As folks who have been reading my reviews over the past dozen or so years will recall, I spent a chunk of the 80's and 90's studying shamanism in various cultural settings, and so have a bunch of “filters” for books on the subject that tend to lead me to somewhat caustic assessments of way too many of these. So, it's a real pleasure when I run into titles which I can wholeheartedly recommend (see this and this for examples), and the current book is one of this sort. Heck (and those keeping track of how many books these days come my way via the dollar store will realize how extreme this is), I actually bought a second copy at retail (well, Amazon's discounted retail) to give to a shaman friend who I felt had to read this. Frankly, I'm amazed this took six years to get on my radar (it came out in 2010), but I'm glad it did.Of course, I was quite positive about this book's predecessor, so I was predisposed to be open to Don Miguel Ruiz & Don Jose Ruiz' The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery. Interestingly, this is co-authored by Jose, the son of Miguel who has been pioneering the “Toltec Wisdom” niche, and I wonder how much of this book emerges from that influence. It certainly is different in a lot of ways from The Four Agreements, the concepts of which are re-framed in the first half of this book. Here are a couple of bits setting up both the initial four and the fifth:
At this point I need to indulge in some mental churning … bear with me. The comment I want to make about this volume is that it reminds me quite a bit of “Fourth Way” (Gurdjieff/Ouspensky/Bennett/etc.) material – which is a compliment – but this, somewhat ironically, brings to mind a bit of snark I'd read about Castaneda's writing (which seems to be the origin point of a lot of the “Toltec” concepts), that it was just “Gurdjieff in a serape”. Obviously, Castaneda was presenting his vision in the context of fictionalized narratives, and not as “systems” per se (although there is a very good book which attempts to extract something of a system out of Castaneda's various writings), so wasn't so much a similar thing, but dynamically frequently walked the same pathways. The Fifth Agreement, as opposed to Castaneda, does seem to be intended to be a “system”, building from the first four, and moving into some really advanced ground.... the Four Agreements slowly help you to recover your authentic self. With practice, these four simple agreements take you to what you really are, not what you pretend to be, and this is exactly where you want to be: what you really are. … The fifth agreement is ultimately about seeing your whole reality with they eyes of truth without words. The result of practicing the fifth agreement is the complete acceptance of yourself just the way you are, and the complete acceptance of everybody else just the way they are.
I suppose here would be as good a place as any to “cut to the chase” as far as what the 5th is … and this is likely to be a shocker to anyone used to “fluff bunny” new age twaddle … it reads: “Be Skeptical, But Learn To Listen”, with the further commentary:
The book gets into some deep stuff … talking about awareness and language in a way that drives all the way back to the womb, and how our perception of reality is really a perception of our words for reality and not reality itself. At one point the authors state: “Toltec is a Nahuatl word meaning artist.” … I have no way to judge the veracity of that claim (within the scope of effort I'm willing to devote to getting this review done), but it feeds into another over-arching conception here:Don't believe yourself or anybody else. Use the power of doubt to question everything you hear: Is it really the truth? Listen to the intent behind words, and you will understand the real message.
This is interesting, but it gets more intense:All humans are artists, all of us. Every symbol, every word, is a little piece of art. … thanks to our programming, our greatest masterpiece of art is the use of a language to create an entire virtual reality within our mind. The virtual reality we create could be a clear reflection of the truth, or it could be completely distorted. Either way, it's art. Our creation could be our personal heaven, or it could be our personal hell. It doesn't matter; it's art.
And then it gets a bit more technical:Humans are born with awareness; we are born to perceive the truth, but we accumulate knowledge, and we learn to deny what we perceive. We practice not being aware, and we master not being aware. The word is pure magic, and we learn to use our magic against ourselves, against creation, against our own kind.
… and all that heavy content is sketched out in the first 25 pages!If we can understand what the human mind is, and what the human mind does, we can begin to separate reality from virtual reality, or pure perception, which is truth, from symbology, which is art. Self-mastery is all about awareness, and it begins with self-awareness. First to be aware of what is real, and then to be aware of what is virtual, which means what we believe about what is real.
The rest of the first half of the book (which is split into two sections, Part I – The Power of Symbols, and Part II – The Power of Doubt), then walks the reader through the original Four Agreements (plus an additional chapter), re-stated to set in the new context. I don't want to delve too deeply into this material, but figured it might be useful to at least note the chapter titles (especially if you don't recall the Four Agreements): “The Story of You – The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word”, “Every Mind Is a World – The Second Agreement: Don't Take Anything Personally”, “Truth or Fiction: The Third Agreement: Don't Make Assumptions”, (the extra chapter, “The Power of Belief – The Symbol of Santa Claus”), and “Practice Makes the Master – The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best”. Those headings give you a general idea of how the re-framing goes in relation to the first book. There are a number of terms familiar from the Castaneda material, like form and dream, along with more general terms like “belief” and “faith” that are used in specific ways here. I was really tempted to grab a few paragraphs of this (notably from pages 76-77 from the “Belief” chapter), but everything sort of builds on the surrounding info, and it would have had to have been a big honking blockquote to get across what I would have hoped to convey, so this is one point where I'm just going to say “buy the book already!”.
The second half of the book was what really blew me away. It starts with the introduction of the Fifth Agreement (which is, as noted above: “Be Skeptical, But Learn To Listen”) which extends the preceding material into direct action, à la:
This is all pretty heady … and then the book makes a total jump. One of those Castaneda concepts is “attention” (I have contemplated writing a book on the various, and sometimes interpenetrating, concepts of “attention”, from the “Toltec” to the “Fourth Way” to the “attention economy” contexts … hey, in Judy Tenuta's line: “it could happen”), and it suddenly is the “payoff” of the book, with three progressively more “advanced” chapters, featuring “The Dream of the {First/Second/Third} Attention”. This starts off in the Eden myth:Once you realize that hardly anything you know through symbols is true, then be skeptical has a much bigger meaning. Be skeptical is masterful because it uses the power of doubt to discern the truth. Whenever you hear a message from yourself, or from another artist, simply ask: Is it truth, or is it not truth? Is it reality or is it a virtual reality? The doubt takes you behind the symbols, and makes you responsible for every message you deliver and receive. … if faith is believing without a doubt, and doubt is not believing, be skeptical. Don't believe.
This chapter continues to pretty much take apart all religious belief as “all the lies that come with the whole Tree of Knowledge” … which moves to belief in general:The Tree of Knowledge is just a reflection of the Tree of Life. We already know that knowledge is created with symbols, and that symbols aren't real. When we eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the symbols become a virtual reality that talks to us as the voice of knowledge, and we live in that reality believing that it's real, which means without awareness, of course.
It's obvious that humans ate the fruit of the Tree of Death. … there are billions of humans walking around in this world who are dead, but they don't know they are dead. Yes, their bodies are alive, but they are dreaming without any awareness that they are dreaming, and this is what the Toltec call the dream of the first attention
The way to get out of being “dead” (or be “resurrected”)? Awareness … “When you recover awareness, you resurrect and come back to life.” … which leads on to the dream of the second attention. Another familiar Castaneda term comes in here, integrity, which is the drive that launches “the war of the gods”:The symbols are competing for control of our attention, and in one way or another they're changing all the time; they're taking turns possessing us. There are thousands of symbols that want to take their place in our head and control us … those symbols are alive, and that life comes from us because we believe.
The authors talk of “human sacrifice” here, which they define as originating “because we believe in so many superstitions and distortions in our knowledge”, with the actual war happening inside our heads, that expresses itself outside ourselves in various lethal conflicts … even in conflict with ourselves in endless self-punishment of past failings. The chapter goes into detail of how to use the five agreements as tools to win that war:It's a war between the authentic self and what we call the tyrant, the big judge, the book of law, the belief system. It's a war between ideas, between opinions, between beliefs. … We give our power to these symbols, we take them to the realm of the gods and we sacrifice our lives in the name of these gods.
The next chapter, on the dream of the third attention (or that of the masters) is a bit esoteric, but the basis is:Once you recover awareness of what you are, the war in your head is over. It's obvious that you are the one who creates all the symbols. … The war is over because your faith is not invested in lies. Even though lies still exist, you no longer believe.
Some concepts come in here, “presence” and intent ...In the dream of the third attention, you finally have the awareness of what you are, but not with words. … The highest point you can reach is when you go beyond symbols and become one with life …
This gets pretty far out there (arguably in an Atman/Brahman mode), connecting the individual with all motion, with light, universes within universes, and on to soul. Again, this is pretty extreme stuff here, and I'd probably not be doing it or you a service to try to summarize it. Also, the following chapters, being based on these “dreams”, will likewise be hard to convey … but they are “Becoming a Seer”, and “The Three Languages” (which are “1-2-3”, “A-B-C”, and “Do-Re-Mi”) which has a key question: “What kind of messenger are you?”. This all may seem, in my outlining it, so much “woo-woo”, but I assure you (especially from the standpoint of having studied this stuff a long time) it all works together into a very congruent whole … and I highly recommend it.Look at your own hand. Move your fingers. The force that moves your fingers is what the Toltec call intent … Intent is the only living being that exists, and it's that force that is moving everything. You are not the fingers. You are the force that is moving them.
In fact, The Fifth Agreement is likely to get another behavior out of me that almost never happens with any book … I intend to block out some time to re-read it, and I suspect that I may even re-re-read it at some later date. I don't know when the last time I was so taken by a book (maybe Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous), so that's high praise indeed.
Of course, there is a certain caveat lurking in all the above … I've read all the Castaneda books, I've read almost all the “Fourth Way” books, I've read a lot of Shamanic material, and have been boots-on-the-ground (entheogens in the head?) working with assorted Shamanic teachers … so MY context on this book is very likely to not be shared with many, and I can see where somebody without that background, coming to this cold, might be very tempted to reject it out of hand. I do think this is something that ought to be read by “all and sundry”, however.
This is sufficiently popular that it will no doubt be available at your local book store, at its quite reasonable cover price … the online big boys, however, have it at a substantial discount which makes getting it via that channel pretty much a wash with what used copies (when shipping's added) would set you back. This isn't just a bit of New Age fluff, but a coherent system based on a very convincing philosophical approach. Good stuff … go get a copy!
