Awareness

by Anthony de Mello

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked. “That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.

people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.

If you are damaged, you did it; and if you are helped, you did it. You really did! You think people help you? They don’t. You think people support you? They don’t.

most of what we feel and think we conjure up for ourselves in our heads, including this business of being helped by people.

You are never in love with anyone. You’re only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person.

You never trust anyone. You only trust your judgment about that person.

Think of someone you love very much, someone you’re close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to that person in your mind,

“I’d rather have happiness than have you.”

How many of you felt selfish when you said this?

Imagine somebody saying to you, “How could you be so selfish that you’d choose happiness over me?”

“The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness.”

We don’t want to be unconditionally happy. I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing.

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,

Look at the heartache everywhere, look at the loneliness, look at the fear, the confusion, the conflict in the hearts of people, inner conflict, outer conflict. Suppose somebody gave you a way of getting rid of all of that? Suppose somebody gave you a way to stop that tremendous drainage of energy, of health, of emotion that comes from these conflicts and confusion. Would you want 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.”

It’s only when you’re sick of your sickness that you’ll get out of it.

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.

one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?”

crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything.

if everybody agrees on something, you can be sure it’s wrong!

every great idea, when it first began was in a ...

“Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy.”

You’re always getting something out of everything you do, until you wake up.

Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce.

There’s a guru in India who says, “Every time a prostitute comes to me, she’s talking about nothing but God. She says I’m sick of this life that I’m living. I want God. But every time a priest comes to me he’s talking about nothing but sex.”

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.

So you must “receive” your demons, because when you fight them, you empower them.

Don’t renounce it, see through it.

Some of us get woken up by the harsh realities of life. We suffer so much that we wake up. But people keep bumping again and again into life. They still go on sleepwalking. They never wake up.

if you haven’t been bumped sufficiently by life, and you haven’t suffered enough, then there is another way: to listen.

agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth.

most of what I’m giving you is really theories. No theory adequately covers reality.

I can speak to you, not of the truth, but of obstacles to the truth. Those I can describe. I cannot describe the truth. No one can.

All I can do for you is challenge your beliefs and the belief system t...

That’s what learning is all about where spirituality is con...

are you listening for what will confirm what you already think? Or are you listening in order to discover something new?

We don’t want new things, particularly when they’re disturbing, particularly when they involve change. Most particularly if it involves saying, “I was wrong.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is faith! An openness to the truth, no matter what the consequences,

Your beliefs give you a lot of security, but faith is insecurity.

being open does not mean being gullible,

The first step, as I said, was a readiness to admit that you don’t want to wake up,

The second step is a readiness to understand, to listen, to challenge your whole belief system.

two types of selfishness.

pleasure of pleasing myself.

pleasure of pleasin...

That isn’t charity, that’s enlightened self-interest.

the gospel of Jesus is ultimately a gospel of self-interest.

the achievement of self-interest by acts of charity.

You know the inner pleasure you have while doing acts of charity.