Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well (The Anthony De Mello Legacy Library)

by Anthony de Mello

He said, you don’t have to do anything; it’s enough for you to simply be watchful and awake. Awareness, he said, releases reality to change you. He asserted that by simply being aware, all that is false and neurotic within you will drop and your eyes will open to the divinity surrounding you. You will suddenly see that all is well; that you are already happy, right now, and always have been; that you are already at peace right now, and always were, but you just did not know it.

Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.

That’s what learning is all about where spirituality is concerned: unlearning, unlearning almost everything you’ve been taught. A willingness to unlearn, to listen.

Stop fixing yourself. You’re OK. Don’t interfere. Don’t fix anything. Simply watch. Observe. These things in you that you struggle to fix just need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.

Effort, whatever the form it takes, whether it be willpower, habit, a technique, or a spiritual exercise, does not lead to change. At best, effort leads to repression and a covering over of the root problem. Effort may change the outward behavior, but it does not change the inner person.

An attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.

And when you are depressed and miserable, the cause is there for everyone to see: Life is not giving you what you have convinced yourself you can’t be happy without.

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

But if your spirit becomes unclogged and your senses open, you will begin to perceive things as they really are. You will begin to interact with reality, and you will be entranced by the harmonies of the universe. Then, you will understand what God is—for you will at last know what love is.

To be in the state called love, you must be sensitive to the uniqueness and beauty of every single thing and person around you. You can hardly be said to love what you do not even notice; and if you notice only a few beings to the exclusion of others, that is not love at all. For love excludes no one at all; it embraces the whole of life. Love listens to the symphony as a whole, not to just one or the other of the musical instruments.

Waking up is unpleasant. We are nice and comfortable in bed; it’s irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru does not attempt to wake people up.