The Extra Mile, Part 1

By Anthony de Mello

If you take a look at the way you have been put together and the way you function you will find that inside your head there is a whole program, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be, and what you should want. 

Who is responsible for the programming?  Not you.  It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes.  It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, your past experiences who fed the operating instructions into your computer.  Wherever you go your computer goes along with you.  It insists that its demands be met by life, by people and by you.  If the demands are met, the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy.  If they are not met, even if it is not your fault, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer.  

For instance, when other people don’t live up to your computer’s expectations, it torments you with frustration, anger, or bitterness.  When things are not under your control, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, worry.  Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions.  And you generally cope by expending more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met.  If that happens you will be granted a measure of precarious peace.  At any moment something is going to be out of conformity with your computer’s programming and the computer will insist that you become upset again. 

And so you live a pathetic existence, constantly at the mercy of things and people, trying desperately to make them conform to your computer’s demands, so that you can enjoy the only peace you can ever know—a temporary respite from negative emotions, courtesy of your computer and your programming. 

Is there a way out? 

Show No Partiality, Part 1

By Anthony de Mello

Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people.  As a result they have a stranglehold on you.  See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval.  They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection.

Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead.  You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think.

And observe how even when you control them you depend on them and are enslaved by them. 

People have become so much a part of your being that you cannot even imagine living a life that is unaffected or uncontrolled by them.  As a matter of fact, they have convinced you that if you ever broke free of them, you would become an island—solitary, bleak, unloving.  But the exact opposite is true. How can you love someone whom you are a slave to?  How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? 

Boredom

Buddha left his kingdom when he was twenty nine at the peak of his youth.  He was bored with women, wine, wealth, kingdom, and everything.  He had everything.  He had seen them all.  He renounced the world not because the world is bad but because he was bored with it.  What was he doing for six years sitting in those forests?  He was getting acquainted with boredom.  What can one do in the forest but watch one’s breath, look at one’s navel, day in, day out, year in, year out.  He created that boredom to its ultimate peak and one night it disappeared.  He became enlightened.

Only human being is capable of being bored and enlightened.  Boredom is one of the most important things in human life.  It exists only when the mind starts coming closer and closer to enlightenment.  No other animal is capable of being bored, hence they cannot become enlighten. 

We can respond to boredom in two ways.  One way is to escape from it temporarily and avoid it by finding things to keep us occupy.  But we’ll find that again and again boredom will come back.  It has to be faced.  The other response is to face it, to meditate on it, to be with it.  That’s what the Buddha was doing under the bodhi tree—that’s what all the Zen people have been doing down the ages.

More

A large part our lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with more. When we no longer feel the lives that we are, we are likely to try to fill up our lives with more of everything; more is better.  The ego satisfaction is short-lived so we keep looking for more, more, and more.  We need to check our driving for more.  An uncheck driving for more for endless growth is a disease.  It is the same disease the cancerous cell manifest.  The cancerous cell only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is apart. 

As a spiritual practice, we should investigate our relationship with more, especially in the world of things through self observation, particularly, things that are designated with the word “My.”  We need to be alert and honest to find out whether our sense of self worth is bound up with the things we possessed.  Do certain things induce the feeling of important and superiority?  Does the lack of them make us feel inferior to others who have more than we are?  Do we casually mention things we own or show them off to increase our sense of worth in someone else’s eye and in your own eyes?  Do we feel angry when someone else has more than we do?  Do we feel angry when we loose a possession?

Live in Joy

Live in joy, in love, even among those who hate.

Live in joy, in health, even among the afflicted.

Live in joy, in peace, even among the troubled.

Live in joy, without possessions, like the shining ones.

The winner sows hatred because the loser suffers.

Let go of winning and losing and find joy.

Meditate on these sutras of Gautama the Buddha.  These sutras gave me immense insight into the heart of this awakened man.  He is one of the most joyous persons ever. 

Often within pain and depression, there are thoughts that we’ve had so long and held so close that we don’t even know that they are there.  We’ve never stop to see if we believe them.  What if we stop to ask? 

If your feelings could talk, what would it says and who would it says that to?  Please be as bluntly as you can.  Don’t rush this and be precise.  Otherwise you’ll come up with something that seems wise and kind (the thoughts you think you should be thinking instead of the thought that is really there and hurting.)

Sadness

Most of us don’t look at our sadness closely.  We try to avoid seeing it in many ways.  If we feel sad, we either hang out with our friends, instant messaging on the computer, playing games, watching TV, read, and so on.  We start doing something so that we do not have to see the sadness.   

The spiritual teachings say that this is not the right approach.  The teachings say that when we are sad, it is a momentous phenomenon.  It is sacred.  Sadness is a great blessing.  It is authentic.  It is silence.  It is there because we are alone.  It is giving us a chance to go deeper into our aloneness rather than jumping from one shallow happiness to another shallow happiness and wasting our lives.  It is better to use sadness as a means for meditation.  Witness it.  It is a friend!  It opens the door of our eternal aloneness.  And being alone is ultimately our natural state.  There is no way not to be alone. Alone we are born and alone we will die.  We can deceive ourselves that we are not alone, that we have a wife, a husband, children, friends, jobs, money, and power.  These things are there to keep us engaged so that we don’t become aware of our aloneness.    

So the next time you feel sad, sit silently and be sad.  There is nothing wrong with being sad.  Sadness has its own beauties.  Don’t escape from it. Get acquainted with the sadness, go deeper into it, and you will be surprised.  It is a great relaxation, a great rest, and you come out of it rejuvenated, refreshed, and livelier.  And once you have tasted it, you will seek those beautiful moments of sadness again and again.  You will welcome them and they will open new doors of your aloneness….

Do you look at your sadness closely? 

What is love?

What is love? An enlightened person would tell us that ordinary love is just a masquerade.  Ordinary love is a duty.  It is conditional.  It pretends too much.  It brings frustration. It obliges.  It expects.  It demands.  It attaches.  It concerns.  It exploits.  It is shallow.  It is at time syrupy, almost sickening and nauseating.  It feeds the ego which is not the real you but the unreal you. 

The same enlightened person would also tell us that real love is a totally different phenomenon.  Real love is freedom.  It is unconditional.  It is sharing.  It knows nothing of demand but joy and giving.  It is non-pretentious.  Real love is a nourishment to the soul.  It brings fulfillment.  It never wants to be rewarded, even to be thanked.  It does not oblige, expect, and demand.  It detaches.  It knows compassion and considerate but has no concerns.  At time, it can be hard, aloof, and very cold.  It does not feed the ego.  It would not fulfill any unreal need and any poisonous idea in the other.

If I ask the Hindus, they’d say that I love my husband not for my husband’s sake, but for my own sake because he gives me pleasures.  But deep down, I love my own pleasure.   They say that I love my daughter, my friends, and others not because of them, but because of me.  Deep down my daughter makes me happy, my friends give me solace and this is what I am hankering for.  So the Hindus say that I don’t really love others but love myself.  Even if I say that I love others, truly it is just a long, roundabout way to love myself.  For the Greeks, loving self would have been ridiculous.  Love can only exist between two persons.  For anything to be loved, the other is needed.

Love is an enigma.  It is a paradox.  

What is love to you? 

I am currently on vacation.  If you’d like to see some of our vacation pictures, please visit ronlawhouston.  Thanks for stopping by.  You will hear from me in about two weeks.  You can visit my site as often as you like to read other posts, leave comments, or just to hang out.  *Muah*

Have a meditative July!

Why does love become an attachment? 

When I love something or someone, I tend to become attached to this something or someone.  Why does love become an attachment?  Am I confusing myself by associating love with attachment?  Am I just using love to get something else that I wanted?

Unconsciously, I may have used love as a bait to catch an attachment fish.  There is a subtle fear of freedom.  Though attachment comes with bondage, pain, suffering, and other ugly things, it also comes with commitment, security, and other desirable traits including not being alone.  While I talked about detachment and freedom, I don’t have the courage to really be detached and be freed because I don’t want to end up alone.  When I am lonely nothing seems meaningful.  I become bored with myself.  At least with someone, I am occupied in creating artificial meanings around me.  It gives me an illusion that I am a giving person: a devoted wife, mother, daughter, friends, and employee. It appears that I don’t live for myself, I am not selfish, and that I live for someone else.   

But when I am alone, I long for attachment and when I am in attachment, I long for detachment.  It is one of the paradoxes of the mind.   If I struggle against attachment, then I also take the wrong turn.  I have observed that people are also struggling against attachment.  They feel caged and imprisoned while they are in relationships with families, friends, and others.  They feel attached to their properties, wives, husbands, children, and other love ones. They escaped to other places to be either alone or with new partners and only to find out that they are once again attached to the new surroundings.

So attachment cannot be easily detached.  Attachment will take many forms.  The only way to understand attachment is to try to understand why it is there and know the deep cause.  Why do I cling?  Why do I tend to get attached to my love ones?   I cling because I am afraid I will loose them.  Somebody may steal them from me tomorrow.  What available to me today may not be available to me tomorrow.  I will be left empty again.  I cling because I am not.  Inside, my own self is empty and hollow.  I have no root, no center.  I try to cling to anything and to anyone in order to feel safe.  When I am not rooted, I try to cling to the roots of others.    

Why do you get attached to another: a person, a thing, a thought, a belief, a tradition, a memory, an expectation….?  Why do you cling on to them?