the past or currently are an abuser, you might like the idea that you’ve done nothing so bad as the victim has done to themselves because they’re agreeing to hold onto the trauma you’ve caused. If you’re born into a healthy environment and can afford all the healthcare you need, you might feel a bit better than others by thinking your health is a reward for being as good as you are while others get sick for the things they do wrong.

If you’re born in one of the communities where corporations plant unhealthy levels of toxic waste and half the town gets cancer, it’s probably not because of words. It’s probably because of the toxic waste that causes cancer. Disagreeing that the toxic waste causes cancer is actually not going to prevent you from getting cancer, kind of like how disagreeing about the existence of Covid-19 doesn’t stop you from getting it. If you then go and protest the waste site and attract the ire of the corporation, it is actually not your fault if they retaliate. You’re advocating for your community and family. It might actually be the corporation’s fault for adding even more suffering to your life for the sake of their bottom line.

Gossiping has become the main form of communication in human society. It has become the way we feel close to each other, because it makes us feel better to see someone else feel as badly as we do. There is an old expression that says, “Misery likes company,” and people who are suffering in hell don’t want to be all alone. Fear and suffering are an important part of the dream of the planet; they are how the dream of the planet keeps us down.

Anthropologist Robert Dunbar pioneered the Gossip Theory of Evolution in which he argues that primates maintained social bonds through physical grooming, but this limited the size of their packs. Dunbar’s number of 150, proposed as the number of stable relationships a human can have, is the result of using language to maintain social bonds and track a network of resources.

It’s incredibly efficient to be able to share information about another human’s credibility instead of having to undergo physical rituals on an interpersonal basis. Those who tell lies, break rules, take without contributing, or lack empathy can be flagged. At the same time, those who accomplish great feats, have generous dispositions, or made lucky discoveries can also be flagged. In fact, studies have found that humans who witness unfair behavior exhibit a spike in their heart rate, but being able to warn someone about the unfairness led to a drop towards their baseline heart rate. We literally release oxytocin and dopamine as we do so, which is why gossiping can feel good and bring you closer to someone.

It is true though that gossip can be a way to reassure people whose status is threatened. One of the quickest ways to stabilize ourselves after a challenge to our self-worth can be to compare ourselves to someone we think is worse. That can lead to a lot of toxicity both in a personal life and a community, but it can come out of a real internal anxiety or insecurity that’s being poorly regulated. We might reasonably conclude that a mature perspective on gossip is that it should be done with the intent to be helpful (or to seek help) rather than a way to compare yourself to others.

Using the analogy of the human mind as a computer, gossip can be compared to a computer virus. A computer virus is a piece of computer language written in the same language all the other codes are written in, but with a harmful intent. This code is inserted into the program of your computer when you least expect it and most of the time without your awareness. After this code has been introduced, your computer doesn’t work quite right, or it doesn’t function at all because the codes get so mixed up with so many conflicting messages that it stops producing good results.

Set aside how contentious comparisons between human minds and computers have become in 2026. There actually are things called gossip protocols in computer networks where data is rapidly shared between peer devices without a central authority in order to synchronize updates. So we literally use the concept of gossip to improve consistency in our machines. Also, viruses are generally not waiting for you to agree before they run and cause damage. A big swing and a miss on this metaphor.

For example, you are beginning a new class with a new teacher and you have looked forward to it for a long time. On the first day of class, you run into someone who took the class before, who tells you, “Oh that instructor was such a pompous jerk! He didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was a pervert too, so watch out!”

I feel obligated to say that you should absolutely take warnings about authority figures protected by institutions who might be abusing their powers seriously, especially if multiple peers are corroborating it. Trust is earned, not owed. Those in power should be expected to do more to earn trust than peers. They can ruin your life a lot easier than you could even make a dent in theirs. When I was at UC Irvine in 2018, allegations of sexual misconduct arose around Francisco Ayala. Over 60 people were interviewed. He resigned and his name was removed from buildings, scholarships, and any positions named in his honor. You do not have to wait until an investigation goes through 5 dozen people before you listen to a peer’s warning. I think it’s very weird to pick an example like this. At minimum, it has aged very poorly as a text before the MeToo movement.

The Second Agreement

The next three agreements are really born from the first. The second agreement is don’t take anything personally.

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Using an earlier example, if I see you on the street and I say, “Hey, you are so stupid,” without knowing you, it’s not about you; it’s about me. If you take it personally, then perhaps you believe you are stupid. Maybe you think to yourself, “How does he know? Is he clairvoyant, or can everybody see how stupid I am?”

You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell.

Why does Ruiz pick such weird scenarios? Who experiences life like this? I’ll throw out two that are far more plausible to me.

Let’s imagine a teacher handing out an F to a student followed by “Hey you’re really bad at math, maybe don’t pursue being a math major.” You actually would be very reasonable in taking that personally. An authority figure entrusted by the whole of society to evaluate your performance in a record that will follow you for the rest of your life has given you both a quantitative and qualitative assessment that you are a failure at something in a way that will impact your future after you invested time and effort into getting better. It might be phrased harshly, but it is true that you should pick a career that aligns with your strengths that you also feel you can do sustainably, and you are receiving substantive evidence that your current trajectory isn’t aligned with that. You can take it personally without even knowing yet if you agree with it. I would even say that you might have an unhealthy ego if you were completely unfazed by that comment.

Let’s imagine you’re walking home in the middle of the day with groceries and a stranger calls you a racial slur. It would be very reasonable for you to take that as a threat to your personal safety. Someone who lives near you feels comfortable enough openly antagonizing you for the color of your skin while invoking a history of gratuitous, torturous violence. You would be reasonable in feeling less safe tomorrow than today, even if you know completely that you are not lesser than anyone else. So you shouldn’t take the insult personally as truth, but you should absolutely take it as indicative of a threat to you personally. These are distinct dimensions of that experience. What you agree to has absolutely on bearing on how comfortable someone else feels in hurting you.

During the period of our education, or our domestication, we learn to take everything personally. We think we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me, always me!

Increasingly, I’m favoring the theory that this book is a projection of Ruiz’s own mindset. He sees this quality in others everywhere because he sees it in himself, and he assumes everyone has the problems he has. But since his car crash made him the purveyor of ancient Toltec wisdom who knows the secret to be free of all of life’s problems, he can freely accuse others of ignorance.

I know that when you are happy you will tell me, “Miguel, you are such an angel!” But, when you are mad at me you will say, “Oh, Miguel, you are such a devil! You are so disgusting. How can you say those things?” Either way, it does not affect me because I know what I am. I don’t have the need to be accepted. I don’t have the need to have someone tell me, “Miguel, you are doing so good!” or “How dare you do that!”

I think Ruiz told on himself a little. I personally feel happy when my loved ones are happy because I showed them love, and I feel sad when my loved ones are in pain because of something I said or did. If I told them they live in a dream where 95% of their beliefs are false so nothing they say influences me, they might think I’m a psychopathic narcissist indifferent to their lived experiences. We wouldn’t be loved ones for very long. It’s possible for me to realize that I am neither an angel nor a devil, but still glean useful information from acknowledging someone’s emotions and thoughts in a specific situation. It’s called feedback. Learn to take it. This book sure could’ve used it.

You may even tell me, “Miguel, what you are saying is hurting me.” But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself.

The most charitable interpretation of this is that Ruiz has separated the concept of a trigger from the concept of a cause, and he’s trying to say that a trigger provokes a reaction that produces suffering for the person reacting, not anything earlier in the causal chain of events. This is situationally true at best.

Using the example of a racial slur above, you are not hurting yourself because you have to be on alert for a threat. The cause of the problem in that situation is the person posing the threat. It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten that our brains actually evolved to scan for useful information with predictive power and process a reward for doing so. We pick up on triggers because the cause has been part of a cause-effect chain and been associated with harm. If someone has PTSD, and someone else deliberately introduces a trigger that reminds them of past trauma, I would absolutely say you can blame that second person as the cause of suffering. It would be a little insane to blame the person with PTSD for having a brain that picked up on a trigger from trauma they had no role in causing.

Otherwise we’re approaching “I didn’t punch you, you just put your body in an arrangement to encounter movement with my fist, so it’s really your fault”: I didn’t hurt you, you just have painful associations I know about that I still bring up.

How does this even square with the First Agreement? How can you be impeccable with your word if you deny that your words can cause pain? How can you write a book with words in it that you intend others to take personally while also writing “don’t take anything personally?” What about that Hitler guy, did he not hurt anyone with his black magic spells he spoke? I suppose Ruiz would dismiss this criticism as me in my own dream that doesn’t affect his, and that I shouldn’t take his book personally.

If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.

Do you think someone tried to cheat on their spouse with this logic? “Babe, you’re just jealous because you’re afraid of losing me, but remember that nothing I do should be taken personally by you. You’re only hurting yourself by using me as an excuse to get mad. Now please close the door on your way out.”

If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of those emotions. If you don’t feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy… In that state of bliss you are making love all the time with everything that you perceive.

Setting aside the creepiness of “making love all the time with everything that you perceive” (if you say this as a teacher in a classroom, you absolutely deserve to be called a “pervert”), this is reiterating his theory of suffering, which is that it should be avoided alongside all negative emotions. If this is your expectation of life, it makes sense that you might struggle with things like distress tolerance; Ruiz outlines the guide to blaming yourself for not stifling your nervous system’s reactions rather than enduring or processing it. But this is not universal.

If you expect suffering as a structural part of the world as actual Mesoamerican cultures influenced by the Toltecs did, then you might be alarmed by the expectations being set up here. Why do we create tragic plays or watch sad movies? Why do we venerate The Titanic and Schindler’s List? Because we as humans have a full spectrum of emotions that we’re drawn to feel and share with others. We watch sad things to work out our own ambiguous emotions, to see how others cope with and grieve after a tragedy, to empathize as a transcendental experience itself, to experience emotional depth when we feel numb, to feel the relief after a good cry, to indulge our morbid curiosity. I could not imagine my life would be made fuller for having avoided these experiences in the pursuit of some hedonistic state of constant pleasure and love-making to everything all the time.

Or maybe you crossed “alarmed” a while ago when he promised the First Agreement would give you Heaven on Earth.

Even if someone got a gun and shot you in the head, it was nothing personal. Even at that extreme.

I really cannot overstate how ridiculous this book gets at times.

Even the opinions you have about yourself are not necessarily true; therefore, you don’t need to take whatever you hear in your own mind personally. The mind has the ability to talk to itself, but it also has the ability to hear information that is available from other realms. Sometimes you hear a voice in your mind, and you may wonder where it came from. This voice may have come from another reality in which there are living beings very similar to the human mind. The Toltecs called these beings Allies. In Europe, Africa, and India they called them the Gods

More whiplash as we rapidly switch from common sense self-help advice to folk psychology to perennialist spiritual metaphysics based on misinformation.

Who is the “they” here? I’ve already spent more time than this book deserves addressing the perennialist premise, especially as Ruiz seems to be getting lazier with the cultural appropriation after a few dozen pages. I’m just in awe of how much nuance someone can erase in good conscience. Europe means who? Protestants? Catholics? Jews? Greeks and Olympians? Nords and Aesir? Paganistic and Gnostic sects? Celtic pantheons? Druids? Satanic witch covens? Modern Africa is split between Christianity, Islam, and several thousand indigenous belief systems. India has Hinduism with Devas and Asuras which is translated into “Gods” and “Demons” for a Western audience, but the claim about being in a separate reality is not even close to universally accepted. India also has Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism which famously does not do Creator God worship.

Ruiz is not even attempting to be serious about perennialism here. That, I could respectfully disagree with while hearing out its arguments. I do think it’s true that most religious teachings people will encounter have baseline agreement on not being a materialist asshole concerned only with yourself instead of appreciating communal experiences as a unique aspect of the human condition. This is simply erasure in order to make room to substitute his own beliefs. Ironic for someone who started his book noting that ancient wisdom had to be hidden because conquerors from other continents would misuse it.

Our mind also exists in the level of the Gods. Our mind also lives in that reality and can perceive that reality. The mind sees with the eyes and perceives this waking reality. But the mind also sees and perceives without the eyes, although the reason is hardly aware of this perception. The mind lives in more than one dimension. There may be times when you have ideas that don’t originate in your mind, but you are perceiving them with your mind. You have the right to believe or not believe these voices and the right not to take what they say personally. We have a choice whether or not to believe the voices we hear within our own minds, just as we have a choice of what to believe and agree with in the dream of the planet.

The most generous interpretation I can give for this section is that he’s attempting to recreate something like the collective unconscious proposed by Carl Jung which all humans inherit as a result of our shared growth as a species, from which patterns of archetypes appear in world religions.

For instance, there’s a common idea that humans are a mix of opposing dualist forces which include materialist and transcendental components, and we must listen to entities from a transcendental realm to guide us away from the suffering of the material world. Some Hindu belief systems conceptualize an immortal core and a finite contraction into a temporary ego; the cults of Dionysus in Ancient Greece thought humans arose from a mix of materialist Titans and the spark of Zeus of the Olympians; contemporary media leans into the imagery of a devil on one shoulder with an angel on the other. Ruiz himself did this at the start with tonalli and naghual.

Or just play Persona, which really runs with Jung for inspiration. The Metaverse where Shadows emerge out of the collective fears and repressed desires of human nature, where tarot cards represent archetypal roles people play, is a depiction of a manifestation of the collective unconscious. The Trickster who rebels against order can oppose a corrupted order. You might feel the archetype of a Trickster within you when you notice someone with authority is getting a little too uppity and could use some humbling, and you have to choose whether that aligns with your overall Self or not. Loki is probably the Trickster example most people are familiar with thanks to Marvel and God of War.

If Ruiz was referencing this idea, it really would’ve been nice if he bothered engaging with the world religions he namedrops so that there was more substance behind this premise.

The mitote can be compared to a huge marketplace where thousands of people are talking and bartering at the same time. Each one has different thoughts and feelings; each one has a different point of view.

The programming in the mind — all of those agreements we have made — are not necessarily compatible with each other. Every agreement is like a separate living being; it has its own personality and its own voice. There are conflicting agreements that go against other agreements and on and on until it becomes a big war in the mind. The mitote is the reason humans hardly know what they want, how they want it, or when they want it. They don’t agree with themselves because there are parts of the mind that want one thing, and other parts that want exactly the opposite.

The concept of ambivalence is well-established, but personifying beliefs or agreements runs into the homunculus problem again. Proposing minds inside minds doesn’t really help us understand minds, it just rearranges the problem with even more confusing moving parts.

When we really see other people as they are without taking it personally, we can never be hurt by what they say or do. Even if others lie to you, it is okay. They are lying to you because they are afraid. They are afraid you will discover that they are not perfect.

No, some people lie because fraud can make a lot of money. Some people lie to win support for righteous personal crusades that they believe is in service of a greater good. Some people lie to cover up crimes and abuse. Some people lie as part of exploitative institutions that happily engage in wars and genocide. Some people lie just because it’s fun. Some people lie so that someone dies in fulfilled comfort rather than distress over something they can’t change. Some people lie for safety because they don’t trust others, which can be very reasonable in a hostile society. Some lie by omission to protect their privacy or appear neutral. Some lie because it’s a deception tactic between two competing sides that might consider themselves in a kind of war. Some liars want to get caught so you can see their power over determining the consensus about reality. Some liars will tell deliberately bad lies to make themselves seem more pathetic as a way of guilting you.

If you have the need to be abused, you will find it easy to be abused by others. Likewise, if you are with people who need to suffer, something in you makes you abuse them. It is as if they have a note on their back that says, “Please kick me.” They are asking for justification for their suffering. Their addiction to suffering is nothing but an agreement that is reinforced every day.

What a horrifying sequence of thoughts. You have to wonder what exactly was going through Ruiz’s mind when he wrote “something in you makes you abuse them.”

And if you practice the first two agreements, you will break seventy five percent of the teeny, tiny agreements that keep you trapped in hell.

Excuse me sir, I was promised Heaven on Earth already. By my math, 95 - 75 = 20%.

The Third Agreement

The Third Agreement is Don’t Make Assumptions. We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking — we take it personally — then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing.

We make assumptions because that’s how the intelligence and information processing in our brains work. We take inputs from the environment, run it through our mental model of reality, and then decide on the next course of action. You can avoid making assumptions because that’s impossible. You can mitigate the risk of your assumptions as you test them and update them with new information. So Ruiz is taking the radical position of opposing 18th century Bayesian inference.

It is impossible to live without making assumptions. You assume the sun comes up tomorrow. You assume that you’re going to see your family when you get home from work. You assume that if you don’t pay taxes, you’ll be in trouble with the IRS. You assume that your boss will be unhappy if you skip work without notice. Even if you agree with Ruiz, are you not assuming that the principle of not making assumptions is going to improve your life? You had to assume this book had helpful advice if you picked it up, right? So much of this book is self-defeating.

The concept of humans as cognitive misers in contemporary psychology was proposed by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984: “People are limited in their ability to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can.” For example, Ruiz clearly has not explored world religions or even Toltecs from an anthropological or archaeological standpoint, so he uses the shortcut of religious stereotypes to reinforce his perennialism. Ironic that this entire book is told in terms of assumptions about what “we” as humans are like, including the assumption that “something in you makes you abuse them.”

Before this concept, a popular one was the naive scientist model that assumed humans are constantly proposing and testing hypotheses in order to learn about the world. Obviously we don’t always work like that, but it also felt overly simplistic to say humans are simply looking for shortcuts to rewards. That doesn’t explain why we develop sophisticated explanations with nuance depending on our incentives and motives. A combination of these models comes out in the idea of a motivated tactician, or someone who isn’t neutral about what they choose to test or conclude but can still apply tactical long-term thinking along certain motivations.

Karl Friston, one of the most highly cited neuroscientists in the world, introduced the free energy principle. Simply, organisms that reduce surprises from the world are more likely to survive, so building a model out of assumptions to reduce uncertainty over time is literally a survival skill. Our active inference capacity allows us to translate sensory feedback into adjustments to our prediction mechanisms. This is why it’s important to let children fail safely and often instead of driving perfectionism. They need to think about what they’re doing wrong so they can experience what it’s like to adjust their assumptions in the face of uncertainty.

Real scientists and researchers, who live in a world where data is used to update beliefs instead of unverifiable oral storytelling traditions that seem contradictory to archaeological evidence, have been challenging old assumptions by rigorously studying biology, information, and public health policies. I have lots of criticisms of contemporary academia, but at least there’s a way to discuss whether something is true or not within these spaces.

Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering

That’s assuming you can trust the clarification, of course.

After many repetitions these new agreements will become second nature, and you will see how the magic of your word transforms you from a black magician into a white magician. A white magician uses the word for creation, giving, sharing, and loving. By making this one agreement a habit, your whole life will be completely transformed.

The Fourth Agreement

The fourth agreement is about the action of the first three: Always do your best.

I mean, what’s the alternative, don’t do your best? How do you know if you’ve done your best without assuming you could have done better, thus contradicting the third agreement? You can’t ask for a clarification from yourself to know if you did your best, and if you ask someone else, well they’re in a dream where 95% of their beliefs are wrong.

There was a man who wanted to transcend his suffering so he went to a Buddhist temple to find a Master to help him. He went to the Master and asked, “Master, if I meditate four hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?”

The Master looked at him and said, “If you meditate four hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in ten years.”

Thinking he could do better, the man then said, “Oh, Master, what if I meditated eight hours a day, how long will it take me to transcend?” The Master looked at him and said, “If you meditate eight hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in twenty years.”

This isn’t necessarily inconsistent with Buddhist ideas about how pursuing enlightenment through an egoistic effort only turns it into another attachment, though I haven’t yet found an external source in Buddhist texts that has this parable.

“But why will it take me longer if I meditate more?” the man asked. The Master replied, “You are not here to sacrifice your joy or your life. You are here to live, to be happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two hours of meditation, but you spend eight hours instead, you will only grow tired, miss the point, and you won’t enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can live, love, and be happy.”

This part becomes inconsistent. The goal of meditation is not to simply send you back to your worldly attachments with less stress. It is to address the nature of attachment itself as the core of suffering. This misses the point.

Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely. You are going to be productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything. But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy.

This is delusionally optimistic. Sometimes you do your best and you still fail. You cannot lead your life with the expectation that there will not be suffering if you just git gud. It is incredibly irresponsible to set this up for desperate people. I expect this kind of language from televangelists asking you to send seed money through the mail to get a miracle rather than seek medical treatment.

For example, most people go to work every day just thinking of payday, and the money they will get from the work they are doing. They can hardly wait for Friday or Saturday, whatever day they receive their money and can take time off. They are working for the reward, and as a result they resist work. They try to avoid the action and it becomes more difficult, and they don’t do their best.

They try to escape. They get drunk because they don’t like themselves. They don’t like their life. There are many ways that we hurt ourselves when we don’t like who we are.

Did Jeff Bezos commission this book? In case you are a child, let me explain the fundamentals of the employer-employee relationship.

A long time ago, the land mass we now call America was home to several thousand indigenous nations which leaned in the direction of stewardship rather than ownership. Stewardship is the idea that there is a responsibility a community has to allocating land and its resources in a way that’s sustainable and agreeable for future generations. Tribes might maintain boundaries or allocate tracts of land to families, but it wasn’t the same as claiming the land was theirs to do literally anything with.

Then, a bunch of wealthy families across the ocean financed trips to begin a hostile takeover of that land so they could divide it into assets to feed their addiction to power. A couple centuries of raping, pillaging, enslaving, and genociding passed, and this class of families almost completely replaced stewardship with ownership, i.e. “fuck you, I got mine.” They parted with a little bit of it to get buy-in from the colonists they brought over to keep their hierarchy, but they eventually carved up the entire country’s resources so that if you stepped on land you weren’t supposed to, they could shoot you. After several industrial revolutions, they set up these buildings called factories to tear through natural resources that were once communal. You and your children got these things called jobs that might allow you to buy bread, cigarettes, and a roof shared with a dozen other people.

Workers, because they’re not stupid, realized that there was actually no benefit to doing their best. Their bosses did not reward them with promotions, raises, part-ownership, perks, healthcare, pensions, etc. They did not somehow become happier knowing they exerted more energy to live up to their potential as process-doers and widget-makers. In fact, it just raised the standard on everyone for what was possible and therefore expected. Without ownership or a democratic accountability system, the organization was an authoritarian bureaucracy by definition. If the company grew, it meant more workers would be hired to compete with the existing workers, and the owners would have an easier time lobbying politicians.

Simply: the employer’s goal is to get as much productivity out of the worker as possible for as little cost as possible. The employee’s goal is to get as much pay out of the employer as possible while minimizing their cost of doing work. That’s how the game works. Almost no one is running a charity, not even many who claim they run charities.

Reinhold Niebuhr, author of the Serenity Prayer, was observing this exact system when he became a pro-union advocate. How would it in any way benefit the workers to push themselves to doing their best as individuals trying to express their creative potential? In fact, they got the most advancement in their own conditions when they stopped working altogether to strike as a union of workers and improve their lives, when they were angry enough at being mistreated that they refused to participate at all. That’s how workers got weekends, 40 hour work weeks, OSHA for safety in the workplace, child labor laws, improved pay, and a littany of other benefits across the entire economy. Niebuhr was explicit that elite classes are never incentivized to voluntarily reduce their own benefits. Anger is useful when you need to stand up for yourself. Our brains literally release hormones when we observe unfair behavior, remember? Discussing a plan of action with others is biologically what we know to bring us relief.

I have a feeling this book wouldn’t be used as often if “do your best” was accompanied by “to collectivize as workers in order to bargain for better conditions.” The Gita is unambiguous that you should fight the good fight, just don’t attach yourself to the outcome. Celebrate yourself for choosing the right action even in the face of defeat. Ruiz just wants the aesthetics of adopting that mindset while actually encouraging you to roll over and take it.

When you do your best, you don’t give the Judge the opportunity to find you guilty or to blame you. If you have done your best and the Judge tries to judge you according to your Book of Laws, you’ve got the answer: “I did my best.” There are no regrets. That is why we always do our best. It is not an easy agreement to keep, but this agreement is really going to set you free.

What if the Judge says “no you didn’t, you could’ve applied one of the other Agreements better”? Or “you never know if you did your best, so never assume you did just like the Agreements say?”

A good example of this comes from the story about Forrest Gump.

It’s telling that Ruiz references Forrest Gump in the same surface-level way he references concepts from religions. This is on the same page:

In India they perform a ritual called puja. In this ritual, they take idols that represent God in many different forms and bathe them, feed them, and give their love to them. They even chant mantras to these idols. The idol itself is not important. What is important is the way they perform the ritual, the way they say, “I love you, God.”

Puja is not a specific ritual, it’s a generic term for worship. It can involve idols, but you can also just sit and pray or meditate. Some choose to use idols, and some interpret the idols as a manifestation of the divine power themselves. In doing so, feeding and bathing the idol can be a form of affectionate offering, but there is nothing about puja that requires an affection towards anything divine or transcendental. Sometimes it’s a ritual obligation for a community that is completely disconnected from your personal internal state, so you can even have hate in your heart while doing puja. Other times it’s about respect more than love. I often hear Christians say you can’t hate God without believing in Him and if you do then to reject His love is a sin. Some Hindu traditions might say that even if you hate the divine, you are still participating in intense absorption in your relationship with it.

God is life. God is life in action. The best way to say, “I love you, God,” is to live your life doing your best.

This doesn’t even mean anything. There are lots of deep conversations we could have about knowledge, action, and their associated virtues and logical implications, but there’s nothing to work with here. It feels increasingly that this book gets repetitive and lazy towards the end, but then, Ruiz literally told us that it would after The First Agreement. We’re just regurgitating feel-good cliches from New Age movements that were quickly commodified into gaslighting listicles for spiritually-impoverished consumers whose only exposure to non-materialism has been through their lived emotions from a monolithic nation that acts like a remote island from the rest of the world. I really tried not to be so negative and critical, but it’s hard given how exploitative this book and its publisher’s cohort of spiritual misleaders are.

When you honor these four agreements together, there is no way that you will live in hell. There is no way. If you are impeccable with your word, if you don’t take anything personally, if you don’t make assumptions, if you always do your best, then you are going to have a beautiful life. You are going to control your life one hundred percent.

This is delusional magical thinking. Remember what I said before: this empowers you only to blame you. You are at fault for everything that happens to you if you control your life 100%. The solution that guarantees you that you get to control your life 100% isn’t the issue; you are. You can fail the solution. The solution can’t fail you.

These are insane expectations to give to people struggling to put their life back together and feel a sense of control.

Just do your best to honor these agreements. You can make this agreement today: I choose to honor The Four Agreements. It’s so simple and logical that even a child can understand them. But, you must have a very strong will, a very strong will to keep these agreements. Why? Because wherever we go we find that our path is full of obstacles. Everyone tries to sabotage our commitment to these new agreements, and everything around us is a setup for us to break them

More of the same nonsense. Your weak will is the problem. You don’t actually want to live a life free of abuse and oppression. If you did, you would just not take it personally and thereby gain the powers of Toltec white magician-warriors to be free of the social contract.

I’d like to propose something that might sound bold: the problems in your life are actually not so easily solved by cliches that fit onto a sticky note. Your brain evolves past that of a child precisely so you can engage with that complexity of life alongside other adults while modeling behavior for children to follow. We use terms like Heaven and Hell to refer to idealized alternative realities that don’t exist on the messy complexities of Earth that we have to navigate within this lifetime. We have language skills so we can put brains together to come up with solutions collectively. You would not need language if humans were just meant to be lone wolves that compete in the game of survival of the fittest.

They like to turn this around on you. They’ll say you’re expecting someone else to solve your problems rather than changing yourself, or that the only thing you can control is yourself. It’s the easiest thing in the world to burrow your head into the sand, disregard the world outside which preceded you and will outlast you, and pursue a dream world where you imagine only pleasures for yourself.

It’s actually much harder to work with people collectively to produce change instead of coming up with rationalizations or excuses that give you a pass from an obligation to act. That takes humility to realize you cannot act as if you live in a vacuum without consequences, and to listen to the feedback others give you instead of tossing it out as a “them problem I won’t take personally.” You might have to take some things personally if you’re interested in personal growth and having interpersonal relationships. You might have to embrace failing and suffering in order to develop the resilience it takes to make a difference in people’s lives or a legacy that your successors will celebrate. Look at how often this book tells you to treat yourself as God instead of telling you to find fellowship and peers like yourself who can communicate towards action that improves your life across a shared model of reality.

To quote a wise group of philosophers, “everybody wants to rule the world, but no one wants to die.”

Do not give your Judge the satisfaction of turning you into a victim. No, be tough with yourself.

The Judge is the only thing in this book Ruiz consistently identifies as capable of making you a victim. Notice that the solution is once again blaming yourself even harder.

The Toltec Path to Freedom

Who stops us from being free? We blame the government, we blame the weather, we blame our parents, we blame religion, we blame God. Who really stops us from being free? We stop ourselves. What does it really mean to be free? Sometimes we get married and we say that we lose our freedom, then we get divorced and we are still not free. What stops us? Why can’t we be ourselves?

Alright, he’s just openly stepping into the political arena here. It’s only fair to return that now.

This is a book that gives cover to authoritarians, abusers, and assholes. He is openly discouraging government accountability here when government actions and policies are directly responsible for the capital one does or does not have access to. There is a direct connection between the government’s policies and your experience as a person living in a society. If you live in a democratic society that’s contingent on a marketplace of ideas, you actually do have to vocally blame the parts of the government or its policies you want changed. That’s what informed citizens do.

I’m going to pause here even though there’s a bit more because it only gets more vapid until the end. There, the author has included several prayers to be made to a Creator that end in Amen. I’m not sure the Toltecs ended their religious rituals with that. That might be from a different group of people who are closer to the demographic of consumers the publishers are aiming for.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll probably append the remaining notes at some point, but I am burnt out on Ruiz for now. If you’re not, he lists more material you can buy for a second time in case you forgot he mentioned them at the start. There’s a Gift Edition of this book for “a special friend” and a Toltec Wisdom Card Deck.