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AT THE CROSSROAD OF THE RELIGIONS dr. Dumitrana M.
Hyperion University Bucharest, Romania
It was almost natural that the Indian Anthony de Mello to start his exposition proclaiming: People are sleeping. The world is sleeping. Everything we believe that happens in reality, is actually only the product of the sleep.
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.” (Awareness, p.3)
A SLEEPING WORLD. The theme “the life is a dream” is not new. Both the Oriental and Occidental culture have approached it; the Orient-from antiquity, as a philosophy and spiritual way to transcend it; the Occident-much later, as literature and existential intuition. The mystical theology became also interested in the crepuscular- as the place from one come out to the light, not speaking about sleep, but speaking about awakeness. It was almost natural that the Indian Anthony de Mello (1) to start his exposition proclaiming : People are sleeping. The world is sleeping. Everything we believe that happens in reality, is actually , only the product of the sleep. The habitual state of people is the sleep: “ They’ re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they die in their sleep, without ever waking up” . ( 2, p.5) People are not aware of their sleep; they reject the efforts to be awaken and holds desperately on everything looks like happiness. The lives, the intellectual patterns, the ideologies, religions, all are sunk in the ocean of the sleepy conscience, offering solutions within the sleep, discovering conditionings that are presented as criteria for truth, good and salvation. There is nothing to force man to perpetuate his somnambular existence except his own will. The profound cause of the human race sleep has nothing to do with the unhappiness of the falling down from the Paradise but to the fact that men, really do not want to be happy. More precisely, they do not want to live simply, the happiness but define this one only by reporting it to the possession of something. Man is ready to be happy with the condition to have this or that; if he does not get this and that, he refuses to be happy. Once these objects/beings/states are obtained, man plunges into a relationship full of suffering towards them: possession, preservation, loss. This is the defining relation for the dream of the human existence, considered to be the normal-natural way towards success: acquisition and fight for keeping.
Surrounded by this environment, breathing and incorporating it, man has to try to make the first step out: to understand that the sleep has no reality and the main obstacle for wakening is himself: “ 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.” (2, p. 15)
CONTROL AND CONDITIONING. The humankind sleep has not anything left in the wind, anything disorganized. On the contrary, since his birth, today we could say , even since his intrauterine period, man is programmed in the smallest details; the society prepares him to understand, to feel, to develop following certain pre-established canons; these are conditionings which man ends by internalizing them , by honestly considering them as being his own, therefore defending them by any means.
Firstly, there is the affective conditioning; the emotional experiences are programmed since childhood: “ When we were young , we were programmed to unhappiness. They taught us that in order to be happy you need money, success, a beautiful or handsome partner in life, a good job, friendship, spirituality, God-you name it. Unless you get these things, you’re not going to be happy, we were told. Now, that is what I call an attachment. An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.” (2, p. 134). therefore, man begins to attach himself to objects and beings , more than that, to depend on them. He cannot conceive his existence without this object, without that person. They are all, his. His house, his car, his family. He does not accept to lose them, just because there are his. Finally, love means for him, possession. Losing the love means the recognition of the independent existence of the objects, of the beings, that is means his disappointment, his suffering. Therefore, man wants to possess, that is to be dependent, as the condition of happiness. In fact, this is an open declaration of the rejection of the happiness. For soothing the sufferings there are other organized structures, inscribed under the names ‘psychology’ and ‘spirituality’. About psychology, Anthony ae Mello, psychologist and psychotherapist himself, tells the following story: “This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says: “ This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.” The conductor says, “You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.” -Psychology and spirituality [ as means of programming man’s sleep] transfer the bomb from your lap to under your seat. They don’t really solve your problems. They exchange your problems for other problems” (2, pp.41-42) The solutions offered in dream belongs to the dream. There is a need for awakening, not for seeing real solutions but to understand that there is no problem to be solved.
However, the understanding is hindered by a second and most important conditioning-the one of the intellect, programmed to think in already built concepts and to consider these concepts as being categories of truth. But the concept is not the same as reality. They are different, even if initially, every notion is an instrument in the process of perceiving the reality. In the end, the same concept becomes an obstacle in perceiving what is real. More than that, the notions are expressed by words and the combination of the words determines realities which man confounds with the reality. Here there is another De Mello’s story illustrating the slavery of the words: “ A guru was once attempting to explain to a crowd how human being react to words, feed on words, live on words, rather than on reality. One of the men stood up and protested: he said. “I don’t agree that words have all that much effect on us”. The guru said, “ Sit down, you, son of the bitch’, the man went livid with rage and said “You call yourself an enlightened person, a guru, a master, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself’. The guru then said “Pardon me, sir, I was carried away. I really beg your pardon; that was a lapse; I’m sorry.” The man finally calmed down. Then, the guru said “It took just a few words to get a whole tempest going
within you; and it took just a few words to calm down, didn’t it? words, words, words, words, how imprisoning they are if they’re not used properly.”(2, p. 143)
The words are the favorite tools of the ideologies; the more they are, the more useful for programming the confusion between word and reality. The word is the best substitute for everything existing; as for example” when we look at a tree, we really don’t see. We think we do, but we don’t. When we look at a person, we really don’t see that person, we only think we do. What we’re seeing is something that we fixed in our mind. We get an impression and we hold on to that impression and we keep looking at a person through that impression. And we do this with almost everything” (2,p. 103). In this ‘everything’ Anthony de Mello includes even the concept/word ‘God’. God, an absolute mystery, is explained by theologians by words, in the attempt to get close in their knowledge, to something cannot be known. The perception of God is obstructed by the idea about God; therefore, man cannot reach God only because he thinks he knows. In the name of truth , the priest Anthony de Mello takes the risk to speak critically about religion and its view of God in his very peculiar style: “ A Hindu priest once had a dispute with a philosopher who claimed that the final barrier to God was the word ‘God’. The priest was quite shocked by this, but the philosopher said “ The ass that you mount and that you use to travel to a house is not the means by which you enter the house. You use the concept to get there; then you dismount, you go beyond it.” And De Mello concludes: one does not need to be a mystic to understand that reality is something that cannot be captured by words and concepts (2,p. 123). The excessive attention paid to words give birth to a new form of idolatry, far more dangerous than others: the mental idolatry. Men use their mind to create their own God. Living within their own illusion, is understandable how they come to reject God , the true One. Unfortunately, religion works in the same way; it ‘knows’, it decides and guides. Its decisions, rituals and beliefs replace the divine reality in another kind of reverse values .Here it is again a little story on Christian way of idolatry: “ I am reminded of the story of the time they were taking the statue of Our Lady of Fatima on an airplane to a pilgrimage for worship and as they were flying over the South of France the plane began to wobble and to shake and it looked like it was going to come apart. And the miraculous statue cried out: “Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!” And all was well. Wasn’t it wonderful, one “Our Lady” helping another “Our Lady?”(2,p.64)
ESCAPING FROM CONDITIONING. Though sprinkled with humorous stories , Anthony de Mello’s picture of the world is not at all humoristic. As in a huge trap, unaware of their slavery, people live as in a sort of hypnosis; more specific: auto-hypnosis . It happens however, for some, to want to wake up. The first step: the understanding of illusion and admitting the error: I’ve been wrong all my life - supposes a readiness to listen, to comprehend, to challenge the whole belief system. The crucial attitude is the detachment; the main instrument is the self-observation, by which one watches himself, the things around him and the reactions inside him as having no connection between them. The main reason bringing sufferings to people is that they identify themselves with the negative/positive feelings and their sources. Self-observation stops this identification: “If we want to follow the analogy, you would be the sky, observing the clouds” (2,p.36). The understanding through self-observation contributes to the elimination of the useless burden: the collection of one’s past experiences of one’s conditioning and programming. And finally, an essential question starts to function: Who am I? or better: What am I? Reaching this question is good news; the bad news is this is just the beginning of a long process toward what Anthony de Mello calls the death of me :“ To deny the self, to die to it, to lose it, is to understand its true nature. When you do that . it will disappear; it will vanish. [...] To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what
you thought you were. You thought you were at the center; now you experience yourself as satellite. You thought you were the dancer; you know experience yourself as the dance.” (pp. 104; 106). What is denied here is not the real Ego, but the illusion of it; me and mine are vanished at the moment when an awaken man analyzed them with detachment. The denial is identical with renunciation (to renounce illusions) and with gaining the capacity to see ( to see the reality, the truth). Understanding and detachment are the attitudes leading to awakeness and finally, to awareness. But the awareness is not something one obtains in the same way as the other goods (material or mental).One cannot change the state of conditioning by an effort of will; cannot change it through ideal or by building up new habits. If one does this, he will only change his behavior, but he would not change himself. But the change will be produce “ by itself’, following the gain of understanding and awareness. For all these acquisitions, man holds the entire responsibility : “ Not even the greatest guru in the world can take a single step for you. You’ve got to take it yourself... No one else can help you. It is you who have to digest your food, it is you who have to understand. No one else can understand for you. It is you who have to seek. Nobody can seek for you. And if what you seek is truth, then you must do this. You can lean on no one. At a first sight, in De Mello’s opinion, man is alone in his search for truth. But he is alone-though he does not know, in his world of conditionings, he is alone in his sleep, as he is fighting against it. Man is alone, De Mello affirms it explicitly, but is a loneliness free from fear and dependencies. It is a loneliness of freedom and force, from this new position, man, who died for his old life of sleep, is free to live a new reality.
THE CHANGE. “Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore. You refuse to need any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call anyone, your own. The birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through life. If you ever get to this state, you will at last know what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. Every word there is measured. To see at last with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. You will know what it means to love.” (p. 173) Together with the real love appears the real happiness. Man becomes aware of his own existence, autonomous from the emotional point of view and conceptual, too. This means that, finally, one can see the truth : The truth expressed so far in concepts and words, was only a limitation in which the barriers of the relative knowledge gave the illusion of the progress. Now, the truth can be observed at once; he cannot be described or explained. It is. Man has the chance to see it and this can happen by awareness only: “ Awareness, awareness, awareness! In awareness is healing; in awareness is truth; in awareness is salvation; in awareness is spirituality; in awareness is growth; in awareness is love; in awareness is awakening. Awareness.” (2, p. 103)
THE GOAL OF CHANGE - IMITATIO CHRISTI. The change tends to awareness. But this is not the ultimate aim; the state of awareness is man’s main responsibility. Since the moment the change is accomplished ( as a honest deep longing for truth), one can see the reality, can liv the reality, can finally to enter a normal relationship with God. As it was already seen, Anthony de Mello is extremely direct when he describes the relation of the religion with God; the religion(s) contains only a construction of concepts, more valuable that the divine reality that these concepts suppose to represent; in a way, religion is a perpetual killing of the divine: “ There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was very cold, bitterly cold. He taught the people there to make fire. The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put fire-they could cook, could keep themselves warm, etc. They were so grateful that they had learned the art of making fire. But before they could express
their gratitude to the man, he disappeared. He wasn’t concerned with getting their recognition or gratitude; he was concerned about their well-being. He went to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value of his invention. People were interested there too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their priests, who began to notice that this man was drawing crowds and they were losing their popularity.So, they decided to do away with him. They poisoned him, crucified him, put I any way you like. But they were afraid now that the people might turn against them, so they were very wise, even wily. Do you know what they did? They had a portrait of the man made and mounted it on the main altar of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and to pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did for centuries. The veneration and the worship went on, but there was no fire.”(2, pp.174-175)
Reading these words, one can understand why the Vatican felt the need to produce a document on Anthony de Mello’s opinions, detaching the Church teachings from them.(3) But what aims Anthony de Mello and unfortunately, he does not explain enough, is precisely , the reaching the ideal conduct, that Christian Church too, preaches. But the absolute honesty in realizing this behavior can constitute an obstacle in a world of the world. Father De Mello emphasizes on the fact that meditation on Jesus’s comportment and his imitation are useless and are only external forms : “ Meditating on and imitating externally the behavior of Jesus is no help. It’s not a question of imitating Christ, it’s a question of becoming what Jesus was. It’s a question of becoming Christ , becoming aware, understanding what’s going on within you. All the other methods we use for selfchange could be compared to pushing a car.” (2, p. 156)
FEW WORDS OF CLOSING. “God, whatever that is, is there. It’s all there. The poor little fish in the ocean says’ “Excuse me, I’m looking for the ocean. Can you tell me, where I can find it?” Pathetic, isn’t it? If we would just open our eyes and see, then we would understand.” (2, p. 103) The Jesuit Father Anthony de Mello’s writings, but especially, his (short) life, transmit the turmoil of this search for God. The first quality one needs for starting this road is honesty and Anthony de Mello had it, profoundly, even excessively for the external eyes. To cut deeply in his flesh, for removing the ballast of the self-affection in the all its forms ( social success, good marriage, wealth, careful observance of Church rituals, charity, priesthood)- that is to seek awakeness, understanding and awareness- this is the main content of De Mello’s message, the main content of his actions toward himself. Born and bred in India, he is obviously influenced by the giant wisdom of his country. Christian as religion, he breaths Jesus Christ, in a such profound way that is almost impossible for the other people to understand to what degree of self-sacrifice Anthony de Mello strove to answer to Jesus’ call: be like Me! The favorite form of his writings is the short story- as a simple narration, as a parable, as a joke or a humorous tale, having usually, however , several levels of meaning. Most of these stories make people to break into laugh; sometimes, they lead people to understanding. No doubt, for the “good” people , Father Anthony de Mello was like an explosion. This is precisely what he wanted to be. A whirl for pushing, for forcing people to wake up. His writings (his words) , are a typical example of the embodiment of different religions, leading however, if one follows their teachings to the last consequences, -to the same spiritual reality. If India receives his work as a normal thing, true and well known, not the same is the reaction of the religion regulated by rules; this kind of religion ( including the Christianity) , ordering the spiritual experience by words, judges the new religious experiences by the same words. From this point of view, to reject Father Anthony de Mello’s ideas is normal and compulsory.
Still, behind religion, remains the psychological approach. Even the psychologist and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello, himself, warned about the “deception” of comforting, replacing the seek for reality and truth, his stories and themes for the spiritual exercises remain instruments which may help man in his efforts for awakening and becoming alive.
It is said that once , a fire burst in a house, inside of which a man was deeply sleeping. They tried to get him out through the window: no way. They tried then to get him out through the door: they couldn’t. He was too fat and too heavy. They did not know what to do when somebody suggested: “ Wake him up and he will get out by himself. (4,p. 172)
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Anthony the Mello was bom at 4th of September 1931 in Santa Cruz-Bombay, India ,in
a Portuguese Catholic family .He studied philosophy in Spain, theology in Poona, India and psychology in United States. He entered the Jesuit Order in 1947 (the 1st of July) and became a priest in 1961 ( March, 23).His main position , as a director of the Institute of Pastoral Counseling ‘Sadhana’ constituted the best opportunity for his activity of spiritual guidance, in the line of St. Ignatius of Loyola. He died suddenly in New York, in July,2. 1987 and buried in India.
2. Anthony de Mello, S.J., Awareness, edited by J.Francis Stroud, S.J., Fount Paperbacks, Harper Collins Publishers, London: 1990
3. See Notification concerning the writings of Father Anthony de Mello, S.J., adopted in the Ordinary Session of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, June 24,1998
4. Anthony de Mello, S.J., Dieu est la dehors. Tome II. Histoires d’humour et de sagesse.
Editions Bellarmin, Desclee de Brouwer, Montreal-Paris, 1992.
НА ПЕРЕКРЕСТКЕ РЕЛИГИЙ
Думитрана М.
Университет Гиперион Бухарест, Румыния
Представлялось почти естественным, что индиец Энтони де Мелло начинал свою презентацию восклицанием: «Люди спят. Мир спит. Все, во что мы верим как в реальность, является на самом деле только продуктом сна».
