"If it is peace you want, seek to
change yourself, not other people.
It is easier to protect your feet
with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth."
Anthony De Mello
Is it real - or your ego?
Do you think I am going to help anybody? No! Oh, no, no, no, no, no!
Don't expect me to be of help to anyone. Nor do I expect to damage
anyone. If you are damaged, you did it; and if you are helped, you did
it. You really did! You think people help you? They don't. You think
people support you? They don't.
There was a woman in a therapy
group I was conducting once. She was a religious sister. She said to me,
"I don't feel supported by my superior." So I said, "What do you mean
by that?" And she said, "Well, my superior, the provincial superior,
never shows up at the novitiate where I am in charge, never. She never
says a word of appreciation.
" I said to her, "All right let's do a
little role playing. Pretend I know your provincial superior. In fact,
pretend I know exactly what she thinks about you. So I say to you
(acting the part of the provincial superior), 'You know, Mary, the
reason I don't come to that place you're in is because it is the one
place in the province that is trouble-free, no problems. I know you're
in charge, so all is well.' How do you feel now?" She said, "I feel
great." Then I said to her, "All right, would you mind leaving the room
for a minute or two? This is part of the exercise." So she did.
While
she was away, I said to the others in the therapy group, "I am still the
provincial superior, O.K.? Mary out there is the worst novice director I
have ever had in the whole history of the province. In fact, the reason
I don't go to the novitiate is because I can't bear to see what she is
up to. It's simply awful. But if I tell her the truth, it's only going
to make those novices suffer all the more. We are getting somebody to
take her place in a year or two; we are training someone. In the
meantime I thought I would say those nice things to her to keep her
going. What do you think of that?" They answered, "Well, it was really
the only thing you could do under the circumstances." Then I brought
Mary back into the group and asked her if she still felt great. "Oh
yes," she said. Poor Mary! She thought she was being supported when she
wasn't. The point is that most of what we feel and think we conjure up
for ourselves in our heads, including this business of being helped by
people.
Do you think you help people because you are in love
with them? Well, I've got news for you. You are never in love with
anyone. You're only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of
that person. Take a minute to think about that: You are never in love
with anyone, you're in love with your prejudiced idea of that person.
Isn't that how you fall out of love? Your idea changes, doesn't it? "How
could you let me down when I trusted you so much?" you say to someone.
Did you really trust them? You never trusted anyone. Come off it! That's
part of society's brainwashing. You never trust anyone. You only trust
your judgment about that person. So what are you complaining about? The
fact is that you don't like to say, "My judgment was lousy." That's not
very flattering to you, is it? So you prefer to say, "How could you have
let me down?"
So there it is: People don't really want to grow
up, people don't really want to change, people don't really want to be
happy. As someone so wisely said to me, "Don't try to make them happy,
you'll only get in trouble. Don't try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes
your time and it irritates the pig." Like the businessman who goes into a
bar, sits down, and sees this fellow with a banana in his ear - a
banana in his ear! And he thinks, "I wonder if I should mention that to
him. No, it's none of my business." But the thought nags at him. So
after having a drink or two, he says to the fellow, "Excuse me, ah,
you've got a banana in your ear." The fellow says, "What?" The
businessman repeats, "You've got a banana in your ear. " Again the
fellow says, "What was that?" "You've got a banana in your ear!" the
businessman shouts. "Talk louder," the fellow says, "I've got a banana
in my ear!"
So it's useless. "Give up, give up, give up," I say
to myself. Say your thing and get out of here. And if they profit,
that's fine, and if they don't, too bad!
The Four Steps To Wisdom
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
marvelous 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.
It reminds me of the Irish prisoner
who dug a tunnel under the prison wall and managed to escape. He comes
out right in the middle of a school playground where little children are
playing. Of course, when he emerges from the tunnel he can't restrain
himself anymore and begins to jump up and down, crying, "I'm free, I'm
free, I'm free! A little girl there looks at him scornfully and says,
"That's nothing. I'm four."
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 neighbor!" 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 neighbor 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.
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