The following is the 37th chapter in, “AWARENESS: A de Mellow Spirituality Conference in His Own Words” by Fr. Anthony de Mello, S.J. edited by J. Francis Stroud, S.J., Copyright © 1990 by the DeMello Stroud Spirituality Center.
“Every time I have a concept, it is something that I could
apply to a number of individuals. We’re not talking about a concrete,
particular name like Mary or John, which doesn’t have a conceptual meaning. A
concept applies to any number of individuals, countless individuals. Concepts
are universal. For instance, the word ‘leaf’ could be applied to every single
leaf on a tree; the same word applies to all those individual leaves. Moreover,
the same word applies to all the leaves on all trees, big ones, small ones,
tender ones, dried ones, yellow ones, green ones, banana leaves. So if I say to
you that I saw a leaf this morning, you really don’t have an idea of what I
saw.
“Let’s see if you can understand that. You do have an idea of what I did not see. I did not see an animal. I did
not see a dog. I did not see a human being. I did not see a shoe. So you have
some kind of a vague idea of what I saw, but it isn’t particularized, it isn’t
concrete. ‘Human being’ refers not to primitive man, not to civilized man, not
to grownup man, not to a child, not to a male or a female, not to this
particular age or another, not to this culture or the other, but to the
concept. The human being is found concrete; you never find a universal human
being like your concept. So your concept points, but it is never entirely
accurate; it misses uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal.
“When I give you a concept, I give you something, and yet how little I have given you. The concept is so
valuable, so useful for science. For instance, if I say that everyone here is
an animal that would be perfectly accurate from a scientific viewpoint. But
we’re something more than animals. If I say that Mary Jane is an animal, that’s
true; but because I’ve omitted something essential about her, it’s false; it
does her an injustice. When I call a person a woman, that’s true; but there are
lots of things in that person that don’t fit into the concept ‘woman.’ She is
always this particular, concrete, unique woman, who can only be experienced, not
conceptualized. The concrete person I’ve got to see for myself, to experience
for myself, to intuit for myself. The individual can be intuited but cannot be
conceptualized.
“A person is beyond the thinking mind. Many of you would
probably be proud to be called Americans, as many Indians would probably be
proud to be called Indians. But what is ‘American,’ what is ‘Indian’? It’s a
convention; it’s not part of your nature. All you’ve got is a label. You really
don’t know the person. The concept always misses or omits something extremely
important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete
uniqueness. The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, ‘The day you
teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.’
How true! The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and
you say to him, Sparrow,’ then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy,
moving object similar to it he says, ‘Oh, sparrows. I’ve seen sparrows. I’m bored by sparrows.’
“If you don’t look at things through your concepts, you’ll
never be bored. Every single thing is unique. Every sparrow is unlike every
other sparrow despite the similarities. It’s a great help to have similarities,
so we can abstract, so that we can have a concept. It’s a great help, from the
point of view of communication, education, science. But it’s also very
misleading and a great hindrance to seeing this
concrete individual. If all you experience is your concept, you’re not
experiencing reality, because reality is concrete. The concept is a help, to lead you to reality, but when you get
there, you’ve got to intuit or experience it directly.
“A second quality of a concept is that it is static whereas
reality is in flux. We use the same name for Niagara Falls, but that body of
water is constantly changing. You’ve got the word ‘river,’ but the water there
is constantly flowing. You’ve got one word for your ‘body,’ but the cells in
your body are constantly being renewed. Let’s suppose, for example, there is an
enormous wind outside and I want the people in my country to get an idea of
what an American gale or hurricane is like. So I capture it in a cigar box and
I go back home and say, ‘Look at this.’ Naturally, it isn’t a gale anymore, is
it? Once it’s captured. Or if I want
you to get the feel of what the flow of a river is like and I bring it to you
in a bucket. The moment I put it into a bucket it has stopped flowing. The
moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static,
dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when
you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows.
Finally, if we are to believe the mystics (and it doesn’t take too much of an
effort to understand this, or even believe it, but no one can see it at once),
reality is whole, but words and
concepts fragment reality. That is
why it is so difficult to translate from one language to another, because each
language cuts reality up differently. The English word ‘home’ is impossible to
translate into French or Spanish. ‘Casa’
is not quite ‘home’; ‘home’ has associations that are peculiar to the English
language. Every language has untranslatable words and expressions, because
we’re cutting reality up and adding something or subtracting something and
usage keeps changing. Reality is a whole and we cut it up to make concepts and
we use words to indicate different parts. If you had never seen an animal in
your life, for example, and one day you found a tail—just a tail—and somebody
told you, ‘That’s a tail,’ would you have any idea of what it was if you had no
idea what an animal was?
“Ideas actually fragment the vision, intuition, or
experience of reality as a whole. This is what the mystics are perpetually
telling us. Words cannot give you reality. They only point, they only indicate.
You use them as pointers to get to reality. But once you get there, your
concepts are useless. A Hindu priest once had a dispute with a philosopher who
claimed that the final barrier to God was the word ‘God,’ the concept of God.
The priest was quite shocked by this, but the philosopher said, ‘The ass that
you mount —and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you
enter the house. You use the concept to get there; then you dismount, you go
beyond it.’ You don’t need to be a mystic to understand that reality is
something that cannot be captured by words or concepts. To know reality you
have to know beyond knowing.
“Do those words ring a bell? Those of you who are familiar
with The Cloud of Unknowing would
recognize the expression. Poets, painters, mystics, and the great philosophers
all have intimations of its truth. Let’s suppose that one day I’m watching a
tree. Until now, every time I saw a tree, I said, ‘Well, it’s a tree’, but
today when I’m looking at the tree, I don’t see a tree. At least I don’t see
what I’m accustomed to seeing. I see something with the freshness of a child’s
vision. I have no word for it. I see something unique, whole, flowing, not
fragmented. And I’m in awe. If you were to ask me, ‘What did you see?’ what do
you think I’d answer? I have no word for it. There is no word for reality.
Because as soon as I put a word to it, we’re back into concepts again.
“And if I cannot express this reality that is visible to my
senses, how does one express what cannot be seen by the eye or heard by the ear?
How does one find a word for the reality of God? Are you beginning to
understand what Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and all the rest were saying and
what the Church teaches constantly when she says that God is mystery, is
unintelligible to the human mind?
“The great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote
to a young German drug addict who had asked him for help. The addict had said, ‘You
theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my life? How
could this God get me off drugs?’ Rahner said to him, ‘I must confess to you in
all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not
understand what God is; no one can. We have intimations, inklings; we make
faltering, inadequate attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word
for it, no sentence for it.’ And talking to a group of theologians in London,
Rahner said, ‘The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God,
and to explain God as unexplainable.’ Unexplainable mystery. One does not know,
one cannot say. One says, ‘Ah, ah…’
“Words are pointers, they’re not descriptions. Tragically, people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing. How could you get so crazy? Can you be crazier than that? Even where human beings are concerned, or trees and leaves and animals, the word is not the thing. And you would say that, where God is concerned, the word is one thing? What are you talking about? An internationally famous scripture scholar attended this course in San Francisco, and he said to me, ‘My God, after listening to you, I understand that I’ve been an idol worshiper all my life!’ He said this openly. ‘It never struck me that I had been an idol worshiper. My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol.’ These are the more dangerous idol worshipers. They use a very subtle substance, the mind, to produce their God.
“What I’m leading you to is the following:
awareness of reality, around you. Awareness means to watch, to observe what
is going on within you and around you. ‘Going on’ is pretty accurate: Trees,
grass, flowers, animals, rock, all of
reality is moving. One observes it, one watches it. How essential it is for the
human being not just to observe himself or herself, but to watch all of
reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Do you want to break out of your
prison? Then look; observe; spend
hours observing. Watching what? Anything.
The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones,
watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you
will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what
our thoughts and our words have imposed on us. Hopefully we will see. What will
we see? This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words and
concepts. This is a spiritual
exercise—connected with spirituality—connected with breaking out of your cage,
out of the imprisonment of the concepts and words.
“How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a
child. This doesn’t mean you should drop your concepts totally; they’re very
precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function.
Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We’re invited, not to become
children, but to become like
children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of
paradise; we do have to develop an ‘I’ and a ‘me’ through these concepts. But
then we need to return to paradise. We need to be redeemed again. We need to
put off the old man, the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the
state of the child but without being
a child. When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it
isn’t the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it’s the formless wonder of the
child. Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and
words and concepts. Then hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll return to wonder
again.”
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