You are being pro­vid­ed with a book chap­ter by chap­ter. I will request you to read the book for me after each chap­ter. After read­ing the chap­ter, 1. short­en the chap­ter to no less than 300 words and no more than 400 words. 2. Do not change the name, address, or any impor­tant nouns in the chap­ter. 3. Do not trans­late the orig­i­nal lan­guage. 4. Keep the same style as the orig­i­nal chap­ter, keep it con­sis­tent through­out the chap­ter. Your reply must com­ply with all four require­ments, or it’s invalid.
I will pro­vide the chap­ter now.

2
THE FIRST AGREEMENT

Be Impec­ca­ble with Your Word

THE FIRST AGREEMENT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE and
also the most dif­fi­cult one to hon­or. It is so impor­tant that with just
this first agree­ment you will be able to tran­scend to the lev­el of
exis­tence I call heav­en on earth.
The first agree­ment is to be impec­ca­ble with your word. It sounds
very sim­ple, but it is very, very pow­er­ful.
Why your word? Your word is the pow­er that you have to cre­ate.
Your word is the gift that comes direct­ly from God. The Gospel of
John in the Bible, speak­ing of the cre­ation of the uni­verse, says, “In
the begin­ning was the word, and the word was with God, and the
word is God.” Through the word you express your cre­ative pow­er. It
is through the word that you man­i­fest every­thing. Regard­less of what
lan­guage you speak, your intent man­i­fests through the word. What
you dream, what you feel, and what you real­ly are, will all be
man­i­fest­ed through the word.
The word is not just a sound or a writ­ten sym­bol. The word is a
force; it is the pow­er you have to express and com­mu­ni­cate, to think,
and there­by to cre­ate the events in your life. You can speak. What
oth­er ani­mal on the plan­et can speak? The word is the most
pow­er­ful tool you have as a human; it is the tool of mag­ic. But like a
sword with two edges, your word can cre­ate the most beau­ti­ful
dream, or your word can destroy every­thing around you. One edge is
the mis­use of the word, which cre­ates a liv­ing hell. The oth­er edge is
the impec­ca­bil­i­ty of the word, which will only cre­ate beau­ty, love, and
heav­en on earth. Depend­ing upon how it is used, the word can set
you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know. All the
mag­ic you pos­sess is based on your word. Your word is pure mag­ic,
and mis­use of your word is black mag­ic.
The word is so pow­er­ful that one word can change a life or destroy
the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple. Some years ago one man in Ger­many,
by the use of the word, manip­u­lat­ed a whole coun­try of the most
intel­li­gent peo­ple. He led them into a world war with just the pow­er of
his word. He con­vinced oth­ers to com­mit the most atro­cious acts of
vio­lence. He acti­vat­ed people’s fear with the word, and like a big
explo­sion, there was killing and war all around the world. All over the
world humans destroyed oth­er humans because they were afraid of
each oth­er. Hitler’s word, based on fear-gen­er­at­ed beliefs and
agree­ments, will be remem­bered for cen­turies.
The human mind is like a fer­tile ground where seeds are
con­tin­u­al­ly being plant­ed. The seeds are opin­ions, ideas, and
con­cepts. You plant a seed, a thought, and it grows. The word is like
a seed, and the human mind is so fer­tile! The only prob­lem is that
too often it is fer­tile for the seeds of fear. Every human mind is fer­tile,
but only for those kinds of seeds it is pre­pared for. What is impor­tant
is to see which kind of seeds our mind is fer­tile for, and to pre­pare it
to receive the seeds of love.
Take the exam­ple of Hitler: He sent out all those seeds of fear, and
they grew very strong and beau­ti­ful­ly achieved mas­sive destruc­tion.
See­ing the awe­some pow­er of the word, we must under­stand what
pow­er comes out of our mouths. One fear or doubt plant­ed in our
mind can cre­ate an end­less dra­ma of events. One word is like a
spell, and humans use the word like black magi­cians, thought­less­ly
putting spells on each oth­er.
Every human is a magi­cian, and we can either put a spell on
some­one with our word or we can release some­one from a spell. We
cast spells all the time with our opin­ions. An exam­ple: I see a friend
and give him an opin­ion that just popped into my mind. I say,
“Hmmm! I see that kind of col­or in your face in peo­ple who are going
to get can­cer.” If he lis­tens to the word, and if he agrees, he will have
can­cer in less than one year. That is the pow­er of the word.
Dur­ing our domes­ti­ca­tion, our par­ents and sib­lings gave their
opin­ions about us with­out even think­ing. We believed these opin­ions
and we lived in fear over these opin­ions, like not being good at
swim­ming, or sports, or writ­ing. Some­one gives an opin­ion and says,
“Look, this girl is ugly!” The girl lis­tens, believes she is ugly, and
grows up with the idea that she is ugly. It doesn’t mat­ter how
beau­ti­ful she is; as long as she has that agree­ment, she will believe
that she is ugly. That is the spell she is under.
By hook­ing our atten­tion, the word can enter our mind and change
a whole belief for bet­ter or for worse. Anoth­er exam­ple: You may
believe you are stu­pid, and you may have believed this for as long
as you can remem­ber. This agree­ment can be very tricky, caus­ing
you to do a lot of things just to ensure that you are stu­pid. You may
do some­thing and think to your­self, “I wish I were smart, but I must
be stu­pid or I wouldn’t have done that.” The mind goes in hun­dreds
of dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and we could spend days get­ting hooked by
just that one belief in our own stu­pid­i­ty.
Then one day some­one hooks your atten­tion and using the word,
lets you know that you are not stu­pid. You believe what the per­son
says and make a new agree­ment. As a result, you no longer feel or
act stu­pid. A whole spell is bro­ken, just by the pow­er of the word.
Con­verse­ly, if you believe you are stu­pid, and some­one hooks your
atten­tion and says, “Yes, you are real­ly the most stu­pid per­son I
have ever met,” the agree­ment will be rein­forced and become even
stronger.

Now let us see what the word impec­ca­bil­i­ty means. Impec­ca­bil­i­ty
means “with­out sin.” Impec­ca­ble comes from the Latin peca­tus,
which means “sin.” The im in impec­ca­ble means “with­out,” so
impec­ca­ble means “with­out sin.” Reli­gions talk about sin and
sin­ners, but let’s under­stand what it real­ly means to sin. A sin is
any­thing that you do which goes against your­self. Every­thing you
feel or believe or say that goes against your­self is a sin. You go
against your­self when you judge or blame your­self for any­thing.
Being with­out sin is exact­ly the oppo­site. Being impec­ca­ble is not
going against your­self. When you are impec­ca­ble, you take
respon­si­bil­i­ty for your actions, but you do not judge or blame
your­self.
From this point of view, the whole con­cept of sin changes from
some­thing moral or reli­gious to some­thing com­mon­sense. Sin
begins with rejec­tion of your­self. Self-rejec­tion is the biggest sin that
you com­mit. In reli­gious terms self-rejec­tion is a “mor­tal sin,” which
leads to death. Impec­ca­bil­i­ty, on the oth­er hand, leads to life.
Being impec­ca­ble with your word is not using the word against
your­self. If I see you in the street and I call you stu­pid, it appears that
I’m using the word against you. But real­ly I’m using my word against
myself, because you’re going to hate me for this, and your hat­ing me
is not good for me. There­fore, if I get angry and with my word send
all that emo­tion­al poi­son to you, I’m using the word against myself.
If I love myself I will express that love in my inter­ac­tions with you,
and then I am being impec­ca­ble with the word, because that action
will pro­duce a like reac­tion. If I love you, then you will love me. If I
insult you, you will insult me. If I have grat­i­tude for you, you will have
grat­i­tude for me. If I’m self­ish with you, you will be self­ish with me. If I
use the word to put a spell on you, you are going to put a spell on
me.
Being impec­ca­ble with your word is the cor­rect use of your ener­gy;
it means to use your ener­gy in the direc­tion of truth and love for
your­self. If you make an agree­ment with your­self to be impec­ca­ble
with your word, just with that inten­tion, the truth will man­i­fest through
you and clean all the emo­tion­al poi­son that exists with­in you. But
mak­ing this agree­ment is dif­fi­cult because we have learned to do
pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. We have learned to lie as a habit of our
com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­ers and more impor­tant­ly with our­selves. We
are not impec­ca­ble with the word.
The pow­er of the word is com­plete­ly mis­used in hell. We use the
word to curse, to blame, to find guilt, to destroy. Of course, we also
use it in the right way, but not too often. Most­ly we use the word to
spread our per­son­al poi­son — to express anger, jeal­ousy, envy, and
hate. The word is pure mag­ic — the most pow­er­ful gift we have as
humans — and we use it against our­selves. We plan revenge. We
cre­ate chaos with the word. We use the word to cre­ate hate between
dif­fer­ent races, between dif­fer­ent peo­ple, between fam­i­lies, between
nations. We mis­use the word so often, and this mis­use is how we
cre­ate and per­pet­u­ate the dream of hell. Mis­use of the word is how
we pull each oth­er down and keep each oth­er in a state of fear and
doubt. Because the word is the mag­ic that humans pos­sess and
mis­use of the word is black mag­ic, we are using black mag­ic all the
time with­out know­ing that our word is mag­ic at all.
There was a woman, for exam­ple, who was intel­li­gent and had a
very good heart. She had a daugh­ter whom she adored and loved
very much. One night she came home from a very bad day at work,
tired, full of emo­tion­al ten­sion, and with a ter­ri­ble headache. She
want­ed peace and qui­et, but her daugh­ter was singing and jump­ing
hap­pi­ly. The daugh­ter was unaware of how her moth­er was feel­ing;
she was in her own world, in her own dream. She felt so won­der­ful,
and she was jump­ing and singing loud­er and loud­er, express­ing her
joy and her love. She was singing so loud that it made her mother’s
headache even worse, and at a cer­tain moment, the moth­er lost
con­trol. Angri­ly she looked at her beau­ti­ful lit­tle girl and said, “Shut
up! You have an ugly voice. Can you just shut up!”
The truth is that the mother’s tol­er­ance for any noise was
nonex­is­tent; it was not that the lit­tle girl’s voice was ugly. But the
daugh­ter believed what her moth­er said, and in that moment she
made an agree­ment with her­self. After that she no longer sang,
because she believed her voice was ugly and would both­er any­one
who heard it. She became shy at school, and if she was asked to
sing, she refused. Even speak­ing to oth­ers became dif­fi­cult for her.
Every­thing changed in the lit­tle girl because of this new agree­ment:
She believed she must repress her emo­tions in order to be accept­ed
and loved.
When­ev­er we hear an opin­ion and believe it, we make an
agree­ment, and it becomes part of our belief sys­tem. This lit­tle girl
grew up, and even though she had a beau­ti­ful voice, she nev­er sang
again. She devel­oped a whole com­plex from one spell. This spell
was cast upon her by the one who loved her the most: her own
moth­er. Her moth­er didn’t notice what she did with her word. She
didn’t notice that she used black mag­ic and put a spell on her
daugh­ter. She didn’t know the pow­er of her word, and there­fore she
isn’t to blame. She did what her own moth­er, father, and oth­ers had
done to her in many ways. They mis­used the word.
How many times do we do this with our own chil­dren? We give
them these types of opin­ions and our chil­dren car­ry that black mag­ic
for years and years. Peo­ple who love us do black mag­ic on us, but
they don’t know what they do. That is why we must for­give them;
they don’t know what they do.
Anoth­er exam­ple: You awake in the morn­ing feel­ing very hap­py.
You feel so won­der­ful, you stay one or two hours in front of the
mir­ror, mak­ing your­self beau­ti­ful. Well, one of your best friends says,
“What has hap­pened to you? You look so ugly. Look at the dress you
are wear­ing; you look ridicu­lous.” That’s it; that is enough to put you
all the way down in hell. Maybe this girl­friend just told you this to hurt
you. And, she did. She gave you an opin­ion with all the pow­er of her
word behind it. If you accept the opin­ion, it becomes an agree­ment
now, and you put all your pow­er into that opin­ion. That opin­ion
becomes black mag­ic.
These types of spells are dif­fi­cult to break. The only thing that can
break a spell is to make a new agree­ment based on truth. The truth
is the most impor­tant part of being impec­ca­ble with your word. On
one side of the sword are the lies which cre­ate black mag­ic, and on
the oth­er side of the sword is the truth which has the pow­er to break
the spell of black mag­ic. Only the truth will set us free.

Look­ing at every­day human inter­ac­tions, imag­ine how many times
we cast spells on each oth­er with our word. Over time this inter­ac­tion
has become the worst form of black mag­ic, and we call it gos­sip.
Gos­sip is black mag­ic at its very worst because it is pure poi­son.
We learned how to gos­sip by agree­ment. When we were chil­dren,
we heard the adults around us gos­sip­ing all the time, open­ly giv­ing
their opin­ions about oth­er peo­ple. They even had opin­ions about
peo­ple they didn’t know. Emo­tion­al poi­son was trans­ferred along
with the opin­ions, and we learned this as the nor­mal way to
com­mu­ni­cate.
Gos­sip­ing has become the main form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in human
soci­ety. It has become the way we feel close to each oth­er, because
it makes us feel bet­ter to see some­one else feel as bad­ly as we do.
There is an old expres­sion that says, “Mis­ery likes com­pa­ny,” and
peo­ple who are suf­fer­ing in hell don’t want to be all alone. Fear and
suf­fer­ing are an impor­tant part of the dream of the plan­et; they are
how the dream of the plan­et keeps us down.
Using the anal­o­gy of the human mind as a com­put­er, gos­sip can
be com­pared to a com­put­er virus. A com­put­er virus is a piece of
com­put­er lan­guage writ­ten in the same lan­guage all the oth­er codes
are writ­ten in, but with a harm­ful intent. This code is insert­ed into the
pro­gram of your com­put­er when you least expect it and most of the
time with­out your aware­ness. After this code has been intro­duced,
your com­put­er doesn’t work quite right, or it doesn’t func­tion at all
because the codes get so mixed up with so many con­flict­ing
mes­sages that it stops pro­duc­ing good results.
Human gos­sip works exact­ly the same way. For exam­ple, you are
begin­ning a new class with a new teacher and you have looked
for­ward to it for a long time. On the first day of class, you run into
some­one who took the class before, who tells you, “Oh that
instruc­tor was such a pompous jerk! He didn’t know what he was
talk­ing about, and he was a per­vert too, so watch out!”
You are imme­di­ate­ly imprint­ed with the word and the emo­tion­al
code the per­son had when say­ing this, but what you are not aware of
is his or her moti­va­tion in telling you. This per­son could be angry for
fail­ing the class or sim­ply mak­ing an assump­tion based on fears and
prej­u­dices, but because you have learned to ingest infor­ma­tion like a
child, some part of you believes the gos­sip, and you go on to the
class. As the teacher speaks, you feel the poi­son come up inside
you and you don’t real­ize you see the teacher through the eyes of
the per­son who gave you that gos­sip. Then you start talk­ing to oth­er
peo­ple in the class about this, and they start to see the teacher in the
same way: as a jerk and a per­vert. You real­ly hate the class, and
soon you decide to drop out. You blame the teacher, but it is gos­sip
that is to blame.
All of this mess can be caused by one lit­tle com­put­er virus. One
lit­tle piece of mis­in­for­ma­tion can break down com­mu­ni­ca­tion
between peo­ple, caus­ing every per­son it touch­es to become infect­ed
and con­ta­gious to oth­ers. Imag­ine that every sin­gle time oth­ers
gos­sip to you, they insert a com­put­er virus into your mind, caus­ing
you to think a lit­tle less clear­ly every time. Then imag­ine that in an
effort to clean up your own con­fu­sion and get some relief from the
poi­son, you gos­sip and spread these virus­es to some­one else.
Now imag­ine this pat­tern going on in a nev­er-end­ing chain
between all the humans on earth. The result is a world full of humans
who can only read infor­ma­tion through cir­cuits that are clogged with
a poi­so­nous, con­ta­gious virus. Once again, this poi­so­nous virus is
what the Toltecs called the mitote, the chaos of a thou­sand dif­fer­ent
voic­es all try­ing to talk at once in the mind.
Even worse are the black magi­cians or “com­put­er hack­ers” who
inten­tion­al­ly spread the virus. Think back to a time when you or
some­one you know was angry with some­one else and desired
revenge. In order to seek revenge you said some­thing to or about
that per­son with the inten­tion of spread­ing poi­son and mak­ing that
per­son feel bad about him- or her­self. As chil­dren we do this quite
thought­less­ly, but as we grow old­er we become much more
cal­cu­lat­ed in our efforts to bring oth­er peo­ple down. Then we lie to
our­selves and say that per­son received a just pun­ish­ment for their
wrong­do­ing.
When we see the world through a com­put­er virus, it is easy to
jus­ti­fy the cru­elest behav­ior. What we don’t see is that mis­use of our
word is putting us deep­er into hell.

For years we have received the gos­sip and spells from the words
of oth­ers, but also from the way we use our word with our­selves. We
talk to our­selves con­stant­ly and most of the time we say things like,
“Oh, I look fat, I look ugly. I’m get­ting old, I’m los­ing my hair. I’m
stu­pid, I nev­er under­stand any­thing. I will nev­er be good enough,
and I’m nev­er going to be per­fect.” Do you see how we use the word
against our­selves? We must begin to under­stand what the word is
and what the word does. If you under­stand the first agree­ment, be
impec­ca­ble with your word, you begin to see all the changes that can
hap­pen in your life. Changes first in the way you deal with your­self,
and lat­er in the way you deal with oth­er peo­ple, espe­cial­ly those you
love the most.
Con­sid­er how many times you have gos­siped about the per­son
you love the most to gain the sup­port of oth­ers for your point of view.
How many times have you hooked oth­er people’s atten­tion, and
spread poi­son about your loved one in order to make your opin­ion
right? Your opin­ion is noth­ing but your point of view. It is not
nec­es­sar­i­ly true. Your opin­ion comes from your beliefs, your own
ego, and your own dream. We cre­ate all this poi­son and spread it to
oth­ers just so we can feel right about our own point of view.
If we adopt the first agree­ment, and become impec­ca­ble with our
word, any emo­tion­al poi­son will even­tu­al­ly be cleaned from our mind
and from our com­mu­ni­ca­tion in our per­son­al rela­tion­ships, includ­ing
with our pet dog or cat.
Impec­ca­bil­i­ty of the word will also give you immu­ni­ty from any­one
putting a neg­a­tive spell on you. You will only receive a neg­a­tive idea
if your mind is fer­tile ground for that idea. When you become
impec­ca­ble with your word, your mind is no longer fer­tile ground for
words that come from black mag­ic. Instead, it is fer­tile for the words
that come from love. You can mea­sure the impec­ca­bil­i­ty of your word
by your lev­el of self-love. How much you love your­self and how you
feel about your­self are direct­ly pro­por­tion­ate to the qual­i­ty and
integri­ty of your word. When you are impec­ca­ble with your word, you
feel good; you feel hap­py and at peace.
You can tran­scend the dream of hell just by mak­ing the agree­ment
to be impec­ca­ble with your word. Right now I am plant­i­ng that seed
in your mind. Whether or not the seed grows depends upon how
fer­tile your mind is for the seeds of love. It is up to you to make this
agree­ment with your­self: I am impec­ca­ble with my word. Nur­ture this
seed, and as it grows in your mind, it will gen­er­ate more seeds of
love to replace the seeds of fear. This first agree­ment will change the
kind of seeds your mind is fer­tile for.
Be impec­ca­ble with your word. This is the first agree­ment that you
should make if you want to be free, if you want to be hap­py, if you
want to tran­scend the lev­el of exis­tence that is hell. It is very
pow­er­ful. Use the word in the cor­rect way. Use the word to share
your love. Use white mag­ic, begin­ning with your­self. Tell your­self
how won­der­ful you are, how great you are. Tell your­self how much
you love your­self. Use the word to break all those tee­ny, tiny
agree­ments that make you suf­fer.
It is pos­si­ble. It is pos­si­ble because I did it, and I am no bet­ter than
you. No, we are exact­ly the same. We have the same kind of brain,
the same kind of bod­ies; we are humans. If I was able to break those
agree­ments and cre­ate new agree­ments, then you can do the same.
If I can be impec­ca­ble with my word, why not you? Just this one