THE NEXT THREE AGREEMENTS ARE REALLY BORN from the first
agreement. The second agreement is don’t take anything personally.
Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Using an earlier
example, if I see you on the street and I say, “Hey, you are so stupid,” without
knowing you, it’s not about you; it’s about me. If you take it personally, then
perhaps you believe you are stupid. Maybe you think to yourself, “How does he
know? Is he clairvoyant, or can everybody see how stupid I am?”
You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon
as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of
hell. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance.
Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of
selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.”
During the period of our education, or our domestication, we learn to take
everything personally. We think we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me,
always me!
Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All
people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely
different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally,
we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to
impose our world on their world.
Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it
has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they
give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point
of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.
If someone gives you an opinion and says, “Hey, you look so fat,” don’t take
it personally, because the truth is that this person is dealing with his or her own
feelings, beliefs, and opinions. That person tried to send poison to you and if
you take it personally, then you take that poison and it becomes yours. Taking
things personally makes you easy prey for these predators, the black magicians.
They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison
they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up.
You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if
you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to
poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement.