The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

By Anthony De Mello

• Spirituality means waking up
• Even the best psychologist will tell you that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful
• You never trust anyone. You only trust your judgment about that person.
• 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...So you must “receive” your demons, because when you fight them, you empower them.
• 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.
• A willingness to unlearn, to listen
• “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” - Buddha
• We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
• The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you’re ready to listen and if you’re ready to be challenged, there’s one thing that you can do, but no one can help you - self-observation...Watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else (It means that you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever).
• What you judge you cannot understand
• When you step out of yourself and observe “me,” you no longer identify with “me.” Suffering exists in “me,” so when you identify “I” with “me,” suffering begins. Say that you are afraid or desirous or anxious. When “I” does not identify with money, or name, or nationality, or persons, or friends, or any quality, the “I” is never threatened.
• All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me.
• When negative feelings come in you go blind...It’s very important that when you swing into action, you be able to see things with detachment. But negative emotions prevent that.
• Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.
• No one can show you how to do it, because he would be giving you a technique, he would be programming you. But watch yourself.
• Ignorance and fear, ignorance caused by fear, that’s where all the evil comes from, that’s where your violence comes from. The person who is truly nonviolent, who is incapable of violence, is the person who is fearless. It’s only when you’re afraid that you become angry.
• The unaware life is a mechanical life. It’s not a human, it’s programmed, conditioned.