The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

by Anthony de Mello

Recall the kind of feeling you have when someone praises you, when you are approved, accepted, applauded. And contrast that with the kind of feeling that arises within you when you look at the sunset or the sunrise or Nature in general, or when you read a book or watch a movie that you thoroughly enjoy. Get the taste of this feeling and contrast it with the first, namely, the one that was generated within you when you were praised. Understand that the first type of feeling comes from self-glorification, self-promotion. It is a worldly feeling. The second comes from self-fulfillment, a soul feeling.

There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head,

But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion. And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs.

There is not a single moment in your life when you do not have everything that you need to be happy.

The reason why you are unhappy is because you are focusing on what you do not have rather than on what you have right now.

Yet another belief: Happiness will come if you manage to change the situation you are in and the people around you.

What makes you happy or unhappy is not the world and the people around you, but the thinking in your head.

Make a list of all your attachments and desires and to each of them say these words: “Deep down in my heart I know that even after I have got you I will not get happiness.” And ponder on the truth of those words.

Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is.

Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions.

Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming.

This finally led you to abject emotional dependence so that the object of your attachment had the power to thrill you when you attained it, to make you anxious lest you be deprived of it and miserable when you lost it.

Each time you are anxious and afraid, it is because you may lose or fail to get the object of your attachment, isn’t it?

And each time you feel jealous, isn’t it because someone may make off with what you are attached to?

And almost all your anger comes from someone standing in the way of your atta...

Almost every negative emotion you experience is the direct outcome of an attachment.

The third and final truth: If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it. If you have a thousand favorite dishes, the loss of one will go unnoticed and leave your happiness unimpaired. But it is precisely your attachments that prevent you from developing a wider and more varied taste for things and people.

For when you cling, what you offer the other is not love but a chain by which both you and your beloved are bound. Love can only exist in freedom. The true lover seeks the good of his

beloved which requires especially the liberation of the beloved from the lover.

“Am I in charge of this situation or is this situation in charge of me?”

Who decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: first your attachments, second your beliefs and third your fears.

Your attachments: You will inevitably look for what fosters or threatens them and turn a blind eye to the rest. You won’t be interested in the rest any more than the avaricious businessman is interested in anything that does not involve the making of money.

set on getting something that you did not have, or on holding on to something that you had, or on avoiding something that you did not want.

The first truth: You must choose between your attachment and happiness. You cannot have both.

The third truth: If you wish to be fully alive you must develop a sense of perspective. Life is infinitely greater than this trifle your heart is attached to and which you have given the power to so upset you.

Trifle, yes, because if you live long enough a day will easily come when it will cease to matter. It will not even be remembered—your own experience will confirm this. Just as today you barely remember, are no longer the least bit affected by those tremendous trifles that so disturbed you in the past.

And so the fourth truth brings you to the unavoidable conclusion th...

outside of you has the power to make you ha...

whether you will cling to your attachment or not in an...

But the moment your preference turns into an attachment, it hardens you to the other sounds, you suddenly undervalue them.

What you need is not renunciation but understanding, awareness.

Now you will move through life living from one moment to the other, wholly absorbed in the present, carrying with you so little from the past that your spirit could pass through the eye of a needle; as little distracted by the worries of the future as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.

Second, contemplate the walls, spend hours just observing your ideas, your habits, your attachments and your fears without any judgment

and condemnation. Look at them and they will crumble.

Sit down quietly and observe how your mind functions. There is a steady flow of thoughts and feelings and reactions there. Watch the whole of it for long stretches of time the way you watch a river or a movie.

You will soon find it so much more absorbing than any river or movie. And so much more life-giving and liberating. After all can you even be said to be alive if you are not even conscious of your own thoughts and reactions?