FOUR AGREEMENTS TOLTEC WISDOM COLLECTION Don Miguel Ruiz

This great value set offers the three most widely acclaimed works of Don Miguel Ruiz, whose simple yet incredibly powerful teachings are based on ancient Toltec wisdom. The Four Agreements reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering, and offers a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, happiness and love. In The Mastery of Love, he brings alive his magical blend of wisdom through stories to show us how we can release ourselves, at last, from the fear-based beliefs and assumptions that prevent the pure manifestation of love in our lives and relationships. In The Voice of Knowledge, we are reminded of a profound and simple truth: the only way to end our emotional suffering and restore our joy in living is to stop believing in lies ? mainly about ourselves. Recover your faith in the truth and return to your own common sense.
Boxed set: 3 Paperback books, 130mm x 190mm, total 631pp, 2008

Click here for our special offer: buy THE FOUR AGREEMENTS TOLTEC WISDOM COLLECTION and receive a free copy of THE GENTLE ART OF BLESSING: CYGNUS REVIEW CALENDAR 2009.

Extract
The Mastery of Love
Every relationship in your life can be healed, every relationship can be wonderful, but it's always going to begin with you. You need to have the courage to use the truth, to talk to yourself with the truth, to be completely honest with yourself. Perhaps you don't have to be honest with the whole world, but you can be honest with yourself. Perhaps you cannot control what is going to happen around you, but you can control your own reactions. Those reactions are going to guide the dream of your life, your personal dream. It's your reactions that make you so unhappy or make you so happy.

Your reactions are the key to having a wonderful life. If you can learn to control your own reactions, then you can change your life.

You are responsible for the consequences of whatever you do, think, say, and feel. Perhaps it's hard for you to see what actions caused the consequence - what emotions, what thoughts - but you can see the consequence because you are suffering the consequence or enjoying the consequence. You control your personal dream by making choices. You have to see if you like the consequence of your choices or not. If it's a consequence you enjoy, then keep doing what you are doing. Perfect. But if you don't like what is happening in your life, if you aren't enjoying your dream, then try to find out what is causing the consequences you don't like. This is the way to transform your dream.

Your life is the manifestation of your personal dream. If you can transform the program of your personal dream, you can become a dream master. A dream master creates a masterpiece of life.

The Voice of Knowledge
You have seen how you create a virtual reality, the dream of your life, and you know that your life is a story. Now with that awareness, the question is: Are you happy with your story? Something important to understand is that you can be whatever you want to be because you are the artist and your life is your creation. It's your story. It's your comedy or your drama, and if the story is changing anyway, then why not direct the change with awareness?

Now that you are an artist with awareness, you can see if you like your art, and you can practice making it better. Practice makes the master. But it's action that makes the difference. When I discovered this, my action was to take responsibility for my art and purify my program. As an artist I started exploring the possibilities - every action and every reaction. And by the way, this is our real nature: to explore. Explore what? Life! What else can we explore?

To change the story of your life is what the Toltec call the mastery of transformation. It's about transforming you, the storyteller, the dreamer. Life is changing so fast, and you can see that you are always transforming, but you master transformation when you no longer resist change. Instead, you take advantage of change, and you enjoy change. To master transformation is to live in the present moment, all the time. Life is an eternal now because the force of life is creating everything right now, and it is transforming everything right now.

How are you going to change your story? Well, now you know that you are creating your story according to what you believe about yourself. The way to transform what you believe about yourself is to unlearn what you have already learned. When you unlearn, your faith returns to you, your personal power increases, and you can invest your faith in new beliefs.

The Four Agreements
There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, 'This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; this is possible, that is impossible.'

One single agreement is not such a problem, but we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.

Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change even the smallest agreement?

If we can see it is our agreements that rule our own life, and we don't like the dream of our life, we need to change the agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us to break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.

Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements.

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.

From The Four Agreements Toltec Wisdom Collection, ?2008 by Don Miguel Ruiz, published by Amber-Allen Publishing.