How Happiness Happens

The following is the 19th 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.

 “Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.

“There’s the story of the disciple who went to the master and said, ‘Could you give me a word of wisdom? Could you tell me something that would guide me through my days?’ It was the master’s day of silence, so he picked up a pad. It said, ‘Awareness.’ When the disciple saw it, he said, ‘This is too brief. Can you expand on it a bit?’ So the master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness.’ The disciple said, ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’ The master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness means—awareness.’

“That’s what it is to watch yourself. No one can show you how to do it, because he would be giving you a technique, he would be programming you. But watch yourself. When you talk to someone, are you aware of it or are you simply identifying with it? When you got angry with somebody, were you aware that you were angry or were you simply identifying with your anger? Later, when you had the time, did you study your experience and attempt to understand it? Where did it come from? What brought it on? I don’t know of any other way to awareness. You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change. But when you understand it, it changes.

“I am sometimes asked, ‘Is this growing in awareness a gradual thing, or is it a whammo kind of thing?’  There are some lucky people who see this in a flash. They just become aware. There are others who keep growing into it, slowly, gradually, increasingly. They begin to see things. Illusions drop away, fantasies are peeled away, and they start to get in touch with facts. There’s no general rule. There’s a famous story about the lion who came upon a flock of sheep and to his amazement found a lion among the sheep. It was a lion who had been brought up by the sheep ever since he was a cub. It would bleat like a sheep and run around like a sheep. The lion went straight for him, and when the sheep-lion stood in front of the real one, he trembled in every limb. And the lion said to him, ‘What are you doing among these sheep?’ And the sheep-lion said, ‘I am a sheep.’ And the lion said, ‘Oh no you’re not. You’re coming with me.’ So he took the sheep-lion to a pool and said, ‘Look!’ And when the sheep-lion looked at his reflection in the water, he let out a mighty roar, and in that moment he was transformed. He was never the same again.

“If you’re lucky and the gods are gracious or if you are gifted with divine grace (use any theological expression you want), you might suddenly understand who ‘I’ is, and you’ll never be the same again, never. Nothing will ever be able to touch you again and no one will ever be able to hurt you again.

“You will fear no one and you will fear nothing. Isn’t that extraordinary? You’ll live like a king, like a queen. This is what it means to live like royalty. Not rubbish like getting your picture in the newspapers or having a lot of money. That’s a lot of rot. You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either. Isn’t that a wonderful state to be in! Some people arrive at this goal painstakingly, step by step, through months and weeks of self-awareness. But I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it on faith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before.

“You’re much more energetic, much more alive. People think that if they had no cravings, they’d be like deadwood. But in fact they’d lose their tension. Get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. Relaxed. You wouldn’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen.

“There’s a lovely saying of Tranxu, a great Chinese sage, that I took the trouble to learn by heart. It goes: ‘When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.’  Isn’t that an image of what most people are? When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.

“Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about. That can only come from awareness. And in awareness you will understand that honor doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a social convention, that’s all. That’s why the mystics and the prophets didn’t bother one bit about it. Honor or disgrace meant nothing to them. They were living in another world, in the world of the awakened. Success or failure meant nothing to them. They had the attitude: ‘I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?’

“Someone once said, ‘The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.’  But these are the easiest things in the world if you haven’t identified with the ‘me’.  You can say things like ‘I’m wrong! If you knew me better, you’d see how often I’m wrong. What would you expect from an ass?’  But if I haven’t identified with these aspects of ‘me’, you can’t hurt me. Initially, the old conditioning will kick in and you’ll be depressed and anxious. You’ll grieve, cry, and so on. ‘Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed’. But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it anymore. Do you know what a big difference that is?

“You step outside of yourself and look at that depression, and don’t identify with it. You don’t do a thing to make it go away; you are perfectly willing to go on with your life while it passes through you and disappears. If you don’t know what that means, you really have something to look forward to. And anxiety? There it comes and you’re not troubled. How strange! You’re anxious but you’re not troubled.

“Isn’t that a paradox? And you’re willing to let this cloud come in, because the more you fight it, the more power you give it. You’re willing to observe it as it passes by. You can be happy in your anxiety. Isn’t that crazy? You can be happy in your depression. But you can’t have the wrong notion of happiness. Did you think happiness was excitement or thrills? That’s what causes the depression. Didn’t anyone tell you that? You’re thrilled, all right, but you’re just preparing the way for your next depression. You’re thrilled but you pick up the anxiety behind that: How can I make it last? That’s not happiness, that’s addiction.

“I wonder how many nonaddicts there are reading this book? If you’re anything like the average group, there are few, very few. Don’t look down your nose at the alcoholics and the drug addicts: maybe you’re just as addicted as they are. The first time I got a glimpse of this new world, it was terrifying. I understood what it meant to be alone, with nowhere to rest your head, to leave everyone free and be free yourself, to be special to no one and love everyone—because love does that. It shines on good and bad alike; it makes rain fall on saints and sinners alike.

“Is it possible for the rose to say, ‘I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad?’ Or is it possible for the lamp to say, ‘I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people.’ Or can a tree say, ‘I’ll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad’? These are images of what love is about.

“It’s been there all along, staring us in the face in the scriptures, though we never cared to see it because we were so drowned in what our culture calls love with its love songs and poems—that isn’t love at all, that’s the opposite of love. That’s desire and control and possessiveness. That’s manipulation, and fear, and anxiety—that’s not love. We were told that happiness is a smooth complexion, a holiday resort. It isn’t these things, but we have subtle ways of making our happiness depend on other things, both within us and outside us. We say, ‘I refuse to be happy until my neurosis goes.’ I have good news for you: You can be happy right now, with the neurosis, You want even better news? There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing what in India we call anand—bliss, bliss. There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have. Otherwise you would be experiencing bliss. You’re focusing on what you don’t have. But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.

“Jesus was talking horse sense to lay people, to starving people, to poor people. He was telling them good news: It’s yours for the taking. But who listens? No one’s interested, they’d rather be asleep”.

How Happiness Happens

The following is the 19th 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.

 “Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.

“There’s the story of the disciple who went to the master and said, ‘Could you give me a word of wisdom? Could you tell me something that would guide me through my days?’ It was the master’s day of silence, so he picked up a pad. It said, ‘Awareness.’ When the disciple saw it, he said, ‘This is too brief. Can you expand on it a bit?’ So the master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness.’ The disciple said, ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’ The master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness means—awareness.’

“That’s what it is to watch yourself. No one can show you how to do it, because he would be giving you a technique, he would be programming you. But watch yourself. When you talk to someone, are you aware of it or are you simply identifying with it? When you got angry with somebody, were you aware that you were angry or were you simply identifying with your anger? Later, when you had the time, did you study your experience and attempt to understand it? Where did it come from? What brought it on? I don’t know of any other way to awareness. You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change. But when you understand it, it changes.

“I am sometimes asked, ‘Is this growing in awareness a gradual thing, or is it a ‘whammo’ kind of thing?’  There are some lucky people who see this in a flash. They just become aware. There are others who keep growing into it, slowly, gradually, increasingly. They begin to see things. Illusions drop away, fantasies are peeled away, and they start to get in touch with facts. There’s no general rule. There’s a famous story about the lion who came upon a flock of sheep and to his amazement found a lion among the sheep. It was a lion who had been brought up by the sheep ever since he was a cub. It would bleat like a sheep and run around like a sheep. The lion went straight for him, and when the sheep-lion stood in front of the real one, he trembled in every limb. And the lion said to him, ‘What are you doing among these sheep?’ And the sheep-lion said, ‘I am a sheep.’ And the lion said, ‘Oh no you’re not. You’re coming with me.’ So he took the sheep-lion to a pool and said, ‘Look!’ And when the sheep-lion looked at his reflection in the water, he let out a mighty roar, and in that moment he was transformed. He was never the same again.

“If you’re lucky and the gods are gracious or if you are gifted with divine grace (use any theological expression you want), you might suddenly understand who ‘I’ is, and you’ll never be the same again, never. Nothing will ever be able to touch you again and no one will ever be able to hurt you again.

“You will fear no one and you will fear nothing. Isn’t that extraordinary? You’ll live like a king, like a queen. This is what it means to live like royalty. Not rubbish like getting your picture in the newspapers or having a lot of money. That’s a lot of rot. You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either. Isn’t that a wonderful state to be in! Some people arrive at this goal painstakingly, step by step, through months and weeks of self-awareness. But I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it on faith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before.

“You’re much more energetic, much more alive. People think that if they had no cravings, they’d be like deadwood. But in fact they’d lose their tension. Get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding, you will be yourself. Relaxed. You wouldn’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen.

“There’s a lovely saying of Tranxu, a great Chinese sage, that I took the trouble to learn by heart. It goes: ‘When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.’  Isn’t that an image of what most people are? When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.

“Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about. That can only come from awareness. And in awareness you will understand that honor doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a social convention, that’s all. That’s why the mystics and the prophets didn’t bother one bit about it. Honor or disgrace meant nothing to them. They were living in another world, in the world of the awakened. Success or failure meant nothing to them. They had the attitude: ‘I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?’

“Someone once said, ‘The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.’  But these are the easiest things in the world if you haven’t identified with the ‘me’.  You can say things like ‘I’m wrong! If you knew me better, you’d see how often I’m wrong. What would you expect from an ass?’  But if I haven’t identified with these aspects of ‘me’, you can’t hurt me. Initially, the old conditioning will kick in and you’ll be depressed and anxious. You’ll grieve, cry, and so on. ‘Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed’. But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it anymore. Do you know what a big difference that is?

“You step outside of yourself and look at that depression, and don’t identify with it. You don’t do a thing to make it go away; you are perfectly willing to go on with your life while it passes through you and disappears. If you don’t know what that means, you really have something to look forward to. And anxiety? There it comes and you’re not troubled. How strange! You’re anxious but you’re not troubled.

“Isn’t that a paradox? And you’re willing to let this cloud come in, because the more you fight it, the more power you give it. You’re willing to observe it as it passes by. You can be happy in your anxiety. Isn’t that crazy? You can be happy in your depression. But you can’t have the wrong notion of happiness. Did you think happiness was excitement or thrills? That’s what causes the depression. Didn’t anyone tell you that? You’re thrilled, all right, but you’re just preparing the way for your next depression. You’re thrilled but you pick up the anxiety behind that: How can I make it last? That’s not happiness, that’s addiction.

“I wonder how many nonaddicts there are reading this book? If you’re anything like the average group, there are few, very few. Don’t look down your nose at the alcoholics and the drug addicts: maybe you’re just as addicted as they are. The first time I got a glimpse of this new world, it was terrifying. I understood what it meant to be alone, with nowhere to rest your head, to leave everyone free and be free yourself, to be special to no one and love everyone—because love does that. It shines on good and bad alike; it makes rain fall on saints and sinners alike.

“Is it possible for the rose to say, ‘I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad?’ Or is it possible for the lamp to say, ‘I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people.’ Or can a tree say, ‘I’ll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad’? These are images of what love is about.

“It’s been there all along, staring us in the face in the scriptures, though we never cared to see it because we were so drowned in what our culture calls love with its love songs and poems—that isn’t love at all, that’s the opposite of love. That’s desire and control and possessiveness. That’s manipulation, and fear, and anxiety—that’s not love. We were told that happiness is a smooth complexion, a holiday resort. It isn’t these things, but we have subtle ways of making our happiness depend on other things, both within us and outside us. We say, ‘I refuse to be happy until my neurosis goes.’ I have good news for you: You can be happy right now, with the neurosis, You want even better news? There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing what in India we call anand—bliss, bliss. There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have. Otherwise you would be experiencing bliss. You’re focusing on what you don’t have. But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.

“Jesus was talking horse sense to lay people, to starving people, to poor people. He was telling them good news: It’s yours for the taking. But who listens? No one’s interested, they’d rather be asleep”.

The Land of Love (Part 1)

The following is Part 1 of the 57th and final 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.

“If we really dropped illusions for what they can give us or deprive us of, we would be alert. The consequence of not doing this is terrifying and unescapable [sic]. We lose our capacity to love. If you wish to love, you must learn to see again. And if you wish to see, you must learn to give up your drug. It’s as simple as that. Give up your dependency. Tear away the tentacles of society that have enveloped and suffocated your being. You must drop them. Externally, everything will go on as before, but though you will continue to be in the world, you will no longer be of it. In your heart, you will now be free at last, if utterly alone. Your dependence on your drug will die. You don’t have to go to the desert; you’re right in the middle of people; you’re enjoying them immensely. But they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable. That’s what aloneness means. In this solitude your dependence dies. The capacity to love is born. One no longer sees others as means of satisfying one’s addiction. Only someone who has attempted this knows the terrors of the process. It’s like inviting yourself to die. It’s like asking the poor drug addict to give up the only happiness he has ever known. How to replace it with the taste of bread and fruit and the clean taste of the morning air, the sweetness of the water of the mountain stream? While he is struggling with his withdrawal symptoms and the emptiness he experiences within himself now that his drug is gone, nothing can fill the emptiness except his drug. Can you imagine a life in which you refuse to enjoy or take pleasure in a single word of appreciation or to rest your head on anyone’s shoulder for support? Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore. You refuse to need any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call anyone your own. The birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through life. If you ever get to this state, you will at last know what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. Every word there is measured. To see at last with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. You will know what it means to love. But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone.

“How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, by the infinite patience and compassion you would have for a drug addict. By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug. What good things? The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and intimacy with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not depend emotionally but whose company you enjoy. It will also help if you take on activities that you can do with your whole being, activities that you so love to do that while you’re engaged in them success, recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to you. It will help, too, if you return to nature. Send the crowds away, go up to the mountains, and silently commune with trees and flowers and animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars. I’ve told you what a spiritual exercise it is to gaze at things, to be aware of things around you. Hopefully, the words will drop, the concepts will drop, and you will see, you will make contact with reality. That is the cure for loneliness. Generally, we seek to cure our loneliness through emotional dependence on people, through gregariousness and noise. That is no cure. Get back to things, get back to nature, go up in the mountains. Then you will know that your heart has brought you to the vast desert of solitude, there is no one there at your side, absolutely no one.

“At first this will seem unbearable. But it is only because you are unaccustomed to aloneness. If you manage to stay there for a while, the desert will suddenly blossom into love. Your heart will burst into song. And it will be springtime forever; the drug will be out; you’re free. Then you will understand what freedom is, what love is, what happiness is, what reality is, what truth is, what God is. You will see, you will know beyond concepts and conditioning, addictions and attachments. Does that make sense?

“Let me end this with a lovely story. There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was very cold, bitterly cold. He taught the people there to make fire. The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put fire—they could cook, could keep themselves warm, etc. They were so grateful that they had learned the art of making fire. But before they could express their gratitude to the man, he disappeared. He wasn’t concerned with getting their recognition or gratitude; he was concerned about their wellbeing [sic]. He went to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value of his invention. People were interested there, too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their priests, who began to notice that this man was drawing crowds and they were losing their popularity. So they decided to do away with him. They poisoned him, crucified him, put it any way you like. But they were afraid now that the people might turn against them, so they were very wise, even wily. Do you know what they did? They had a portrait of the man made and mounted it on the main altar of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did for centuries. The veneration and the worship went on, but there was no fire.

“Where’s the fire? Where’s the love? Where’s the drug uprooted from your system? Where’s the freedom? This is what spirituality is all about. Tragically, we tend to lose sight of this, don’t we? This is what Jesus Christ is all about. But we overemphasized the ‘Lord, Lord,’ didn’t we? Where’s the fire? And if worship isn’t leading to the fire, if adoration isn’t leading to love, if the liturgy isn’t leading to a clearer perception of reality, if God isn’t leading to life, of what use is religion except to create more division, more fanaticism, more antagonism? It is not from lack of religion in the ordinary sense of the word that the world is suffering, it is from lack of love, lack of awareness. And love is generated through awareness and through no other way, no other way. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the stars, and the rain. You don’t possess these things; you surrender to them. And surrender occurs when you are aware of your illusions, when you are aware of your addictions, when you are aware of your desires and fears. As I told you earlier, first, psychological insight is a great help, not analysis, however; analysis is paralysis. Insight is not necessarily analysis. One of your great American therapists put it very well: ‘It’s the ‘Aha’ experience that counts.’ Merely analyzing gives no help; it just gives information. But if you could produce the ‘Aha’ experience, that’s insight. That is change. Second, the understanding of your addiction is important. You need time. Alas, so much time that is given to worship and singing praise and singing songs could so fruitfully be employed in selfunderstanding [sic]. Community is not produced by joint liturgical celebrations. You know deep down in your heart, and so do I, that such celebrations only serve to paper over differences. Community is created by understanding the blocks that we put in the way of community, by understanding the conflicts that arise from our fears and our desires. At that point community arises. We must always beware of making worship just another distraction from the important business of living. And living doesn’t mean working in government, or being a big businessman, or performing great acts of charity. That isn’t living. Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness. ‘The birds of the air . . . they neither toil nor spin’—that is living. I began by saying that people are asleep, dead. Dead people running governments, dead people running big business, dead people educating others; come alive! Worship must help this, or else it’s useless. And increasingly—you know this and so do I—we’re losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they’re not interested in having more fears and more guilts [sic] laid on them. They’re not interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are interested in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I live? How can I taste these marvelous things that the mystics speak of? So that’s the second thing— understanding. Third, don’t identify. Somebody asked me as I was coming here today, ‘Do you ever feel low?’ Boy, do I feel low every now and then. I get my attacks. But they don’t last, they really don’t. What do I do? First step: I don’t identify. Here comes a low feeling. Instead of getting tense about it, instead of getting irritated with myself about it, I understand I’m feeling depressed, disappointed, or whatever. Second step: I admit the feeling is in me, not in the other person, e.g., in the person who didn’t write me a letter, not in the exterior world; it’s in me. Because as long as I think it’s outside me, I feel justified in holding on to my feelings. I can’t say everybody would feel this way; in fact, only idiotic people would feel this way, only sleeping people. Third step: I don’t identify with the feeling. ‘I’ is not that feeling. ‘I’ am not lonely, ‘I’ am not depressed, ‘I’ am not disappointed. Disappointment is there, one watches it. You’d be amazed how quickly it glides away. Anything you’re aware of keeps changing; clouds keep moving. As you do this, you also get all kinds of insights into why clouds were coming in the first place.”

Getting Real

The following is the 50th 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.

“One red-letter day in my life occurred in India. It was a great day, really, the day after I was ordained. I sat in a confessional. We had a very saintly Jesuit priest in our parish, a Spaniard, whom I had known even before I went to the Jesuit novitiate. The day before I left for the novitiate, I thought I’d better make a clean breast of everything so that when I got to the novitiate I’d be nice and clean and wouldn’t have to tell the novice master anything. This old Spanish priest would have crowds of people lined up at his confessional; he had a violet-colored handkerchief which he covered his eyes with, and he’d mumble something and give you a penance and send you away. He’d only met me a couple of times, but he’d call me Antonie. So I stood in line, and when my turn came, I tried changing my voice as I made my confession. He listened to me patiently, gave me my penance, absolved me, and then said, ‘Antonie, when are you going to the novitiate?’

“Well, anyway, I went to this parish the day after my ordination. And the old priest says to me, ‘Do you want to hear confessions?’ I said, ‘All right.’ He said, ‘Go and sit in my confessional.’ I thought, ‘My, I’m a holy man. I’m going to sit in his confessional.’ I heard confessions for three hours. It was Palm Sunday and we had the Easter crowd coming in. I came out depressed, not from what I had heard, because I had been led to expect that, and, having some inkling of what was going on in my own heart, I was shocked by nothing. You know what depressed me? The realization that I was giving them these little pious platitudes: ‘Now pray to the Blessed Mother, she loves you,’ and ‘Remember that God is on your side.’ Were these pious platitudes any cure for cancer? And this is a cancer I’m dealing with, the lack of awareness and reality. So I swore a mighty oath to myself that day: ‘I’ll learn, I’ll learn, so it will not be said of me when it is all over, ‘Father, what you said to me was absolutely true but totally useless.’

“Awareness, insight. When you become an expert (and you’ll soon become an expert) you don’t need to take a course in psychology. As you begin to observe yourself, to watch yourself, to pick up those negative feelings, you’ll find your own way of explaining it. And you’ll notice the change. But then you’ll have to deal with the big villain, and that villain is self-condemnation, self-hatred, self-dissatisfaction.”

Addictive Love

The following is the 42nd 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.

“The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when you’re hell-bent on getting this or the other thing, you become ruthless, hard, and insensitive. How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them. If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of people. When I die to the need for people, then I’m right in the desert. In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can take it for a while, you’ll suddenly discover that it isn’t lonely at all. It is solitude, it is aloneness, and the desert begins to flower. Then at last you’ll know what love is, what God is, what reality is. But in the beginning giving up the drug can be tough, unless you have a very keen understanding or unless you have suffered enough. It’s a great thing to have suffered. Only then can you get sick of it. You can make use of suffering to end suffering. Most people simply go on suffering. That explains the conflict I sometimes have between the role of spiritual director and that of therapist. A therapist says, ‘Let’s ease the suffering.’ The spiritual director says, ‘Let her suffer, she’ll get sick of this way of relating to people and she’ll finally decide to break out of this prison of emotional dependence on others.’ Shall I offer a palliative or remove a cancer? It’s not easy to decide.

“A person slams a book on the table in disgust. Let him keep slamming it on the table. Don’t pick up the book for him and tell him it’s all right. Spirituality is awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. When your mother got angry with you, she didn’t say there was something wrong with her, she said there was something wrong with you; otherwise she wouldn’t have been angry. Well, I made the great discovery that if you are angry, Mother, there’s something wrong with you. So you’d better cope with your anger. Stay with it and cope with it. It’s not mine. Whether there’s something wrong with me or not, I’ll examine that independently of your anger. I’m not going to be influenced by your anger.

“The funny thing is that when I can do this without feeling any negativity toward another, I can be quite objective about myself, too. Only a very aware person can refuse to pick up the guilt and anger, can say, ‘You’re having a tantrum. Too bad. I don’t feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore, and I refuse to feel guilty.’ I’m not going to hate myself for anything I’ve done. That’s what guilt is. I’m not going to give myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done, either right or wrong. I’m ready to analyze it, to watch it, and say, ‘Well, if I did wrong, it was in unawareness.’ Nobody does wrong in awareness. That’s why theologians tell us very beautifully that Jesus could do no wrong. That makes very good sense to me, because the enlightened person can do no wrong. The enlightened person is free. Jesus was free and because he was free, he couldn’t do any wrong. But since you can do wrong, you’re not free.”

Good Religion The Antithesis of Unawareness

The following is the 23nd 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 Center for Spiritual Exchange

“Somebody came up to me once during a conference and asked, ‘What about Our Lady of Fatima? What do you think of her?’ When I am asked questions like that, I am reminded of the story of the time they were taking the statue of Our Lady of Fatima on an airplane to a pilgrimage for worship, and as they were flying over the South of France the plane began to wobble and to shake and it looked like it was going to come apart. And the miraculous statue cried out, ‘Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!’ And all was well. Wasn’t it wonderful, one ‘Our Lady’ helping another ‘Our Lady’?

“There was also a group of a thousand people who went on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to venerate the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sat down before the statue in protest because the Bishop of the Diocese had declared ‘Our Lady of Lourdes’ patroness of the diocese! They were sure that Our Lady of Guadalupe felt this very much, so they were doing the protest in reparation for the offense. That’s the trouble with religion, if you don’t watch out.

“When I speak to Hindus, I tell them, ‘Your priests are not going to be happy to hear this (notice how prudent I am this morning), but God would be much happier, according to Jesus Christ, if you were transformed than if you worshiped. He would be much more pleased by your loving than by your adoration.’ And when I talk to Moslems (sic), I say, ‘Your Ayatollah and your mullahs are not going to be happy to hear this, but God is going to be much more pleased by your being transformed into a loving person than by saying, ‘Lord, Lord.’ It’s infinitely more important that you be waking up. That’s spirituality, that’s everything. If you have that, you have God. Then you worship ‘in spirit and in truth.’ When you become love, when you are transformed into love. The danger of what religion can do is very nicely brought out in a story told by Cardinal Martini, the Archbishop of Milan. The story has to do with an Italian couple that’s getting married. They have an arrangement with the parish priest to have a little reception in the parish courtyard outside the church. But it rained, and they couldn’t have the reception, so they said to the priest, ‘Would it be all right if we had the celebration in the church?’

“Now Father wasn’t one bit happy about having a reception in the church, but they said, ‘We will eat a little cake, sing a little song, drink a little wine, and then go home.’ So Father was persuaded. But being good life-loving Italians they drank a little wine, sang a little song, then drank a little more wine, and sang some more songs, and within a half hour there was a great celebration going on in the church. And everybody was having a great time, lots of fun and frolic. But Father was all tense, pacing up and down in the sacristy, all upset about the noise they were making. The assistant pastor comes in and says, ‘I see you are quite tense’.

“‘Of course, I’m tense. Listen to all the noise they are making, and in the House of God!, for heaven’s sake!’

‘Well, Father, they really had no place to go.’

‘I know that! But do they have to make all that racket?’

‘Well, we mustn’t forget, must we, Father, that Jesus himself was once present at a wedding!’

Father says, ‘I know Jesus Christ was present at a wedding banquet, YOU don’t have to tell me Jesus Christ was present at a wedding banquet! But they didn’t have the Blessed Sacrament there!!!’

“You know there are times like that when the Blessed Sacrament becomes more important than Jesus Christ. When worship becomes more important than love, when the Church becomes more important than life. When God becomes more important than the neighbor. And so it goes on. That’s the danger. To my mind this is what Jesus was evidently calling us to—first things first! The human being is much more important than the Sabbath. Doing what I tell you, namely, becoming what I am indicating to you, is much more important than Lord, Lord. But your mullah is not going to be happy to hear that, I assure you. Your priests are not going to be happy to hear that. Not generally. So that’s what we have been talking about. Spirituality. Waking up. And as I told you, it is extremely important if you want to wake up to go in for what I call ‘self-observation.’ Be aware of what you’re saying, be aware of what you’re doing, be aware of what you’re thinking, be aware of how you’re acting. Be aware of where you’re coming from, what your motives are. The unaware life is not worth living.

“The unaware life is a mechanical life. It’s not human, it’s programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood. In the country where I come from, you have hundreds of thousands of people living in little hovels, in extreme poverty, who just manage to survive, working all day long, hard manual work, sleep and then wake up in the morning, eat something, and start all over again. And you sit back and think, ‘What a life.’ ‘Is that all that life holds in store for them?’ And then you’re suddenly jolted into the realization that 99.999% of people here are not much better. You can go to the movies, drive around in a car, you can go for a cruise. Do you think you are much better off than they are? You are just as dead as they are. Just as much a machine as they are—a slightly bigger one, but a machine nevertheless. That’s sad. It’s sad to think that people go through life like this.

“People go through life with fixed ideas; they never change. They’re just not aware of what’s going on. They might as well be a block of wood, or a rock, a talking, walking, thinking machine. That’s not human. They are puppets, jerked around by all kinds of things. Press a button and you get a reaction. You can almost predict how this person is going to react. If I study a person, I can tell you just how he or she is going to react. With my therapy group, sometimes I write on a piece of paper that so-and-so is going to start the session and so-and-so will reply. Do you think that’s bad? Well, don’t listen to people who say to you, ‘Forget yourself! Go out in love to others.’ Don’t listen to them! They’re all wrong. The worst thing you can do is forget yourself when you go out to others in the so-called helping attitude.

“This was brought home to me very forcibly many years ago when I did my studies in psychology in Chicago. We had a course in counseling for priests. It was open only to priests who were actually engaged in counseling and who agreed to bring a taped session to class. There must have been about twenty of us. When it was my turn, I brought a cassette with an interview I had had with a young woman. The instructor put it in a recorder and we all began to listen to it. After five minutes, as was his custom, the instructor stopped the tape and asked, ‘Any comments?’ Someone said to me, ‘Why did you ask her that question?’ I said, ‘I’m not aware that I asked her a question. As a matter of fact, I’m quite sure I did not ask any questions.’ He said, ‘You did.’ I was quite sure because at that time I was consciously following the method of Carl Rogers, which is person-oriented and nondirective. You don’t ask questions. And you don’t interrupt or give advice. So I was very aware that I mustn’t ask questions. Anyway, there was a dispute between us, so the instructor said, ‘Why don’t we play the tape again?’ So we played it again and there, to my horror, was a whopping big question, as tall as the Empire State Building, a huge question. The interesting thing to me was that I had heard that question three times, the first time, presumably, when I asked it, the second time when I listened to the tape in my room (because I wanted to take a good tape to class), and the third time when I heard it in the classroom. But it hadn’t registered! I wasn’t aware.

“That happens frequently in my therapy sessions or in my spiritual direction. We tape-record the interview, and when the client listens to it, he or she says, ‘You know, I didn’t really hear what you said during the interview. I only heard what you said when I listened to the tape.’ More interestingly, I didn’t hear what I said during the interview.

It’s shocking to discover that I’m saying things in a therapy session that I’m not aware of. The full import of them only dawns on me later. Do you call that human? ‘Forget yourself and go out to others,’ you say! Anyhow, after we listened to the whole tape there in Chicago, the instructor said, ‘Are there any comments?’ One of the priests, a fifty year-old man to whom I had taken a liking, said to me, ‘Tony, I’d like to ask you a personal question. Would that be all right?’ I said, ‘Yes, go ahead. If I don’t want to answer it, I won’t.’ He said, ‘Is this woman in the interview pretty?’

“You know, honest to goodness, I was at a stage of my development (or undevelopment) where I didn’t notice if someone was good-looking or not. It didn’t matter to me. She was a sheep of Christ’s flock; I was a pastor. I dispensed help. Isn’t that great! It was the way we were trained. So I said to him, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ He said, ‘Because you don’t like her, do you?’ I said, ‘What?!’ It hadn’t ever struck me that I liked or disliked individuals. Like most people, I had an occasional dislike that would register in consciousness, but my attitude was mostly neutral. I asked, ‘What makes you say that?’ He said, ‘The tape.’ We went through the tape again, and he said, ‘Listen to your voice. Notice how sweet it has become. You’re irritated, aren’t you?’ I was, and I was only becoming aware of it right there. And what was I saying to her nondirectively? I was saying, ‘Don’t come back.’ But I wasn’t aware of that. My priest friend said, ‘She’s a woman. She will have picked this up. When are you supposed to meet her next?’ I said, ‘Next Wednesday.’ He said, ‘My guess is she won’t come back.’ She didn’t. I waited one week but she didn’t come. I waited another week and she didn’t come. Then I called her. I broke one of my rules: Don’t be the rescuer.

“I called her and said to her, ‘Remember that tape you allowed me to make for the class? It was a great help because the class pointed out all kinds of things to me (I didn’t tell her what!) that would make the session somewhat more effective. So if you care to come back, that would make it more effective.’ She said, ‘All right, I’ll come back.’ She did. The dislike was still there. It hadn’t gone away, but it wasn’t getting in the way. What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.

“Awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness. What they trained us to do in that course was to become participant observers. To put it somewhat graphically, I’d be talking to you and at the same time I’d be out there watching you and watching me. When I’m listening to you, it’s infinitely more important for me to listen to me than to listen to you. Of course, it’s important to listen to you, but it’s more important that I listen to me. Otherwise I won’t be hearing you. Or I’ll be distorting everything you say. I’ll be coming at you from my own conditioning. I’ll be reacting to you in all kinds of ways from my insecurities, from my need to manipulate you, from my desire to succeed, from irritations and feelings that I might not be aware of. So it’s frightfully important that I listen to me when I’m listening to you. That’s what they were training us to do, obtaining awareness.

“You don’t always have to imagine yourself hovering somewhere in the air. Just to get a rough idea of what I’m talking about, imagine a good driver, driving a car, who’s concentrating on what you’re saying. In fact, he may even be having an argument with you, but he’s perfectly aware of the road signals. The moment anything untoward happens, the moment there’s any sound, or noise, or bump, he’ll hear it at once. He’ll say, ‘Are you sure you closed that door back there?’ How did he do that? He was aware, he was alert. The focus of his attention was on the conversation, or argument, but his awareness was more diffused. He was taking in all kinds of things.

“What I’m advocating here is not concentration. That’s not important. Many meditative techniques inculcate concentration, but I’m leery of that. They involve violence and frequently they involve further programming and conditioning. What I would advocate is awareness, which is not the same as concentration at all. Concentration is a spotlight, a floodlight. You’re open to anything that comes within the scope of your consciousness. You can be distracted from that, but when you’re practicing awareness, you’re never distracted. When awareness is turned on, there’s never any distraction, because you’re always aware of whatever happens to be.

“Say I’m looking at those trees and I’m worrying. Am I distracted? I am distracted only if I mean to concentrate on the trees. But if I’m aware that I’m worried, too, that isn’t a distraction at all. Just be aware of where your attention goes. When anything goes awry or anything untoward happens, you’ll be alerted at once. Something’s going wrong! The moment any negative feeling comes into consciousness, you’ll be alerted. You’re like the driver of the car.

“I told you that St. Teresa of Avila said God gave her the grace of disidentifying herself with herself. You hear children talk that way. A two-year-old says, ‘Tommy had his breakfast this morning.’ He doesn’t say ‘I,’ although he is Tommy. He says ‘Tommy’—in the third person. Mystics feel that way. They have disidentified from themselves and they are at peace.

“This was the grace St. Teresa was talking about. This is the ‘I’ that the mystic masters of the East are constantly urging people to discover. And those of the West, too! And you can count Meister Eckhart among them. They are urging people to discover the ‘I.’”

How Happiness Happens

The following is the 20th 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 Center for Spiritual Exchange

“Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing.After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.

“There’s the story of the disciple who went to the master and said, ‘Could you give me a word of wisdom? Could you tell me something that would guide me through my days?’ It was the master’s day of silence, so he picked up a pad. It said, ‘Awareness.’ When the disciple saw it, he said, ‘This is too brief. Can you expand on it a bit?’ So the master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness.’ The disciple said, ‘Yes, but what does it mean?’ The master took back the pad and wrote, ‘Awareness, awareness, awareness means—awareness.’

“That’s what it is to watch yourself. No one can show you how to do it, because he would be giving you a technique, he would be programming you. But watch yourself. When you talk to someone, are you aware ofit or are you simply identifying with it? When you got angry with somebody,were you aware that you were angry or were you simply identifying with your anger? Later, when you had the time, did you study your experience and attempt to understand it? Where did it come from? What brought it on? I don’t know of any other way to awareness. You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You don’t change. But when you understand it, it changes.

“I am sometimes asked, ‘Is this growing in awareness a gradual thing, or is it a ‘whammo’ kind of thing?’ There are some lucky people who see this in a flash. They just become aware. There are others who keep growing into it, slowly, gradually, increasingly. They begin to see things.Illusions drop away, fantasies are peeled away, and they start to get in touch with facts. There’s no general rule. There’s a famous story about the lion who came upon a flock of sheep and to his amazement found a lion among the sheep.It was a lion who had been brought up by the sheep ever since he was a cub. It would bleat like a sheep and run around like a sheep. The lion went straight for him, and when the sheep-lion stood in front of the real one, he trembled in every limb. And the lion said to him, ‘What are you doing among these sheep?’And the sheep-lion said, ‘I am a sheep.’ And the lion said, ‘Oh no you’re not.You’re coming with me.’ So he took the sheep-lion to a pool and said, ‘Look!’And when the sheep-lion looked at his reflection in the water, he let out a mighty roar, and in that moment he was transformed. He was never the same again.

“If you’re lucky and the gods are gracious or if you are gifted with divine grace (use any theological expression you want), you might suddenly understand who ‘I’ is, and you’ll never be the same again, never.Nothing will ever be able to touch you again and no one will ever be able to hurt you again.

“You will fear no one and you will fear nothing. Isn’t that extraordinary? You’ll live like a king, like a queen. This is what it means to live like royalty. Not rubbish like getting your picture in the newspapers or having a lot of money. That’s a lot of rot. You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure.They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either. Isn’t that a wonderful state to be in!Some people arrive at this goal painstakingly, step by step, through months and weeks of self awareness. But I’ll promise you this: I have not known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter ofweeks. The quality of their life changes, so they don’t have to take it onfaith anymore. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact,they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before.

“You’re much more energetic, much more alive. People think that if they had no cravings, they’d be like deadwood. But in fact they’d lose their tension. Get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding,you will be yourself. Relaxed. You wouldn’t be driving with your brakes on. That’s what would happen.

“There’s a lovely saying of Tranxu, a great Chinese sage,that I took the trouble to learn by heart. It goes: ‘When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind,sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. He cares! He thinks more of winning than of shooting, and the need to win drains him of power.’ Isn’t that an image of what most people are? When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.

“Now there’s human living for you. That’s what life is all about. That can only come from awareness. And in awareness you will understand that honor doesn’t mean a thing. It’s a social convention, that’s all. That’s why the mystics and the prophets didn’t bother one bit about it. Honor or disgrace meant nothing to them. They were living in another world, in the world of the awakened. Successor failure meant nothing to them. They had the attitude: ‘I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?’

“Someone once said, ‘The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.’ But these are the easiest things in the world if you haven’t identified with the ‘me.’ You can say things like ‘I’m wrong! If you knew me better, you’d see how often I’m wrong. What would you expect from an ass?’ But if I haven’t identified with these aspects of ‘me,’ you can’t hurt me. Initially, the old conditioning will kick in and you’ll be depressed and anxious. You’ll grieve, cry, and so on. ‘Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.’ But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it anymore. Do you know what a big difference that is?

“You step outside of yourself and look at that depression, and don’t identify with it. You don’t do a thing to make it go away; you are perfectly willing to go on with your life while it passes through you and disappears. If you don’t know what that means, you really have something to look forward to. And anxiety? There it comes and you’re not troubled. How strange! You’re anxious but you’re not troubled.

“Isn’t that a paradox? And you’re willing to let this cloud come in, because the more you fight it, the more power you give it. You’re willing to observe it as it passes by. You can be happy in your anxiety. Isn’t that crazy? You can be happy in your depression. But you can’t have the wrong notion of happiness. Did you think happiness was excitement or thrills? That’s what causes the depression. Didn’t anyone tell you that? You’re thrilled, all right, but you’re just preparing the way for your next depression. You’re thrilled but you pick up the anxiety behind that: How can I make it last?That’s not happiness, that’s addiction.

“I wonder how many non addicts there are reading this book? If you’re anything like the average group, there are few, very few. Don’t look down your nose at the alcoholics and the drug addicts: maybe you’re just as addicted as they are. The first time I got a glimpse of this new world, it was terrifying. I understood what it meant to be alone, with nowhere to rest your head, to leave everyone free and be free yourself, to be special to no one and love everyone—because love does that. It shines on good and bad alike; it makes rain fall on saints and sinners alike.

“Is it possible for the rose to say, ‘I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad’? Or is it possible for the lamp to say, ‘I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people’? Or can a tree say, ‘I’ll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad’? These are images of what love is about.

“It’s been there all along, staring us in the face in the scriptures, though we never cared to see it because we were so drowned in what our culture calls love with its love songs and poems—that isn’t love at all,that’s the opposite of love. That’s desire and control and possessiveness.That’s manipulation, and fear, and anxiety—that’s not love. We were told that happiness is a smooth complexion, a holiday resort. It isn’t these things, but we have subtle ways of making our happiness depend on other things, both within us and outside us. We say, ‘I refuse to be happy until my neurosis goes.’ I have good news for you: You can be happy right now, with the neurosis. You want even better news? There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing what in India we call anand—bliss, bliss. There’s only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have. Otherwise you would be experiencing bliss. You’re focusing on what you don’t have. But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.

“Jesus was talking horse sense to lay people, to starving people, to poor people. He was telling them good news: It’s yours for the taking. But who listens? No one’s interested, they’d rather be asleep.”

Negative Feelings Toward Others

The following is the 18th 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 Center for Spiritual Exchange

“At one of my conferences, someone made the following observation:

“‘I want to share with you something wonderful that happened to me. I went to the movies and I was working shortly after that and I was really having trouble with three people in my life. So I said, ‘All right, just like I learned at the movies, I’m going to come outside myself.’ For a couple of hours, I got in touch with my feelings, with how badly I felt toward these three people. I said, ‘I really hate those people.’ Then I said, ‘Jesus, what can you do about all that?’ A little while later I began to cry, because I realized that Jesus died for those very people and they couldn’t help how they were, anyway. That afternoon I had to go to the office, where I spoke to those people. I told them what my problem was and they agreed with me. I wasn’t mad at them and I didn’t hate them anymore.’

“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? ‘He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.’ No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.

“One of you told of working in an institution. During a staff meeting someone would inevitably say, ‘The food stinks around here,’ and the regular dietitian would go into orbit. She has identified with the food. She is saying, ‘Anyone who attacks the food attacks me; I feel threatened.’ But the ‘I’ is never threatened; it’s only the ‘me’ that is threatened.

“But suppose you witness some out-and-out injustice, something that is obviously and objectively wrong. Would it not be a proper reaction to say this should not be happening? Should you somehow want to involve yourself in correcting a situation that’s wrong? Someone’s injuring a child and you see abuse going on. How about that kind of thing? I hope you did not assume that I was saying you shouldn’t do anything. I said that if you didn’t have negative feelings you’d be much more effective, much more effective. Because when negative feelings come in, you go blind. ‘Me’ steps into the picture, and everything gets fouled up. Where we had one problem on our hands before, now we have two problems. Many wrongly assume that not having negative feelings like anger and resentment and hate means that you do nothing about a situation. Oh no, oh no! You are not affected emotionally but you spring into action. You become very sensitive to things and people around you. What kills the sensitivity is what many people would call the conditioned self: when you so identify with ‘me’ that there’s too much of ‘me’ in it for you to see things objectively, with detachment. It’s very important that when you swing into action, you be able to see things with detachment. But negative emotions prevent that.

“What, then, would we call the kind of passion that motivates or activates energy into doing something about objective evils? Whatever it is, it is not a reaction; it is action.

“Some of you wonder if there is a gray area before something becomes an attachment, before identification sets in. Say a friend dies. It seems right and very human to feel some sadness about that. But what reaction? Self-pity? What would you be grieving about? Think about that. What I’m saying is going to sound terrible to you, but I told you, I’m coming from another world. Your reaction is personal loss, right? Feeling sorry for ‘me’ or for other people your friend might have brought joy to. But that means you’re feeling sorry for other people who are feeling sorry for themselves. If they’re not feeling sorry for themselves, what would they be feeling sorry for? We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent. We’re so accustomed to hear the opposite of this that what I say sounds inhuman, doesn’t it?”

Finding Yourself

The following is the 16th 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 Center for Spiritual Exchange

“The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: ‘Who am I?’ Or rather: ‘What is ‘I’?’ What is this thing I call ‘I’? What is this thing I call self?

“You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know  who you are? My, you are still asleep. You are a sleeping scientist. You mean  you understood what Jesus Christ is and you don’t know who you are? How do you know that you have understood Jesus Christ? Who is the person doing the understanding? Find that out first. That’s the foundation of everything, isn’t it? It’s because we haven’t understood this that we’ve got all these stupid religious people involved in all these stupid religious wars—Muslims fighting against Jews, Protestants fighting Catholics, and all the rest of that rubbish.They don’t know who they are, because if they did, there wouldn’t be wars. Like the little girl who says to a little boy, ‘Are you a Presbyterian?’ And he says,‘No, we belong to another abomination!’

“But what I’d like to stress right now is self-observation.You are listening to me, but are you picking up any other sounds besides the sound of my voice as you listen to me? Are you aware of your reactions as you listen to me? If you aren’t, you’re going to be brainwashed. Or else you are going to be influenced by forces within you of which you have no awareness at all. And even if you’re aware of how you react to me, are you simultaneously aware of where your reaction is coming from?Maybe you are not listening to me at all; maybe your daddy is listening to me.Do you think that’s possible? Of course it is. Again and again in my therapy  groups I come across people who aren’t there at all. Their daddy is there, their mommy is there, but they’re not there. They never were there. ‘I live now, not I, but my daddy lives in me.’ Well, that’s absolutely, literally true. I could take you apart piece by piece and ask, ‘Now, this sentence, does it come from Daddy, Mommy, Grandma, Grandpa,whom?’

“Who’s living in you? It’s pretty horrifying when you come  to know that. You think you are free, but there probably isn’t a gesture, a thought, an emotion, an attitude, a belief in you that isn’t coming from someone else. Isn’t that horrible? And you don’t know it. Talk about a mechanical life that was stamped into you. You feel pretty strongly about certain things, and you think it is you who are feeling strongly about them,but are you really? It’s going to take a lot of awareness for you to understand that perhaps this thing you call ‘I’ is simply a conglomeration of your past experiences, of your conditioning and programming.

“That’s painful. In fact, when you’re beginning to awaken, you experience a great deal of pain. It’s painful to see your illusions being shattered. Everything that you thought you had built up crumbles and that’s painful. That’s what repentance is all about; that’s what waking up is all about. So how about taking a minute, right where you’re sitting now, to be aware, even as I talk, of what you’re feeling in your body, and what’s going on in your mind, and what your emotional state is like? How about being aware of the blackboard, if your eyes are open, and the color of these walls and the material they’re made of? How about being aware of my face and the reaction you have to this face of mine? Because you have a reaction whether you’re aware of it or not. And it probably isn’t your reaction, but one you were conditioned to have. And how about being aware of some of the things I just said, although that wouldn’t be awareness, because that’s just memory now.

“Be aware of your presence in this room. Say to yourself, ‘I’m in this room.’ It’s as if you were outside yourself looking at yourself. Notice a slightly different feeling than if you were looking at things in the room. Later we’ll ask, ‘Who is this person who is doing the looking?’ I am looking at me. What’s an ‘I’? What’s ‘me’? For the time being it’s enough that I watch me, but if you find yourself condemning yourself or approving yourself, don’t stop the condemnation and don’t stop the judgment or approval, just watch it. I’m condemning me; I’m disapproving of me; I’m approving of me. Just look at it, period. Don’t try to change it! Don’t say, ‘Oh, we were told not to do this.’ Just observe what’s going on. As I said to you before, self-observation means watching— observing whatever is going on in you and around you as if it were happening to someone else.”

What’s on Your Mind?

The following is the 9thchapter 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 Center for Spiritual Exchange

“Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. That’s what I’m really talking about. There’s a nice story about some people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil perishing from thirst. They had no idea that the water they were floating on was fresh water. The river was coming out into the sea with such force that it went out for a couple of miles, so they had fresh water right there where they were. But they had no idea. In the same way, we’re surrounded with joy, with happiness, with love. Most people have no idea of this whatsoever. The reason: They’re brainwashed. The reason: They’re hypnotized; they’re asleep. Imagine a stage magician who hypnotizes someone so that the person sees what is not there and does not see what is there. That’s what it’s all about. Repent and accept the good news. Repent! Wake up! Don’t weep for your sins. Why weep for sins that you committed when you were asleep? Are you going to cry because of what you did in your hypnotized state? Why do you want to identify with a person like this? Wake up! Wake up! Repent! Put on a new mind. Take on a new way of looking at things! For ‘the kingdom is here!’ It’s the rare Christian who takes that seriously. I said to you that the first thing you need to do is wake up, to face the fact that you don’t like being woken up. You’d much rather have all of the things which you were hypnotized into believing are so precious to you, so important to you, so important for your life and your survival. Second, understand. Understand that maybe you’ve got the wrong ideas and it is these ideas that are influencing your life and making it the mess that it is and keeping you asleep. Ideas about love, ideas about freedom, ideas about happiness, and so forth. And it isn’t easy to listen to someone who would challenge those ideas of yours which have come to be so precious to you. There have been some interesting studies in brainwashing. It has been shown that you’re brainwashed when you take on or ‘interject’ an idea that isn’t yours, that is someone else’s. And the funny thing is that you’ll be ready to die for this idea. Isn’t that strange? The first test of whether you’ve been brainwashed and have interjected convictions and beliefs occurs the moment they’re attacked. You feel stunned, you react emotionally. That’s a pretty good sign—not infallible, but a pretty good sign—that we’re dealing with brainwashing. You’re ready to die for an idea that never was yours. Terrorists or saints (so called) take on an idea, swallow it whole, and are ready to die for it. It’s not easy to listen, especially when you get emotional about an idea. And even when you don’t get emotional about it, it’s not easy to listen; you’re always listening from your programming, from your conditioning, from your hypnotic state. You frequently interpret everything that’s being said in terms of your hypnotic state or your conditioning or your programming. Like this girl who’s listening to a lecture on agriculture and says, ‘Excuse me, sir, you know I agree with you completely that the best manure is aged horse manure. Would you tell us how old the horse should optimally be?’ See where she’s coming from? We all have our positions, don’t we? And we listen from those positions. ‘Henry, how you’ve changed! You were so tall and you’ve grown so short. You were so well built and you’ve grown so thin. You were so fair and you’ve become so dark. What happened to you, Henry?’ Henry says, ‘I’m not Henry. I’m John.’ ‘Oh, you changed your name too!’ How do you get people like that to listen? The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away? How ready are you to think of something unfamiliar?

“The first reaction is one of fear. It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.

“By way of an example, I made the point that everything we do is tainted with selfishness. That isn’t easy to hear. But think now for a minute, let’s go a little deeper into that. If everything you do comes from self-interest—enlightened or otherwise—how does that make you feel about all your charity and all your good deeds? What happens to those? Here’s a little exercise for you. Think of all the good deeds you’ve done, or of some of them (because I’m only giving you a few seconds). Now understand that they really sprang from self-interest, whether you knew it or not. What happens to your pride? What happens to your vanity? What happens to that good feeling you gave yourself, that pat on the back every time you did something that you thought was so charitable? It gets flattened out, doesn’t it? What happens to that looking down your nose at your neighbor who you thought was so selfish? The whole thing changes, doesn’t it? ‘Well,’ you say, ‘my neighbor has coarser tastes than I do.’ You’re the more dangerous person, you really are. Jesus Christ seems to have had less trouble with the other type than with your type. Much less trouble. He ran into trouble with people who were really convinced they were good. Other types didn’t seem to give him much trouble at all, the ones who were openly selfish and knew it. Can you see how liberating that is? Hey, wake up! It’s liberating. It’s wonderful! Are you feeling depressed? Maybe you are. Isn’t it wonderful to realize you’re no better than anybody else in this world? Isn’t it wonderful? Are you disappointed? Look what we’ve brought to light! What happens to your vanity? You’d like to give yourself a good feeling that you’re better than others. But look how we brought a fallacy to light!’