On purifying our vision

On purifying our vision

American missionaries who went to the South Sea Islands with their wives were horrified to see women coming bare breasted to church.
The wives insisted that the women should be more decently dressed.
So the missionaries gave them shirts to wear.
The following Sunday the women came wearing their shirts but with two big holes cut out for comfort' for ventilation.
They were right; the missionaries were wrong.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Every child has a god in him; our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.

Every child has a god in him;

our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.

There’s a lovely Italian film directed by Federico Fellini, 8 ½.
In one scene there’s a Christian Brother going out on a picnic or excursion with a group of eight to ten year old boys.
They’re on a beach, moving right on ahead while the Brother brings up the rear with three or four of them around him.
They come across an older woman, who’s a whore, and they say to her,
“Hi,”
and she says, “Hi.”
And they say, “Who are you?”
And she says, “I’m a prostitute.”
They don’t know what that is but they pretend to.
One of the boys, who seems a bit more knowing than the others, says, “A prostitute is a woman who does certain things if you pay her.”
They ask, “Would she do those things if we paid her?”
“Why not?” the answer came.
So they take up a collection and give her the money, saying, “Would you do certain things now that we’ve given you the money?”
She answers, “Sure, kids, what do you want me to do?”
The only thing that occurs to the kids is for her to take her clothes off.
So she does.
Well, they look at her; they’ve never seen a woman naked before.
They don’t know what else to do, so they say, “Would you dance?”
She says, “Sure.”
So they all gather round singing and clapping; the whore is moving her behind and they’re enjoying themselves immensely.
The Brother sees all this. He runs down the beach and yells at the woman.
He gets her to put her clothes on, and the narrator says:
“At that moment, the children were spoiled; until then they were innocent, beautiful.”

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Words

Words

Awakening should be a surprise. When you don't expect something to happen and it happens, you feel surprise. When Webster's wife caught him kissing the maid, she told him she was very surprised. Now, Webster was a stickler for using words accurately (understandably, since he wrote a dictionary), so he answered her, "No, my dear, I am surprised. You are astonished!"

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

How to solve problems?

How to solve problems?

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, “What do you have on your lap there?”
And the man 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 we generally understand it) transfer the bomb from your lap to under your seat.
They don’t really solve your problems. They exchange your problems for other problems.
Has that ever struck you?
You had a problem, now you exchange it for another one. It’s always going to be that way until we solve the problem called “you.”

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

What is awakening like?

What is awakening like?

There’s a story about Ramirez.
He is old and living up there in his castle on a hill.
He looks out the window (he’s in bed and paralyzed) and he sees his enemy.
Old as he is, leaning on a cane, his enemy is climbing up the hill - slowly, painfully.
It takes him about two and a half hours to get up the hill.
There’s nothing Ramirez can do because the servants have the day off.
So his enemy opens the door, comes straight to the bedroom, puts his hand inside his cloak, and pulls out a gun.
He says, “At last, Ramirez, we’re going to settle scores!”
Ramirez tries his level best to talk him out of it.
He says, “Come on, Borgia, you can’t do that.
You know I’m no longer the man who ill-treated you as that youngster years ago, and you’re no longer that youngster. Come off it!”
“Oh no,” says his enemy, “your sweet words aren’t going to deter me from this divine mission of mine. It’s revenge I want and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
And Ramirez says, “But there is!”
“What?” asks his enemy.
“I can wake up,” says Ramirez. And he did; he woke up!

That’s what enlightenment is like.
When someone tells you, “There is nothing you can do about it,”
you say, “There is, I can wake up!”

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

The tramp: “What is enlightenment like?”

The tramp

“What is enlightenment like?”

“What is enlightenment like? What is awakening like?”
It's like the tramp in London who was settling in for the night.
He'd hardly been able to get a crust of bread to eat.
Then he reaches this embankment on the river Thames.
There was a slight drizzle, so he huddled in his old tattered cloak.
He was about to go to sleep when suddenly a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce pulls up. Out of the car steps a beautiful young lady who says to him,
“My poor man, are you planning on spending the night here on this embankment?”
And the tramp says, “Yes.”
She says, “I won't have it. You're coming to my house and you're going to spend a comfortable night and you're going to get a good dinner.”
She insists on his getting into the car.
Well, they ride out of London and get to a place where she has a sprawling mansion with large grounds. They are ushered in by the butler, to whom she says, “James, please make sure he's put in the servants' quarters and treated well,” which is what James does.
The young lady had undressed and was about to go to bed when she suddenly remembers her guest for the night.
So she slips something on and pads along the corridor to the servants' quarters. She sees a little chink of light from the room where the tramp was put up. She taps lightly at the door, opens it, and finds the man awake.
She says, “What's the trouble, my good man, didn't you get a good meal?”
He said, “Never had a better meal in my life, lady.”
“Are you warm enough?”
He says, “Yes, lovely warm bed.”
Then she says, “Maybe you need a little company. Why don't you move over a bit?”
And she comes closer to him and he moves over and falls right into the Thames.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Stubbornness

Stubbornness

“Henry, how you've changed!
You were so tall and you've grown so short.
You were so well built and you've grown so thin.
You were so fair and you've become so dark.
What happened to you, Henry?”
Henry says, “I'm not Henry. I'm John.”
“Oh, you changed your name too!”

How do you get people like that to listen?

The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don't want to see.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Johnny, the mentally retarded

Johnny, the mentally retarded

There's the story of little Johnny who, they say, was mentally retarded. But evidently he wasn't, as you'll learn from this story. Johnny goes to modelling class in his school for special children and he gets his piece of putty and he's modelling it. He takes a little lump of putty and goes to a corner of the room and he's playing with it. The teacher comes up to him and says, "Hi, Johnny." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the teacher says, "What's that you've got in your hand?" And Johnny says, "This is a lump of cow dung." The teacher asks, "What are you making out of it?" He says, "I'm making a teacher." The teacher thought, "Little Johnny has regressed." So she calls out to the principal, who was passing by the door at that moment, and says, "Johnny has regressed." So the principal goes up to Johnny and says, "Hi, son." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the principal says, "What do you have in your hand?" And he says, "A lump of cow dung." "What are you making out of it?" And he says, "A principal." The principal thinks that this is a case for the school psychologist. "Send for the psychologist!" The psychologist is a clever guy. He goes up and says, "Hi." And Johnny says, "Hi." And the psychologist says, "I know what you've got in your hand." "What?" "A lump cow dung." Johnny says, "Right." "And I know what you're making out of it." "What?" "You're making a psychologist." "Wrong. Not enough cow dung!" And they called him mentally retarded!

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

A banana in your ear

A banana in your ear

Don't try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig!

Like the businessman who goes into a bar, sits down, and sees this fellow with a banana in his ear - a banana in his ear!
And he thinks, “I wonder if I should mention that to him. No, it's none of my business.”
But the thought nags at him. So after having a drink or two, he says to the fellow, “Excuse me, ah, you've got a banana in your ear.”
The fellow says, “What?”
The businessman repeats, “You've got a banana in your ear.”
Again the fellow says, “What was that?”
“You've got a banana in your ear!” the businessman shouts.
“Talk louder,” the fellow says, “I've got a banana in my ear!”

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Being supported

Being supported

There was a woman in a therapy group I was conducting once. She was a religious sister. She said to me, “I don’t feel supported by my superior.” So I said, “What do you mean by that?” And she said, “Well, my superior, the provincial superior, never shows up at the novitiate where I am in charge, never. She never says a word of appreciation.” I said to her, “All right let's do a little role playing. Pretend I know your provincial superior. In fact, pretend I know exactly what she thinks about you. So I say to you (acting the part of the provincial superior), 'You know, Mary, the reason I don't come to that place you're in is because it is the one place in the province that is trouble-free, no problems. I know you're in charge, so all is well.' How do you feel now?” She said, “I feel great.”
Then I said to her, “All right, would you mind leaving the room for a minute or two? This is part of the exercise.” So she did. While she was away, I said to the others in the therapy group, “I am still the provincial superior, O.K.? Mary out there is the worst novice director I have ever had in the whole history of the province. In fact, the reason I don't go to the novitiate is because I can't bear to see what she is up to. It's simply awful. But if I tell her the truth, it's only going to make those novices suffer all the more. We are getting somebody to take her place in a year or two; we are training someone. In the meantime I thought I would say those nice things to her to keep her going. What do you think of that?” They answered, “Well, it was really the only thing you could do under the circumstances.” Then I brought Mary back into the group and asked her if she still felt great. “Oh yes,” she said.

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

The rain

The nature of the rain

"The nature of rain is the same,

but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens."

Arabic Proverb

Whistler’s kids

9

Whistler’s kids

In the early 1850s American painter, James McNeill Whistler, spent a brief-and academically unsuccessful-period at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. The story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge he drew a romantic stone one, complete with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. “Get those children off that bridge!” said the instructor. “This is an engineering exercise.”
Whistler got the kids off the bridge, drew them fishing from the bank of the river and resubmitted the drawing. The angry instructor yelled, “I told you to remove those children. Get them completely out of the picture!”
But the creative urge was too strong .in Whistler. His next version had the children “completely out of the picture” indeed. They were buried under two small tombstones on the river bank.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2
Anthony de Mello

Looking at a famous island

8

Looking at a famous island

The old man had lived most of his life on what was considered to be one of the loveliest islands in the world.
Now that he had returned to spend his retirement years in the big city someone said to him, “It must have been wonderful lo live for so many years on an island that is considered one of the wonders of the world.”
The old man gave that some thought, then said, “Well, to tell you the truth, if I had known it was so famous, I’d have looked at it.”

People don’t need to be taught how to look.
They merely need to be saved from schools that blind them.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2
Anthony de Mello

I’ve forgotten how to stop

7

I’ve forgotten how to stop

Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in the world was once asked: “You could have stopped any time, couldn’t you, because you always had much more than you needed?”
He replied: “Yes, that’s right. But I could not stop, I had forgotten how to.”

Many fear that if they stopped to think and wonder they might not be able to get started again.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2
Anthony de Mello

Profit

Profit

What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon

when we cannot live on the earth?

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Collection rocks on the moon

6

Collection rocks on the moon

One of the few men to walk on the moon tells how he had to suppress his artistic instincts when he got there.

He remembered looking back at Earth and being enraptured by the sight. For a while he stood rooted to the ground, thinking. “My, that’s lovely!”

Then he quickly shook the mood off and said to himself, “Stop wasting your lime and go collect rocks.”

There are two educations:
the one that teaches how to make a living
and the one that teaches how to live.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2
Anthony de Mello

Awareness

Awareness

Last year on Spanish television I heard a story about this gentleman who knocks on his son's door.

“Jaime,” he says, “wake up!” Jaime answers, “I don’t want to get up, papa.”

The father shouts, “Get up, you have to go to school.”

Jaime says, “I don’t want to go to school.”

“Why not?” asks the father.

“Three reasons,” says Jaime.

“First, because it's so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school.”

And the father says, “Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school:

First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the headmaster.”

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Life is...

Someone said:

"Life is something that happens to us

while we're busy making other plans."

John Lennon

The eagle's egg

The eagle's egg

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 neighbour. "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

Anthony de Mello

Chosen to clap and cheer

5

Chosen to clap and cheer

Little Johnny was being tried out for a part in the school play. His mother knew that he had set his heart on it but she feared he would not be chosen. On the day the parts were given out. Johnny, back from school, rushed into his mother’s arms, bursting with pride and excitement. “Mother.” he shouted, “guess what! I’ve been chosen to clap and cheer.”

From a child’s report card: “Samuel participates very nicely in the group singing by helpful listening.”

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2
Anthony de Mello