Our Illusion About Others

The following is the 11th 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.

“So if you stop to think, you would see that there’s nothing to be very proud of after all. What does this do to your relationship with people? What are you complaining about? A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot—you glorified her, didn’t you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They’re not! They’re not nice. They’re as bad as you are—bad, you understand? They’re asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference.

“Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

“It’s probably too startling for many of you to understand that everyone except the very rare awakened person can be expected to be selfish and to seek his or her own selfinterest [sic] whether in coarse or in refined ways. This leads you to see that there’s nothing to be disappointed about, nothing to be disillusioned about. If you had been in touch with reality all along, you would never have been disappointed. But you chose to paint people in glowing colors; you chose not to see through human beings because you chose not to see through yourself. So you’re paying the price now.

“Before we discuss this, let me tell you a story. Somebody once asked, ‘What is enlightenment like? What is awakening like?’ It’s like the tramp in London who was settling in for the night. He’d hardly been able to get a crust of bread to eat. Then he reaches this embankment on the river Thames. There was a slight drizzle, so he huddled in his old tattered cloak. He was about to go to sleep when suddenly a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce pulls up. Out of the car steps a beautiful young lady who says to him, ‘My poor man, are you planning on spending the night here on this embankment?’ And the tramp says, ‘Yes.’ She says, ‘I won’t have it. You’re coming to my house and you’re going to spend a comfortable night and you’re going to get a good dinner.’ She insists on his getting into the car. Well, they ride out of London and get to a place where she has a sprawling mansion with large grounds. They are ushered in by the butler, to whom she says, ‘James, please make sure he’s put in the servants’ quarters and treated well.’ Which is what James does. The young lady had undressed and was about to go to bed when she suddenly remembers her guest for the night. So she slips something on and pads along the corridor to the servants’ quarters. She sees a little chink of light from the room where the tramp was put up. She taps lightly at the door, opens it, and finds the man awake. She says, ‘What’s the trouble, my good man, didn’t you get a good meal?’ He said, ‘Never had a better meal in my life, lady.’ ‘Are you warm enough?’ He says, ‘Yes, lovely warm bed.’ Then she says, ‘Maybe you need a little company. Why don’t you move over a, bit.’ And she comes closer to him and he moves over and falls right into the Thames.

“Ha! You didn’t expect that one! Enlightenment! Enlightenment! Wake up. When you’re ready to exchange your illusions for reality, when you’re ready to exchange your dreams for facts, that’s the way you find it all. That’s where life finally becomes meaningful. Life becomes beautiful.

“There’s a story about Ramirez. He is old and living up there in his castle on a hill. He looks out the window (he’s in bed and paralyzed) and he sees his enemy. Old as he is, leaning on a cane, his enemy is climbing up the hill—slowly, painfully. It takes him about two and a half hours to get up the hill. There’s nothing Ramirez can do because the servants have the day off. So his enemy opens the door, comes straight to the bedroom, puts his hand inside his cloak, and pulls out a gun. He says, ‘At last, Ramirez, we’re going to settle scores!’ Ramirez tries his level best to talk him out of it. He says, ‘Come on, Borgia, you can’t do that. You know I’m no longer the man who ill-treated you as that youngster years ago, and you’re no longer that youngster. Come off it!’ ‘Oh no,’ says his enemy, ‘your sweet words aren’t going to deter me from this divine mission of mine. It’s revenge I want and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ And Ramirez says, ‘But there is!’ ‘What?’ asks his enemy. ‘I can wake up,’ says Ramirez. And he did; he woke up! That’s what enlightenment is like. When someone tells you, ‘There is nothing you can do about it,’ you say, ‘There is, I can wake up!’ All of a sudden, life is no longer the nightmare that it has seemed. Wake up!

“Somebody came up to me with a question. What do you think the question was? He asked me, ‘Are you enlightened?’ What do you think my answer was? What does it matter!

“You want a better answer? My answer would be: ‘How would I know? How would you know? What does it matter?’ You know something? If you want anything too badly, you’re in big trouble. You know something else? If I were enlightened and you listened to me because I was enlightened, then you’re in big trouble. Are you ready to be brainwashed by someone who’s enlightened? You can be brainwashed by anybody, you know. What does it matter whether someone’s enlightened or not? But see, we want to lean on someone, don’t we? We want to lean on anybody we think has arrived. We love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn’t it? What do you want to hope for? Isn’t that another form of desire?

“You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be hoping. But then, you forget that you have it all right now anyway, and you don’t know it. Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?”

Good, Bad, or Lucky

The following is the 10th 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.

“To me, selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing. To me, it would seem to be the same thing as nonbeing. Whatever it is, I’m saying: Stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, ‘The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.’ We differ from others—from criminals, for example—only in what we do or don’t do, not in what we are. The only difference between Jesus and those others was that he was awake and they weren’t. Look at people who win the lottery. Do they say, ‘I’m so proud to accept this prize, not for myself, but for my nation and my society.’ Does anybody talk like that when they win the lottery? No. Because they were lucky, lucky. So they won the lottery, first prize. Anything to be proud of in that?

“In the same way, if you achieved enlightenment, you would do so in the interest of self and you would be lucky. Do you want to glory in that? What’s there to glory about? Can’t you see how utterly stupid it is to be vain about your good deeds? The Pharisee wasn’t an evil man, he was a stupid man. He was stupid, not evil. He didn’t stop to think. Someone once said, ‘I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get started again.’”

On The Proper Kind of Selfishness

The following is the 3rd 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 first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it. You don’t want to be happy. Want a little test? Let’s try it. It will take you exactly one minute. You could close your eyes while you’re doing it or you could keep them open. It doesn’t really matter. Think of someone you love very much, someone you’re close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind, ‘I’d rather have happiness than have you.’ See what happens. ‘I’d rather be happy than have you. If I had a choice, no question about it, I’d choose happiness.’ How many of you felt selfish when you said this? Many, it seems. See how we’ve been brainwashed? See how we’ve been brainwashed into thinking, ‘How could I be so selfish?’ But look at who’s being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to you, ‘How could you be so selfish that you’d choose happiness over me?’ Would you not feel like responding, ‘Pardon me, but how could you you be so selfish that you would demand that I choose you above my own happiness?!’

“A woman once told me that when she was a child her Jesuit cousin gave a retreat in the Jesuit church in Milwaukee. He opened each conference with the words: ‘The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness.’ That’s marvelous! I asked her, ‘Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. Isn’t that delightful? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

“She would love me at the cost of her happiness and I would love her at the cost of my happiness, and so you’ve got two  unhappy people, but long live love!”

Our Illusion About Others

The following is the 11th 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.

“So if you stop to think, you would see that there’s nothing to be very proud of after all. What does this do to your relationship with people? What are you complaining about? A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot—you glorified her, didn’t you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They’re not! They’re not nice. They’re as bad as you are—bad, you understand? They’re asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference.

“Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

“It’s probably too startling for many of you to understand that everyone except the very rare awakened person can be expected to be selfish and to seek his or her own selfinterest [sic] whether in coarse or in refined ways. This leads you to see that there’s nothing to be disappointed about, nothing to be disillusioned about. If you had been in touch with reality all along, you would never have been disappointed. But you chose to paint people in glowing colors; you chose not to see through human beings because you chose not to see through yourself. So you’re paying the price now.

“Before we discuss this, let me tell you a story. Somebody once asked, ‘What is enlightenment like? What is awakening like?’ It’s like the tramp in London who was settling in for the night. He’d hardly been able to get a crust of bread to eat. Then he reaches this embankment on the river Thames. There was a slight drizzle, so he huddled in his old tattered cloak. He was about to go to sleep when suddenly a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce pulls up. Out of the car steps a beautiful young lady who says to him, ‘My poor man, are you planning on spending the night here on this embankment?’ And the tramp says, ‘Yes.’ She says, ‘I won’t have it. You’re coming to my house and you’re going to spend a comfortable night and you’re going to get a good dinner.’ She insists on his getting into the car. Well, they ride out of London and get to a place where she has a sprawling mansion with large grounds. They are ushered in by the butler, to whom she says, ‘James, please make sure he’s put in the servants’ quarters and treated well.’ Which is what James does. The young lady had undressed and was about to go to bed when she suddenly remembers her guest for the night. So she slips something on and pads along the corridor to the servants’ quarters. She sees a little chink of light from the room where the tramp was put up. She taps lightly at the door, opens it, and finds the man awake. She says, ‘What’s the trouble, my good man, didn’t you get a good meal?’ He said, ‘Never had a better meal in my life, lady.’ ‘Are you warm enough?’ He says, ‘Yes, lovely warm bed.’ Then she says, ‘Maybe you need a little company. Why don’t you move over a, bit.’ And she comes closer to him and he moves over and falls right into the Thames.

“Ha! You didn’t expect that one! Enlightenment! Enlightenment! Wake up. When you’re ready to exchange your illusions for reality, when you’re ready to exchange your dreams for facts, that’s the way you find it all. That’s where life finally becomes meaningful. Life becomes beautiful.

“There’s a story about Ramirez. He is old and living up there in his castle on a hill. He looks out the window (he’s in bed and paralyzed) and he sees his enemy. Old as he is, leaning on a cane, his enemy is climbing up the hill—slowly, painfully. It takes him about two and a half hours to get up the hill. There’s nothing Ramirez can do because the servants have the day off. So his enemy opens the door, comes straight to the bedroom, puts his hand inside his cloak, and pulls out a gun. He says, ‘At last, Ramirez, we’re going to settle scores!’ Ramirez tries his level best to talk him out of it. He says, ‘Come on, Borgia, you can’t do that. You know I’m no longer the man who ill-treated you as that youngster years ago, and you’re no longer that youngster. Come off it!’ ‘Oh no,’says his enemy, ‘your sweet words aren’t going to deter me from this divine mission of mine. It’s revenge I want and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ And Ramirez says, ‘But there is!’ ‘What?’ asks his enemy. ‘I can wake up,’ says Ramirez. And he did; he woke up! That’s what enlightenment is like. When someone tells you, ‘There is nothing you can do about it,’ you say, ‘There is, I can wake up!’ All of a sudden, life is no longer the nightmare that it has seemed. Wake up!

“Somebody came up to me with a question. What do you think the question was? He asked me, ‘Are you enlightened?’ What do you think my answer was? What does it matter!

“You want a better answer? My answer would be: ‘How would I know? How would you know? What does it matter?’ You know something? If you want anything too badly, you’re in big trouble. You know something else? If I were enlightened and you listened to me because I was enlightened, then you’re in big trouble. Are you ready to be brainwashed by someone who’s enlightened? You can be brainwashed by anybody, you know. What does it matter whether someone’s enlightened or not? But see, we want to lean on someone, don’t we? We want to lean on anybody we think has arrived. We love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn’t it? What do you want to hope for? Isn’t that another form of desire?

“You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be hoping. But then, you forget that you have it all right now anyway, and you don’t know it. Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?”

Good, Bad, or Lucky

The following is the 10th 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.

“To me, selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing. To me, it would seem to be the same thing as nonbeing. Whatever it is, I’m saying: Stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, ‘The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.’ We differ from others—from criminals, for example—only in what we do or don’t do, not in what we are. The only difference between Jesus and those others was that he was awake and they weren’t. Look at people who win the lottery. Do they say, ‘I’m so proud to accept this prize, not for myself, but for my nation and my society.’ Does anybody talk like that when they win the lottery? No. Because they were lucky, lucky. So they won the lottery, first prize. Anything to be proud of in that?

“In the same way, if you achieved enlightenment, you would do so in the interest of self and you would be lucky. Do you want to glory in that? What’s there to glory about? Can’t you see how utterly stupid it is to be vain about your good deeds? The Pharisee wasn’t an evil man, he was a stupid man. He was stupid, not evil. He didn’t stop to think. Someone once said, ‘I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get started again.’”

On The Proper Kind of Selfishness

The following is the 3rd 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 first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it. You don’t want to be happy. Want a little test? Let’s try it. It will take you exactly one minute. You could close your eyes while you’re doing it or you could keep them open. It doesn’t really matter. Think of someone you love very much, someone you’re close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind, ‘I’d rather have happiness than have you.’ See what happens. ‘I’d rather be happy than have you. If I had a choice, no question about it, I’d choose happiness.’ How many of you felt selfish when you said this? Many, it seems. See how we’ve been brainwashed? See how we’ve been brainwashed into thinking, ‘How could I be so selfish?’ But look at who’s being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to you, ‘How could you be so selfish that you’d choose happiness over me?’ Would you not feel like responding, ‘Pardon me, but how could you you be so selfish that you would demand that I choose you above my own happiness?!’

“A woman once told me that when she was a child her Jesuit cousin gave a retreat in the Jesuit church in Milwaukee. He opened each conference with the words: ‘The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness.’ That’s marvelous! I asked her, ‘Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. Isn’t that delightful? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

“She would love me at the cost of her happiness and I would love her at the cost of my happiness, and so you’ve got two  unhappy people, but long live love!”

Good, Bad or Lucky

The following is the 10th 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

“To me, selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for non-being. To me, it would seem to be the same thing as non-being. Whatever it is, I’m saying: Stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, ‘The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.’ We differ from others—from criminals, for example—only in what we do or don’t do, not in what we are. The only difference between Jesus and those others was that he was awake and they weren’t. Look at people who win the lottery. Do they say, ‘I’m so proud to accept this prize, not for myself, but for my nation and my society.’ Does anybody talk like that when they win the lottery? No. Because they were lucky, lucky. So they won the lottery, first prize. Anything to be proud of in that?
In the same way, if you achieved enlightenment, you would do so in the interest of self and you would be lucky. Do you want to glory in that? What’s there to glory about? Can’t you see how utterly stupid it is to be vain about your good deeds? The Pharisee wasn’t an evil man, he was a stupid man. He was stupid, not evil. He didn’t stop to think. Someone once said, ‘I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get started again.”

The Masquerade of Charity

The following is the 8th 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

“Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. You say that it is very difficult to accept that there may be times when you are not honest to goodness really trying to be loving or trustful. Let me simplify it. Let’s make it as simple as possible. Let’s even make it as blunt and extreme as possible, at least to begin with. There are two types of selfishness. The first type is the one where I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself. That’s what we generally call self-centeredness. The second is when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. That would be a more refined kind of selfishness.
“The first one is very obvious, but the second one is hidden, very hidden, and for that reason more dangerous, because we get to feel that we’re really great. But maybe we’re not all that great after all. You protest when I say that. That’s great!
“You, madam, you say that, in your case, you live alone, and go to the rectory and give several hours of your time. But you also admit you’re really doing it for a selfish reason —your need to be needed—and you also know you need to be needed in a way that makes you feel like you’re contributing to the world a little bit. But you also claim that, because they also need you to do this, it’s a two-way street.
“You’re almost enlightened! We’ve got to learn from you. That’s right. She is saying, ‘I give something, I get something.’ She is right. I go out to help, I give something, I get something. That’s beautiful. That’s true. That’s real. That isn’t charity, that’s enlightened self-interest.
“And you, sir, you point out that the gospel of Jesus is ultimately a gospel of self-interest. We achieve eternal life by our acts of charity. ‘Come blest of my Father, when I was hungry, you gave me to eat,’ and so on. You say that perfectly confirms what I’ve said. When we look at Jesus, you say, we see that his acts of charity were acts of ultimate self-interest, to win souls for eternal life. And you see that as the whole thrust and meaning of life: the achievement of self-interest by acts of charity.
“All right. But you see, you are cheating a bit because you brought religion into this. It’s legitimate. It’s valid. But how would it be if I deal with the gospels, with the Bible, with Jesus, toward the end of this retreat. I will say this much now to complicate it even more. ‘I was hungry, and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink,’ and what do they reply? ‘When? When did we do it? We didn’t know it.’ They were unconscious! I sometimes have a horrid fantasy where the king says, ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat,’ and the people on the right side say, ‘That’s right, Lord, we know.’ ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ the king tells them. ‘It doesn’t follow the script; you’re not supposed to have known.’ Isn’t that interesting? But you know. You know the inner pleasure you have while doing acts of charity. Aha! That’s right! It’s the opposite of someone who says, ‘What’s so great about what I did? I did something, I got something. I had no notion I was doing anything good. My left hand had no idea what my right hand was doing.’ You know, a good is never so good as when you have no awareness that you’re doing good. You are never so good as when you have no consciousness that you’re good. Or as the great Sufi would say, ‘A saint is one until he or she knows it.’ Unselfconscious! Unselfconscious!
“Some of you object to this. You say, ‘Isn’t the pleasure I receive in giving, isn’t that eternal life right here and now?’ I wouldn’t know. I call pleasure, pleasure, and nothing more. For the time being, at least until we get into religion later on. But I want you to understand something right at the beginning, that religion is not—I repeat: not—necessarily connected with spirituality. Please keep religion out of this for the time being.
“All right, you ask, what about the soldier who falls on a grenade to keep it from hurting others? And what about the man who got into a truck full of dynamite and drove into the American camp in Beirut? How about him? ‘Greater love than this no one has.’ But the Americans don’t think so. He did it deliberately. He was terrible, wasn’t he? But he wouldn’t think so, I assure you. He thought he was going to heaven. That’s right. Just like your soldier falling on the grenade.
“I’m trying to get at a picture of an action where there is not self, where you’re awake and what you do is done through you. Your deed in that case becomes a happening. ‘Let it be done to me.’ I’m not excluding that. But when you do it, I’m searching for the selfishness. Even if it is only ‘I’ll be remembered as a great hero,’ or ‘I’d never be able to live if I didn’t do this. I’d never be able to live with the thought if I ran away.’ But remember, I’m not excluding the other kind of act. I didn’t say that there never is any act where there is not self. Maybe there is. We’ll have to explore that. A mother saving a child—saving her child, you say. But how come she’s not saving the neighbor’s child? It’s the hers. It’s the soldier dying for his country. Many such deaths bother me. I ask myself, ‘Are they the result of brainwashing?’ Martyrs bother me. I think they’re often brainwashed. Muslim martyrs, Hindu martyrs, Buddhist martyrs, Christian martyrs, they are brainwashed!
“They’ve got an idea in their heads that they must die, that death is a great thing.
“They feel nothing, they go right in. But not all of them, so listen to me properly. I didn’t say all of them, but I wouldn’t exclude the possibility. Lots of communists get brainwashed (you’re ready to believe that). They’re so brainwashed they’re ready to die. I sometimes say to myself that the process that we use for making, for example, a St. Francis Xavier could be exactly the same process used for producing terrorists. You can have a man go on a thirty-day retreat and come out all aflame with the love of Christ, yet without the slightest bit of self-awareness. None. He could be a big pain. He thinks he’s a great saint. I don’t mean to slander Francis Xavier, who probably was a great saint, but he was a difficult man to live with. You know he was a lousy superior, he really was! Do a historical investigation. Ignatius always had to step in to undo the harm that this good man was doing by his intolerance. You need to be pretty intolerant to achieve what he achieved. Go, go, go, go—no matter how many corpses fall by the wayside. Some critics of Francis Xavier claim exactly that. He used to dismiss men from our Society and they’d appeal to Ignatius, who would say, ‘Come to Rome and we’ll talk about it.’ And Ignatius surreptitiously got them in again. How much self-awareness was there in this situation? Who are we to judge, we don’t know.
“I’m not saying there’s no such thing as pure motivation. I’m saying that ordinarily everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything. When you do something for the love of Christ, is that selfishness? Yes. When you’re doing something for the love of anybody, it is in your self-interest. I’ll have to explain that.
“Suppose you happen to live in Phoenix and you feed over five hundred children a day. That gives you a good feeling? Well, would you expect it to give you a bad feeling? But sometimes it does. And that is because there are some people who do things so that they won’t have to have a bad feeling. And they call that charity. They act out of guilt. That isn’t love. But, thank God, you do things for people and it’s pleasurable. Wonderful! You’re a healthy individual because you’re self-interested. That’s healthy.
“Let me summarize what I was saying about selfless charity. I said there were two types of selfishness; maybe I should have said three. First, when I do something, or rather, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself; second, when I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others. Don’t take pride in that. Don’t think you’re a great person. You’re a very ordinary person, but you’ve got refined tastes. Your taste is good, not the quality of your spirituality. When you were a child, you liked Coca-Cola; now you’ve grown older and you appreciate chilled beer on a hot day. You’ve got better tastes now. When you were a child, you loved chocolates; now you’re older, you enjoy a symphony, you enjoy a poem. You’ve got better tastes. But you’re getting your pleasure all the same, except now it’s in the pleasure of pleasing others. Then you’ve got the third type, which is the worst: when you do something good so that you won’t get a bad feeling. It doesn’t give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You hate it. You’re making loving sacrifices but you’re grumbling. Ha! How little you know of yourself if you think you don’t do things this way.
“If I had a dollar for every time I did things that gave me a bad feeling, I’d be a millionaire by now. You know how it goes. ‘Could I meet you tonight, Father?’ ‘Yes, come on in!’ I don’t want to meet him and I hate meeting him. I want to watch that TV show tonight, but how do I say no to him? I don’t have the guts to say no. ‘Come on in,’ and I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, I’ve got to put up with this pain.’
“It doesn’t give me a good feeling to meet with him and it doesn’t give me a good feeling to say no to him, so I choose the lesser of the two evils and I say, ‘O.K., come on in.’ I’m going to be happy when this thing is over and I’ll be able to take my smile off, but I start the session with him: ‘How are you?’ ‘Wonderful,’ he says, and he goes on and on about how he loves that workshop, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, when is he going to come to the point?’ Finally he comes to the point, and I metaphorically slam him against the wall and say, ‘Well, any fool could solve that kind of problem,’ and I send him out. ‘Whew! Got rid of him,’ I say. And the next morning at breakfast (because I’m feeling I was so rude) I go up to him and say, ‘How’s life?’ And he answers, ‘Pretty good.’ And he adds, ‘You know, what you said to me last night was a real help. Can I meet you today, after lunch?’ Oh God!
“That’s the worst kind of charity, when you’re doing something so you won’t get a bad feeling. You don’t have the guts to say you want to be left alone. You want people to think you’re a good priest! When you say, ‘I don’t like hurting people,’ I say, ‘Come off it! I don’t believe you.’ I don’t believe anyone who says that he or she does not like hurting people. We love to hurt people, especially some people. We love it. And when someone else is doing the hurting we rejoice in it. But we don’t want to do the hurting ourselves because we’ll get hurt! Ah, there it is. If we do the hurting, others will have a bad opinion of us. They won’t like us, they’ll talk against us and we don’t like that!”

Good, Bad, or Lucky

The following is the 10th 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

“To me, selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing. To me, it would seem to be the same thing as nonbeing. Whatever it is, I’m saying: Stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, ‘The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.’ We differ from others—from criminals, for example—only in what we do or don’t do, not in what we are. The only difference between Jesus and those others was that he was awake and they weren’t. Look at people who win the lottery. Do they say, ‘I’m so proud to accept this prize, not for myself, but for my nation and my society.’ Does anybody talk like that when they win the lottery? No. Because they were lucky, lucky. So they won the lottery, first prize. Anything to be proud of in that?
In the same way, if you achieved enlightenment, you would do so in the interest of self and you would be lucky. Do you want to glory in that? What’s there to glory about? Can’t you see how utterly stupid it is to be vain about your good deeds? The Pharisee wasn’t an evil man, he was a stupid man. He was stupid, not evil. He didn’t stop to think. Someone once said, ‘I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get started again.”