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Spiritwalk
Teachers
Anthony DeMello

Contents
Foreword
1. On Waking Up
2. Will I Be of Help to
You
3. On the Proper Kind of
Selfishness
4. On Wanting Happiness
5. Are We Talking
About Psychology in this Spirituality Course
6. Neither is Renunciation
the Solution
-

-
-
FOREWORD
Tony de Mello on an occasion among friends was asked to say a few words
- about the nature of his work. He stood up, told a story which he
repeated
- later in conferences, and which you will recognize from his book Song
of
- the Bird. To my astonishment, he said this story applied to me.
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.
Astonished? At first I felt downright insulted! Was he publicly likening
- me to a barnyard chicken? In a sense, yes, and also, no. Insulting?
Never.
- That wasn't Tony's way. But he was telling me and these people that
in
- his eyes I was a "golden eagle," unaware of the heights to
which I could
- soar. This story made me understand the measure of the man, his
genuine
- love and respect for people while always telling the truth. That was
what his
- work was all about, waking people up to the reality of their
greatness. This
- was Tony de Mello at his best, proclaiming the message of
"awareness,"
- seeing the light we are to ourselves and to others, recognizing we
are
- better than we know.
This book captures Tony in flight, doing just that-in live dialogue and interaction --
touching on all the themes that enliven the hearts of those who listen.
Maintaining the spirit of his live words, and sustaining his spontaneity with
- a responsive audience on the printed page was the task I faced after
his death.
- Thanks to the wonderful support I enjoyed from George McCauley, S.J.,
Joan
- Brady, John Culkin, and others too numerous to single out, the
exciting,
- entertaining, provocative hours Tony spent communicating with real
people
- have been wonderfully captured in the pages that follow.
Enjoy the book. Let the words slip into your soul and listen, as Tony would
- suggest, with your heart. Hear his stories, and you'll hear your own.
Let me
- leave you alone with Tony - a spiritual guide - a friend you will
have for life.
J. Francis Stroud, S.J.
De Mello Spirituality Center
Fordham University
Bronx, New York

1.
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. Though 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's 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."

2.
WILL I BE OF HELP TO YOU?
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!

3.
ON THE PROPER KIND OF SELFISHNESS
The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is
that you don't want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be
honest enough to admit to yourself that you don't like it. You don't want
to be happy. Want a little test? Let's try it. It will take you exactly
one minute. You could close your eyes while you're doing it or you could
keep them open. It doesn't really matter. Think of someone you love very
much, someone you're close to, someone who is precious to you, and say to
that person in your mind, "I'd rather have happiness than have you." See
what happens. "I'd rather be happy than have you. If I had a choice, no
question about it, I'd choose happiness." How many of you felt selfish when
you said this? Many, it seems. See how we've been brainwashed? See how
we've been brainwashed into thinking, "How could I be so selfish?" But look
at who's being selfish. Imagine somebody saying to YOU, "How could you be
so selfish that you'd choose happiness over me?" Would you not feel like
responding, "Pardon me, but how could YOU be so selfish that YOU would
demand I choose you above my own happiness?!"
A woman once told me that when she was a child her Jesuit cousin gave a
retreat in the Jesuit church in Milwaukee. He opened each conference with
the words: "The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is
unselfishness." That's marvelous! I asked her, "Would you want me to love
you at the cost of my happiness?" "Yes," she answered. Isn't that
delightful? Wouldn't that be wonderful? SHE would love me at the cost of
HER happiness and I would love her at the cost of MY happiness, and so
you've got two unhappy people, but LONG LIVE LOVE!

4.
ON WANTING HAPPINESS
I was saying that we don't want to be happy. We want
other things. Or
let's put it more accurately: We don't want to be unconditionally happy.
I'm ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing.
But this is really to say to our friend or to our God or to anyone, "You
are my happiness. If I don't get you, I refuse to be happy." It's so
important to understand that. We cannot imagine being happy without those
conditions. That's pretty accurate. We cannot conceive of being happy
without them. We've been taught to place our happiness in them.
So that's the first thing we need to do if we want to come awake, which is
the same thing as saying: if we want to love, if we want freedom, if we
want joy and peace and spirituality. In that sense, spirituality is the
most practical thing in the whole wide world. I challenge anyone to think
of anything more practical than spirituality as I have defined it- -- not
piety, not devotion, not religion, not worship, but spirituality -- -waking
up, waking up! Look at the heartache everywhere, look at the loneliness,
look at the fear, the confusion, the conflict in the hearts of people,
inner conflict, outer conflict. Suppose somebody gave you a way of getting
rid of all of that? Suppose somebody gave you a way to stop that
tremendous drainage of energy, of health, of emotion that comes from these
conflicts and confusion. Would you want that? Suppose somebody showed us
a way whereby we would truly love one another, and be at peace, be at love.
Can you think of anything more practical than that? But, instead, you
have people thinking that big business is more practical, that politics is
more practical, that science is more practical. What's the earthly use of
putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?

5.
ARE WE TALKING ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY IN THIS SPIRITUALITY COURSE?
Is psychology more practical than spirituality? Nothing
is more practical
than spirituality. What can the poor psychologist do? He can only relieve
the pressure. I'm a psychologist myself, and I practice psychotherapy, and
I have this great conflict within me when I have to choose sometimes
between psychology and spirituality. I wonder if that makes sense to
anybody here. It didn't make sense to me for many years.
I'll explain. It didn't make sense to me for many years until I suddenly
discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they
get disillusioned with all relationships. Isn't that a terrible thing to
think? They've got to suffer enough in a relationship before they wake up
and say, "I'm sick of it! There must be a better way of living than
depending on another human being." And what was I doing as a
psychotherapist? People were coming to me with their relationship
problems, with their communication problems, etc., and sometimes what I did
was a help. But sometimes, I'm sorry to say, it wasn't, because it kept
people asleep. Maybe they should have suffered a little more. Maybe they
ought to touch rock bottom and say, "I'm sick of it all. " It's only when
you're sick of your sickness that you'll get out of it. Most people go to
a psychiatrist or a psychologist to get relief. I repeat: to get belief.
Not to get out of it.
There's the story of little Johnny who, they say, was mentally retarded.
But evidently he wasn't, as you'll learn from this story. Johnny goes to
modeling class in his school for special children and he gets his piece of
putty and he's modeling it. He takes a little lump of putty and goes to a
corner of the room and he's playing with it. The teacher comes up to him
and says, "Hi, Johnny." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the teacher says,
"What's that you've got in your hand?" And Johnny says, "This is a lump of
cow dung." The teacher asks, "What are you making out of it?" He says,
"I'm making a teacher."
The teacher thought, "Little Johnny has regressed." So she calls out to
the principal, who was passing by the door at that moment, and says,
"Johnny has regressed."
So the principal goes up to Johnny and says, "Hi, son." And Johnny says,
"Hi." And the principal says, "What do you have in your hand?" And he
says,
"A lump of cow dung." "What are you making out of it?" And he says,
"A
principal."
The principal thinks that this is a case for the school psychologist.
"Send for the psychologist!"
The psychologist is a clever guy. He goes up and says, "Hi." And Johnny
says, "Hi." And the psychologist says, "I know what you've got in your
hand." "What?" "A lump cow dung." Johnny says, "Right."
"And I know
what you're making out of it." "What?" "You're making a
psychologist."
"Wrong. Not enough cow dung!" And they called him mentally retarded!
The poor psychologists, they're doing a good job. They really are. There
are times when psychotherapy is a tremendous help, because when you're on
the verge of going insane, raving mad, you're about to become either a
psychotic or a mystic. That's what the mystic is, the opposite of the
lunatic. Do you know one sign that you've woken up? It's when you are
asking yourself, "Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?" It really is.
Because we are crazy. The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The
only reason we're not locked up in an institution is that there are so many
of us. So we're crazy. We're living on crazy ideas about love, about
relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything. We're crazy
to the point, I've come to believe, that if everybody agrees on something,
you can be sure it's wrong! Every new idea, every great idea, when it first
began was in a minority of one. That man called Jesus Christ --minority of
one. Everybody was saying something different from what he was saying.
The Buddha- -- minority of one. Everybody was saying something different
from what he was saying. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said, "Every
great idea starts out as a blasphemy." That's well and accurately put.
You're going to hear lots of blasphemies during these days. "He hath
blasphemed!" Because people are crazy, they're lunatics, and the sooner you
see this, the better for your mental and spiritual health. Don't trust
them. Don't trust your best friends. Get disillusioned with your best
friends. They're very clever. As you are in your dealings with everybody
else, though you probably don't know it. Ah, you're so wily, and subtle,
and clever. You're putting on a great act.
I'm not being very complimentary here, am I? But I repeat: You want to
wake up. You're putting on a great act. And you don't even know it. You
think you're being so loving. Ha! Whom are you loving? Even your
self-sacrifice gives you a good feeling, doesn't it? "I'm sacrificing
myself! I'm living up to my ideal." But you're getting something out of it,
aren't you? You're always getting something out of everything you do,
until you wake up.
So there it is: step one. Realize that you don't want to wake up. It's
pretty difficult to wake up when you have been hypnotized into thinking
that a scrap of old newspaper is a check for a million dollars. How
difficult it is to tear yourself away from that scrap of old newspaper.

6.
NEITHER IS RENUNCIATION THE SOLUTION
Anytime you're practicing renunciation, you're deluded. How about that!
You're deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something,
you are tied forever to the thing you renounce. There's a guru in India
who says, "Every time a prostitute comes to me, she's talking about nothing
but God. She says I'm sick of this life that I'm living. I want God. But
every time a priest comes to me he's talking about nothing but sex." Very
well, when you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you
fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it,
you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to
fight it.
This includes communism and everything else. So you must "receive" your
demons, because when you fight them, you empower them. Has nobody ever
told you this? When you renounce something, you're tied to it. The only
way to get out of this is to see through it. Don't renounce it, SEE
THROUGH IT. Understand its true value and you won't need to renounce it;
it will just drop from your hands. But of course, if you don't see that,
if you're hypnotized into thinking that you won't be happy without this,
that, or the other thing, you're stuck. What we need to do for you is not
what so-called spirituality attempts to do --namely, to get you to make
sacrifices, to renounce things. That's useless. You're still asleep.
What we need to do is to help you understand, understand, understand. If
you understood, you'd simply drop the desire for it. This is another way
of saying: If you woke up, you'd simply drop the desire for it.

7
LISTEN AND UNLEARN
Some of us get woken up by the harsh realities of life. We suffer so much
that we wake up. But people keep bumping again and again into life. They
still go on sleepwalking. They never wake up. Tragically, it never occurs
to them that there may be another way. It never occurs to them that there
may be a better way. Still, if you haven't been bumped sufficiently by
life, and you haven't suffered enough, then there is another way: to
listen. I don't mean you have to agree with what I'm saying. That
wouldn't be listening. Believe me, it really doesn't matter whether you
agree with what I'm saying or you don't. Because agreement and
disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don't
have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth
is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude. So you could be
disagreeing with me and still sight the truth. But there has to be an
attitude of openness, of willingness to discover something new. That's
important, not your agreeing with me or disagreeing with me. After all,
most of what I'm giving you is really theories. No theory adequately
covers reality. So I can speak to you, not of the truth, but of obstacles
to the truth. Those I can describe. I cannot describe the truth. No one
can. All I can do is give you a description of your falsehoods, so that
you can drop them. All I can do for you is challenge your beliefs and the
belief system that makes you unhappy. All I can do for you is help you to
unlearn. That's what learning is all about where spirituality is
concerned: unlearning, unlearning almost everything you've been taught. A
willingness to unlearn, to listen.
Are you listening, as most people do, in order to confirm what you already
think? Observe your reactions as I talk. Frequently you'll be startled or
shocked or scandalized or irritated or annoyed or frustrated. Or you'll be
saying, "Great! "
But are you listening for what will confirm what you already think? Or are
you listening in order to discover something new? That is important. It
is difficult for sleeping people. Jesus proclaimed the good news, yet he
was rejected. Not because it was good, but because it was new. We hate
the new. We hate it! And the sooner we face up to that fact, the better.
We don't want new things, particularly when they're disturbing,
particularly when they involve change. Most particularly if it involves
saying, "I was wrong." I remember meeting an eighty-seven-year-old Jesuit
in Spain; he'd been my professor and rector in India thirty or forty years
ago. And he attended a workshop like this. "I should have heard you speak
sixty years ago," he said. "You know something. I've been wrong all my
life." God, to listen to that! It's like looking at one of the wonders of
the world. That, ladies and gentlemen, is faith! An openness to the
truth, no matter what the consequences, no matter where it leads you and
when you don't even know where it's going to lead you. That's faith. Not
belief, but faith. Your beliefs give you a lot of security, but faith is
insecurity. You don't know. You're ready to follow and you're open,
you're wide open! You're ready to listen. And, mind you, being open does
not mean being gullible, it doesn't mean swallowing whatever the speaker is
saying. Oh no. You've got to challenge everything I'm saying. But
challenge it from an attitude of openness, not from an attitude of
stubbornness. And challenge it all. Recall those lovely words of Buddha
when he said, "Monks and scholars must not accept my words out of respect,
but must analyze them the way a goldsmith analyzes-gold by cutting,
scraping, rubbing, melting."
When you do that, you're listening. You've taken another major step toward
awakening. The first step, as I said, was a readiness to admit that you
don't want to wake up, that you don't want to be happy. There are all
kinds of resistances to that within you. The second step is a readiness to
understand, to listen, to challenge your whole belief system. Not just
your religious beliefs, your political beliefs, your social beliefs, your
psychological beliefs, but all of them. A readiness to reappraise them
all, in the Buddha's metaphor. And I'll give you plenty of opportunity to
do that here.


11
OUR ILLUSION ABOUT OTHERS
So if you stop to think, you would see that there's
nothing to be very
proud of after all. What does this do to your relationship with people?
What are you complaining about? A young man came to complain that his
girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you
complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you're
dealing with selfish people. You're the idiot -- you glorified her,
didn't you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice.
They're not! They're not nice. They're as bad as you are -- bad, you
understand? They're asleep like you. And what do you think they are going
to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference. Can
you imagine how liberating it is that you'll never be disillusioned again,
never be disappointed again? You'll never feel let down again. Never feel
rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here
it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through
yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.
Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of
them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.
It's probably too startling for many of you to understand that everyone
except the very rare awakened person can be expected to be selfish and to
seek his or her own self-interest whether in coarse or in refined ways.
This leads you to see that there's nothing to be disappointed about,
nothing to be disillusioned about. If you had been in touch with reality
all along, you would never have been disappointed. But you chose to paint
people in glowing colors; you chose not to see through human beings because
you chose not to see through yourself. So you're paying the price now.
Before we discuss this, let me tell you a story. Somebody once asked,
"What is enlightenment like? What is awakening like?" It's like the tramp
in London who was settling in for the night. He'd hardly been able to get
a crust of bread to eat. Then he reaches this embankment on the river
Thames. There was a slight drizzle, so he huddled in his old tattered
cloak. He was about to go to sleep when suddenly a chauffeur-driven
Rolls-Royce pulls up. Out of the car steps a beautiful young lady who says
to him, "My poor man, are you planning on spending the night here on this
embankment?" And the tramp says, "Yes." She says, "I won't have it.
You're
coming to my house and you're going to spend a comfortable night and you're
going to get a good dinner." She insists on his getting into the car.
Well, they ride out of London and get to a place where she has a sprawling
mansion with large grounds. They are ushered in by the butler, to whom she
says, "James, please make sure he's put in the servants' quarters and
treated well." Which is what James does. The young lady had undressed and
was about to go to bed when she suddenly remembers her guest for the night.
So she slips something on and pads along the corridor to the servants'
quarters. She sees a little chink of light from the room where the tramp
was put up. She taps lightly at the door, opens it, and finds the man
awake. She says, "What's the trouble, my good man, didn't you get a good
meal?" He said, "Never had a better meal in my life, lady." "Are you
warm
enough?" He says, "Yes, lovely warm bed." Then she says, "Maybe you
need
a little company. Why don't you move over a bit." And she comes closer to
him and he moves over and falls right into the Thames.
Ha! You didn't expect that one! Enlightenment! Enlightenment! Wake up.
When you're ready to exchange your illusions for reality, when you're ready
to exchange your dreams for facts, that's the way you find it all. That's
where life finally becomes meaningful. Life becomes beautiful.
There's a story about Ramirez. He is old and living up there in his castle
on a hill. He looks out the window (he's in bed and paralyzed) and he sees
his enemy. Old as he is, leaning on a cane, his enemy is climbing up the
hill -- slowly, painfully. It takes him about two and a half hours to get
up the hill. There's nothing Ramirez can do because the servants have the
day off. So his enemy opens the door, comes straight to the bedroom, puts
his hand inside his cloak, and pulls out a gun. He says, "At last,
Ramirez, we're going to settle scores!" Ramirez tries his level best to
talk him out of it. He says, "Come on, Borgia, you can't do that. You
know I'm no longer the man who ill-treated you as that youngster years ago,
and you're no longer that youngster. Come off it!" "Oh no," says his
enemy, ''your sweet words aren't going to deter me from this divine mission
of mine. It's revenge I want and there's nothing you can do about it."
And Ramirez says, "But there is!" "What?" asks his enemy. "I can
wake
up," says Ramirez. And he did; he woke up! That's what enlightenment is
like. When someone tells you, "There is nothing you can do about it," you
say, "There is, I can wake up!" All of a sudden, life is no longer the
nightmare that it has seemed. Wake up!
Somebody came up to me with a question. What do you think the question
was? He asked me, "Are you enlightened?" What do you think my answer was?
What does it matter!
You want a better answer? My answer would be: "How would I know? How
would you know? What does it matter?" You know something? If you want
anything too badly, you're in big trouble. You know something else? If I
were enlightened and you listened to me because I was enlightened, then
you're in big trouble. Are you ready to be brainwashed by someone who's
enlightened? You can be brainwashed by anybody, you know. What does it
matter whether someone's enlightened or not? But see, we want to lean on
someone, don't we? We want to lean on anybody we think has arrived. We
love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn't it? What
do you want to hope for? Isn't that another form of desire?
You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don't
you? Otherwise you wouldn't be hoping. But then, you forget that you have
it all right now anyway, and you don't know it. Why not concentrate on the
now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand
the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn't the
future just another trap?

from Anthony de Mello, Awareness:
A De Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words
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