Breaking the Weary Cycle of Life

From The Way to Love by Anthony De Mello . . .

Left to its own devices life would never produce love, it would only lead you to attraction, from attraction to pleasure, then to attachment, to satisfaction, which finally leads to wearisomeness and boredom. 

Then comes a plateau. Then once again the weary cycle: attraction, pleasure, attachment, fulfillment, satisfaction, boredom. All of this mixed with the anxieties, the jealousies, the possessiveness, the sorrow, the pain, that make the cycle a roller coaster.

When you have gone repeatedly around and around the cycle, a time finally comes when you have had enough and want to call a halt to the whole process. And if you are lucky enough not to run into something or someone else that catches your eye, you will have at least attained a fragile peace. That is the most that life can give you; and you can mistakenly equate this state with freedom and you die without ever having known what it means to be really free and to love.

No, if you wish to break out of the cycle and into the world of love, you must strike while the attachment is alive and raw, not when you have outgrown it. And you must strike not with the sword of renunciation, for that kind of mutilation only hardens, but with the sword of awareness.

What must you be aware of?

Three things:

• First, you must see the suffering that the drug of attachment is causing you, the ups and downs, the thrills, the anxieties and disappointments, the boredom to which it must inevitably lead.

• Second, you must realize   what   this drug is cheating   you out of namely, the freedom to love and to enjoy every minute and everything in life.

• Third, you must understand how, because of your addiction and your programming, you have invested the object of your attachment with a beauty and a value it simply does not have: What you are so enamored of is in your head, not in your beloved person or thing. See this and the sword of awareness breaks the spell.