More Words

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

“Mark Twain put it very nicely when he said, ‘It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have frozen to death.’ We do freeze to death on words. It’s not the cold outside that matters, but the thermometer. It’s not reality that matters, but what you’re saying to yourself about it. I was told a lovely story about a farmer in Finland. When they were drawing up the Russian-Finnish border, the farmer had to decide whether he wanted to be in Russia or Finland. After a long time he said he wanted to be in Finland, but he didn’t want to offend the Russian officials. These came to him and wanted to know why he wanted to be in Finland. The farmer replied, ‘It has always been my desire to live in Mother Russia, but at my age I wouldn’t be able to survive another Russian winter.’

“Russia and Finland are only words, concepts, but not for human beings, not for crazy human beings. We’re almost never looking at reality. A guru was once attempting to explain to a crowd how human beings react to words, feed on words, live on words, rather than on reality. One of the men stood up and protested; he said, ‘I don’t agree that words have all that much effect on us.’ The guru said, ‘Sit down, you son of a bitch.’ The man went livid with rage and said, ‘You call yourself an enlightened person, a guru, a master, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ The guru then said, ‘Pardon me, sir, I was carried away. I really beg your pardon; that was a lapse; I’m sorry.’ The man finally calmed down. Then the guru said, ‘It took just a few words to get a whole tempest going within you; and it took just a few words to calm you down, didn’t it?’ Words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if they’re not used properly.”

Addictive Love

The following is the 41st 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.”

At a Loss For Words

The following is the 37th chapter in, “AWARENESS: A de Mellow Spirituality Conference in His Own Words” by Fr. Anthony de Mello, S.J. edited by J. Francis Stroud, S.J., Copyright © 1990 by the DeMello Stroud Spirituality Center.

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

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

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

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

Permanent Worth

The following is the 32nd 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 move on to another idea, there is the whole matter of one’s personal worth. Personal worth doesn’t mean self-worth. Where do you get self-worth from? Do you get it from success in your work? Do you get it from having a lot of money? Do you get it from attracting a lot of men (if you’re a woman) or a lot of women (if you’re a man)? How fragile all that is, how transitory. When we talk about self-worth, are we not talking, really, about how we are reflected in the mirrors of other people’s minds? But do we need to depend on that? One understands one’s personal worth when one no longer identifies or defines one’s self in terms of these transient things. I’m not beautiful because everyone says I’m beautiful. I’m really neither beautiful nor ugly. These are things that come and go. I could be suddenly transformed into a very ugly creature tomorrow, but it is still ‘I.’ Then, say, I get plastic surgery and I become beautiful again. Does the ‘I’ really become beautiful? You need to give a lot of time to reflect on these things. I’ve thrown them at you in rapid succession, but if you would take the time to understand what I have been saying, to dwell on it, you’ll have a gold mine there. I know, because when I stumbled upon these things for the first time, what a treasure I discovered.

“Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don’t lead to growth in themselves. What leads to growth is painful experiences. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow. Let’s limit ourselves, for the time being, to psychological suffering, to all those negative emotions we have. Don’t waste your time on a single one of them. I’ve already told you what you could do with those emotions. The disappointment you experience when things don’t turn out as you wanted them to, watch that! Look at what it says about you. I say this without condemnation (otherwise you’re going to get caught up in self-hatred). Observe it as you would observe it in another person. Look at that disappointment, that depression you experience when you are criticized. What does that say about you?

“Have you heard about the fellow who said, ‘Who says that worry doesn’t help? It certainly does help. Every time I worry about something it doesn’t happen!’ Well, it certainly helped him. Or the other fellow who says, ‘The neurotic is a person who worries about something that did not happen in the past. He’s not like us normal people who worry about things that will not happen in the future.’ That’s the issue. That worry, that anxiety, what does it say about you?

“Negative feelings, every negative feeling is useful for awareness, for understanding. They give you the opportunity to feel it, to watch it from the outside. In the beginning, the depression will still be there, but you will have cut your connection with it. Gradually you will understand the depression. As you understand it, it will occur less frequently, and will disappear altogether. Maybe, but by that time it won’t matter too much. Before enlightenment I used to be depressed. After enlightenment I continue to be depressed. But gradually, or rapidly, or suddenly, you get the state of wakefulness. This is the state where you drop desires. But remember what I meant by desire and cravings. I meant: ‘Unless I get what I desire, I refuse to be happy.’ I mean cases where happiness depends on the fulfillment of desire.”

Loosing The Rat Race

The following is the 31st 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.

“Let’s get back to that marvelous sentence in the gospel about losing oneself in order to find oneself. One finds it in most religious literature and in all religious and spiritual and mystical literature.

“How does one lose oneself? Did you ever try to lose something? That’s right, the harder you try, the harder it gets. It’s when you’re not trying that you lose things. You lose something when you’re not aware. Well, how does one die to oneself? We’re talking about death now, we’re not talking about suicide. We’re not told to kill the self, but to die. Causing pain to the self, causing suffering to the self would be self-defeating. It would be counterproductive. You’re never so full of yourself as when you’re in pain. You’re never so centered on yourself as when you’re depressed. You’re never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy. Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self. Look how conscious you are of your tooth when you have a toothache. When you don’t have a toothache, you’re not even aware you have a tooth, or that you have a head, for that matter, when you don’t have a headache. But it’s so different when you have a splitting headache.

“So it’s quite false, quite erroneous, to think that the way to deny the self is to cause pain to the self, to go in for abnegation, mortification, as these were traditionally understood. To deny the self, to die to it, to lose it, is to understand its true nature. When you do that, it will disappear; it will vanish. Suppose somebody walks into my room one day. I say, ‘Come right in. May I know who you are?’ And he says, ‘I am Napoleon.’ And I say, ‘Not the Napoleon . . .’ And he says, ‘Precisely. Bonaparte, Emperor of France.’ ‘What do you know!’ I say, even while I’m thinking to myself, ‘I better handle this guy with care.’

“‘Sit down, Your Majesty,’ I say. ‘Well, they tell me you’re a pretty good spiritual director. I have a spiritual problem. I’m anxious, I’m finding it hard to trust in God. I have my armies in Russia, see, and I’m spending sleepless nights wondering how it’s going to turn out.’ So I say, ‘Well, Your Majesty, I could certainly prescribe something for that. What I suggest is that you read chapter 6 of Matthew: ‘Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin.’

“By this point I’m wondering who is crazier, this guy or me. But I go along with this lunatic. That’s what the wise guru does with you in the beginning. He goes along with you; he takes your troubles seriously. He’ll wipe a tear or two from your eye. You’re crazy, but you don’t know it yet. The time has to come soon when he’ll pull the rug out from under your feet and tell you, ‘Get off it, you’re not Napoleon.’ In those famous dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, God is reported to have said to her, ‘I am He who is; you are she who is not.’ Have you ever experienced your is-not-ness? In the East we have an image for this. It is the image of the dancer and the dance. God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God’s dance. It isn’t as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer. Oh no. You’re not a dancer at all. You are being danced! Did you ever experience that? So when the man comes to his senses and realizes that he is not Napoleon, he does not cease to be. He continues to be, but he suddenly realizes that he is something other than what he thought he was.

“To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were. You thought you were at the center; now you experience yourself as satellite. You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance. These are just analogies, images, so you cannot take them literally. They just give you a clue, a hint; they’re only pointers, don’t forget. So you cannot press them too much. Don’t take them too literally.”

Sleepwalking

The following is the 27th 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 scriptures are always hinting of that, but you’ll never understand a word of what the scriptures are saying until you wake up. Sleeping people read the scriptures and crucify the Messiah on the basis of them. You’ve got to wake up to make sense out of the scriptures. When you do wake up, they make sense. So does reality. But you’ll never be able to put it into words. You’d rather do something? But even there we’ve got to make sure that you’re not swinging into action simply to get rid of your negative feelings. Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They’re not coming from love, they’re coming from negative feelings. They’re coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injustice or whatever. You’ve got to make sure of your ‘being’ before you swing into action. You have to make sure of who you are before you act. Unfortunately, when sleeping people swing into action, they simply substitute one cruelty for another, one injustice for another. And so it goes. Meister Eckhart says, ‘It is not by your actions that you will be saved’ (or awakened; call it by any word you want), ‘but by your being. It is not by what you do, but by what you are that you will be judged.’ What good is it to you to feed the hungry, give the thirsty to drink, or visit prisoners in jail?

“Remember that sentence from Paul: ‘If I give my body to be burned and all my goods to feed the poor and have not love . . .’ It’s not your actions, it’s your being that counts. Then you might swing into action. You might or might not. You can’t decide that until you’re awake. Unfortunately, all the emphasis is concentrated on changing the world and very little emphasis is given to waking up. When you wake up, you will know what to do or what not to do. Some mystics are very strange, you know. Like Jesus, who said something like ‘I wasn’t sent to those people; I limit myself to what I am supposed to do right now. Later, maybe.’ Some mystics go silent. Mysteriously, some of them sing songs. Some of them are into service. We’re never sure. They’re a law unto themselves; they know exactly what is to be done. ‘Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord,’ as I said to you earlier.

“Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, ‘Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?’ Everything becomes beautiful when you change. Or you look at the trees and the mountains through windows that are wet with rain from a storm, and everything looks blurred and shapeless. You want to go right out there and change those trees, change those mountains. Wait a minute, let’s examine your window. When the storm ceases and the rain stops, and you look out the window, you say, ‘Well, how different everything looks.’ We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.

“Remember that sentence from scripture about everything turning into good for those who love God? When you finally awake, you don’t try to make good things happen; they just happen. You understand suddenly that everything that happens to you is good. Think of some people you’re living with whom you want to change. You find them moody, inconsiderate, unreliable, treacherous, or whatever. But when you are different, they’ll be different. That’s an infallible and miraculous cure. The day you are different, they will become different. And you will see them differently, too. Someone who seemed terrifying will now seem frightened. Someone who seemed rude will seem frightened. All of a sudden, no one has the power to hurt you anymore. No one has the power to put pressure on you. It’s something like this: You leave a book on the table and I pick it up and say, ‘You’re pressing this book on me. I have to pick it up or not pick it up.’ People are so busy accusing everyone else, blaming everyone else, blaming life, blaming society, blaming their neighbor. You’ll never change that way; you’ll continue in your nightmare, you’ll never wake up.

“Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of ‘I’; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.”

Four Steps to Wisdom

The following is the 25th 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 you need to do is get in touch with negative feelings that you’re not even aware of. Lots of people have negative feelings they’re not aware of. Lots of people are depressed and they’re not aware they are depressed. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they were. You can’t deal with a cancer that you haven’t detected. You can’t get rid of boll weevils on your farm if you’re not aware of their existence. The first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings. What negative feelings? Gloominess, for instance. You’re feeling gloomy and moody. You feel self-hatred or guilt. You feel that life is pointless, that it makes no sense; you’ve got hurt feelings, you’re feeling nervous and tense. Get in touch with those feelings first.

“The second step (this is a four-step program) is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. That’s such a self-evident thing, but do you think people know it? They don’t, believe me. They’ve got Ph.D.s and are presidents of universities, but they haven’t understood this. They didn’t teach me how to live at school. They taught me everything else. As one man said, “I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it.” That’s what spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you.

“Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality. That’s crazy! Stop trying to change the other person. We spend all our time and energy trying to change external circumstances, trying to change our spouses, our bosses, our friends, our enemies, and everybody else. We don’t have to change anything. Negative feelings are in you. No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy. There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you or hurt you. No event, condition, situation, or person. Nobody told you this; they told you the opposite. That’s why you’re in the mess that you’re in right now. That is why you’re asleep. They never told you this. But it’s self-evident.

“Let’s suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The rain? Or you? What’s causing the negative feeling? The rain or your reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table’s fine. It’s busy being what it was made to be—a table. The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist only in the human mind. We might add: in the stupid, sleeping human mind. Reality is not problematic. Take away human beings from this planet and life would go on, nature would go on in all its loveliness and violence. Where would the problem be? No problem. You created the problem. You are the problem. You identified with “me” and that is the problem. The feeling is in you, not in reality.

“The third step: Never identify with that feeling. It has nothing to do with the ‘I’. Don’t define your essential self in terms of that feeling. Don’t say, ‘I am depressed’. If you want to say, ‘It is depressed’, that’s all right. If you want to say depression is there, that’s fine; if you want to say gloominess is there, that’s fine. But not: I am gloomy. You’re defining yourself in terms of the feeling. That’s your illusion; that’s your mistake. There is a depression there right now, there are hurt feelings there right now, but let it be, leave it alone. It will pass. Everything passes, everything. Your depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness. Those are the swings of the pendulum. If you seek kicks or thrills, get ready for depression. Do you want your drug? Get ready for the hangover. One end of the pendulum swings to the other.

“This has nothing to do with ‘I’; it has nothing to do with happiness. It is the ‘me’. If you remember this, if you say it to yourself a thousand times, if you try these three steps a thousand times, you will get it. You might not need to do it even three times. I don’t know; there’s no rule for it. But do it a thousand times and you’ll make the biggest discovery in your life. To hell with those gold mines in Alaska. What are you going to do with that gold? If you’re not happy, you can’t live. So you found gold. What does that matter? You’re a king; you’re a princess. You’re free; you don’t care anymore about being accepted or rejected, that makes no difference. Psychologists tell us how important it is to get a sense of belonging. Baloney! Why do you want to belong to anybody? It doesn’t matter anymore.

“A friend of mine told me that there’s an African tribe where capital punishment consists of being ostracized. If you were kicked out of New York, or wherever you’re residing, you wouldn’t die. How is it that the African tribesman died? Because he partakes of the common stupidity of humanity. He thinks he will not be able to live if he does not belong. It’s very different from most people, or is it? He’s convinced he needs to belong. But you don’t need to belong to anybody or anything or any group. You don’t even need to be in love. Who told you you do? What you need is to be free. What you need is to love. That’s it; that’s your nature. But what you’re really telling me is that you want to be desired. You want to be applauded, to be attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you.
You’re wasting your life. Wake up! You don’t need this. You can be blissfully happy without it.

“Your society is not going to be happy to hear this, because you become terrifying when you open your eyes and understand this. How do you control a person like this? He doesn’t need you; he’s not threatened by your criticism; he doesn’t care what you think of him or what you say about him. He’s cut all those strings; he’s not a puppet any longer. It’s terrifying. ‘So we’ve got to get rid of him. He tells the truth; he has become fearless; he has stopped being human’. Human! Behold! A human being at last! He broke out of his slavery, broke out of their prison.

“No event justifies a negative feeling. There is no situation in the world that justifies a negative feeling. That’s what all our mystics have been crying themselves hoarse to tell us. But nobody listens. The negative feeling is in you. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus, Lord Krishna says to Arjuna, ‘Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord’. A marvelous sentence.

“You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.

“It reminds me of the Irish prisoner who dug a tunnel under the prison wall and managed to escape. He comes out right in the middle of a school playground where little children are playing. Of course, when he emerges from the tunnel he can’t restrain himself anymore and begins to jump up and down, crying, ‘I’m free, I’m free, I’m free’! A little girl there looks at him scornfully and says, ‘That’s nothing. I’m four’.

“The fourth step: How do you change things? How do you change yourselves? There are many things you must understand here, or rather, just one thing that can be expressed in many ways. Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, ‘Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor’! The patient replies, ‘Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better’. Isn’t that absurd? But that’s what we all do. The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes. You’re suffering because you are asleep, but you’re thinking, ‘How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed’.

“We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good. But has it ever struck you that even if your wife changes or your husband changes, what does that do to you? You’re just as vulnerable as before; you’re just as idiotic as before; you’re just as asleep as before. You are the one who needs to change, who needs to take medicine. You keep insisting, ‘I feel good because the world is right’. Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying.”

Stripping Down to the “I”

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 DeMello Stroud Spirituality Center

“I suggest another exercise now. Would you write down on a piece of paper any brief way you would describe yourself—for example, businessman, priest, human being, Catholic, Jew, anything.

“Some write, I notice, things like, fruitful, searching pilgrim, competent, alive, impatient, centered, flexible, reconciler, lover, member of the human race, overly structured. This is the fruit, I trust, of observing yourself. As if you were watching another person.

“But notice, you’ve got ‘I’ observing ‘me’. This is an interesting phenomenon that has never ceased to cause wonder to philosophers, mystics, scientists, psychologists, that the ‘I’ can observe ‘me’. It would seem that animals are not able to do this at all. It would seem that one needs a certain amount of intelligence to be able to do this. What I’m going to give you now is not metaphysics; it is not philosophy. It is plain observation and common sense. The great mystics of the East are really referring to that ‘I’, not to the ‘me’. As a matter of fact, some of these mystics tell us that we begin first with things, with an awareness of things; then we move on to an awareness of thoughts (that’s the ‘me’); and finally we get to awareness of the thinker. Things, thoughts, thinker. What we’re really searching for is the thinker. Can the thinker know himself? Can I know what ‘I’ is? Some of these mystics reply, ‘Can the knife cut itself? Can the tooth bite itself? Can the eye see itself? Can the ‘I’ know itself’? But I am concerned with something infinitely more practical right now, and that is with deciding what the ‘I’ is not. I’ll go as slowly as possible because the consequences are devastating. Terrific or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

“Listen to this: Am I my thoughts, the thoughts that I am thinking? No. Thoughts come and go; I am not my thoughts. Am I my body? They tell us that millions of cells in our body are changed or are renewed every minute, so that by the end of seven years we don’t have a single living cell in our body that was there seven years before. Cells come and go. Cells arise and die. But “I” seems to persist. So am I my body? Evidently not!

“’I’ is something other and more than the body. You might say the body is part of ‘I’, but it is a changing part. It keeps moving, it keeps changing. We have the same name for it but it constantly changes. Just as we have the same name for Niagara Falls, but Niagara Falls is constituted by water that is constantly changing. We use the same name for an ever-changing reality.

“How about my name? Is ‘I’ my name? Evidently not, because I can change my name without changing the ‘I’. How about my career? How about my beliefs? I say I am a Catholic, a Jew—is that an essential part of ‘I’? When I move from one religion to another, has the ‘I’ changed? Do I have a new ‘I’” or is it the same ‘I’ that has changed? In other words, is my name an essential part of me, of the ‘I’? Is my religion an essential part of the ‘I’? I mentioned the little girl who says to the boy, ‘Are you a Presbyterian’? Well, somebody told me another story, about Paddy. Paddy was walking down the street in Belfast and he discovers a gun pressing against the back of his head and a voice says, ‘Are you Catholic or Protestant’? Well, Paddy has to do some pretty fast thinking. He says, ‘I’m a Jew’. And he hears a voice say, ‘I’ve got to be the luckiest Arab in the whole of Belfast’. Labels are so important to us. ‘I am a Republican’, we say. But are you really? You can’t mean that when you switch parties you have a new ‘I’. Isn’t it the same old ‘I’ with new political convictions? I remember hearing about a man who asks his friend, ‘Are you planning to vote Republican’? The friend says, ‘No, I’m planning to vote Democratic. My father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat, and my great-grandfather was a Democrat’. The man says, ‘That is crazy logic. I mean, if your father was a horse thief, and your grandfather was a horse thief, and your great-grandfather was a horse thief, what would you be’? ‘Ah’, the friend answered, ‘then I’d be a Republican’!

“We spend so much of our lives reacting to labels, our own and others’. We identify the labels with the ‘I’. Catholic and Protestant are frequent labels. There was a man who went to the priest and said, ‘Father, I want you to say a Mass for my dog’. The priest was indignant. ‘What do you mean, say a Mass for your dog’? ‘It’s my pet dog’, said the man. ‘I loved that dog and I’d like you to offer a Mass for him’. The priest said, ‘We don’t offer Masses for dogs here. You might try the denomination down the street. Ask them if they might have a service for you’. As the man was leaving, he said to the priest, ‘Too bad. I really loved that dog. I was planning to offer a million-dollar stipend for the Mass’. And the priest said, ‘Wait a minute, you never told me your dog was Catholic’.

“When you’re caught up in labels, what value do these labels have, as far as the ‘I’ is concerned? Could we say that ‘I’ is none of the labels we attach to it? Labels belong to ‘me’. What constantly changes is ‘me’. Does ‘I’ ever change? Does the observer ever change? The fact is that no matter what labels you think of (except perhaps human being) you should apply them to ‘me ‘. ‘I’ is none of these things. So when you step out of yourself and observe ‘me’, you no longer identify with ‘me’. Suffering exists in ‘me’, so when you identify ‘I’ with ‘me’, suffering begins.

“Say that you are afraid or desirous or anxious. When ‘I’ does not identify with money, or name, or nationality, or persons, or friends, or any quality, the ‘I’ is never threatened. It can be very active, but it isn’t threatened. Think of anything that caused or is causing you pain or worry or anxiety. First, can you pick up the desire under that suffering, that there’s something you desire very keenly or else you wouldn’t be suffering. What is that desire? Second, it isn’t simply a desire; there’s an identification there. You have somehow said to yourself, ‘The well-being of ‘I’, almost the existence of ‘I’, is tied up with this desire’. All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.”

Finding Yourself

The following is the 15th 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 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.”

Are We Talking About Spirituality in This Psychology Course

The following is the 5th 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.

“Is psychology more practical than spirituality? Nothing is more practical than spirituality. What can the poor psychologist do? He can only relieve the pressure. I’m a psychologist myself, and I practice psychotherapy, and I have this great conflict within me when I have to choose sometimes between psychology and spirituality. I wonder if that makes sense to anybody here. It didn’t make sense to me for many years.

“I’ll explain. It didn’t make sense to me for many years until I suddenly discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they get disillusioned with all relationships. Isn’t that a terrible thing to think? They’ve got to suffer enough in a relationship before they wake up and say, ‘I’m sick of it! There must be a better way of living than depending on another human being.’ And what was I doing as a psychotherapist? People were coming to me with their relationship problems, with their communication problems, etc., and sometimes what I did was a help. But sometimes, I’m sorry to say, it wasn’t, because it kept people asleep. Maybe they should have suffered a little more. Maybe they ought to touch rock bottom and say, ‘I’m sick of it all.’ It’s only when you’re sick of your sickness that you’ll get out of it. Most people go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get relief. I repeat: to get relief. Not to get out of it.

“There’s the story of little Johnny who, they say, was mentally retarded. But evidently he wasn’t, as you’ll learn from this story. Johnny goes to modeling class in his school for special children and he gets his piece of putty and he’s modeling it. He takes a little lump of putty and goes to a corner of the room and he’s playing with it. The teacher comes up to him and says, ‘Hi, Johnny.’ And Johnny says, ‘Hi.’ And the teacher says, ‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’ And Johnny says, ‘This is a lump of cow dung.’ The teacher asks, ‘What are you making out of it?’ He says, ‘I’m making a teacher.’
“The teacher thought, ‘Little Johnny has regressed.’ So she calls out to the principal, who was passing by the door at that moment, and says, ‘Johnny has regressed.’

“So the principal goes up to Johnny and says, ‘Hi, son.’ And Johnny says, ‘Hi.’ And the principal says, ‘What do you, have in your hand?’ And he says, ‘A lump of cow dung.’ ‘What are you making out of it?’ And he says, ‘A principal.’

“The principal thinks that this is a case for the school psychologist. ‘Send for the psychologist!’

“The psychologist is a clever guy. He goes up and says, ‘Hi.’ And Johnny says, ‘Hi.’ And the psychologist says, ‘I know what you’ve got in your hand.’

‘What?’ ‘A lump of cow dung.’ Johnny says, “‘Right.’ ‘And I know what you’re making out of it.’ ‘What?’

“‘You’re making a psychologist.’ ‘Wrong. Not enough cow dung!’ And they called him mentally retarded!

“The poor psychologists, they’re doing a good job. They really are. There are times when psychotherapy is a tremendous help, because when you’re on the verge of going insane, raving mad, you’re about to become either a psychotic or a mystic. That’s what the mystic is, the opposite of the lunatic. Do you know one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, ‘Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?’ It really is. Because we are crazy. The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we’re not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us. So we’re crazy. We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything. We’re crazy to the point, I’ve come to believe, that if everybody agrees on something, you can be sure it’s wrong! Every new idea, every great idea, when it first began was in a minority of one. That man called Jesus Christ—minority of one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying. The Buddha—minority of one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said, ‘Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.’ That’s well and accurately put. You’re going to hear lots of blasphemies during these days. ‘He hath blasphemed!’ Because people are crazy, they’re lunatics, and the sooner you see this, the better for your mental and spiritual health. Don’t trust them. Don’t trust your best friends. Get disillusioned with your best friends. They’re very clever. As you are in your dealings with everybody else, though you probably don’t know it. Ah, you’re so wily, and subtle, and clever. You’re putting on a great act.

“I’m not being very complimentary here, am I? But I repeat: You want to wake up. You’re putting on a great act. And you don’t even know it. You think you’re being so loving. Ha! Whom are you loving? Even your self-sacrifice gives you a good feeling, doesn’t it? ‘I’m sacrificing myself! I’m living up to my ideal.’ But you’re getting something out of it, aren’t you? You’re always getting something out of everything you do, until you wake up.

“So there it is: step one. Realize that you don’t want to wake up. It’s pretty difficult to wake up when you have been hypnotized into thinking that a scrap of old newspaper is a check for a million dollars. How difficult it is to tear yourself away from that scrap of old newspaper.”