The Happiness Podcast: Recent Episodes
Anthony De Mello/The DeMello Spirituality Center
The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to change. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. In order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away? How ready are you to embrace something unfamiliar?
What I am about to convey in the coming 4 minutes could be the most important minutes in your life. If you could grasp this, you’d hit upon the secret of awakening. You would never be unhappy again. Nothing would have the power to hurt you again. I mean that, nothing. It’s like throwing black paint in the air; the air remains uncontaminated. You never color the air black. No matter what happens to you, you remain uncontaminated. You remain at peace. There are human beings who have attained this. Become one of them!
We love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn’t it? 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? The future is just another trap?
Until we solve the problem called you, we’re going to get nowhere. The great mystics and masters in the East will say, “Who are you?” Many think the most important question in the world is: “Who is Jesus Christ?” Wrong! Many think it is: “Does God exist?” Wrong! Many think it is: “Is there a life after death?” Wrong! Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of: Is there a life before death?
What your society did to you when you were born was NOT to allow you to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life—namely, work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind. You were given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention, success, making it to the top, prestige, accolades, power, being the boss. You lost your freedom to be yourself and now others have the power to make you happy or miserable.
What does self-change entail? I’m going to break it down into two segments for you. First, we'll address insight. Not effort, not cultivating habits, not positive affirmations, not having an ideal state to change into, not focusing on what should be instead of what is. Second, we'll address understanding; by which De Mello means understanding the source of the suffering you are experiencing over and over.
Transformation is effortless. It's like a sailboat. When a sailboat has a mighty wind in its sail, it glides along so effortlessly that the boatman has nothing to do but steer. He makes no effort; he doesn’t push the boat. That’s an image of what happens when drop false beliefs and come home to yourself.
To live like a king or queen spiritually means you know no anxiety at all, no inner conflict, no tensions, no pressures, no upset, no heartache. Until you can transcend these reactions, your life remains a mess.
Some people make awakening a goal. They're determined to get there. They say, “I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened.” DeMello tells a story of a disciple who leaves his guru for the hills to attain enlightenment. Years pass, but he remains unenlightened; not until he gives it up.
When there’s something within you that moves in the direction of greater inner awareness, that very awareness creates its own discipline. It is the discipline of waking up! Through awareness you wake up, and there’s nothing so important in the world as awakening. Nothing!
What few of us ever understand is that the problem isn’t the situation; the problem is that we are afraid of the situation. The situation is whatever it is. In itself, it's neutral. Nothing is happening to you, it is happening in you. Your pain or upset come from how you are seeing the situation through some form of fear. Through awareness you can identify the fear, see it as mind made, not real, and let it pass. The more you practice allowing fear into awareness and embracing it instead of suppressong it, the less it will control you. Practicing awareness is how we wake up from the unhappiness we are living.
Researchers have found that happiness is what people want most. But researchers have also found that happiness is eluding most of us. It's hard to locate a completely happy person. Turns out it's only four percent of the population. The irony is we have it already. We were born happy. Happiness is our birthright. It’s built right into our spiritual DNA. Our brain has evolved neurocircuits to generate it. It's there for the taking.
These things in you that you struggle to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change. You see, you don’t have to do anything for enlightenment. You don’t have to do anything for liberation and spirituality. All you have to do is see something, understand something. If you would understand it, you would be free.
Anthony De Mello encourages us to do cultivate awareness every day, throughout the day. If you remember to do his simple process throughout the day, you will get it. You will become more and more aware and as a result more and more free. Before you believed what society's programming told you, that once every worldly thing falls into place, I’ll find happiness and peace.” Through awarness you'll discover that finding the natural state of happiness and peace within you is how everything falls into place.” You find that truth through awareness .
Spirituality means waking up. But most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, live asleep, and die in their sleep without ever waking up. Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they had been. https://demellocenter.com
A radio interview with Don Goewey, the De Mello Center's executive director, on Anthony De Mello's spirituality. It begins with the fact that only 4% of the population are completely happy. Happiness eludes most of us. The irony is we were born happy but have lost touch with it. We were born free but have become trapped in limited thinking. We were born with an open heart that stress and fear so easily close. We were born gifted beings of immeasurable worth but often feel not good enough. There is a divinity of joy within us and surrounding us, there to make life meaningful and beautiful and rich, but we’ve become blocked from seeing it. It’s as if we are all hypnotized to see what is not there, and not see what is there. The good news, we can wake up here and now through a simple process of awareness.
It often takes a midlife crisis to realize that nothing of the world can make you happy or set you free. Through one step - the step called awareness - you come to see that you are free and happy already just the way you are and always have been but you didn’t see it because you are always focused on what you don’t have instead of what you have. Waking up is seeing that right here, right now you have everything you need to be free, happy and at peace.
Sit on the bank of a river, in reality, or in fantasy, and watch the water flow. Or sit in a railway station and see the crowds go by. Or watch the sun shimmer in the trees. Or light a candle and look at the flame. It will speak to you, not to your brain but to your heart, creating a silence in your spirit, and a wisdom that your conscious mind could never grasp. Visit Anthony De Mello's personally engaging website at https://demellocenter.com
When I try to change what I dislike in me by fighting it I merely push it underground. If I accept it, it will surface and evaporate. What I resist will stubbornly persist. I consider the example of Jesus, who sets himself the task of moving mountains and battles with exasperating foes. Yet even in his anger he is loving—he combines a keen desire for change with an acceptance of reality as it is. I try to be like him. I start with feelings I dislike.
Ignorance and fear, ignorance caused by fear, that’s where all the suffering comes from, that’s where your violence comes from. The person who is truly nonviolent, who is incapable of violence, is the person who is fearless. It’s only when you’re afraid that you become angry. Think of the last time you were angry. Go ahead. Think of the last time you were angry and search for the fear behind it.
Is it possible that one would suffer because of one’s cultural programming mixed with one's toxic past and how it might've wired the brain and yet some day through an awakening one could rise above it all? This much is clear— the human heart pulses with serenity and happiness even as storms pass by. There may be clouds on the outside but there's blue sky on the inside. Many of the mystics say before enlightenment, they identify with the clouds. After enlightenment, they identify with the sky.
Does the dropping of attachments mean detachment from the material world? No. One uses the material world, one enjoys the material world, but one doesn’t make one’s happiness depend on the material world. You really begin to enjoy things when you’re unattached because attachment brings anxiety. If you’re anxious when you’re holding on to something, you can hardly enjoy it. It's not a withdrawal from enjoyment; it’s a withdrawal from possessiveness, anxiety, tension, and the loss of something.
All the mystics tell us our life is in our hands. Okay, let’s suppose you want to grasp that. Let’s suppose you want to see it. What do you have to first understand about yourself? First, your life is in a mess. You don’t like to hear that; it brings up all kinds of resistance, but here is the litmus test that proves it. Once it's fully embrace, without any self-condemnation, everything can begin to change.
I’ll tell you what it means to live like a king or queen. It means to know no anxiety at all. To have no inner conflict at all. No tensions, no pressures, no upset, no heartache. What are you left with? Happiness, undiluted. People ask me, “What do I do to be happy?” You don’t do anything to be happy. You know why? Because you have it already, but you're blocking it. Remove the blocks.
Where there is love, there is no desire. I am referring to desire in the sense of attachment. Where there is attachment there is fear. Love begins where attachments end. You know what society will tell you? “Attachment islove.” Are you really expecting to find life here? You can find only manipulation, seduction, and control. You can find only death and misery. The death of happiness, the death of innocence, the death of freedom, the death of authenticity.
A Japanese master woke up each morning laughing a great belly laugh that resounded through the monastery, waking up the other monks. The monks wondered what made the master laugh but he wouldn’t say. For millennia, mystics have posed the question to seekers: “Why are you unhappy? Why are you scared?” Until we've seen Reality, it makes sense to us to feel unsafe; to be unhappy. Yet it's as silly as a fish afraid of drowning. This is what the master was laughing at.
There is never a minute when, consciously or unconsciously, you are not aware of or attuned to the reactions of others, marching to the beat of their drums. When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people and beg for the comforting drug of reassurance called approval. To live with people in this state involves a never-ending tension. A nice definition of an awakened person is someone who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within. Awake up! Life is a banquet. Enjoy it.
I look at Jesus in his agony on the night before he died. I stand quite close to him and watch him reaching out for human help, but no one now can reach him —he is entirely on his own before he dies.
I think of myself as quite a decent person, good-hearted and respected, with minor flaws and failings, until it dawns on me that the greatest spiritual failings are the ones committed in ignorance. I see the well-intentioned damage “love” inflicts on helpless children. I see the marks of cruelty in fervently religious people. I see fair-minded Pharisees assess the evidence against Jesus, and consider it their duty to do away with him.
I see how frequently I rush outside myself —to people, occupations, places, things—in search of strength and peace and meaning, forgetting that the source of all is here within my heart. It is here that I must search.
God says, “Give me your heart.” And then, in answer to my puzzlement, I hear him say, “Your heart is where your treasure is.” My treasures—here they are: persons...places...occupations ...things ... experiences of the past... the future’s hopes and dreams. I pick each treasure up, starting with the past and something near me says, " In the measure that your heart is in past treasures you are fossilized and dead, and then it moves to the next treasure with yet another admonition.
We look to gurus, writers, friends, surroundings to give us peace or fortitude or meaning in our life. But these external agents can never be a substitute for inner, deeper sources.
When the Messiah came his people failed to see him. He’s still around. When did you see him last?
Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. There are three 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 third is I give something, I get something. That’s beautiful. That’s true. That’s real. That isn’t charity, that’s enlightened self-interest.
Spiritual greed makes us attached to peace. We are saying, “Unless I’m peaceful, I won’t be happy.” Did it ever occur to you that you could be happy in tension? Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed. You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself. The harder you try to change yourself, the worse it gets. You are called upon to be aware. Let tension or the calmness take care of itself. Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality.
We’ve been taught to look for our happiness in outside things: money, power, romance, approval. That’s the first thing we need to understand if we want to come awake, which is the same thing as saying: if we want to love, if we want freedom, if we want joy and peace and spirituality. In that sense, spirituality is the most practical thing in the whole wide world. I challenge anyone to think of anything more practical than spirituality as I have defined it—not piety, not devotion, not religion, not worship, but spirituality—waking up, waking up!
Happiness is your natural state. It is coming home to yourself simply by observing yourself. Does that sound a bit tedious? It's not. Self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness, which is the experience of your essential nature. Everything changes and you become oriented to awareness instead of to suffering.
A big part of why our life is a mess. It's because we don’t want to be happy; we don’t want to be at peace. We've been programmed by society want other things. Money, power, reputation. Admit it! You've been trained to believe that you cannot be happy until or unless you get this thing or that person and this result. The irony is you are happy already but don't know it.
Where does self-worth comes from, Anthony DeMello asks: "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.
Do not suppress desire, because desire is energy and the more energy we have, the better. Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire. See them for what they are worth. Because if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at it and see and understand how you may be preparing the ground for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into simply a preference.
Everyone asks me about what will happen when they finally arrive. Is this just curiosity? We’re always asking how would this fit into this or that system, or whether this would make sense in this or that context, or what it will feel like when we get there. Get started and you will know; it cannot be described. It is said widely in the East, “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” It cannot be said; only the opposite can be said.
You are not your depression. You are not your anxiety or stress. That is but a strange kind of trick of the mind, a strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking— though you are not aware of it—that you are your depression, that you are your anxiety, that you are the thrills that you have. You so much more than a transient emotion.
I want to give you a taste of the difference between analysis and awareness, or information on the one hand and insight on the other. I want to show how information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.
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 them you will the reality of God everywhere.
When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live. Desire breeds anxiety but we don't want to see it. But when you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you will be ready to see it.
If the eye is unobstructed, it results in sight; if the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; if the nose is unobstructed, the result is a sense of smell; if the mouth is unobstructed, the result is a sense of taste; if the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom.
Listening to this podcast could be the most important few minutes in your lives. If you could grasp it, you’d hit upon the secret of awakening. You would be happy forever. You would never be unhappy again. Nothing would have the power to upset you again. Nothing.
"Silence is the great revelation, " said Lao-tse. We are accustomed to think of Scripture as the revelation of God. And so it is. I want you now to discover the revelation that silence brings. To take in the revelation that Scripture offers, you must expose yourself to Scripture. To take in the revelation that silence offers you must first attain silence. And this is not easy. Let us attempt to do this in this exercise.
One cannot say anything about the awakened state; one can only talk about the sleeping state. One hints at the awakened state. One cannot say anything about happiness. Happiness cannot be defined. What can be defined is misery. Drop unhappiness and you will know. Love cannot be defined; un-love can. Drop un-love, drop fear, and you will know. We want to find out what the awakened person is like. But you’ll know only when you get there.
Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. That is extremely important for the process of change. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come back to life.
We filter out life constantly, so much so that often we don’t see the reality of what is there. Where does the filtering come from? It's our conditioning, our culture, our programming. It's the way we were taught to see things and to experience life. Even the words we choose function as filters. There’s another demon doing the filtering, distorting and destroying true perception, haunting us with fear. It's the one called attachment. That filter is the root of all suffering.
The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when you’re hell-bent on getting this or that thing or result or person, 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 the need for people.
Suppress your desire and you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at your desire and see it for what it is really worth, and how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into a preference. When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness.
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 until I suddenly discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they get disillusioned with all relationships.
I want to give you a taste of the difference between analysis and awareness, or information on the one hand and insight on the other. Information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.
Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance. The only tragedy there is in the world is un-wakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else, but death is not a tragedy at all. Dying is wonderful; it’s only horrible to people who have never understood life. It’s only when you’re afraid of life that you fear death.
The only way to change is by changing your understanding. But what does it mean to understand? How do we go about it? Consider how we’re enslaved by various attachments; we’re striving to rearrange the world so that we can keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them. I fear that a friend may stop loving me; he or she may turn to somebody else. I have to keep making myself attractive because I have to get this other person. Somebody brainwashed me into thinking I need his or her love. But I really don’t. I don’t need anybody’s love; I just need to get in touch with reality.
Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.
How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child. This doesn’t mean you should drop your concepts totally; they’re very precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function. Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We’re invited, not to become children, but to become like children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an “I” and a “me” through these concepts. But then we need to return to paradise.
Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.
It’s quite false 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, to drop out of the rat race world of the ego is to understand your true nature. When you do that, the self will disappear; it will vanish. 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.
The first thing 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 want to stay in your nice warm bed made of illusions and false beliefs.
There is a point I want to make that has to do with happiness. It is one of my favorite stories. You know, sometimes a story says more than a whole day’s lecture because it speaks to the depths within us, and this one certainly speaks to mine. This is a story of about a villager in India who comes across a sannyasi, which is a person who, having attained enlightenment, understands that the whole world is his home and the sky is his roof, and God is his father Who will look after him, so he moves from place to place the way you and I would move from one room of our home to another.
Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. There’s a story about some people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil perishing from thirst. They had no idea that the water they were floating on was fresh water from a river flowing out to sea with such force that it reached their raft. But they had no idea. In the same way, we’re surrounded with joy, happiness, and love but most people have no idea of it whatsoever.
We’re scared about things that are not. We’re tied to things that don’t exist. They’re illusions. They’re falsehoods. They’re beliefs; they’re not realities. The agonies we go through over things that we have—we have convinced ourselves that our happiness depends upon them, but it doesn’t.
Look into your own heart. Can you say? Oh, there's anger and quarrels in my life but there is no rancor, no bitterness, no hatred. Can you say? Oh, there is pain and suffering in my life, but there is no inner turmoil and conflict. There is a great deal of activity in my life, but there's no stress. Can you say that? If you can, you are a lovely oasis of peace in the vast desert of this world. If you can't, it's time to awaken the oasis within you.
"I discovered something about ten years ago," Anthony De Mello states, "and it revolutionized my life. I became a new man. Later, having discovered it, I found it in all the major religious writings, and I was amazed. I mean, I was reading it, but I hadn’t recognized it. I wished to God I’d found this when I was younger. Oh, what a difference it would have made."
You were given a taste of various psychosocial addictions: approval, attention, success, making it to the top, prestige, getting your name in the paper, power, being the boss. Having a taste for these drugs, you became addicted and began to dread losing them. Recall the lack of control you felt, the terror at the prospect of failure or of making mistakes, at the prospect of criticism by others. So you became cravenly dependent on others and you lost your freedom.
To exterminate the darkness, pronounce the name over each part of your being that is in need of healing (your heart … your mind … your limbs … your senses …) and see each part become aglow, alive with grace.
How do you surrender. Begin by seeking silence. For this, come home to yourself. Come to the present. Ask yourself: Where am I right now? What am I doing? What am I thinking? What am I sensing in my body? What is the quality of my breathing?
Imagine you walk into a church. The candles on the altar are the only source of light. You rest your eyes upon the host at the altar that stands out clear and white against the darkness. The host is like a magnet, for it draws your eyes and being toward itself as to the center. Most of our life we focus on the outer surface, but here you gaze into the very heart of things, the center of your being and of the world. As you keep looking a silence falls upon you.
God says, “Give me your heart.” And then, in answer to our puzzlement, we might hear God say, “Your heart is where your treasure is.”
What treasure? Is it people … places … occupations … things … experiences of the past … the future’s hopes and dreams? Or is it something entirely different that God wants from us?
Imagine that you walk into a desert to contemplate your life. Immediately, you see how frequently you rush outside yourself —to people, occupations, places, things— in search of strength and peace and meaning, forgetting that the source of all is here within your own heart, understanding that it is here where you must search. Each person carries thoughts that have the power to bring instant peace. In this podcast, De Mello offers a way to search for yours.
Imagine you are in the presence of Christ and you ask him to give you a list of everything in you he finds defective— each indication of selfishness, each area where you have yet to grow, each thing in you you need to change. Then ask him which of these defects, in his opinion, needs the most urgent attention. Do you have the will to rise above this defect?
If you could choose the circumstances of your death, what would you choose? When your life is coming to an end, how many experiences shall you look back to and say, “To have experienced that alone would have made my life worthwhile”?
In this next session of the Wellsprings Series, Anthony De Mello provides the simple, foundational elements that lead to an enlightened life. When you awaken, the world, your family, your feelings, your body, even your neuroses remain the same — it is you that are the same no longer. You are more loving now, more accepting of what is undesirable. More peaceful, too, for having come to see that attack and defense cannot lead to lasting change —only love and understanding can.
Anthony De Mello takes your mind on a vacation to find the place inside of you that steps out to the vast stillness of Heaven.
In this podcast, Anthony De Mello introduces his Wellsprings Series and discusses the spiritual power it holds to transform your life experience.
Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? How do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding with no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand. When you say of someone, “He’s a Republican,” understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on him. “She’s a Democrat.” Understanding has stopped at that moment. How are you going to understand what you disapprove of or what you approve of, for that matter?
All of this sounds like a new world, doesn’t it?
The first thing you need to do to wake up 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 get rid of boll weevils on your farm if you’re not aware of their existence. To awaken, the first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings
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? Who’s living in you as you?
The harder you try to change, the worse it can get. Does this mean that a certain degree of passivity is all right? Yes, the more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. That’s the meaning, I think, of Jesus’ words: “When someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him your left as well.” You always empower the demons you fight. That’s very Oriental. But if you flow with the enemy, you overcome the enemy.
Some people make awakening a goal. They are determined to get there; they say, “I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened.” In that case, it’s better to be the way you are, simply to be aware of the way you are. Simple awareness is happiness compared with trying to react all the time. People react so quickly because they are not aware. You will come to understand that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in awareness. But as awareness grows, you react less and act more. It really doesn’t matter.
Do not 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. Understand it. Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire. Know your preferences. When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re moving toward wakefulness
A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He’s not attempting to change them or train them or get anything out of them. He wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly.
Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand. and what you do not understand cannot change.
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.
When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live. Understand too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills. That’s another illusion, that a thrill comes from living a desire fulfilled. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you are ready to see it.
Love is generated through awareness and through no other way, no other way. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you.
You’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.
The pandemic has changed the world as we have known it. What Anthony de Mello offers in this podcast is a change of mind, a change heart that opens to a new way of looking at the world, a new way of looking at life, at everything. It is a simple way of being in which peace and happiness become your constant companions, even as you relate to all the changes the Pandemic imposes.
Are you having trouble with people? You find somebody selfish, moody, unreliable, rejecting, stupid, intolerable, irresponsible, insulting? Think of the troubles you have with human relations. Do you know the root of all of those problems? Hold onto your chairs.
Yesterday you had occasions to be happy that you weren’t even conscious of. Do you see them now? It is inconceivable that anyone could be grateful and unhappy. Thank the Lord for each event of yesterday and notice the effect this has on you. And the things you call unpleasant, undesirable — search for the good that comes from these … the seeds for growth they carry … and find reason to be grateful for them too. Finally, see yourself moving through each portion of today in gratitude —and happiness.
Have you ever felt disgusted with life, sick at heart of constantly running away from fears and anxieties, weary of your begging rounds, exhausted from being dragged about helplessly by your attachments and addictions? Have you ever felt the utter meaninglessness of working for a degree, then finding a job, then settling down to a life of boredom; or, if you are an achiever, settling down to a life of emotional turmoil caused by the things that you are chasing after? If you have, and is there a single human being who hasn't, the divine flame of discontent has arisen within your heart.
Now is the time to feed it before it gets stamped out by the routine chores of life. Now is the Holy Season when you simply must find the time to get away and look at your life, allowing the flame to grow as you look, refusing to let anything distract you from this task.
Think of some of the painful events in your life. For how many of them are you grateful today, because thanks to them you changed and grew? Here is a simple truth of life that most people never discover. Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self- discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain.
How does one drop an attachment? People try to do this through renunciation. But to renounce some bars of the music, to blot them out of one's consciousness creates exactly the type of violence, conflict and insensitivity that clinging does. Once again you have hardened yourself. The secret is to renounce nothing, cling to nothing, enjoy every thing and allow it to pass, to flow.
God makes his sun to shine on good and bad alike and makes his rain to fall on saints and sinners alike; so, you must be all goodness as your heavenly Father is all goodness." Contemplate in astonishment the sheer goodness of the rose, the lamp, the tree, for there you have an image of what love is all about. How does one attain this quality of love?
What does it mean to love? It means to be sensitive to life, to things, to persons, to feel for everything and everyone to the exclusion of nothing and no one. For exclusion can only be achieved through a hardening of oneself, through closing one's doors. And the moment there is a hardening, sensitivity dies.
A big lie that we were told when we were kids is the following: You need to be loved. When you’re a kid, yes, granted, that’s okay. Let’s not quarrel about that. But what if you’re sixty-four years old? You’re twenty-five years old? They’re still telling you that you need to be loved. You need to be a success. You need to be approved. You need to be appreciated. It's rubbish yet everybody’ goes on believing this. There’s only one emotional need you have and that is to love.
Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed to be unhappy and so, no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail? If you wish to be happy the first thing you need is not effort or even goodwill or good desires but a clear understanding of how exactly you have been programmed. This is what happened:your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without lots of money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God. What is your particular combination?
Some of us get woken up by the harsh realities of life. We suffer so much that we wake up. Other people keep bumping again and again into life. They still go on sleepwalking. It doesn't occur to them that there may be a better way. If you haven’t been bumped sufficiently by life, and you haven’t suffered enough, then there is another way: to listen.
Is there any way you can know that what you are in touch with is Reality? Here is one sign: What you perceive does not fit into any formula whether given by another or created by yourself. It simply cannot be put into words. So, what can teachers do? They can bring to your notice what is unreal, they cannot show you Reality; you will have to walk out there all alone and discover for yourself. To walk alone-that means to walk away from every formula-the one given to you by others, the ones you learned from books, the ones that you yourself invented in the light of your own past experience.
Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone or anything, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you in need of correction. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change. The situation needs to change” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you. So how do we transform our being? This podcasts provides a way.
From Anthony DeMello's book The Way to Love. Narration by Paul Coutinho. What you call the experience of happiness is not happiness at all but the excitement and thrill caused by some person or thing or event. True happiness is un-caused. You are happy for no reason at all. And true happiness cannot be experienced. It is not within the realm of consciousness. It is un-self-consciousness.
Buddhism says, "May all beings practice dying." Why? Because when we transcend the fear of death, we become more alive. This podcasts offers an exercise in dying to become more fully awake and alive.
Can you be said to love me if you cling to me and will not let me go, if you will not let me be? Can you be said to love me if you need me psychologically or emotionally for your happiness? This is not love; it is craving and wherever there is craving there is a threat and where there is a threat there is fear, and where there is fear there is no love because we always hate what we fear. But where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency, and no fear because perfect love casts out fear.
It is said that God was in the world for the world was created by Him but the world did not recognize Him. We have made images of God that are more unlike Him than like Him. Therefore, the first thing we need to do if we want to find God is have the readiness to realize that our ideas of God are all inadequate. Then the second thing we need to do is listen, hear, and see in a special way called heart listening, heart hearing, heart seeing. That’s all we have to do. DeMello explains how in this podcast.
Suffering is a sign given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering. 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 just suppress your desire and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at it and see it for what it is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into what I call a preference. When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake.
Spiritual greed makes us attached to peace. We are saying, “Unless I’m peaceful, I won’t be happy.” Did it ever occur to you that you could be happy in tension? Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed. You don’t make a goal out of relaxation and sensitivity. Have you ever heard of people who get tense trying to relax? If one is tense, one simply observes one’s tension. You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself. The harder you try to change yourself, the worse it gets. You are called upon to be aware. Let tension or the calmness take care of itself. Step by step, let whatever happens happen. Real change will come when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality. Awareness releases reality to change you.
God is love, so what is love? Love is sensitivity, love is consciousness. A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn’t harden itself to any person or thing. Love entails clarity of perception, objectivity; there is nothing so clear-sighted as love. But the moment you become attached, then you’re blocking out so much of life. You’ve got eyes only for the object of your attachment; the heart has hardened. It can no longer see life as it is.
The only way to change is by changing your understanding. But what does it mean to understand? How do we go about it? Consider how we’re enslaved by various attachments; we’re striving to rearrange the world so that we can keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them. How liberating it is not to depend emotionally on anything. If you could get one second’s experience of that, you’d be breaking through your prison and getting a glimpse of the sky. Someday, maybe, you will even fly.
Life is a banquet and the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. Why? We’ve been brainwashed into believing what isn't true. Wake up and see the truth. Heaven is here and now. Don’t suffer with the pain of the past; it happened when you were asleep. Wake up! Put on a new mind. Take on a new way of looking at things! Awakening is in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. To do that, what you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
This podcast is about what it means to really begin to live and what blocks us from living fully. DeMello offers an exercise to unblock ourselves that is so simple that you might think it couldn't possibly produce a change in you that changes everything for you . . . but it does.
Society drugged us when we were kids. They didn’t bring us up on the healthy, wholesome nourishment of play and work and the pleasures of the senses, and as we grew older, the pleasures of the mind. Instead, they addicted us to a drug called “approval.” A drug called “success.” A drug called "money" and "reputation" and "making it to the top" and "never feeling good enough or having enough." As a result, we've lost our ability to love.
This is Anthony DeMello's parable about listening for the singer in the song, looking for the dancer in the dance, experiencing the life inside the moment.
The trouble with most people is they’re busy trying to fix things in themselves that they really don’t understand. Stop fixing yourself. Don’t interfere. Don’t fix anything. Simply watch. Observe. You're OK. These things in you just need to be understood. If you understand them, they will change and you would finally see that all is well, within you and around you. This short practice is a simple way of discovering this.
De Mello talks about effortlessness in transformation change. He likens it to the image a sailboat. When a sailboat has a mighty wind in its sail, it glides along so effortlessly that the boatman has nothing to do but steer. He makes no effort; he doesn’t push the boat. That’s an image of what happens when change comes about through awareness, through understanding.
Can you imagine how liberating it is to never be disillusioned by people again, never be disappointed by anyone again? Imagine never feeling let down again. Never feeling rejected. If you want to wake up, if you want happiness and freedom, here it is: Drop your false ideas about people and see through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love everyone. Otherwise you spend your life grappling with your wrong notions about others, with your illusions constantly crashing against reality.
The religion known as freedom makes all people good, for it destroys the inner conflict that makes people devils. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you start nourishing yourself with sunsets and nature, with a good movie or a good book. You start pursuing enjoyable work that you love, and you make time for good company. In short, you break free of the negative drives society programmed into you that has blocked you from being happy.
Every new idea, every great idea, when it first began was in a minority of one. That man called Jesus Christ—a minority of one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying. The Buddha— a 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. It never occurs to our rigidity that comes from having become dogmatic that there may be a better way. If you haven’t been bumped sufficiently by life, and you haven’t suffered enough, then waking up may require seeing that there is another way. It is the way of listening.
One sign that you’ve woken up is you're asking yourself, “Am I crazy or is the whole world crazy?" We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything; and it's all been feed to us by our crazy society. The sooner we see this, the better for our mental and spiritual health.