At a Loss For Words

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.

“Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary-General, put it so beautifully: ‘God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.’ We don’t have to quarrel about a word, because ‘God’ is only a word, a concept. One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, about concepts, about judgments. Drop your concepts, drop your opinions, drop your prejudices, drop your judgments, and you will see that.

“‘Quia de deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de deo, quomodo sit sed quomodo non sit.’ This is St. Thomas Aquinas’ introduction to his whole Summa Theologica: ‘Since we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not, we cannot consider how God is but only how He is not.’ I have already mentioned Thomas’ commentary on Boethius’ De Sancta Trinitate, where he says that the loftiest degree of the knowledge of God is to know God as the unknown, tamquam ignotum. And in his Questio Disputata de Potentia Dei, Thomas says, ‘This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God—to know that we do not know God.’ This gentleman was considered the prince of theologians. He was a mystic, and is a canonized saint today. We’re standing on pretty good ground.

“In India, we have a Sanskrit saying for this kind of thing: ‘neti, neti.’ It means: ‘not that, not that.’ Thomas’ own method was referred to as the via negativa, the negative way. C. S. Lewis wrote a diary while his wife was dying. It’s called A Grief Observed. He had married an American woman whom he loved dearly. He told his friends, ‘God gave me in my sixties what He denied me in my twenties.’ He hardly had married her when she died a painful death of cancer. Lewis said that his whole faith crumbled, like a house of cards. Here he was the great Christian apologist, but when disaster struck home, he asked himself, ‘Is God a loving Father or is God the great vivisectionist?’ There’s pretty good evidence for both! I remember that when my own mother got cancer, my sister said to me, ‘Tony, why did God allow this to happen to Mother?’ I said to her, ‘My dear, last year a million people died of starvation in China because of the drought, and you never raised a question.’ Sometimes the best thing that can happen to us is to be awakened to reality, for calamity to strike, for then we come to faith, as C. S. Lewis did. He said that he never had any doubts before about people surviving death, but when his wife died, he was no longer certain. Why? Because it was so important to him that she be living. Lewis, as you know, is the master of comparisons and analogies. He says, ‘It’s like a rope. Someone says to you, ‘Would this bear the weight of a hundred twenty pounds? You answer, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, we’re going to let down your best friend on this rope.’ Then you say, ‘Wait a minute, let me test that rope again.’ You’re not so sure now.’ Lewis also said in his diary that we cannot know anything about God and even our questions about God are absurd. Why? It’s as though a person born blind asks you, ‘The color green, is it hot or cold?’ Neti, neti, not that. ‘Is it long or is it short?’ Not that. ‘Is it sweet or is it sour?’ Not that. ‘Is it round or oval or square?’ Not that, not that. The blind person has no words, no concepts, for a color of which he has no idea, no intuition, no experience. You can only speak to him in analogies. No matter what he asks, you can only say, ‘Not that.’ C. S. Lewis says somewhere that it’s like asking how many minutes are in the color yellow. Everybody could be taking the question very seriously, discussing it, fighting about it. One person suggests there are twenty-five carrots in the color yellow, the other person says, ‘No, seventeen potatoes,’ and they’re suddenly fighting. Not that, not that!

“This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know. Our great tragedy is that we know too much. We think we know, that is our tragedy; so we never discover. In fact, Thomas Aquinas (he’s not only a theologian but also a great philosopher) says repeatedly, ‘All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.’”

Awareness Without Evaluating Everything

The following is the 13th 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

“Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.

“When you say of someone, ‘He’s a communist,’ understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on him. ‘She’s a capitalist.’ Understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on her, and if the label carries undertones of approval or disapproval, so much the worse! How are you going to understand what you disapprove of, or what you approve of, for that matter? All of this sounds like a new world, doesn’t it? No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is. Because if you desire to change what is into what you think should be, you no longer understand. A dog trainer attempts to understand a dog so that he can train the dog to perform certain tricks. A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He has no other aim. He’s not attempting to train them or get anything out of them. He’s interested in ants, he wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly. Change will happen, you will not have to bring it about. As the life of awareness settles on your darkness, whatever is evil will disappear. Whatever is good will be fostered. You will have to experience that for yourself.

“But this calls for a disciplined mind. And when I say disciplined, I’m not talking about effort. I’m talking about something else. Have you ever studied an athlete. His or her whole life is sports, but what a disciplined life he or she leads. And look at a river as it moves toward the sea. It creates its own banks that contain it. When there’s something within you that moves in the right direction, it creates its own discipline. The moment you get bitten by the bug of awareness. Oh, it’s so delightful! It’s the most delightful thing in the world; the most important, the most delightful. There’s nothing so important in the world as awakening. Nothing! And, of course, it is also discipline in its own way.

“There’s nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions, talk and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you’re hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you’re looking at? The great Socrates said, ‘The unaware life is not worth living.’ That’s a self-evident truth. Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else’s—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. Do you want to see how mechanical you really are? ‘My, that’s a lovely shirt you’re wearing.’ You feel good hearing that. For a shirt, for heaven’s sake! You feel proud of yourself when you hear that. People come over to my center in India and they say, ‘What a lovely place, these lovely trees’ (for which I’m not responsible at all), ‘this lovely climate.’ And already I’m feeling good, until I catch myself feeling good, and I say, ‘Hey, can you imagine anything as stupid as that?’ I’m not responsible for those trees; I wasn’t responsible for choosing the location. I didn’t order the weather; it just happened. But ‘me’ got in there, so I’m feeling good. I’m feeling good about ‘my’ culture and ‘my’ nation. How stupid can you get? I mean that. I’m told my great Indian culture has produced all these mystics. I didn’t produce them. I’m not responsible for them. Or they tell me, ‘That country of yours and its poverty—it’s disgusting.’ I feel ashamed. But I didn’t create it. What’s going on? Did you ever stop to think? People tell you, ‘I think you’re very charming,’ so I feel wonderful. I get a positive stroke (that’s why they call it I’m O.K., you’re O.K.). I’m going to write a book someday and the title will be I’m an Ass, You’re an Ass. That’s the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you’re an ass. It’s wonderful. When people tell me, ‘You’re wrong.’ I say, ‘What can you expect of an ass?’.

“Disarmed, everybody has to be disarmed. In the final liberation, I’m an ass, you’re an ass. Normally the way it goes, I press a button and you’re up; I press another button and you’re down. And you like that. How many people do you know who are unaffected by praise or blame? That isn’t human, we say. Human means that you have to be a little monkey, so everybody can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing. But is that human? If you find me charming, it means that right now you’re in a good mood, nothing more.

“It also means that I fit your shopping list. We all carry a shopping list around, and it’s as though you’ve got to measure up to this list—tall, um, dark, um, handsome, according to my tastes. ‘I like the sound of his voice.’ You say, ‘I’m in love.’ You’re not in love, you silly ass. Any time you’re in love—I hesitate to say this—you’re being particularly asinine. Sit down and watch what’s happening to you. You’re running away from yourself. You want to escape. Somebody once said, ‘Thank God for reality, and for the means to escape from it.’ So that’s what’s going on. We are so mechanical, so controlled. We write books about being controlled and how wonderful it is to be controlled and how necessary it is that people tell you you’re O.K. Then you’ll have a good feeling about yourself. How wonderful it is to be in prison! Or as somebody said to me yesterday, to be in your cage. Do you like being in prison? Do you like being controlled? Let me tell you something: If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you’re O.K., you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you’re not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people’s expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair, whether your shoes are polished—in short, whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human?

“This is what you’ll discover when you observe yourself! You’ll be horrified! The fact of the matter is that you’re neither O.K. nor not O.K. You may fit the current mood or trend or fashion! Does that mean you’ve become O.K.? Does your O.K.-ness depend on that? Does it depend on what people think of you? Jesus Christ must have been pretty ‘not O.K.’ by those standards. You’re not O.K. and you’re not not O.K., you’re you. I hope that is going to be the big discovery, at least for some of you. If three or four of you make this discovery during these days we spend together, my, what a wonderful thing! Extraordinary! Cut out all the O.K. stuff and the not-O.K. stuff; cut out all the judgments and simply observe, watch. You’ll make great discoveries. These discoveries will change you. You won’t have to make the slightest effort, believe me.

“This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says, ‘What do you have on your lap there?’ And the man says, ‘This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.’ The conductor says, ‘You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.’

“Psychology and spirituality (as we generally understand it) transfer the bomb from your lap to under your seat. They don’t really solve your problems. They exchange your problems for other problems. Has that ever struck you? You had a problem, now you exchange it for another one. It’s always going to be that way until we solve the problem called ‘you.’”

Will I Be of Help to You in This Retreat?

The following is the 2nd 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.

“Do you think I am going to help anybody? No! Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Don’t expect me to be of help to anyone. Nor do I expect to damage anyone. If you are damaged, you did it; and if you are helped, you did it. You really did! You think people help you? They don’t. You think people support you? They don’t.

“There was a woman in a therapy group I was conducting once. She was a religious sister. She said to me, ‘I don’t feel supported by my superior.’ So I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ And she said, ‘Well, my superior, the provincial superior, never shows up at the novitiate where I am in charge, never. She never says a word of appreciation.’ I said to her, ‘All right, let’s do a little role playing. Pretend I know your provincial superior. In fact, pretend I know exactly what she thinks about you. So I say to you (acting the part of the provincial superior), ‘You know, Mary, the reason I don’t come to that place you’re in is because it is the one place in the province that is trouble-free—no problems. I know you’re in charge, so all is well.’ How do you feel now?’ She said, ‘I feel great.’ Then I said to her, ‘All right, would you mind leaving the room for a minute or two. This is part of the exercise.’ So she did. While she was away, I said to the others in the therapy group, ‘I am still the provincial superior, O.K.? Mary out there is the worst novice director I have ever had in the whole history of the province. In fact, the reason I don’t go to the novitiate is because I can’t bear to see what she is up to. It’s simply awful. But if I tell her the truth, it’s only going to make those novices suffer all the more. We are getting somebody to take her place in a year or two; we are training someone. In the meantime I thought I would say those nice things to her to keep her going. What do you think of that?’ They answered, ‘Well, it was really the only thing you could do under the circumstances.’ Then I brought Mary back into the group and asked her if she still felt great. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. Poor Mary! She thought she was being supported when she wasn’t. The point is that most of what we feel and think we conjure up for ourselves in our heads, including this business of being helped by people.

“Do you think you help people because you are in love with them? Well, I’ve got news for you. You are never in love with anyone. You’re only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person. Take a minute to think about that: You are never in love with anyone, you’re in love with your prejudiced idea of that person. Isn’t that how you fall out of love? Your idea changes, doesn’t it? ‘How could you let me down when I trusted you so much?’ you say to someone. Did you really trust them? You never trusted anyone. Come off it! That’s part of society’s brainwashing. You never trust anyone. You only trust your judgment about that person. So what are you complaining about? The fact is that you don’t like to say, ‘My judgment was lousy.’ That’s not very flattering to you, is it? So you prefer to say, ‘How could you have let me down?’

“So there it is: People don’t really want to grow up, people don’t really want to change, people don’t really want to be happy. As someone so wisely said to me, ‘Don’t try to make them happy, you’ll only get in trouble. Don’t try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig.’ Like the businessman who goes into a bar, sits down, and sees this fellow with a banana in his ear—a banana in his ear! And he thinks, ‘I wonder if I should mention that to him. No, it’s none of my business.’ But the thought nags at him. So after having a drink or two, he says to the fellow, ‘Excuse me, ah, you’ve got a banana in your ear.’ The fellow says, ‘What?’ The businessman repeats, ‘You’ve got a banana in your ear.’ Again the fellow says, ‘What was that?’ ‘You’ve got a banana in your ear!’ the businessman shouts. ‘Talk louder,’ the fellow says, ‘I’ve got a banana in my ear!’

“So it’s useless. ‘Give up, give up, give up,’ I say to myself. Say your thing and get out of here. And if they profit, that’s fine, and if they don’t, too bad!”

At a Loss For Words

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.

“Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary-General, put it so beautifully: ‘God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.’ We don’t have to quarrel about a word, because ‘God’ is only a word, a concept. One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, about concepts, about judgments. Drop your concepts, drop your opinions, drop your prejudices, drop your judgments, and you will see that.

“‘Quia de deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de deo, quomodo sit sed quomodo non sit.’ This is St. Thomas Aquinas’ introduction to his whole Summa Theologica: ‘Since we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not, we cannot consider how God is but only how He is not.’ I have already mentioned Thomas’ commentary on Boethius’ De Sancta Trinitate, where he says that the loftiest degree of the knowledge of God is to know God as the unknown, tamquam ignotum. And in his Questio Disputata de Potentia Dei, Thomas says, ‘This is what is ultimate in the human knowledge of God—to know that we do not know God.’ This gentleman was considered the prince of theologians. He was a mystic, and is a canonized saint today. We’re standing on pretty good ground.

“In India, we have a Sanskrit saying for this kind of thing: ‘neti, neti.’ It means: ‘not that, not that.’ Thomas’ own method was referred to as the via negativa, the negative way. C. S. Lewis wrote a diary while his wife was dying. It’s called A Grief Observed. He had married an American woman whom he loved dearly. He told his friends, ‘God gave me in my sixties what He denied me in my twenties.’ He hardly had married her when she died a painful death of cancer. Lewis said that his whole faith crumbled, like a house of cards. Here he was the great Christian apologist, but when disaster struck home, he asked himself, ‘Is God a loving Father or is God the great vivisectionist?’ There’s pretty good evidence for both! I remember that when my own mother got cancer, my sister said to me, ‘Tony, why did God allow this to happen to Mother?’ I said to her, ‘My dear, last year a million people died of starvation in China because of the drought, and you never raised a question.’ Sometimes the best thing that can happen to us is to be awakened to reality, for calamity to strike, for then we come to faith, as C. S. Lewis did. He said that he never had any doubts before about people surviving death, but when his wife died, he was no longer certain. Why? Because it was so important to him that she be living. Lewis, as you know, is the master of comparisons and analogies. He says, ‘It’s like a rope. Someone says to you, ‘Would this bear the weight of a hundred twenty pounds? You answer, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, we’re going to let down your best friend on this rope.’ Then you say, ‘Wait a minute, let me test that rope again.’ You’re not so sure now.’ Lewis also said in his diary that we cannot know anything about God and even our questions about God are absurd. Why? It’s as though a person born blind asks you, ‘The color green, is it hot or cold?’ Neti, neti, not that. ‘Is it long or is it short?’ Not that. ‘Is it sweet or is it sour?’ Not that. ‘Is it round or oval or square?’ Not that, not that. The blind person has no words, no concepts, for a color of which he has no idea, no intuition, no experience. You can only speak to him in analogies. No matter what he asks, you can only say, ‘Not that.’ C. S. Lewis says somewhere that it’s like asking how many minutes are in the color yellow. Everybody could be taking the question very seriously, discussing it, fighting about it. One person suggests there are twenty-five carrots in the color yellow, the other person says, ‘No, seventeen potatoes,’ and they’re suddenly fighting. Not that, not that!

“This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know. Our great tragedy is that we know too much. We think we know, that is our tragedy; so we never discover. In fact, Thomas Aquinas (he’s not only a theologian but also a great philosopher) says repeatedly, ‘All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.’”

Awareness Without Evaluating Everything

The following is the 13th 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

“Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.

“When you say of someone, ‘He’s a communist,’ understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on him. ‘She’s a capitalist.’ Understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on her, and if the label carries undertones of approval or disapproval, so much the worse! How are you going to understand what you disapprove of, or what you approve of, for that matter? All of this sounds like a new world, doesn’t it? No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is. Because if you desire to change what is into what you think should be, you no longer understand. A dog trainer attempts to understand a dog so that he can train the dog to perform certain tricks. A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He has no other aim. He’s not attempting to train them or get anything out of them. He’s interested in ants, he wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly. Change will happen, you will not have to bring it about. As the life of awareness settles on your darkness, whatever is evil will disappear. Whatever is good will be fostered. You will have to experience that for yourself.

“But this calls for a disciplined mind. And when I say disciplined, I’m not talking about effort. I’m talking about something else. Have you ever studied an athlete. His or her whole life is sports, but what a disciplined life he or she leads. And look at a river as it moves toward the sea. It creates its own banks that contain it. When there’s something within you that moves in the right direction, it creates its own discipline. The moment you get bitten by the bug of awareness. Oh, it’s so delightful! It’s the most delightful thing in the world; the most important, the most delightful. There’s nothing so important in the world as awakening. Nothing! And, of course, it is also discipline in its own way.

“There’s nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions, talk and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you’re hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you’re looking at? The great Socrates said, ‘The unaware life is not worth living.’ That’s a self-evident truth. Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts—generally somebody else’s—mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. Do you want to see how mechanical you really are? ‘My, that’s a lovely shirt you’re wearing.’ You feel good hearing that. For a shirt, for heaven’s sake! You feel proud of yourself when you hear that. People come over to my center in India and they say, ‘What a lovely place, these lovely trees’ (for which I’m not responsible at all), ‘this lovely climate.’ And already I’m feeling good, until I catch myself feeling good, and I say, ‘Hey, can you imagine anything as stupid as that?’ I’m not responsible for those trees; I wasn’t responsible for choosing the location. I didn’t order the weather; it just happened. But ‘me’ got in there, so I’m feeling good. I’m feeling good about ‘my’ culture and ‘my’ nation. How stupid can you get? I mean that. I’m told my great Indian culture has produced all these mystics. I didn’t produce them. I’m not responsible for them. Or they tell me, ‘That country of yours and its poverty—it’s disgusting.’ I feel ashamed. But I didn’t create it. What’s going on? Did you ever stop to think? People tell you, ‘I think you’re very charming,’ so I feel wonderful. I get a positive stroke (that’s why they call it I’m O.K., you’re O.K.). I’m going to write a book someday and the title will be I’m an Ass, You’re an Ass. That’s the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you’re an ass. It’s wonderful. When people tell me, ‘You’re wrong.’ I say, ‘What can you expect of an ass?’.

“Disarmed, everybody has to be disarmed. In the final liberation, I’m an ass, you’re an ass. Normally the way it goes, I press a button and you’re up; I press another button and you’re down. And you like that. How many people do you know who are unaffected by praise or blame? That isn’t human, we say. Human means that you have to be a little monkey, so everybody can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing. But is that human? If you find me charming, it means that right now you’re in a good mood, nothing more.

“It also means that I fit your shopping list. We all carry a shopping list around, and it’s as though you’ve got to measure up to this list—tall, um, dark, um, handsome, according to my tastes. ‘I like the sound of his voice.’ You say, ‘I’m in love.’ You’re not in love, you silly ass. Any time you’re in love—I hesitate to say this—you’re being particularly asinine. Sit down and watch what’s happening to you. You’re running away from yourself. You want to escape. Somebody once said, ‘Thank God for reality, and for the means to escape from it.’ So that’s what’s going on. We are so mechanical, so controlled. We write books about being controlled and how wonderful it is to be controlled and how necessary it is that people tell you you’re O.K. Then you’ll have a good feeling about yourself. How wonderful it is to be in prison! Or as somebody said to me yesterday, to be in your cage. Do you like being in prison? Do you like being controlled? Let me tell you something: If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you’re O.K., you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you’re not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people’s expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair, whether your shoes are polished—in short, whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human?

“This is what you’ll discover when you observe yourself! You’ll be horrified! The fact of the matter is that you’re neither O.K. nor not O.K. You may fit the current mood or trend or fashion! Does that mean you’ve become O.K.? Does your O.K.-ness depend on that? Does it depend on what people think of you? Jesus Christ must have been pretty ‘not O.K.’ by those standards. You’re not O.K. and you’re not not O.K., you’re you. I hope that is going to be the big discovery, at least for some of you. If three or four of you make this discovery during these days we spend together, my, what a wonderful thing! Extraordinary! Cut out all the O.K. stuff and the not-O.K. stuff; cut out all the judgments and simply observe, watch. You’ll make great discoveries. These discoveries will change you. You won’t have to make the slightest effort, believe me.

“This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says, ‘What do you have on your lap there?’ And the man says, ‘This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.’ The conductor says, ‘You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.’

“Psychology and spirituality (as we generally understand it) transfer the bomb from your lap to under your seat. They don’t really solve your problems. They exchange your problems for other problems. Has that ever struck you? You had a problem, now you exchange it for another one. It’s always going to be that way until we solve the problem called ‘you.’”