My readings this week on the Toltec “Spirit”

This week I read alot about the Toltec Spirit, made popular primarily by Don Miguel Ruiz. Note, “read” in this case means listening in the car which I do on the way to the office (and this week) on a 7 hour drive.

Two books, “The Four Agreements”, which I have read and reread about 3 times now, and “The Mastery of Self: A Toltec Guide to Personal Freedom”, which is the first read for me. I will focus on the former here because it is a lot easier to share in a short article. I recommend “The Mastery of Self” if you want to go deeper in the Toltec thinking and philosophy.

The Four Agreements is a quick read, but if you really want to apply it you could spend years (even the rest of your life) perfecting it (or at least getting asymptotically closer to perfect). So here are the 4 agreements with a little of my personal color on each one.

1. Be Impeccable with your Word: Our words have power… Power over our ourselves (via self-talk) and power over others (if they believe what we are saying). There is a concept of “domestication” which is to believe things that were told to us without determining for ourselves if they were true. We were all domesticated growing up, and continue to be domesticated if we hear something and believe it is true. If we were told we were good at sports growing up, and we believed it, we live our life believing we were good at sports and we probably excelled at sports because of it. If we were told we sucked at singing and we believed it, then we probably don’t sing very often. Being impeccable with our word means we truly understand what we believe and we live our life and speak from those beliefs — our words reflect what we believe. Of course, working out what we believe to be true FOR OURSELVES is not easy, and that is what makes being impeccable with our word so difficult to achieve.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally: If I walk up to you on the street and say “Hey, you are stupid!”, that is about me, not about you. However, if you take it personally, you might say, “Man, how does he know that? Is he clairvoyant?”. What others do or say is about them, not about us. However, if we take it personally, and we believe it, we are agreeing with what was said. On the flip side, if someone says, “Brian, you are the best!”. That is also about them, and not about me. Even the opinions we have of ourselves shouldn’t be taken personally. These may be a result of domestication, and therefore they are not necessarily true. if we don’t take anything personally, we experience a huge amount of freedom because nothing can hurt us.
3. Don’t make Assumptions: “The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are true. All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.” We make a lot of assumptions — assumptions about what people say, and about what they don’t say. We make assumptions in our personal relationships, at work and even with people we don’t know. The way to avoid assumptions is to ask questions. Ask questions to determine the truth. Also ask for what you want. Everyone has the right to say yes or no, but you have the right to ask. So it is not enough to understand we make assumptions… we have to take action to avoid making assumptions.
4. Always do your best: I got into the habit of saying this to my boys as they were growing up and telling me they didn’t play soccer very well that day (for example). I would ask them, “But did you do your best?”. That is all we can do. This final agreement is about the action of the first 3: Always do your best. Our best will be different every time — it will never be consistent, but it will be our best that day. And doing our best every day will mean we are taking action because we want it, not because we want a reward or are looking for external justification. We won’t always be impeccable with our word, but we can learn who we really are and what we believe, and try again the next day. We will sometimes take things personally, but we can recognize when we do and move on. We will make plenty of assumptions, but we can recognize a little more each day when we do, and work to get the truth.

My goal is to provide helpful suggestions that you can apply to your life to make it more full, fun and interesting and help you thrive on change (Antifragile!). I do this from the perspective that if it works for me, likely it will work for other people!

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