Daly Bread: Recent Episodes
Jerome Daly
When we die before we die, we are surrendering to the Real, to union with God—now—and therefore later too.
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Surrender and letting go might sound like losing, but they are actually about accessing a deeper sense of the self, which is already whole and filled with abundant life.
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Contemplation brings us to the place of divine fullness where hope lives. Contemplation is living in a unity that produces a deep non-rational, and calm hope. God allows us to bring “on earth what is in heaven” every time we can allow, receive, and forgive the conflicts of the moment and sit in some degree of contentment.
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Sooner or later, life is going to lead us into the belly of the beast, into a situation that we can’t fix, can’t control, and can’t explain or understand. That’s where transformation most quickly happens. That’s when we’re uniquely in the hands of God.
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If you try to understand God’s grace by any ledger of merit, you will never understand it.
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The pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, is always death transformed, not death avoided. The universal spiritual pattern is death and resurrection; loss and renewal. But, we want one without the other.
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If we cannot find some way to transform our wounds into sacred wounds, we will become cynical, negative, or bitter. This might be the major task of religion, because we will be wounded, sooner or later.
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We are obsessed by thoughts as soon as we wake up, useless chatter all day. Setting expectations are invariably disappointments and resentments waiting to happen.
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If we can encounter one thing in its uniqueness, it can lead to an encounter with all of creation at the same time. The contemplative mind does not demand, is not needy, and is not easily offended.
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The finite manifests the infinite. The physical is the doorway to the spiritual. All we need is right here, right now. As above, so below.
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The goal of contemplation is to experience the unity of ourselves, with creation, with our neighbor, our enemy, and with God. Here and Now! God is in all things and all things are in God. God is not as transcendent as we first imagined, He is closer than you think.
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Stay out of your thoughts. Rest in your base animal contentment. Feel nothing, emptiness. Stay at the cellular level, without shame or fear, long enough for the Deeper Source to reveal itself.
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We are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments and we act out of compulsive, repetitive, habits.
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Contemplation is a way of observing yourself from a place of non judgmental compassion in order to live your life from a calm inner awareness and acceptance. It is a way of seeing yourself with the eyes of God.
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Your life is not really about you; you are a part of a much larger flow called Life Itself—or simply God.
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In order to be truly conscious, it’s necessary to observe “self” or “me” from a distance, taking a broader view from our isolated self. We must learn to see from the view of the Indwelling Spirit. Then we see with eyes much larger and other than our own.
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Growing up is more about education, psychological and emotional maturity, coming to grips with reality and developing a heathy social integration. Waking up refers to a much deeper enlightenment, and is much more than merely being
educated.
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You have to stay with your pain, no matter what it is or how hard it is, until you’ve learned its lessons. When you can consciously hold your pain, you enter a liminal space that will allow you to break through to a much deeper level of consciousness and awareness.
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Your life is not about you; you are about Life. The eternal life of God is living in you and through you. The problem is most of us, don’t care; aren’t interested. It’s too overwhelming to grasp, but the truth of the matter is, you have never been separate from God except in your mind.
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To be present to something is to allow the moment to influence us and even change us. We must allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Instead, because of our fear, we allow the event to control us.
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When you see through contemplative eyes, you refuse to identify with any one side. You hold the tension between what seems to be conflict and go beyond words, which are limiting, to experience, which has the potential to unify what seems to be contradictions.
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Detached observation of ourselves helps us to recognize our own darkness and to deal with it, but only when ready.
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The task of religion is to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you will know whatever it is that you need to know. When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple and at the same time, that hard. Too much religion has encouraged you to be unconscious, but God loves you more than that.
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As long as you think you are fully in control, you are going to keep using your old learned responses. You need to rewire the old system and the only way to do that is by trusting that darkness will lead to depth, freedom, and love. Change happens when you are standing, at the same time, within both safety and conflict, tradition and newness.
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Authentic spirituality is always seeking to feed our soul. Watch the lens through which we are seeing the moment or we will not see things as they are, but rather see things as we are!
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We make the mistake of feeling emotions are caused by something out there. We like to play the victim. “He made me do it,” or “My abusive parent made me the way I am.” It takes real spiritual and emotional maturity to recognize that our response always and finally comes from us.
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Prayer is not changing God’s mind about us, but allowing God to change our mind about God and the reality right in front of us.
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The mistake we make is that we do not realize that it is how we see that determines what we see and how it will affect us and what our response will be. What and how we see the outer world is a mirror of our state of consciousness. Most of the time, we just do not see at all, but operate on cruise control.
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Philosophers tend toward the universals and poets love the particulars, it is the mystics who teach us how to encompass both.
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Those who don’t know what to do with this life are the ones who are bothered about what they are going to do with another life. One sign that you’re awake is that you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life. You’re not bothered about it; you don’t care. You are not interested. Forget the past. When you hear “Repent for your past,” realize it’s a great religious distraction from waking up. Wake up! That’s what repent means. Not “weep for your sins.” Wake up! Understand, stop all the crying.
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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. 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 norther way than through awareness. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop.
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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.
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“We live in a flash of light; evening comes and it is night forever.” It’s only a flash and we waste it. The way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave.
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Information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness. You don’t change yourself, it’s not me changing me. Change takes place through you, in you.
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If you want a road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. Try to hear them all. You’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged. That is extremely important for the process of change.
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You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention. Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable.
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When you have attained wisdom, who can enslave you? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be.
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If you would die to the past, if you would die toevery minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death. We’re always dying to things. We’re always shedding everything in order to be fully alive and to be resurrected at every moment. Meditating on and imitating externally the behavior of Jesus is no help. It’s not a question of imitating Christ, it’s a question of becoming what Jesus was. It’s a question of becoming Christ, becoming aware, understanding what’s going on within you.
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The more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. The more you fight darkness, the more real it becomes to you, and the more you exhaust yourself. But when you turn on the light of awareness, it melts.
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There is a difference between knowledge and awareness, between information and awareness. I
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It’s not reality that
matters, but what you’re saying to yourself about it.Words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if they’re not used properly.
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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.
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Break out of this prison, this programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; break out into reality. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all. We’re too distracted with attachment. Temporarily, the world rearranges itself to suit our attachment. But hang on; it’ll change; you’ll be depressed tomorrow. Why do we keep doing this
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An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy. Once you get convinced of that—and it gets into our subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being—you are finished.
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Some words correspond to nothing. They were put there by the human mind. There are thousands of words in our
vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all but they trigger emotions, so we begin to see things that are not there.
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We never argue about reality; we argue about opinions, and concepts, and judgments. Drop your concepts, drop your opinions, drop your prejudices, drop your judgments, and you will see.
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Concepts point, but are never entirely accurate; they miss uniqueness, concreteness. The concept is universal. The concept always misses or omits something important, something that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness.
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In order to get awareness, you’ve got to see, and you can’t see if you’re prejudiced. Almost everything and every person we look at, we look at in a prejudiced way.
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When you hold on to anything, you cease to live.
Understand that happiness is not the same as excitement or thrills. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered enough, then you are ready to see. You’re living off of thrills.
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It’s not that you have to suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless. You’d be without energy and that would be terrible. Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better. But don’t suppress desire, understand it.
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Self-worth is really about how we are reflected in the mirrors of other people’s minds. One understands one’s personal worth when one no longer identifies or defines one’s self in terms of these transient things.
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But, how do you lose yourself ?Did you ever try to lose something? The harder you try, the harder it gets. It’s when you’re not trying that you lose things.
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So, what will happen when you finally arrive. Get started and you will know; it cannot be described. It is said, “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” A teacher cannot give you the truth. Truth cannot be put into words or a formula. That isn’t the truth. That isn’t reality. Reality cannot be put into a formula. A teacher can only point out your errors. When you drop your errors, you will know the truth. And even then you cannot say.
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People want to imitate Christ, but, you know, when a monkey plays a saxophone, that doesn’t make him a musician. You can’t imitate Christ by imitating his external behavior. You’ve got to be Christ, you must be what Christ is, love and compassion. An external imitation will get you nowhere.
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You don’t have to do anything. The more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand. The first thing you need to understand is that the negative feeling is inside you. You are responsible for the negative feeling, not the other person. Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit.
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As Meister Eckhart says, “It is not by your actions that you will be saved but by your being. It is not by what you do, but by what you are that you will be judged.”
(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.
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The first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings. The second step is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. The third step: Never identify with that feeling. You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.
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If you refuse to identify with any labels, most of your worries simply cease. This is the secret of awakening. You would never be unhappy again. Nothing would have the power to hurt you again. No matter what happens you remain at peace. This is being human, not a puppet, jerked about this way and that way, letting events or other people tell you how to feel.
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It is extremely important, if you want to wake up, to practice “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.
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The only way to awareness is to 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.
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The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you. Life is a symphony. It plays one melody in your presence, but when you leave, the orchestra doesn’t stop. It keeps playing. That’s what awakening is all about. Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. 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.
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Most people live mechanical lives, with mechanical thoughts that are not their own, mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. We are so mechanical, so controlled. We write books about being controlled and how wonderful it is to be controlled and how necessary it is that people tell you you’re O.K. Then you’ll have a good feeling about yourself. You’ve built a cage for yourself. Do you like being in prison? Do you like being controlled?
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What is enlightenment like? Well, you’ll find it when you’re ready to change your illusions for reality, when you’re ready to change your dreams for facts. That’s where life finally becomes meaningful. Life becomes beautiful. 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 used to be.
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Your good deeds are really self-interest. Have you ever thought about that? You see, you are really acting to of selfishness. You are giving yourself the pleasure of pleasing yourself. It makes you feel good. You are also giving yourself the pleasure of pleasing others. You get to feel that you’re really great, but are you? You give something, you get something. You help someone by giving something, and you get something. That’s not charity, it’s enlightened self-interest. There is nothing wrong with that, but that is what it is.
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For some of us, the harsh realities of life wake us up. We suffer enough to wake up. Others keep on sleepwalking and never wake up. It just never occurs to them that there may be a better way. Even if you haven’t been knocked around by life enough to wake you up, there is another way. It’s through spirituality. But, spirituality is not what you think it is. It’s not about pious acts. Spirituality is about a willingness to listen and unlearn.
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We have all been wounded, that’s part of being human, but we must turn our wounds into sacred wounds.
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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?” When you’re on the verge of going insane, you’re either psychotic or a mystic. The mystic is the opposite of the lunatic because the whole world is crazy. We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything. People are crazy. They are lunatics, and the sooner you see this, the better for your mental and spiritual health.
Is renunciation the answer? Well, what are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce. When you fight something, you’re tied to it. As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it.
You must “receive” your demons, because the only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand its true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands. But, if you’re hypnotized into thinking that you won’t be happy without this, that, or the other thing, you’re stuck. You don’t need to do sacrifices and renounce things. That’s useless when you’re still asleep. You needed to understand. If you understood, you’d simply drop the desire for it. If you woke up, you’d simply drop it.
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The first thing you must 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.
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We are all born with a divine spark, but we have forgotten our true self. Don’t let yourself be domesticated. Embrace the divine within. Remember, we are all called to be saints. We were made by our creator to be a saint. We were made to soar with the eagles. All that is needed is to want it. God will make you what he created you to be, just consent to let him do it. All you have to do is desire it.
Let go, step into your own power and soar.
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