“If you would die to the past, if you would die to every
minute, you would be the person who is fully alive,
because a fully alive person is one who is full of death.”
Anthony de Mello
Jesuit priest and author Father Anthony de Mello’s teachings were temporarily banned within the Roman Catholic Church. The ban has been lifted, but Catholics are still advised to avoid his writings. Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness.
Wisdom comes to those who learn nothing, unlearn everything.
Monk: “All these mountains and rivers and the earth and stars, where do they come from?”
Master: “Where does your question come from?”
If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone.
Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: you’re suffering. Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise, there is no suffering.
When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mind is unobstructed, the result is truth.
The day you follow someone, you cease to follow truth.
There comes a point in your life when you become stark raving insane, commit suicide, or become a mystic.
Nobody is afraid of the unknown, what you really fear is the loss of the known.
The only way that someone can be of help to you is by challenging your ideas.
Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one’s awareness of one’s ignorance.
When you fig
ht something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you’re giving it power.
Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear.
Problems only exist in the human mind.
The only way to change is by changing your understanding.
Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts – generally somebody else’s – mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.
Seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.
What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.
All conflict comes from attachment.
There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.
You are only a disciple because your eyes are closed. The day you open them you will see there is nothing you can learn from me or anyone.
When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.
You can never be free as long as you have an ego to defend.
Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become; flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover, not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.
If you search within your heart, you will find something there that will make it possible for you to understand: a spark of disenchantment and discontent, which if fanned into flame will become a raging forest fire that will burn up the whole of the illusory world you are living in, thereby unveiling to your wondering eyes the kingdom that you have always lived in unsuspectingly.
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