Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout Southern Mexico as
“women and men of knowledge”. They 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 Teotihuacán, the ancient
city of pyramids outside Mexico City known as the place where “Man Becomes God.”
Over the millennia, the naguals were forced to conceal the ancestral wisdom and
maintain its existence in obscurity.
The esoteric Toltec knowledge as embodied and passed on though generations by
different lineages of naguals. Though it remained veiled in secrecy for hundreds of
years, ancient prophecies foretold the coming of an age when it would be necessary
to return the wisdom to the people.

The Four agreements of toltecs are:


Be Impeccable With Your Word
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against
yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of the word in the direction of
truth and love.
The first agreement is the most important one and also the most difficult one to
honor. It is very, very powerful.
Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you
manifest everything. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are.
The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think,
and thereby to create the events in your life. But like a sword with two edges, your
word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything
around you.
The word is so powerful that one word can change a life or destroy the lives of
millions of people. Hitler’s word, based on fear-generated beliefs and agreements,
will be remembered for centuries.
During our domestication, our parents and siblings gave their opinions about us
without even thinking. We believed these opinions and we lived in fear over these
opinions, like not being good at swimming or writing.
By hooking our attention, the word can enter our mind and change a whole belief for
better or worse. For example: You may believe you are stupid. And you may have
believed this for as long as you can remember. This belief may cause you to do a lot
of things just to ensure that you are stupid. Then one day, someone hooks your
attention and using the word, let’s you know that you are not stupid. You believe
what the person says and make a new agreement. As a result you no longer feel or
act, and someone hooks your attention and says, “Yes, you are really the most stupid
person I have ever met,” the agreement will be reinforced and become even
stronger.
Impeccability means “without sin”. A sin is anything tat you do which goes against
yourself. You go against yourself when you judge or blame yourself for anything.
Being without sin is exactly the opposite. Being impeccable is not going against
yourself. You take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or blame
yourself.
Sin begins with rejection of yourself. Self-rejection is the biggest sin that you can
commit.

If I love myself I will express that love in my interactions with you, and then I am
being impeccable with the word, because that action will produce a like reaction. If
I love you, then you will love me.
Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; it means to use
tour energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself. If you make an
agreement with yourself to be impeccable with your word, just with that intention,
the truth will manifest through you and clean all the emotional poison that exits
within you. But making this agreement is difficult because we have learned to do
precisely the opposite.
We must begin to understand what the word is and what the word does. If you
understand the first agreement, be impeccable with your word, you begin to see all
the changes that can happen in your life. Changes first in the way you deal with
yourself, and later in the way you deal with other people, especially those you love
the most.
If we adopt the first agreement, and become impeccable with our word, any
emotional poison will eventually be cleaned from our mind and from our
communication in our personal relationships.
Impeccability of the word will also give you immunity from anyone putting a negative
spell on you. You will receive a negative idea if your mind is fertile ground for that
idea.
You can measure the impeccability of your word by your level of self-love. How
much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself is directly proportionate to
the quality and integrity of your word. When you are impeccable with your word,
you feel good; you feel happy and at peace.
It is up to you to make this agreement with yourself: I am impeccable with my word.
Nurture this seed, as it grows in your mind, it will generate more seeds of love to
replace the seeds of fear. This first agreement will change the kind of seeds your
mind is fertile for.
Be impeccable with your word. This is the first agreement that you should make if
you want to be free, if you want to be happy.
Use the word to share your love, beginning with yourself. Use the word to break all
those teeny, tiny agreements that make you suffer.
Impeccability of the word can lead you to personal freedom, to huge success and
abundance; it can take away all fear and transform it into joy and love.
Don’t Take Anything Personally
Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of
their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the options and actions
of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
The next three agreements are really born from the first agreement.

The second
agreement is don’t take anything personally.

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of
selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me”. During
the period of our domestication, we learn to take everything personally. We think
we are responsible for everything.
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. Even when a
situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do
with you. The opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their
own minds. Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during
domestication.
When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to
defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something
so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong. You
also try hard to be right by giving them your own opinions. Whatever you feel and
do is just a projection of your own personal dream, a reflection of your own
agreements.
It is not important to me what you think about, and I don’t take what you think
personally. I know what I am. I don’t have the need to be accepted. Others are
going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they
think about me is really about me, but it is about them.
Whatever people do, feel, think, or say, don’t take it personally. If they tell you how
wonderful you are, they are no saying that because of you. You know you are
wonderful. It is not necessary to believe other people who tell you that you are
wonderful.
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.
There may be times when you have ideas that don’t originate in your mind, but you
are perceiving them with your mind. 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.
When you make it a strong habit not to take anything personally, you avoid many
aspects in your life. Your anger, jealousy, and envy will disappear, and even your
sadness will simply disappear if you don’t take things personally.
You can see how important this agreement is. Taking nothing personally helps you to
break many habits and routines that trap you in the dream of hell and cause
needless suffering. Just by practicing this second agreement you begin to break
dozens of teeny, tiny, agreements that cause you to suffer. And if you practice the
first two agreements, you will break seventy-five percent of the teeny, tiny
agreements that keep you trapped.
As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you will only need to place
your trust in what others say or do. You will only need to trust your-self to make
responsible choices.

Don’t Make Assumptions
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate
with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama.
With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
We have our tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with
making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.
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.
The whole world of control between humans is about making assumptions and taking
things personally.
Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and we 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.
It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption. In any kind of
relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we
don’t have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they
know us so well. If they don’t do what we want, what we assume they should do, we
feel hurt. A whole drama is created because we make this assumption and then put
more assumptions on top of it.
The human mind needs to justify everything, to explain and understand everything,
in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because
there are so many things that the reasoning mind can’t explain. It is not important
if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we
make assumptions.
Even if we hear something and we don’t understand, we make assumptions about
what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions
because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.
These assumptions are made so fast and unconsciously most of the time because we
have agreements to communicate this way. We have agreed that it is not safe to
ask questions; we have agreed that if people love us, they should know what we want
or how we feel. When we believe something, we assume we are right about it to the
point that we will destroy relationships in order to defend our positions.
We make the assumption that everyone sees life he way we do. We assume that
others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and
abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make.
We also make assumptions about ourselves, and this creates a lot of inner conflict.
Just imagine the day you stop making assumptions with your partner and eventually
with everyone else in your life. Your way of communicating will change completely,
and your relationships will no longer suffer from conflicts by mistaken assumptions.
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The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. Make sure
the communication is clear. Have the courage to ask the questions until you are
clear as you can be, and then do not assume you know all there is to know about a
given situation. Once you hear the answer, you will not have to make assumptions
because you will know the truth.
Without making assumptions your word becomes impeccable.
With clear communications, all your relationships will change.
Becoming aware of these habits and understanding the importance of this
agreement is the first step. What will really make a difference is action. After
many repetitions these new agreements will become second nature.
By making this one agreement a habit, your whole life will be completely
transformed.

Always do Your Best
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you
are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstances do your best, and you will
avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.
This agreement allows the other three to become deeply ingrained habits. The
fourth agreement is about the action of the first three: Always do your best.
Keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the
next. Your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as
good.
Your best will also change over time. As you build the habit of the four agreements,
your best will become better than it used to be.
Just do your best – in any circumstance of your life. If you always do your best
then there is no way you can judge yourself. And if you don’t judge yourself there is
no way you are going to suffer from guilt, blame, and self-punishment. By always
doing your best, you will break a big spell that you have been under.
Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely. When you always do your
best, you will take action. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it,
not because you’re expecting a reward. If you take action just for the sake of doing
it, without expecting a reward, you will find that you enjoy every action you do.
Rewards will come, but you are not attached to the reward. If we like what we do,
if we always do our best, then we are really enjoying life. We are having fun, we
don’t get bored, and we don’t have frustrations.
It is not an easy agreement to keep, but this agreement is really going to set you
free.
When you do your best you learn to accept yourself. But you have to be aware and
learn from your mistakes. Learning from your mistakes means you practice, look
honestly at the results, and keep practicing. This increases your awareness.
Taking action is being alive. It’s taking the risk to go out and express your dream.

The first three agreements will only work if you do your best. By doing your best,
the habits of misusing your word, taking things personally, and making assumptions
will become weaker and less frequent with time.
If you do your best always, over and over again, you will become a master of
transformation. Everything you have ever learned, you learned through repetition.
Action is what makes the difference.
If you break an agreement, begin again tomorrow, and again the next day. Some day
you will discover that you are ruling your life with these Four Agreements. Just live
one day at a time and stay in the present moment.
The Toltec path to Freedom
Breaking Old Agreements
To be Toltec is a way of life. It is a way of life where there are no leaders and no
followers, where you have your own truth and live your own truth.
There are three masteries that lead people to become Toltec:
First is the Mastery of Awareness. This is to be aware of who we really are, with all
the possibilities.
The second is the Mastery of Transformation – how to change, how to be free of
domestication.
The third is the Mastery of Intent. Intent from the Toltec point of view is that
part of life that makes transformation of energy possible; it is the one living being
that seamlessly encompasses all energy, or what we call “God”. Intent is life itself;
it is unconditional love. The Mastery of Intent is therefore the Mastery of Love.
When we talk about the Toltec path to freedom, we find that they have an entire
map for breaking free of domestication. They compare the Judge, the victim, and
the belief system to a parasite that invades the human mind. The food for the
parasite is the negative emotions that come from fear.
The Toltecs believe that the parasite has control of your mind.
The freedom we seek is to use our own mind and body, to live our own life, instead
of the life of the belief system.
We have two choices. One is to keep living the way we are, to surrender to the
Judge, and the victim, to keep living in the dream of the planet. The second choice
is to do what we do as children when parents try to domesticate us. We can rebel
and say “No!”
If we want to be free, we have to destroy the parasite. One solution is to face each
of our fears, one by one. This is a slow process but it works.
The second approach is to stop feeding the parasite – to gain control of our
emotions; we have to refrain from fueling the emotions that come from fear. The
third solution is the initiation of the dead – a symbolic death which kills the
parasite without harming our physical body.
The process of domestication can be called the dream of the first attention
because it was how your attention was used for the first time to create the first
dream of your life.
One way to change your beliefs is to focus you attention on al those agreements and
beliefs, and change the agreements with yourself. In doing this you are using your
attention for the second time, thus creating the dream of the second attention or
the new dream.
The difference is that you are no longer innocent. Now it’s up to you to choose what
to believe and what not to believe, and that includes believing in your self.
The first step is to come aware of the fig that is in your mind. Only with awareness
do you have the possibility of transforming your dream. If you have the awareness
that the whole drama of your life is the result of what you believe, and what you
believe is not real, then you can begin to change it. You need to focus your attention
on what it is that you want to change. You have to know which agreements you want
to change before you can change them.
So the next step is to develop awareness of all the self-limiting beliefs that make
you unhappy. You take an inventory of all that you believe, all your agreements, and
through this process you begin the transformation. The Toltecs call this the Art of
Transformation. One of the ways to do this is to explore and adopt alternative
beliefs such as the four Agreements.
The four Agreements were created to assist you in the Art of Transformation, to
help you break the limiting agreements, gain more personal power, and become
stronger. The stronger you get, the more agreements you can break until the
moment comes when you make it to the core of all those agreements.