The third spiritual agreement in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, “The Four Agreements,” is this: don’t make assumptions. Ruiz writes:

All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally. Take a moment to consider the truth of that statement. The whole world of control between humans is about making assumptions and taking things personally. Our whole dream of hell is based on that.

We create a lot of emotional poison just by making assumptions and taking it personally, because usually we start gossiping (not me!) about our assumptions. Remember, gossiping is the way we communicate to each other in the dream of hell and transfer poison to one another. Because we are afraid to ask for clarification, we make assumptions, and believe we are right about the assumptions; then we defend our assumptions and try to make someone else wrong. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering.