68 pages • 2 hours read
The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
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Chapter 7-PrayersChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The New Dream: Heaven on Earth”
Ruiz begins the book’s final chapter by encouraging people to forget everything they’ve learned because the material presented in the book is the beginning of a new understanding. This new understanding affords people the power to create the reality they want to see. One has the choice to live in heaven or to stay in hell.
Next, Ruiz walks through the process of imagining a new life, where one is happy, free to enjoy life, and unafraid of judgment or openly expressing oneself. He invites imagination of a life in which one loves freely and fully, respects oneself and everyone else, and can live with an open heart, unafraid to be hurt. He emphasizes that this is possible and that men and women all over the world are currently living this blissful life.
What Ruiz calls “the new dream” is the same thing humans have been searching for since the dawn of time: happiness. Buddhists call it Nirvana, Jesus called it Heaven. It’s simply happiness, and it’s a choice. However, most people’s identity is mixed up in the fog of the planet’s dream. They believe that the Judge and Victim are part of their identity. They suffer, but suffering is more familiar and comfortable.
However, Ruiz notes that suffering is unnecessary; it’s a choice, as is happiness. One suffers only because one chooses to. One is happy only because one chooses to be. Ruiz ends the chapter by stating that he has chosen to live in heaven instead of in hell, and asks people to consider what their choice will be.
Prayers Summary
In this portion of the book, Ruiz directs readers to close their eyes and breathe deeply.
Prayer for Freedom
He first walks readers through a prayer of freedom directed to the Creator of the Universe, whose true name is Love. He prays for help to love as the Creator loves, to live freely, and to be able to accept oneself and everything else that the Creator made. He prays that readers can accept others without judgment because when they judge and reject others, they judge and reject themselves and the Creator. He prays that reader’s hearts are cleansed from emotional poison so that they can live in complete peace and love. At the end of the prayer, Ruiz offers himself and the readers to the Creator so that they can be like the Creator and say “I love you” to themselves and the people around them without fear.
Prayer for Love
Ruiz shares an anecdotal dream in which he invites readers to imagine that they’re in a field on a sunny day, aware of the beauty of nature around them. At the edge of a river, they see an old man meditating. His head emits beautiful rainbow light. The man notices the readers and opens his eyes, which are full of love. The readers ask him to teach them to do whatever he does so that they can have that beautiful rainbow light too.
The old man tells the readers his own story, in which his mentor gave him a flame from the mentor’s own heart. The mentor opened the man’s chest and placed the flame in the man’s heart. The old man tells the readers that he felt intense love from that flame because it was his mentor’s love.
The flame grew in the old man’s heart and became a purifying fire. As the love in his heart grew, he was able to love himself fully. He was then able to love the natural world around him and, eventually, all of humanity. He saw himself as one with the world and all people because of his love.
The old man then opens his chest and takes a flame out of his heart. He reaches out to the readers and opens their chests, placing the flame in their heart. They become one with the world and all of humanity, and beautiful rainbow light shines from their heads. They begin to pray and thank the Creator of the Universe for the gift of life and for providing everything they need. They thank the Creator for using their hearts to share love, and they express love for the Creator, themselves, and the world. In the end, they pray for the Creator’s help to maintain the love and peace in their hearts and make it their way of life.
Chapter 7-Prayers Analysis
Chapter 7 focuses on Unconditional Love and looking forward to living out the new dream. The chapter is full of images of what life will look like when the four agreements are in practice and conveys a sense of possibility and excitement. Ruiz uses the last chapter to tie all the themes together. He writes that even though people have been domesticated and taught self-limiting agreements, both suffering and happiness are choices, and people can choose to create a new reality. He writes:
The dream you are living is your creation. It is your perception of reality that you can change at any time. You have the power to create hell, and you have the power to create heaven. Why not dream a different dream? Why not use your mind, your imagination, and your emotions to dream heaven? (124)
The prayers are brief meditations to practice the four agreements and the mastery of love by increasing awareness of one’s unity with the Creator, the energy that connects all things. The Prayer of Love uses vivid imagery to create a scene of an idyllic river. The image of the old man placing a flame from his heart into readers’ hearts describes what love feels like and how it grows. The rainbow light that shines from the old man’s head and then readers’ heads symbolizes the beauty that one can experience when one lives a life of love.
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