The Fifth Agreement

The Fifth Agreement is an update and sequel to one of the world’s most popular self-help books, which shines a new light on ancient, Toltec wisdom, to help us master our selves, cultivate deep awareness, and be who we really are.

In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel described the sum of uncontrollable elements in our lives as the source of our domestication. These include all habits, attitudes, ideas and behaviors we pick up as innocent children from parents, mentors, friends, and teachers. Miguel called it a ‘collective dream.’ You know, what society expects of us.

His son now expands on that idea and illustrates where it comes from. As toddlers, we act naturally, in accordance with our tendencies. We laugh, we eat, we sleep, we explore and we create. We don’t judge ourselves and we don’t regret our actions until, gradually, we’re introduced to symbology.

Symbols are a huge part of all our lives and without them, the world wouldn’t function. However, most of these symbols are somehow biased culturally and socially. They come attached to certain values, things we admire and desire, and norms, the behaviors we deem acceptable. That’s how we pick up all these ideas of what we ‘should’ have and do, and by the time we grow up, we’re completely conditioned from this domestication.

The first piece of evidence that symbology is important, regardless of its flaws, is that you couldn’t be reading this without it. All of humanity uses a shared catalog of symbols to communicate: language. We don’t all use the same catalog and we don’t all understand each other, but without alphabets, words, and sentences, we could neither read nor talk.

However, what this also proves is that all human knowledge must rely, to some degree, on common symbology. Unless at least one person agrees with you that the big brown and green thing is called a tree, or that there’s vitamin C in oranges, or even that 1+1=2, you can’t call these things facts, let alone true.

Since we must use symbols to represent knowledge, and all symbols require that at least two humans agree, everything we know and believe in can only be relative truth. Not that universal truths don’t exist – a tree always exists, regardless of what you call it – but there is very little that isn’t up for grabs. We’re just so used to the symbols we know, our language, what we learn in school, the values our parents teach us, that we don’t think of them as debatable. But they are.