Contrary to what your culture and religion have taught you, nothing—but absolutely nothing of the world—can make you happy. The moment you see that, you will stop moving from one job to another, one friend or lover to another, one place, one spiritual technique, one guru to another. None of these things can give you a single minute of happiness. They can only offer you a temporary thrill, a pleasure, that initially grows in intensity…
When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live. It’s all over the gospel pages. And one attains this by understanding. Understand. Understand another illusion, too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills. That’s another illusion, that a thrill comes from living a desire fulfilled. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered sufficiently, then…
Everyone asks me about what will happen when they finally arrive. Get started and you will know; it cannot be described. It is said widely in the East, “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” It cannot be said; only the opposite can be said. It’s as if you had never tasted a mango and you ask me, “What does it taste like?” I’d say to you, “Sweet,” but in…
If you think that compassion implies softness, there’s no way I can describe compassion to you, absolutely no way, because compassion can be very hard. Compassion can be very rude, compassion can jolt you, compassion can roll up its sleeves and operate on you. Compassion is all kinds of things. Compassion can be very soft, but there’s no way of knowing that. It’s only when you become love—in other words, when you have dropped your…
Some say that there are only two things in the world: love and fear are the only two things. There’s only one evil in the world, fear. There’s only one good in the world, love. It’s sometimes called by other names. It’s sometimes called happiness or freedom or peace or joy or God or whatever. But the label doesn’t really matter. And there’s not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to…
The great masters tell us that the most important question in the world is: “Who am I?” Or rather: “What is ‘I’?” What is this thing I call “I”? What is this thing I call self? You mean you understood everything else in the world and you didn’t understand this? You mean you understood astronomy and black holes and quasars and you picked up computer science, and you don’t know who you are? My, you…
The rich industrialist from the North was horrified to find the Southern fisherman lying lazily beside his boat, smoking a pipe. “Why aren’t you out fishing?” said the industrialist. “Because I have caught enough fish for the day,” said the fisherman. “Why don’t you catch some more?” “What would I do with it?” “You could earn more money” was the reply. “With that you could have a motor fixed to your boat and go into…
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 we tend to 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 why it possesses the artless grace and…
from Awareness by Anthony DeMello . . . Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow. Let’s limit ourselves, for the time being, to psychological suffering, to all those negative emotions we have. I’ve told you what you could…
from Awareness by Anthony DeMello . . . Ask yourself this: How would it be if God gave me the grace not to call anything mine? You’d be detached, wouldn’t you? You’d be dis-identified from things. That’s what it means to lose the self, to deny the self, to die to self. I’ve got different themes, but they are all about the same thing. Call it awareness, call it love, call it spirituality or freedom or awakening…
Have DeMello’s wisdom at your fingertips!
