Date
The-Fifth-Agreement

The Story of You


For thousands of years humans have tried to understand the universe, nature, and mainly human nature. It’s amazing to observe humans in action all around the world, in all the different places and cultures that exist on this beautiful planet Earth. Humans make a lot of effort to understand, but in doing so we also

The Fifth Agreement


by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D., Jose Luis Ruiz, and Janet Mills


make a lot of assumptions. We distort the truth and create the most amazing theories; we create entire philosophies and the most amazing religions; we create stories and superstitions about everything, including ourselves. And this is exactly the main point: We create them.

     Humans are born with the power of creation, and we are constantly creating stories with the words that we learned. Every one of us uses the word to form our opinions, to express our point of view. Countless events are happening all around us, and using our attention, we have the capacity to put all these events together in a story. We create the story of our own life, the story of our family, the story of our community, the story of our country, the story of humanity, the story of the entire world. Every one of us has a story that we share, a message that we deliver to ourselves, and to everyone and everything around us.

     You were programmed to deliver a message, and the creation of that message is your greatest art. What is the message? Your life. With that message, you create mainly the story of you, and then a story about everything you perceive. You create an entire virtual reality in your mind, and you live in that reality. When you think, you’re thinking in your language; you’re repeating in your mind all those words that mean something to you. You’re giving yourself a message, and that message is the truth for you because you believe that it’s the truth.

     The story of you is everything that you know about you. And when I say this, I’m talking to you, knowledge, what you believe you are, not to you, the human, what you really are. As you can see, I make a distinction between you and you because one of you is real, and one of you is not real. You, the physical human, are real; you are the truth. You, knowledge —  you’re not real; you’re virtual.