from Wellspring by Anthony DeMello . . . I set out in search of the source of happiness. I look minutely at the life of a happy person who is poor, then talk with him, attempting to discover what makes this person happy. I think of a joyful person in poor health, in physical pain, and talk again, searching for what it is that makes her joyful. I do the same with a happy person…
From The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello . . . It is commonly held that it is only when you feel deeply loved yourself, that you are able to go out in love to others. This is not true. A man in love does indeed go out to the world not in love but in euphoria. For him the world takes on an unreal, rosy hue, which it loses the moment the euphoria dies. His so-called…
From The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello . . . What is love? Take a look at a rose. Is it possible for the rose to say, “I shall? offer my fragrance to good people and withhold it from bad people?” Or can you imagine a lamp that withholds its rays from a wicked person who seeks to walk in its light? It could only do that by ceasing to be a lamp. And observe how…
from Rediscovering Life by Anthony DeMello Sometimes a story says more than a whole day’s lecture because it speaks to the depths within us. I want to tell you one of my favorite stories that speaks to the depth of me. It has to do with true happiness. It is a story of a villager in India who happens upon a sannyasi. A sannyasi is the wandering mendicant, who having attained enlightenment, understands that the…
From Awareness by Anthony DeMello . . . Wake up. Put on a new mind. All is well. We are surrounded by a loving, joyful force and the only tragedy is that we are blind to it. Life is a banquet and the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. There’s a story about some people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil perishing from thirst. They had no idea that the…
From The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello . . . There is always someone to teach you things mechanical or scientific or mathematical like carpentry or algebra or chemistry, or intellectual things like literature or philosophy or athletic things like baseball or riding a bicycle or hi-tech things like operating a computer or a smart phone. But in the things that really matter, life, love, reality, God, no one can teach you a thing. All they…
From Rediscovering Life by Anthony DeMello . . . Here’s a secret formula for you. If you were not actively engaged in making yourself miserable, you would be happy. You see, we were born happy. All life is shot through with happiness. There’s pain; of course, but who told you that you can’t be happy without pain? Come and meet a friend of mine who’s dying of cancer. She’s happy in pain. So, we were born…
From The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello . . . Compare the serene and simple splendor of a rose in bloom with the tensions and restlessness of your life. The rose has a gift that you lack: It is perfectly content to be itself. It has not been programmed from birth, as you have been, to be dissatisfied with itself, so it has not the slightest urge to be anything other than it is. That is…
From Awareness by Anthony DeMello . . . Let’s talk about effortlessness in change. I thought of a nice image for that, a sailboat. When a sailboat has a mighty wind in its sail, it glides along so effortlessly that the boatman has nothing to do but steer. He makes no effort; he doesn’t push the boat. That’s an image of what happens when change comes about through awareness, through understanding. I was going through some of…
From Awareness by Anthony DeMello . . . Selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for non-being. So, stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, “The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was…
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