Awareness

by Anthony de Mello

Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.

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.

You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either. Isn’t that a wonderful state to be in!

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.

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.

“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.

So if you want to live, you must have no permanent abode. You must have no place to rest your head. You have to flow with it. As the great Confucius said, “The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.” Flow.

“Life is something that happens to us while we’re busy making other plans.” That’s pathetic. Live in the present moment. This is one of the things you will notice happening to you as you come awake.

But falling in love has nothing to do with love at all. It isn’t love, it’s desire, burning desire. You want, with all your heart, to be told by this adorable creature that you’re attractive to her. That gives you a tremendous sensation.

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.

Learn what it means to experience something fully, then drop it and move on to the next moment, uninfluenced by the previous one. You’d be traveling with such little baggage that you could pass through the eye of a needle.

Fears and desires haunt us. Samuel Johnson said, “The knowledge that he is to swing from a scaffold within a week wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind.” You blot out everything else and concentrate only on the fear, or desire, or craving.

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.”

Don’t ask the world to change—you change first. Then you’ll get a good enough look at the world so that you’ll be able to change whatever you think ought to be changed.

I lost my freedom in front of all kinds of things, but no more! I’m satisfied with very little and I enjoy it intensely. When you have enjoyed something intensely, you need very little.

I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you’re lying in your coffin.

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.

And living doesn’t mean working in government, or being a big businessman, or performing great acts of charity. That isn’t living. Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness.

Nourish yourself on wholesome food, good wholesome food. I’m not talking about actual food, I’m talking about sunsets, about nature, about a good movie, about a good book, about enjoyable work, about good company, and hopefully you will break your addictions to those other feelings.