Can you describe light to people who have been sitting in darkness all their
lives?
Can you describe reality to someone in a dream?
Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is.
Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop;
then you will wake up to reality.
Understand your false beliefs and they will drop;
then you will know the taste of happiness.
(Anthony De Mello)
The first thing you need to do 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 deal with a
cancer that you haven't detected. You can't get rid of boll weevils on your
farm if you're not aware of their existence. The first thing you need is
awareness of your negative feelings.
What negative feelings? Gloominess, for instance. You're feeling gloomy and
moody.
You feel self-hatred or guilt. You feel that life is pointless, that it
makes no sense; you've got hurt feelings, you're feeling nervous and tense.
Get in touch with those feelings first.
The second step (this is a four-step program) is to understand that the
feeling is in you, not in reality. That's such a self-evident thing, but do
you think people know it?
They don't, believe me. They've got Ph.D.s and are presidents of
universities, but they haven't understood this. They didn't teach me how to
live at school. They taught me everything else. As one man said, "I got a
pretty good education. It took me years to get over it." That's what
spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish
they taught you.
Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change
reality.
That's crazy! Stop trying to change the other person. We spend all our time
and energy trying to change external circumstances, trying to change our
spouses, our bosses, our friends, our enemies, and everybody else. We don't
have to change anything. 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. Nobody told you this; they told
you the opposite.
That's why you're in the mess that you're in right now. That is why you're
asleep. They never told you this. But it's self-evident.
Let's suppose that rain washes out a picnic. Who is feeling negative? The
rain? Or YOU? What's causing the negative feeling? The rain or your
reaction? When you bump your knee against a table, the table's fine. It's
busy being what it was made to be -- a table.
The pain is in your knee, not in the table. The mystics keep trying to tell
us that reality is all right. Reality is not problematic. Problems exist
only in the human mind. We might add: in the stupid, sleeping human mind.
Reality is not problematic. Take away human beings from this planet and life
would go on, nature would go on in all its loveliness and violence.
Where would the problem be? No problem. You created the problem. You are the
problem. You identified with "me" and that is the problem. The feeling is in
you, not in reality.
The third step: Never identify with that feeling. It has nothing to do with
the "I."
Don't define your essential self in terms of that feeling. Don't say, "I am
depressed."
If you want to say, "It is depressed," that's all right. If you want to say
depression is there, that's fine; if you want to say gloominess is there,
that's fine. But not: I am gloomy. You're defining yourself in terms of the
feeling. That's your illusion; that's your mistake. There is a depression
there right now, there are hurt feelings there right now, but let it be,
leave it alone. It will pass. Everything passes, everything. Your
depressions and your thrills have nothing to do with happiness. Those are
the swings of the pendulum. If you seek kicks or thrills, get ready for
depression. Do you want your drug? Get ready for the hangover. One end of
the pendulum swings to the other.
This has nothing to do with "I"; it has nothing to do with happiness. It is
the "me." If you remember this, if you say it to yourself a thousand times,
if you try these three steps a thousand times, you will get it. You might
not need to do it even three times. I don't know; there's no rule for it.
But do it a thousand times and you'll make the biggest discovery in your
life. To hell with those gold mines in Alaska. What are you going to do with
that gold? If you're not happy, you can't live. So you found gold. What does
that matter? You're a king; you're a princess. You're free; you don't care
anymore about being accepted or rejected, that makes no difference.
Psychologists tell us how important it is to get a sense of belonging.
Baloney! Why do you want to belong to anybody? It doesn't matter anymore.
A friend of mine told me that there's an African tribe where capital
punishment consists of being ostracized. If you were kicked out of New York,
or wherever you're residing, you wouldn't die. How is it that the African
tribesman died? Because he partakes of the common stupidity of humanity. He
thinks he will not be able to live if he does not belong. It's very
different from most people, or is it? He's convinced he needs to belong. 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. But what you're really
telling me is that you want to be desired. You want to be applauded, to be
attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you. You're wasting
your life. WAKE UP! You don't need this. You can be blissfully happy without
it.
Your society is not going to be happy to hear this, because you become
terrifying when you open your eyes and understand this. How do you control a
person like this? He doesn't need you; he's not threatened by your
criticism; he doesn't care what you think of him or what you say about him.
He's cut all those strings; he's not a puppet any longer. It's terrifying.
"So we've got to get rid of him. He tells the truth; he has become fearless;
he has stopped being human.'' HUMAN! Behold! A human being at last! He broke
out of his slavery, broke out of their prison.
No event justifies a negative feeling. There is no situation in the world
that justifies a negative feeling. That's what all our mystics have been
crying themselves hoarse to tell us. But nobody listens. The negative
feeling is in you. In the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus, Lord
Krishna says to Arjuna, "Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart
at the lotus feet of the Lord." A marvellous sentence.
You don't have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister
Eckhart said very beautifully, "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.
The fourth step: How do you change things? How do you change yourselves?
There are many things you must understand here, or rather, just one thing
that can be expressed in many ways. Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor
and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, "Very well, I've
understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a
medicine for your neighbour!" The patient replies, "Thank you very much,
Doctor, that makes me feel much better." Isn't that absurd? But that's what
we all do. The person who is asleep always thinks he'll feel better if
somebody else changes. You're suffering because you are asleep, but you're
thinking, "How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how
wonderful life would be if my neighbour changed, my wife changed, my boss
changed."
We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good. But has it
ever struck you that even if your wife changes or your husband changes, what
does that do to you? You're just as vulnerable as before; you're just as
idiotic as before; you're just as asleep as before. You are the one who
needs to change, who needs to take medicine. You keep insisting, "I feel
good because the world is right." Wrong! The world is right because I feel
good. That's what all the mystics are saying.
(Anthony De Mello)
Page created 7 March 2001