Alexandersmap

    Tag: Anthony De Mello

    • Changing Filters

      “From every pore or living cell of our bodies and from all our senses we are getting feedback from reality. But we are filtering things out constantly. Who’s doing the filtering? Our conditioning? Our culture? Our programming? The way we were taught to see things and to experience them? Even our language can be a filter. There is so much filtering going on that sometimes you won’t see things that are there.” —

      Having dinner with some bright people, Anthony De Mello came up. And I perked up. Not enough people reference De Mello, and I appreciate when someone does. To have read his book Awareness is to shake the tree of what we believe. To read it again and again to absorb what he is telling us is to change our filters. We see the world and our place in it differently.

      “You only change through awareness and understanding. When you see a stone as a stone and a scrap of paper as a scrap of paper, you don’t think that the stone is a precious diamond anymore and you don’t think that that scrap of paper is a check for a billion dollars. When you see that, you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      The irony of De Mello coming up at all was the group I was with were highly-driven people in my career. They are all fueled by purpose and passion beyond making money, and sometimes you don’t see the truth right in front of you. It prompted me to re-read passages from Awareness again, to clear my filters.

      It helps to do regular maintenance on ourselves. What we believe is often just acquired filters. Changing these filters opens up a whole new perspective.

    • Through the Darkness and the Light

      And consider, always, every day, the determination
      of the grass to grow despite the unending obstacles.
      — Mary Oliver, Evidence

      We are change agents, creating new iterations of ourselves with every action. But so is everyone and everything else, which makes change exponential and complicated. There are some things we simply can’t control. One moment we’re celebrating what we’ve accrued and the next we’re mourning what has passed. The moments in between are often confusing and stressful. Mostly, we can only control how we react.

      “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      Life is change, which means accepting the two sides of that coin. Amor fati. There will be obstacles and setbacks. Life is a series of such lessons, learned and forgotten and re-learned again. The lessons are unending, meaning we must learn to endure. We must find a way, despite it all.

      “The nature of the rain is the same and yet it produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden.” — Arab saying (via Anthony De Mello)

      Through everything, there is growth, but isn’t it fair to ask ourselves, what are we growing towards? What are we rooted in, to sustain us in troubled times? What are we reaching for, when times are better? These are our days, through the darkness and the light, to do with what we will.

    • Diligent Awareness (Life as a Poem)

      “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.”
      ― Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart

      “Imagine that you’re unwell and in a foul mood, and they’re taking you through some lovely countryside. The landscape is beautiful but you’re not in the mood to see anything. A few days later you pass the same place and you say, “Good heavens, where was I that I didn’t notice all of this?” Everything becomes beautiful when you change.” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality

      It’s easy to say we should live with awareness, but harder in practice. This business of living demands attention, or rather, distracts our attention from much of the things we’d be focused on if we weren’t so damned busy with that other thing. We forget, sometimes, that life is merely what we pay attention to and everything becomes beautiful when we change. Most of us won’t change or become fully aware, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

      Most don’t want to change, they want to live with what they have, while wishing for more, and do it again tomorrow. When someone does we wonder at their boldness, but don’t connect the dots to doing it ourselves. If we are what we repeatedly do (Aristotle), then doing something completely different strikes at our very identity. No wonder so many refuse to cross that line in the sand.

      “How many people do you know who are obsessed with their work, who are type A or have stress related diseases and who can’t slow down? They can’t slow down because they use their routine to distract themselves, to reduce life to only its practical considerations. And they do this to avoid recalling how uncertain they are about why they live.” ― James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

      The thing is, awareness isn’t about turning our lives upside down, it’s being fully present in the moment. Being open to everything that surrounds us, not just those practical considerations. We aren’t quitting our jobs and living like a hermit in a hot tent when we’re aware, we’re simply inviting more of the universe into our present moment. It seems if we want a more fulfilling life then we ought to fill more of our life with beautiful things.

      I was once a closed young man who thought of poetry as frivolous. Something was missing within me that took years to fill. When you close yourself up the world simply cannot find its way in to fill you. Over time my awareness pendulum has swung wide open. Not coincidently, I write more, listen more, seek more and linger more with the world. When we realize the world exists as a poem, we’re more inclined to dance with its verse.

      “Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive—that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

      We expand into the world we create for ourselves through diligent awareness. Knowing what we are, and who we are, is the job of a lifetime. When we open ourselves to everything, we discover more, and we live a bigger life.

    • Coming to Our Senses

      “Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come unclogged.” — Anthony de Mello, Awareness

      The world wants us to focus on it. It calls to us constantly. Sure, those notifications on our phones and smart watches and other electronics are designed to capture our attention. Our to-do lists grow relentlessly longer. The demand for our attention has never been greater.

      There’s nothing wrong with letting it all drift away.

      Unclogging our senses brings us to them. Focus intently on a task at hand, or nothing at all. Recognize what matters when we get out and listen to nature, or our own voice. Walking is the great sifter of souls, shaking the nagging little things away. Why don’t we walk more?

      We think we’re too busy.

      We have so much noise in our lives that we don’t hear our own voice. We must sift it all away and find what really speaks to us. What is a better use of our time than listening to our own calling and taking meaningful action towards change? We can’t set our compass if we don’t step out into the world and find out where we are right now.

    • Dancing with the Gloriously Possible

      “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.” — Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

      Every now and then you read a book that becomes an instant frame of reference for how you see the world and your place in it for the rest of your days. Walden, Awareness, Meditations, and Atomic Habits are some of the books that changed me profoundly. I can comfortably place Four Thousand Weeks on that short list. This is a mesmerizingly insightful look at the fragile dance we’re all in the middle of, and how we think and react to our realization that life is impossibly short. It reinforces many of the things I’ve written about in this blog, and turned a few working theories upside down and dumped them on the scrapheap. It’s a book I’ll be processing for awhile.

      “Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life... what we think of as “distractions” aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.“

      Confronting our limitation, and how we process that by either living in the moment or distracting ourselves with ritual, busyness, by deferring to the future (all the way to “afterlife”) or skimming along in the shallow pond of the unimportant are all very human reactions to figuring out what the hell to do with this short time before we rejoin infinity. Heady stuff, stuff that demands contemplation. But it can be overwhelming to think about such things. Who wants to be the Debbie Downer in their own life party?

      Burkeman points to the possibility of accepting life for the brief dance it is so you can focus on what you can and cannot achieve. Decide what you’ll focus on, and importantly, what you’ll let fall away. We can’t excel in everything, so why burden ourselves with those things on our to-do list? We know what’s most important already. Be honest with yourself about what is going to fall off and celebrate the unburdening of releasing it for our essential contribution.

      All those books listed above, in one way or another all come down to the idea of making the most of our short time. Since we all know the ship is sinking from the moment we reach awareness, shouldn’t we be conscious about how we react to it? Isn’t it liberating, in a way, to release the burden of the shortness of time and seize this moment? Think about the Titanic in her last moments —would you rather be in the band playing tunes to the end or the fool who jumps into the icy water screaming in denial to the last? Even the people who made it to the life boats gained but a short time more. I’d like to think they used it well.

      And so should we! Since we all meet our fate in the end, shouldn’t we make the most of our brief lives? What will you do with this focused time?

    • Dancing in a State of Solitude

      “The spirit of silence must… pervade the whole of life. That is what matters most of all. It is said sometimes that solitude is the mother of results. Not solitude, but the state of solitude. So much so that we could, strictly speaking, conceive an intellectual life based on two hours’ work per day. But does anyone imagine that having set those two hours aside one may then act as if they did not exist? That would be a grave misconception. Those two hours are given to concentration, but the consecration of the whole life is none the less necessary.” — A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      Living in a state of solitude sounds lonely, but really it’s just the opposite. Lonely is feeling apart from the world, living with a spirit of silence opens you up to the world, to be a part of it. And this is where the magic happens, or, if you will, the consecration of life. To live sacredly, fully alive, fully aware, and full of possibility. This isn’t derived from background noise and distraction, but from quieting the mind and truly seeing.

      “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion”
      — John Graves

      A coworker resigned earlier this week to return to a job he’d previously left, not because the current position wasn’t lucrative and full of growth potential, but because he felt lonely. What he meant by that was he couldn’t drop by to see old industry friends every week in a route, like someone delivering milk. This is a life of the familiar, and there’s comfort in it that we can all understand. The pandemic robbed us of much of this, and even as variants spike people stubbornly hold on to interaction with others because it’s a part of their lives they don’t want to be away from any longer. Who doesn’t understand the draw of the comfortable and familiar?

      A state of solitude turns inward, not to be antisocial or reclusive, but to open up the senses to awareness. Awareness of the inner tension inside of us helps us see that battle others have inside themselves. And this awareness leads to a state of receptiveness—to take in the world as it comes to you. I’m no expert on such things, but I can see that those hours of concentration have brought me closer to it.

      “When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they’re really awake or not. That’s part of asceticism, not awareness. It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there’s nowhere to go because you’re there already. ” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Do you want to dance in your awareness? Seek solitude, wherever you might be. Walk in the natural world. Breath deep, listen and look at the world buzzing around you, look inside, and see. And you’ll find, in the stillness of that moment, that you’re already dancing with it.

    • Killing Phantoms

      “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the ink pot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her.” – Virginia Woolf

      Storytelling is the most human of arts, the one skill that makes the salesperson or the public speaker excel, that makes our living history come alive. And there’s no doubt that Woolf was a great storyteller when you read this excerpt from a speech she gave in 1931. It came to my attention because of one line, the one I’ve bolded, that became a famous quote.

      And what a quote! We all fight our phantoms. Voices in our heads that gently tell us that maybe we should do something less risky, less audacious. Personally, I’m fighting a lazy sloth that keeps whispering in my ear that it’s okay to skip a workout today and eat some cheese. I hate that bastard, but he’s just so persuasive.

      If we agree that storytelling is an art, then what of the stories we tell ourselves? Myths about how the world is and works. We tell ourselves we don’t have time to work out or reasons why we aren’t going after a position we desire or whatever, really, that the voice says is out of reach for someone like us. And we form ideas about how the world works, and the rules that are in place that we all must follow. Which is why we either chafe or become fascinated with those who live outside the boundaries we put ourselves within.

      “I cannot overemphasize enough how much everything is made up and there are no rules.”
      – Tiago Forte

      A statement like Forte’s jumps out at you for the boldness of his words. But don’t we see the truth in it even as we feel the resistance within? For if the way we see the world and our place in it is all made up, what comes next? Chaos?

      “Myths… are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.” – Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens

      The perception of order in a chaotic world comes from the stories we all agree on. We agree to live together in peace, to pay our bills, to not cut in line, to do our part, to vote and get married and raise children to be good citizens so that the next generation is just a little bit better off than we might be. This is the mass cooperation that Harari speaks of, all myths commonly subscribed to.

      Which is why we become outraged when someone breaks the rules. December 7th, September 11th or January 6th become dates forever ingrained in our minds because the rules of social order were so clearly broken. I can feel the outrage I felt on September 11th or January 6th even as I write this. But outrage doesn’t solve anything, clear thinking does. Stimulus and response, as Viktor Frankl so often reminds us.

      “Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.”
      – Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      We can’t change the world, but we can change how we feel about the world. We can take meaningful action in our own lives to pivot away from outrage and towards clear thinking. I can ignore the cheese-pushing troll that lives in my head and just go work out. We can see clearly which perceived rules are holding us back from making progress in our own lives and kill those phantoms once and for all.

      It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. But reality is what you make of it. Once you get past those phantoms.

    • Illusions of the Moment

      “When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness. Wakefulness, happiness—call it what you wish—is the state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are, insofar as this is possible for a human being. To drop illusions, to see things, to see reality. Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to reality. It is that addition that makes you unhappy. I repeat: You have added something … a negative reaction in you. Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction. You have added something by your reaction. And if you examine what you have added, there is always an illusion there, there’s a demand, an expectation, a craving.” – Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Monday mornings are a good time to revisit De Mello. To confront the reality of the work week ahead without dread requires a measure of acceptance of the moment you’re living in. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing do something else as soon as you possibly can. If you enjoy it, understand what it draws out of you and double down on that. Most people in the world today have the freedom to choose how they react.

      The entire quote above might immediately makes you think of Viktor Frankl’s thoughts on stimulus and response. Even in the worst of moments, we can choose how to react to stimulus in our lives. Accept the truth of the matter for what it is and see things for how they are. That might not make you happy, but it makes you fully aware. And don’t we need to be in that state to make effective, meaningful decisions in our lives?

      The question is, what exactly are you adding in the moment? What are your illusions about the way things ought to be, about how someone should speak with you, about wearing a mask or getting vaccinated or how we see a person a bit different from ourself? How do you view that job you’re going to or the title you have or the car you drive? How about how you view the person driving in front of you or the one trying to pass you? What are you adding in that moment?

      We often confront illusions in how others treat us. I had a conversation with an old friend who was poking at me about a tendency I used to have when we were younger. I smiled and let the moment slide away, knowing I’m not that person anymore. You learn to accept who you once were as you get older. But doing so in the moment is a bit trickier, isn’t it? It requires us to be constantly aware of the illusions we’re throwing up. What story am I telling myself right now? And what might happen if I simply subtracted that story?

      This idea of observing yourself in the moment between stimulus and response is a way of getting outside of your own head and seeing the choices in front of you. To shatter the illusion that you don’t have a choice in how you react. To shift to a state of non-delusion and maybe, to choose the path towards happiness. In the thirty years since I first read Man’s Search for Meaning and accelerating in the two years since I read Awareness I’ve chipped away at this within myself. I’m under no illusion that I’ve mastered it, but I work with the tools available to step outside myself towards wakefulness.

      This is a skill that is especially handy on some Monday mornings.

    • Which Comes First?

      Enter first applicant.

      “You understand that this is a simple test we are giving you before we offer you the job you have applied for?”
      “Yes.”
      “Well, what is two plus two?”
      “Four.”

      Enter second applicant.

      “Are you ready for the test?”
      “Yes.”
      “Well, what is two plus two?”
      “Whatever the boss says it is.”

      The second applicant got the job.

      Which comes first, orthodoxy or the truth?
      – Anthony De Mello, The Job, from The Song Of The Bird

      Hard to read this story and not immediately see similarities in the world of politics lately. You either kiss the ring and accept (and parrot) doctrine or you look for the truth outside the door. You see it with people who dare speak of the facts in the face of an overwhelming win in the US Presidential Election, and you see it with people who call you a snowflake if you believe Climate Change is an existential threat or wearing a mask in a pandemic might make a little sense. Call me what you want; give me science, thank you.

      There’s nothing new in this, of course – refer to Galileo or Darwin for examples of the dangers of proposing that the way people see the world might not be entirely accurate. This is especially true when you mess with people’s ideas about religion, politics, and nationalism. Americans generally come together when it counts most, and perhaps we’ll see that once the man who fancies himself the boss for life has less of a hold on power and his spin on orthodoxy.

      The question is, are some things worth the fight for truth, or is everything?

    • Learning to Love Them

      “A man who took great pride in his lawn found himself with a large crop of dandelions. He tried every method he knew to get rid of them. Still they plagued him.
      Finally he wrote the Department of Agriculture. He enumerated all the things he had tried and closed his letter with the question: “What shall I do now?”
      In due course the reply came: “We suggest you learn to love them.”
      – Anthony De Mello, Dandelions

      2020 is almost over, but the damage done this year will be with us for a long time. Damage to our confidence about walking around in public places. Damage to our relationships with people who took the other side in an election. Damage to our faith in humanity itself. Which makes you wonder, what will plaque us when this is over?

      Will we not talk to “certain people” again? Will your neighbor keep their Trump sign up until 2024? Will social change gradually become accepted by the vast majority? Will we ever stand closer than six feet with strangers again? Will those who had COVID suffer from the invasive symptoms of the virus for their lifetimes? Will the planet quickly reject humanity as a virus of its own?

      So many questions developed and honed in the tumultuous forge of 2020. So what shall we do now? What could we possibly love about this year?

      We can get rid of the number on the calendar but we can’t rid ourselves of the lingering resentment for what was taken away from us when the New Year rings in: Loved ones. Friendships. Events. Time.

      We can love the lawn despite the dandelions.

      Personally, I’ve lost a step-father but grown closer to my mother. I’ve found time with friends who were supposed to be on the other side of the world right about now. I’ve missed out on a graduation ceremony and an anniversary trip to Hawaii but gained moments with my children and my wife. I’ve lost time in places far away but immersed myself in necessary home projects and sunk my hands deeper into the garden than before.

      There’s no doubt this year will leave a mark. We’ll all look back on it with complicated emotions. But even soldiers in war would talk of that time fondly for the bonds formed under duress. We’ll learn to love some of 2020, despite it all.