I try to go to yoga two or three times a week. The instructor for early Wednesday runs an insurance/financial advising office outside of the studio, and is fond of bringing in the self-help/improvement kinds of things that can be made to work for both the business side of things as well as the yoga. This is how I first heard of The Four Agreements. I saw the book itself, and in need of retail therapy, I decided to see what the whole thing was about.
On the surface and in curated bits, The Four Agreements is an outline for getting along spiritually and emotionally in a negative and sometimes chaotic modern world. It’s based on the Toltec tradition, a Mesoamerican culture that predates the Aztecs. This will be relevant momentarily. “Agreement” is used in the sense of ‘learned understanding/view” and kind of applies to world-views and culturally defined roles and rules for how the world should work. They are learned, and in most cases, per this book, should be unlearned. The agreements are, in order: “Be impeccable with your word”, “Don’t take anything personally”, “Don’t make assumptions”, and “Always do your best”. Order matters because to some extent, these approaches build on each other.
If I hadn’t known there was a lot of tradition behind these ideas and probably a lot of philosophy etc. that I have no knowledge or understanding of, I would be tempted to dismiss most of what is presented as oversimplified to the point of unrealistic and in a lot of ways encouraging people to live in their own personal bubbles. The idea that an individual should only focus on basically ignoring the complexities of other people and only going by your own worldview, does not seem practical or even that beneficial. You could read this advice as it’s fine to let other people be mean and awful because it doesn’t affect you, the golden rule will always win, and emotions should be controlled not felt of confronted (let’s all be Vulcans?). I’m not entirely persuaded that this is either personally freeing or effective. To be honest, part of the problem, at least for is the lack of practical real world applciations. There are examples, but they are very generalized, and come off as the author showing off. It doesn’t feel very real or realistic.
The basic premise of intentional self-reflection and understanding is a good one. Likewise for some of the general concepts of not letting other people get to you in negative ways. But this is still in a lot of ways popular self-help philosophy. Best-seller or not, those attributes show, and they don’t help.
