Spiritwalk Teachers: Anthony de Mello

Spiritwalk

Teachers

Anthony deMello

Contents

Biography

De Mello, a Jesuit priest from India, died in 1987. His many books, tapes and retreats combined traditional Christian concepts
with insights from Eastern religions.

Quotations

Affirmation	The Fragrance of the Rose	Liberation	Priorities
Charity	The Fool	Listening	Rules
Credentials	Growth and Enlightenment	Mediation	Serentiy
Emptiness	Identity	The Message	True Solitude
On Waking Up	Ideology and Reality	Motion	Wisdom
	Intoxication	The Mystic
One Minute Meditations	One Minute Meditations	One Minute Meditations	One Minute Meditations

The Fragrance of the Rose (Words)

The disciples were absorbed in a discussion of Lao-tzu’s dictum:

Those who know do not say;
Those who say do not know.

When the master entered,
They asked him what the words meant.

Said the master, "Which of you knows the fragrance of a rose?"

All of them indicated that they knew.

Then he said, "put it into words."

All of them were silent.

~ from Anthony deMello, One Minute Wisdom

Affirmation

A woman in great distress over the death of her son
came to the Master for comfort.

He listened to her patiently
while she poured out her tale of woe.

Then he said softly,
"I can not wipe away your tears, my dear.
I can only teach you how to make them holy."

Intoxication (Celebration)

"What would spirituality give me?"
said an alcoholic to the Master.

"Non-alcoholic intoxication," was the answer.

Priorities

According to legend, God sent an Angel to the Master with this message:
"Ask for a million years of life and they will be given you.
Or a million million.
How long do you wish to live?"

"Eighty years," said the Master without the slightest hesitation.

The disciples were dismayed.
"But, Master, if you lived for a million years,
think how many generations would profit by your wisdom."

"If I lived for a million years,
people would be more intent on lengthening their lives
than on cultivating wisdom."

Identity

"How does one seek union with God?" "The harder you seek, the more distance you create
between Him and you." "So what does one do about the distance?" "Understand that it isn't there." "Does that mean that God and I are one?" "Not one.
Not two." "How is that possible?" "The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song -- not one. Not two."

Mediation

"Why do you need a Master?"
asked a visitor of one of the disciples.

"If water must be heated,
it needs a vessel as an intermediary
between the fire and itself,"
was the answer.

The Message (Meaning)

Said a traveler to one of the disciples,
"I have traveled a great distance to listen to the Master,
but I find his words quite ordinary."

"Don't listen to his words.
Listen to his message."

"How does one do that?"

"Take hold of a sentence that he says.
Shake it well till all the words drop off.
What is left will set your heart on fire."

Listening

"Every word, every image used for God
is a distortion more than a description."

"Then how does one speak of God?"

"Through Silence."

"Why, then, do you speak in words?"

At that the Master laughed uproariously.

He said, "When I speak,
you mustn't listen to the words, my dear.
Listen to the Silence."

Serenity

"Are there ways for gauging one's spiritual strength?"

"Many."

"Give us one."

"Find out how often you become disturbed
in the course of a single day."

Liberation

"How shall I get liberation?"

"Find out who has bound you,"
said the Master.

The disciple returned after a week and said,

"No one has bound me." "Then why ask to be liberated?" That was a moment of Enlightenment for the disciple, who suddenly became free.

Emptiness

Sometimes there would be a rush of noisy visitors
and the Silence of the monastery would be shattered.

This would upset the disciples;
not the Master, who seemed just as content
with the noise as with the Silence.

To his protesting disciples he said one day,
"Silence is not the absence of sound,
but the absence of self."

Wisdom

It always pleased the Master to hear people recognize their ignorance. "Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance," he claimed. When asked for an explanation, he said,
"When you come to see you are not as wise today
as you thought you were yesterday,
you are wiser today."

Growth and Enlightenment

"Calamities can bring
growth and Enlightenment," said the Master. And he explained it thus: "Each day a bird would shelter
in the withered branches of a tree
that stood in the middle of a vast deserted plain. One day a whirlwind uprooted the tree, forcing the poor bird to fly a hundred miles in search of shelter ~
' til it finally came to a forest of fruit-laden trees." And he concluded: "If the withered tree had survived, nothing would have induced the bird to give up its security and fly."

True Solitude

Master: As the fish dies on the land, so you die in the midst of worldly business.
To live again, the fish returns to water. You must return to solitude.

Credentials (Authenticity)

The Master was never impressed by diplomas or degrees.
He scrutinized the person, not the certificate.

He was once heard to say,
"When you have ears to hear a bird in song,
you don't need to look at its credentials.

Motion, not Action

To the disciples who were always asking for words of wisdom
the Master said,
"Wisdom is not expressed in words.
It reveals itself in action."

But when he saw them plunge headlong into activity,
he laughed aloud and said,

"That isn't action.
That's motion."

Rules (Knowingness)

There were rules in the monastery,
but the Master always warned
against the tyranny of the law.

"Obedience keeps the rules," he would say.
"Love knows when to break them."

The Fool (Insanity)

On the question of his own Enlightenment
the Master always remained reticent,
even though the disciples tried every means
to get him to talk.

All the information they had on this subject
was what the Master once said
to his youngest son who wanted to know
what his father felt when he became Enlightened.
The answer was: "A fool."

When the boy asked why,
the Master had replied,
"Well, son,
it was like going to great pains
to break into a house by climbing a ladder
and smashing a window and then realizing later
that the door of the house was open."

Ideology and Reality

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished.
No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that.
That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life….
Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning.
Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery
and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

The Mystic

You know you are a Mystic when you wake up one day and ask, am I crazy or or they?

Charity

Charity is never so lovely as when one has lost consciousness that one is practicing charity.
"You mean I helped you? I was enjoying myself. I was just doing my dance.
It helped you, that's wonderful. Congratulations to you. No credit to me." --

Writings

On Waking Up

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it,
are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep,
they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.
They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call
human existence. You know ~ all mystics ~ Catholic, Christian, non-Christian,
no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion ~ are unanimous
on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Thought everything is a mess, all is well.
Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that
all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.

Last year on Spanish television I heard a story about this gentleman who knocks
on his son’s door. "Jaime," he says, "wake up!" Jaime answers, "I don’t want
to get up, Papa."
The father shouts, "Get up, you have to go to school." Jaime says, "I don’t want
to go to school." "Why not?" asks the father. "Three reasons," says Jaime. First,
because it’s so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school. And the
father says, "Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to
school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years
old, and third, because you are the headmaster." Wake up! Wake up! You’ve
grown up. You’re too big to be asleep. Wake up! Stop playing with your toys.
Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe
them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys.
"Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give
me back my reputation, my success." This is what they want; they want their
toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that
people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is
irritating to be woken up. That’s the reason the wise guru will not attempt to
wake people up. I hope I’m going to be wise here and make no attempt
whatsoever to wake you up if you are asleep. It is really none of my business,
even though I say to you at times, "Wake up!" My business is to do my thing,
to dance my dance. If you profit from it fine; if you don’t, too bad! As the Arabs
say, "The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes
and flowers in the gardens."

~ Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

Some excerpts from Anthony de Mello's book Awareness There's nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions, talk and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you're hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you're looking at? the great Socrates said, "The unaware life is not worth living." That's a self-evident truth. Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts--generally somebody else's--mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions. Do you want to see how mechanical you really are? "My, that's a lovely shirt you're wearing." You feel good hearing that. For a shirt, for heaven's sake! You feel proud of yourself when you hear that. People come over to my center in India and they say, "What a lovely place, these lovely trees" (for which I'm not responsible at all), "this lovely climate." And already I'm feeling good, until I catch myself feeling good, and I say, "Hey, can you imagine anything as stupid as that?" I'm not responsible for those trees; I wasn't responsible for choosing the location. I didn't order the weather; it just happened. But "me" got in there, so I'm feeling good. I'm feeling good about "my" culture and "my" nation. How stupid can you get? I mean that. I'm told my great Indian culture has produced all these mystics. I didn't produce them. I'm not responsible for them. Or they tell me, "That country of yours and its poverty--it's disgusting." I feel ashamed. But I didn't create it. What's going on? Did you ever stop to think? People tell you, "I think you're very charming," so I feel wonderful. I get a positive stroke (that's why they call it I'm O.K., you're O.K.). I'm going to write a book someday and the title will be I'm an Ass, You're an Ass. That's the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you're an ass. It's wonderful. When people tell me, "You're wrong." I say, "What can you expect of an ass?" Disarmed, everybody has to be disarmed. In the final liberation, I'm an ass, you're an ass. Normally the way it goes, I press a button and you're up; I press another button and you're down. And you like that. How many people do you know who are unaffected by praise or blame? That isn't human, we say. Human means that you have to be a little monkey, so everybody can twist your tail, and you do whatever you ought to be doing. But is that human? If you find me charming, it means that right now you're in a good mood, nothing more. It also means that I fit your shopping list. We all carry a shopping list around, and it's as though you've got to measure up to this list--tall, um, dark, um, handsome, according to my tastes. "I like the sound of his voice." You say, "I'm in love." You're not in love, you silly ass. Any time you're in love-- I hesitate to say this--you're being particularly asinine. Sit down an watch what's happening to you. You're running away from yourself. You want to escape. Somebody once said, "Thank God for reality, and for the means to escape from it." So that's what's going on. We are so mechanical, so controlled. We write books about being controlled and how wonderful it is to be controlled and how necessary it is that people tell you you're O.K. Then you'll have a good feeling about yourself. How wonderful it is to be in prison! Or as somebody said to me yesterday, to be in your cage. Do you like being in prison? Do you like being controlled? Let me tell you something: If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you're O.K., you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you're not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people's expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair, whether your shoes are polished--in short, whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human? A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen.
The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did,
thinking he was a barnyard chicken.
He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled.
And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a
magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky.
It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents,
with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor.
"He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth--we're chickens."
So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was. From the book Awareness, by Anthony de Mello, S.J. ISBN 0-385-24937-3 � 1990 by the Center for Spiritual Exchange Published by Doubleday

Notes

Anthony DeMello Censured by Vatican

De Mello censure reflects Vatican misgivings about Eastern thinking
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
NCR Staff

“Nobody can be said to have attained the pinnacle of Truth,” Jesuit Fr. Anthony de Mello once
wrote, “until a thousand sincere people have denounced him for blasphemy.”

By that standard, Aug. 23 brought de Mello a bit closer to the mark, as the Vatican’s Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith condemned the works of the Indian Jesuit -- known for his
attempts to bridge Eastern and Western spirituality-- for “relativizing” faith and thus leading to
“religious indifferentism.”

In the United States, reaction has consisted largely of puzzlement among de Mello supporters, both as to the content and the timing of the statement, and alarm among publishers.

In India, meanwhile, Jesuit officials have suggested that the Vatican action may have been prompted by writings published after de Mello’s death, which do not fairly represent his thinking.

In a July 23 letter, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger alerted the presidents of the world’s bishops’
conferences to the impending declaration. He also asked the bishops to try to withdraw de Mello’s
books from circulation, or to ensure that they’re printed with a notice indicating they may cause
“grave harm” to the faith (NCR, Aug. 28).

A spokesman for the U.S. bishops’ conference said that Ratzinger’s concerns have been relayed
to the American bishops, but the conference “will not be taking any further action.” Any decision to
approach publishers about de Mello’s books would have to be made by the bishop of the
diocese in which the publisher is located.

De Mello, a Jesuit priest from India, died in 1987.
His many books, tapes and retreats combined traditional Christian concepts with insights from
Eastern religions. This line of thinking, the Roman congregation contends, led de Mello into “a
progressive distancing from the essential contents of the Christian faith.”

Taken together with the since-lifted excommunication of Oblate Fr. Tissa Balasuriya,
as well as the clash between curial officials and thebishops of Asia at the recent Synod for Asia, the
censure of de Mello seems to reflect deep misgivings in Rome about the impact of Eastern
religious thinking on Christianity.

Ratzinger himself has argued that Eastern spirituality, especially that of India, reinforces
some of what he sees as the worst tendencies in Western thought stemming from the Enlightenment. “The two philosophies are fundamentally
different,” he said in a 1996 address to the doctrinal commissions of Latin American bishops
conferences. “Nonetheless, they seem to mutually confirm one another in their metaphysical and
religious relativism.

“The areligious and pragmatic relativism of Europe and America can get a kind of religious
consecration from India which seems to give its renunication of dogma the dignity of a greater
respect before the mystery of God and man.”

The Vatican action had been rumored for some time in India. More than a year ago, the then Jesuit
provincial for South Asia, Fr. Varkey Perekkatt, told the UCA News service that he had requested
assistance from colleagues around the world to defend de Mello from attacks coming from
“Western right-wing Catholic papers.” Those complaints, another Jesuit said, had “attracted the
Vatican’s attention.”

At the time, Perekkatt said that much of the criticism focused on works that were published
after de Mello’s death. Perekkatt also said that tapes of de Mello’s lectures and retreats were
being published contrary to the late Jesuit’s explicit instructions.

That concern was echoed Aug. 25 by the current South Asia Jesuit provincial, Fr. Lisbert D’Souza,
who said some of these post-humously published works have led to de Mello being “grossly
misunderstood.” The Indian Jesuits, he said, regard only nine books as authentic.

Some Americans who knew and worked with deMello rejected the claim that he undercut church
teaching. “It’s extremely hard for me to believe that anyone would find anything de Mello says to
be anything other than orthodox,” said Jesuit Fr.Francis Stroud. “He was a very devout
churchman.”

Stroud, who collaborated with de Mello, now runs a “De Mello Spirituality Center” from his
residence at Fordham University in New York.

“De Mello did emphasize that God is a mystery,” Stroud said. “But he would quote Thomas
Aquinas saying the very same thing. ... He never denied anything like a personal concept of God.

“When anybody would joke with him, say he was going to get into trouble, he would respond, ‘Not
this wily Jesuit,’ ” Stroud said.

“Somebody’s feeding him [Ratzinger] this stuff, stringing him along,” Stroud said. “It’s hard for me
to believe that he would be taken in by that.”

The timing of the announcement, coming more than 10 years after de Mello’s death, confused
many. “It seems rather strange to condemn someone who has no right of reply,” said Eric
Major, director of the religious books program at Doubleday -- through its Image imprint, the largest
publisher of de Mello’s works in the United States. “Why do it now?”

Doubleday has eight de Mello titles in print, with sales running into “the millions” collectively,
according to Major.

Jesuit Fr. Norris Clarke, a philosopher at Fordham who has written about de Mello, said the
Indian Jesuit’s continuing popularity may explain why Rome felt it necessary to act. “His books and
tapes are circulating all around the world,” Clarke said. “Many think he’s a great spiritual new leader, and his influence is quite a living thing. That may be
what concerned them.”

Clarke said some of de Mello’s statements were elliptical enough to support many interpretations.
“He would talk about theology as pointing a finger at the moon, and we come to mistake the finger
for the moon,” Clarke said. “That doesn’t have to mean anything unorthodox, although you could
read it that way.”

Major said that withdrawing the works from print “can hardly be asked of a secular publishing
house.”

While Doubleday “would like to hear the objections, title by title,” Major said the company
would “reserve the right as publisher, having published his work for 20 years without a hint of
complaint, to continue to serve the Catholic church in its widest spheres.”

Three other publishers in the United States carry de Mello titles: Loyola Press, Ligouri and
Crossroad. Both Loyola and Ligouri said they would comply with a direct request from the U.S.
bishops to withdraw the books, should such a request be made. Crossroad said they would look
into the matter “if and when we’re contacted.”

“If the bishops asked us to withdraw something, we would do it,” said Thomas Santa of Ligouri.
“The bottom line is that we are a part of the church.” At the same time, Santa said, “If we got
an option,” such as publishing the books with some kind of warning, “we would probably go
with it.”

Ligouri is located in the St. Louis archdiocese, under Archbishop Justin Rigali. Both Doubleday
and Crossroad are in New York under Cardinal John O’Connor. Loyola is in Chicago under
Cardinal Francis George.