The Four Agreements for a Better Life

LESSON 1 • Imagine Living a Better Life

Imagine the freedom to live your life the way you really want to live it. Imagine expressing the real you without fear of being judged by others. Imagine a life free of conflict. Imagine that you have permission to be happy and to really enjoy your life. Imagine loving your body just the way it is. Imagine loving yourself just the way you are.

This way of life is entirely possible. But first, you need to expand your awareness to the point where you can perceive what you really are, where you can identify with your true nature.

Have you ever stopped to consider what you are? You’re alive, you exist, but what are you? You know what you believe you are. You know what you were told you are. You know the way you pretend to be, or the way you wish to be seen by other people. But is it really true that you are what you think you are?

You call yourself a human, but “human” is just a symbol to describe what you are. In your mind, you become the tall one, the short one, the smart one, the stupid one. But it’s not the truth. Whatever you say about yourself is just a point of view, and that point of view wasn’t there when you were born.

Everything you think about yourself — every opinion, every self-judgment — is because you’ve learned it. You learned the opinions from the people around you. They expressed their opinions about the way you are, the way you’re not, the way you “should” be. Now you know so many things about yourself, but the real you is beyond everything you know.

What you believe about yourself is just a story. It’s an “image” of yourself, but it’s not the real you.

What you really are is a force, and it’s the same force that creates the stars and manifests itself in infinite ways throughout the universe.

Look at your hand. Move your fingers. The force that moves your fingers is the same force that opens a flower. It’s the same force that makes you dream, or creates a tornado, or makes the stars move throughout the universe.

You — that force of life — are always transforming, always evolving, always creating. What you’re creating is a story — a virtual reality that becomes your mind.

You, that force of life, are also creating your physical body, a world made by billions of living beings — atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs — until the whole being is one.

Your body is a universe. The earth is another universe. The sun and the planets are another universe. And if you expand your awareness, you’ll see that all the universes are connected. Every one of them is alive with the total power of the infinite.

Just imagine if you could identify with your true nature. Imagine how different your life would be if you believed in your “Self” — that force of life.

Imagine realizing the power that you have. The power of creation. The power of belief or faith. The power of love. They’re all the same power, of course, and that is what you are.

Today can be a day just like every other day, or today can be the day that you let go of what you think you are and become aware of what you really are. When you change what you believe about yourself your whole life is going to change.

LESSON 2 • Introduction to “The Four Agreements”

Are you happy with the life you’re living? Do you greet each day with gratitude simply for the gift of being alive?

For most of us, the answer is not a resounding yes. Intuitively we feel that our lives could be fuller, happier, more meaningful. But where do we begin?

Let’s begin by exploring the wisdom behind four simple agreements that have the power to transform your life to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.

The Four Agreements are most accurately described as a way of life or code of conduct, and they’re universal in their appeal. Millions of people from all walks of life have used these principles to create a better life.

Be impeccable with your Word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. And always do your best.

Why have so many people embraced The Four Agreements? Because they work. By practicing these principles we immediately begin to experience more joy and less suffering.

As humans, we cannot avoid all suffering. We’re going to suffer physical pain when we’re ill or injured. We’re going to suffer emotional pain when we lose someone we love.

But there’s another kind of suffering that we can avoid. It’s the emotional suffering we experience as a result of conflict with other people and conflict within ourselves. It’s the suffering we experience because we believe things that aren’t even true, because we make assumptions, we take them personally, and we blurt out words that we later regret. This kind of suffering is needless and yet most of us experience it throughout most of our lives.

Have you ever been wide awake in the middle of the night reliving an unpleasant confrontation with a co-worker? You’d like to get a good night’s sleep, but your mind is spinning out of control. Soon you’re feeling guilty about an offhanded comment you made to a friend. Then you begin to worry about your relationship, your finances, your health, or a host of other nagging concerns.

Have you ever overindulged in food, alcohol, or drugs to avoid facing unpleasant feelings or circumstances? You try to escape from your worries and concerns, your self-judgments and guilt, but how can you escape from your own thoughts?

Have you ever experienced the uneasy feeling that you don’t measure up to society’s standards of beauty or behavior? Have you ever judged yourself for not being smart enough or talented enough, pretty or handsome enough, thin or fit enough, successful or rich enough?

All of these ideas and beliefs are rooted in fear. They limit your life, deplete your energy, and contribute to needless suffering.

There’s a better way to live!

The Four Agreements lead you to stop judging — mainly yourself — and to start practicing another way of life. They have the ability to break thousands of fear-based beliefs and agreements that lead to suffering and drama in your life. They transform your life by changing the way you communicate not only with other people but more importantly, with yourself.

With practice, The Four Agreements help you to recover the real you — your authentic self. And there’s nothing more liberating than to be the real you.

LESSON 3 • Domestication: The Beginning of Needless Suffering

The first and most important of The Four Agreements is “Be impeccable with your Word.”

Why your Word? Because your Word is what you use to create a story about everything you perceive. If you’re miserable at times it’s because you’re telling yourself a story that isn’t true.

Needless suffering of all kinds is the result of misusing your Word. It’s the result of believing in knowledge contaminated with lies. Some lies are innocent, and others are deadly — especially the lies you believe about yourself.

Where do the lies come from? They originate in childhood when you learn to become a member of society. You learn a language, you accumulate knowledge, and more than 90 percent of that knowledge isn’t the truth.

Before you learn to speak, your true nature is to love and be happy. You’re not afraid of the future or ashamed of the past. Your attention is in the moment. You follow your instincts, and they guide you to fulfill your needs, to play, to explore, to enjoy life.

Once you learn to speak, the humans who take care of you teach you what they know, including all the social, religious, and moral rules of their culture. In truth, you’re domesticated the same way any animal is domesticated — through a system of punishment and reward.

You’re told that you’re a good boy or a good girl, a bad boy or a bad girl, depending on what the grown-ups want you to do. Out of fear of being punished and fear of not getting a reward, you start trying to please other people.

In human domestication, you don’t have the opportunity to choose your beliefs. All the rules and values of your family and society are imposed on you. Just like a computer, all that information is downloaded into your head. You’re innocent. You believe what the grown-ups tell you. You agree, and the information is stored in your memory.

Once you master a language, you begin to use words to think, to make sense of everything that happens in your life. As you give meaning to more and more words, thinking becomes automatic. What you know is talking to you, and you’re listening to what your knowledge says.

The voice of knowledge isn’t real, it’s your creation. But you give it life through the power of your faith, which means you believe without a doubt what it’s telling you. This is when the opinions of other humans start taking over your mind.

Your parents and teachers, religion and society tell you that you need to be a certain way in order to be accepted. They tell you the way you “should” be, the way you “should” look, the way you “should” behave.

And because it’s not okay to be what you are, you start pretending to be what you are not. You form an “image” of perfection — the way you wish to be… But you are not.

And you begin to judge yourself: “Look how stupid you are, look how fat, how ugly you are.” You don’t even notice that you’ve learned to use words to reject yourself, and the lie of your imperfection is one of the first lies you tell yourself.

Before domestication, you don’t care what you are or what you look like. You don’t pretend to be what you’re not. After domestication, you try to be good enough for everyone else, but you’re no longer good enough for yourself because you can never live up to your “image” of perfection.

All of your normal human tendencies are lost in the process of domestication, and you begin to search for what you’ve lost. You search for love because you’ve learned to believe that love is somewhere outside of you. You search for freedom because you’re no longer free to be what you really are. You search for happiness because you’re no longer happy. You search for beauty because you no longer believe you’re beautiful.

What you’re searching for is your “Self” when everything is already within you.

LESSON 4 • The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word

If you want to be happy, if you want to be free of needless suffering, be impeccable with your Word!

The Word is more than just a sound or a written symbol. The Word is a force, it’s your power of creation, it’s what you use to create everything you know. All of your knowledge, everything you think, every opinion, every belief you have about yourself, about everything is created with the Word.

The Word has the magic and power of creation because it can reproduce an image, an idea, a feeling, or an entire story in your imagination. Just hearing the word “horse” can reproduce an image in your mind. This is powerful, but it can be even more powerful than that. Just hearing the name of a movie can reproduce an entire movie in your mind.

The Word is the most powerful tool you have as a human, and this power can be used in more than one direction. One direction is impeccability where the Word creates a beautiful story. The other direction is misuse of the Word where the Word creates a living nightmare.

The human mind is like a fertile ground where seeds are continually being planted. The seeds are words, opinions, ideas. You plant a seed, a thought, and it grows. Impeccability of the Word is so important because you’re always delivering a message to yourself and to everyone around you. Every time you speak, your words have the potential to take root in your mind and spontaneously generate thoughts of a similar nature. If other people’s minds are fertile for those ideas, those words live inside of them too.

Most humans completely misuse the Word. We use it to gossip, to curse, to judge, to blame, to create fear, to destroy relationships between people, between nations. We use the Word against ourselves when we say things like: “I’m getting old.”, “I’m fat.”, “I’m worthless.” “I’ll never make it in life.”

How are you using the Word when it comes to describing your own life story? If you believe that you’re not attractive enough, that you’re not good enough, that you will never make it in life, then you believe in lies, and you’re using the Word against yourself.

Being impeccable with your Word means more than telling the truth or doing what you say you’ll do. Impeccability of the Word means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love beginning with yourself. If you love yourself, you’ll express that love in your interactions with other people and that action will produce a like reaction.

When you’re impeccable with your Word, you never use the Word against yourself in the creation of your story. You never betray yourself, you never gossip about yourself, you take responsibility for your actions, but you do not judge or punish yourself for anything.

The Word is a force you cannot see, but you can see the manifestation of the force, which is your life. You know that you’re using the Word against yourself when you’re suffering with guilt, sadness, anger, or fear. You know that you’re using the Word impeccably when you’re happy.

When you’re impeccable with your Word, you begin to see all the changes that can happen in your life — first, in the way you deal with yourself, and later in the way you deal with other people — especially those you love the most.

Impeccability of the Word can lead you to personal freedom. it can take away fear and transform it into joy and love. With just this first agreement, you can completely transform your life. Be impeccable with your Word!

LESSON 5 • The Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally

The second agreement is “Don’t take anything personally.” When you take things personally, you make the assumption that everything is about you. Well, nothing other people do is because of you. What other people do is a projection of their own reality, their own world.

Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Their point of view comes from their belief system, from all the programming they receive during domestication. Likewise, your point of view comes from your belief system. It’s a projection of your world.

You’re creating an entire movie in your mind where you’re the producer, the director, and the main character. Everyone else is a secondary character. Your movie is the way you see the world. It’s your story, it’s your personal point of view, and it’s no one’s truth but yours.

Imagine walking up to a movie theater showing dozens of films. You look around to see what’s playing, and you decide on the Story of You. “The Story of You, please.” You go inside the theater and surprise! You’re the star of the movie. Of course, you recognize all the characters in the movie because it’s the story of your life.

After a while, you decide to go to another movie. In this one, you recognize the names of all the characters, but this is the story of your mother’s life. And the way she projects herself is completely different. You know it’s not authentic. It’s the way she wants everyone to perceive her. But then you begin to realize it’s the way she perceives herself, and it’s a shock.

Then you see a secondary character who has your face, and you say, “This can’t be me.” But you realize this is how your mother sees you. It’s what she believes about you, and it’s far from what you believe about yourself. You can see the way your mother perceives all the secondary characters in her movie — your father, your siblings, your friends — and her perception is completely distorted.

You go to the next theater, and the next. And after watching all the movies of the people you love, you realize that everyone distorts the characters in their movie.

You decide to return to the first theater to see your own movie again, but you no longer believe your story because you can see that it’s just a story. You see yourself acting, but now you know that nobody sees you the way you want to be seen. In that moment, everything changes for you.

Now you can see that everyone is living in their own movie — a virtual world of their own creation. Now it’s clear that whatever people think of you is really about the character who lives in their movie, not yours. They create an image of you and that “image” isn’t you. The people you love don’t really know you, and you don’t know them either. The only thing you know about them is what you believe about them. You have no idea what’s going on in their virtual world — what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling.

Now it’s easy to understand why there’s so much conflict between humans. Most people aren’t aware that everyone is living in their own world. From their point of view, which is their only point of view, everything is all about them. People want the secondary characters to act a certain way, and when they don’t, they get angry or hurt and use the Word to spread emotional poison. They take everything personally.

When you take nothing personally, you avoid many upsets in your life. You’re immune to other people’s emotional poison. You know that all humans live in a virtual world made by words. You listen to their words, you respect their point of view, but you no longer judge or react to what they say.

Whatever people say doesn’t affect you because now you understand what they’re doing. They’re just letting you know what’s going on in their virtual world. With this awareness, the second agreement is pure common sense. Don’t take anything personally!

LESSON 6 • Words and Agreements: The Art of Humans

During all the years we grow up, we make countless agreements with ourselves, with society, with everyone around us. But the most important agreements are the ones we make with ourselves. These agreements are telling us who we are, how to behave, what we believe. They’re telling us what we know.

But who tells us if what we know is the truth? The truth is all around us, but with all the knowledge stored in our mind, we no longer see the truth. We only see our own knowledge; we only see our own story.

When we’re domesticated, all that knowledge we accumulate is just like a wall of fog that doesn’t allow us to perceive what really is. We become blinded by all those false beliefs in our mind. Our belief system is just like a mirror that only shows us what we believe. With all that fog, with all that reflection, we cannot see what we truly are. We cannot see that we’re not free.

There’s something inside us that longs to be free. It’s always telling us this is not who I really am. This is not what I really want. We’re no longer free to be who we really are because our faith, our power of creation, is trapped by the story of what we “should” be.

Humans overeat, abuse alcohol, and take drugs just to avoid their own story — all that distorted knowledge in their heads. Some people suffer from so much emotional pain that they decide to take their own lives. That’s what lies can do to any of us. We try to escape from the self-judgment, the guilt, the blame, the punishment — but we can’t escape from our own thoughts.

You see the problem is not really knowledge. The problem is believing in a distortion of knowledge, and that is what we call a lie. Lies lead us to limitations in our lives, to needless suffering and drama. The truth leads us to our authenticity, to happiness.

We are born to perceive the truth, but our brains learn to interpret everything we perceive according to the meaning we give to every word, according to the structure of our language, according to all the knowledge we have stored in our mind. Everything we perceive is being filtered through our entire belief system, and the result of interpreting everything we perceive by using everything we believe is our virtual world.

All humans are artists, and our greatest masterpiece of art is the use of a language to create an entire reality within our mind. The human mind is nothing but a virtual reality. It isn’t real. What’s real is truth for all of us. But the virtual reality is our personal creation. It’s our art, and it’s only truth for each one of us.

If we can begin to understand what the human mind is and what the human mind does, we can begin to separate “reality” from our “virtual reality,” or pure perception, which is truth, from our story, which is art. With this awareness, we take a big step in our own evolution because now we can take responsibility for our creation. We no longer blame anyone else for all the lies or distortions in our story, for anything that makes us suffer in life.

The “story of you” is everything you know and believe about you. If you don’t like what you believe about yourself, if there’s drama and suffering in your story, and you’re not enjoying your creation, you can change it. It’s your story. It’s your art.

Words are your paintbrush and your life is the canvas. What you create depends on how you use the Word. When you learn to use the Word with awareness, you become a better artist. And when you learn to be impeccable with your Word, your story becomes a masterpiece of art.

LESSON 7 • The Third Agreement: Don’t Make Assumptions

The third agreement is “Don’t make assumptions.” Making assumptions is a setup for suffering because most assumptions are not the truth. They’re fiction. Humans have a powerful imagination and we dream things up in our imaginations. We start imagining what other people are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re saying about us. We invent a whole story because we don’t know the truth. And the problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth.

Humans have a need to know everything and we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know. We don’t stop to consider whether the knowledge is true or not. We go on believing whatever we want to believe because just having knowledge makes us feel safe. There are so many things that our minds cannot explain. We have all these questions that need answers. But instead of asking questions, we make all sorts of assumptions.

All the sadness and drama in our lives is rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally. Almost all of our conflicts are based on this and it’s easy to understand why. Assumptions are nothing more than lies that we’re telling ourselves. We listen to the voice talking in our head. One assumption leads to another assumption. We misunderstand. We take it personally and react by sending emotional poison with our Word. This creates a huge drama for nothing.

One of the biggest assumptions humans make is that everyone sees life the way we do. That’s why we have a fear of being ourselves around other people. We assume that others will judge and reject us the same way we judge and reject ourselves. But that isn’t true. Other people live in a completely different world and they judge us according to their point of view.

Another assumption humans make is that everything in our virtual reality is the absolute truth when it’s actually a relative truth, a virtual truth that’s always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory. Be aware that almost everything you tell yourself is an assumption.

Making assumptions is all about thinking. We think too much and thinking leads to assumptions. Just thinking “What if?” can create a huge drama in our lives because thinking brings fear. What if she doesn’t love me? What if I can’t find a job? What if I fail? We have no control over all that thinking — all those words we distort in our head.

The way to keep yourself from making assumptions is to ask questions. And even then, don’t assume you know all there is to know about a given situation. Once you hear the answers, you won’t have to make assumptions because you’ll know the truth.

When you don’t make assumptions your Word becomes impeccable. Your communication is clear and free of emotional poison. The gift of the third agreement is immunity against your own “voice of knowledge” or what we call “thinking.” When you no longer pay attention to that voice, your attention is in the moment and your life is completely transformed.

When you recover all the energy you invested in making assumptions you can use that energy to create a better life. Don’t make assumptions!

LESSON 8 • Stories, Superstitions, and the Power of Belief

There was a time in your life when you completely owned the power of your belief. But when you were educated, or domesticated, to be a part of humanity the power of your belief went into everything you know. Since then everything you know has ruled your life.

As a little child, you ingest every opinion without questioning if it’s truth or not. You invest your faith in almost everything you were told. You have no reason to doubt what other people tell you until you find out that something they told you isn’t true. You go to school and hear older kids talking. “You see that kid? He still believes in Santa Claus.”

Grown-ups have good intentions but they tell you Santa knows everything you do or don’t do. He knows when you’ve been good or bad, and you believe this.

Christmas comes, and you ask Santa for a bicycle. You were good, but don’t receive a bicycle. Your neighbor who was bad receives a bicycle.

You see the other kid riding his bicycle and your reaction is envy, anger, and sadness. You feel a sense of injustice because you believe in an innocent lie. Later you discover that Santa Claus isn’t real, but you already suffered from believing in a story that isn’t true.

This is just one example of the countless stories and superstitions you learn as a child. And it’s easy to see how you invest your faith in a story like Santa Claus, but not as easy to see how you do this with every story and superstition you believe about yourself.

In the process of domestication, everything you agree to believe becomes part of an invisible structure, and we call it a belief system. From a single letter to a word; from a single story to an entire philosophy, everything you believe is in that structure, and you judge everything according to your beliefs.

Just as the government has a book of law that rules society, the belief system is the book of law that rules your life. It becomes the big judge in your mind and you become its victim because first it judges you, then it punishes you.

When you follow the rules according to your book of law you reward yourself. When you don’t follow the rules, you punish yourself. You don’t even realize that it’s happening, but with every new agreement the belief system grows stronger and gains more power until it rules your life like a tyrant.

If you imagine every agreement as a page in your book of law, then your faith is the glue that binds the pages together. Faith is the power of creation that all humans have, and it’s not about religion. It’s the result of an agreement. When you agree to believe in something without a doubt, you invest your faith, and for you it’s the truth even though it may really be fiction.

When you find out that Santa Claus isn’t the truth, you take your faith out of that story. You know that you’re the one who agreed to believe in Santa Claus, and now you know that you’re the one who agreed to believe in everything you learned about yourself. You’re the one who made the agreements, and you’re the only one who can break them.

If you’re still focusing on what your parents did to you 20 years ago, or what any of the secondary characters in your story did to you, then you’re not seeing the truth. You’re seeing your story.

When all of your attention is not on your story, you can see what is real. You can feel what is real. You recover faith in yourself and now you can create anything you want to create. You can invest your faith in anything you want to believe. It’s your choice.

Happiness is a choice and so is suffering. If you no longer believe in all that you know that makes you suffer, then your suffering disappears. And you don’t need a lot of thinking. You need action. It’s action that’s going to make the difference.

LESSON 9 • The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

The fourth agreement, “Always do your best,” is the agreement that allows the other three to become deeply ingrained habits. The first three agreements are in the realm of the virtual reality. The fourth agreement is in the realm of the physical. Do! Take action!

How can you do your best if you don’t take action? You can have many great ideas in your head, but information or an idea is merely the seed in your mind. What really makes a difference is action.

Always do your best, but don’t overdo! If you overdo you spend more energy than is needed and go against yourself. If you do less than your best, you subject yourself to self-judgment, guilt, and regrets.

But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. You’re alive and changing all the time, and your best is also changing. Your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good. When you wake up refreshed and energized in the morning, your best will be better than when you’re tired at night. Under any circumstance, just do your best! No more, and no less.

Doing your best is about taking action because you want to, not because you’re trying to please other people or your own inner judge. If you take action because you have to, there’s no way you’re going to do your best and it’s better not to do it.

When you take action just for the pleasure of doing it, you enjoy life. You take action because it makes you happy — not because you expect a reward. Most people do exactly the opposite. They only take action when they expect a reward, and they don’t enjoy the action. that’s why they don’t do their best. Taking action is about living fully in the moment and expressing what you really are.

Inaction is sitting in front of the television every day for years because you’re afraid to take the risk of expressing what you are. When there’s inaction, it’s an open invitation for the voice of knowledge to talk to you. But when you’re absorbed in what you’re doing, the mind hardly speaks. You become one with what you’re doing. You’re expressing what you really are, and this is the greatest thing that can happen to anyone.

The way you’re living your life right now is the result of many years of practice. Every moment of your life you practice to become what you believe you are. And if you start practicing something new, such as The Four Agreements, your whole life is going to change. Change is the result of action. It’s the result of practice.

If you practice being impeccable with your Word, if you don’t take anything personally, if you don’t make assumptions, you’re going to break thousands of little habits, routines, and agreements that cause you to suffer in life. The goal is to reprogram your own mind in your own way. The result is the freedom to live your own life instead of the life of the belief system. If you practice The Four Agreements, what you agree to believe will become the choice of your authentic self — not the choice of the “image” of yourself that you thought you were.

Repetition and practice will make you the master, but don’t expect that you can master these agreements right away. Just do your best to honor them. If you fail to keep one of the agreements, make the agreement again. Begin again tomorrow and again the next day. Each day will become easier and easier until one day you discover that you’re ruling your life with The Four Agreements. Instead of struggling with conflict and drama, your life becomes very easy.

LESSON 10 • The Freedom to Be the Real You

The life you’re living is your creation. It’s your perception of reality that you can change at any time. Why not use your power of creation to create a better life? You can live a life of joy and fulfillment, but you have to find the courage to break the agreements that limit you and reclaim your personal power.

You learn by making agreements, and you unlearn by breaking agreements. Every time you break an agreement, the power of belief you invested in that agreement returns to you. You no longer need to spend your power to keep that agreement alive.

As you recover your personal power, your will becomes stronger and this gives you the power to change another agreement, and another, and another, until you change the entire system of your old agreements.

You begin by questioning what you believe. Is it truth, or is it fiction? Is it reality, or is it my virtual reality? With the power of doubt, you challenge every belief in your virtual world. Then you challenge all the beliefs that rule society until lies and superstitions no longer rule your world.

As you unlearn, you recover your faith. Your personal power increases and your will becomes stronger. The will is your intent. It’s the force that can move or change the direction of what exists. The will is what holds your attention and moves your attention. Once you have enough power that you can use your will, you gain control of your own attention.

When your attention is no longer listening to the voice in your head, then you can finally gain control of your life. Your personal power keeps getting stronger, and because you’re much more powerful, you find that almost anything is possible. Soon you’re making agreements that lead you to happiness, to freedom, to love. These new agreements come alive and begin to interact with the outside world and your whole life changes.

The presence of the infinite is everywhere, but when all your attention is on your story, you don’t see that reality. You only see your own virtual reality, your own story, your own knowledge. But the moment will come when you realize that you are here just to be in this moment. And being has nothing to do with knowledge. It’s not about understanding. It’s not about learning. It’s about recovering awareness of the truth, and the truth doesn’t come with words.

The truth is silent. It’s something you just know, it’s something you just feel without words. And it’s called silent knowledge. Just imagine becoming the way you used to be as a very young child before knowledge took over your mind. Imagine living without fear, without blame, without guilt, without judgment, without shame. Imagine that just by being yourself you’re happy. Imagine living with this kind of freedom.

When all of your attention is not on your story, you recover the presence you had when you were born, and you were just like a flower, just like the wind, just like the ocean, just like the sun. You’re just like you, that force of life. You’re here just to be, to enjoy life, to be happy.

Once you see what you really are, it’s not about being right or wrong, or good or bad. It’s not about being young or old, beautiful or ugly, a winner or a loser. All that is over. It was nothing but a story. You’ll know that you are totally free when you no longer have to be the “you” that you pretend to be. This freedom is profound. It’s the freedom to be the real you, and it’s the greatest gift that you can give yourself.