He finally got it!

He finally got it!

There's a story of a disciple who told his guru that he was going to a far place to meditate and hopefully attain enlightenment.
So he sent the guru a note every six months to report the progress he was making.
The first report said, "Now I understand what it means to lose the self."
The guru tore up the note and threw it in the wastepaper basket.
After six months he got another report, which said, "Now I have attained sensitivity to all beings."
He tore it up. Then a third report said, "Now I understand the secret of the one and the many."
It too was torn up. And so it went on for years, until finally no reports came in.
After a time the guru became curious and one day there was a traveler going to that far place.
The guru said, "Why don't you find what happened to that fellow."
Finally, he got a note from his disciple.
It said, "What does it matter?"
And when the guru read that, he said, "He made it!
He made it! He finally got it! He got it!"

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Laughter

Laughter

Philip Roth: In your last book, though, something else is involved. In a little parable you compare the laughter of angels with the laughter of the devil.

The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning. 


Milan Kundera: Yes, man uses the same physiologic manifestations- laughter- to express two different metaphysical attitudes.

Someone's hat drops on a coffin in a freshly dug grave, the funeral loses its meaning and laughter is born.

Two lovers race through the meadow, holding hands, laughing. Their laughter has nothing to do with jokes or humor, it is the serious laughter of angels expressing their joy of being.

Both kinds of laughter belong among life's pleasures, but when it also denotes a dual apocalypse:

the enthusiastic laughter of angel-fanatics, who are so convinced of their world's significance that they are ready to hang anyone not sharing their joy.

And the other laughter, sounding from the opposite side, which proclaims that everything has become meaningless, that even funerals are ridiculous and group sex a mere comical pantomime.

Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

The Most Original Book of the Season

Philip Roth interviews Milan Kundera (30/11/1980)

Belief

Belief

Protean, my heart henceforth assumes all forms: at once

Meadow of gazelles and cloister of the Christians monk

Temple of idols and the pilgrim's Kaaba

The Thora's tablets tantamount

To the Holy Koran's leaves

Religion of love, my allegiance

Wherever its caravans may lead

Just as love is my final faith

Ibn Arabi

Ibn 'Arabī (Arabic: ابن عربي‎) (July 28, 1165 – November 10, 1240) was an Andalusian [Moorish]] Sufi
mystic and philosopher. His full name was Abū 'Abdullāh Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-`Arabī ('أبو عبد الله محمد بن علي بن محمد بن عربي ).

Born in the Spanish township of Murcia on 17th of Ramaḍān 561 AH (27th or 28 July 1165 AD) with respectable family roots, this unique MOORISH mystic, Muḥammad ibn 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-'Arabī is universally known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (The Greatest Master OT DOCTORUS MAXIMUS in medieval europe). According to some other sources, his birthday was cited as 27th of Ramadan 560 (AH) or in other words August 7, 1165.

People identity

People identity

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.

De Profundis

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer, poet, and prominent aesthete; who, after writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the tragedy of his imprisonment and early death.

The Dream Contract

68

THE DREAM CONTRACT

Nasruddin was fast asleep at nine in the morning.

The sun was in the sky, the birds were singing in the trees and his breakfast was getting cold.

So his wife decided to wake him.

He woke up in a rage.

"Why did you wake me up just now?" he yelled.

"The sun has risen in the sky," said she,

"the birds are singing in the trees and your breakfast is getting cold."

"Breakfast be damned," he said,

"I was about to sign a contract worth a million grammes of gold!"

With that he closed his eyes to recapture his shattered dream and those million grammes of gold.

Now Nasruddin was cheating in that contract and his business partner was a tyrant.

If, on recapturing the dream, he stops his cheating, he will become a saint.

If he struggles to free the people from the oppression of the tyrant he will be a freedom fighter.

If, in the middle of it all,

he suddenly realizes he is dreaming,

he will become Awakened. Enlightened.

What kind of saint or freedom fighter are you if you are still asleep?

THE SONG OF THE BIRD

Anthony de Mello

Ignorance

Speaking to ignorant people

Once Nasreddin was invited to deliver a sermon.

When he got on the pulpit, he asked,

"Do you know what I am going to say?"

The audience replied "no",

so he announced,

"I have no desire to speak to people who don't even know what I will be talking about!"

And left.

The people felt embarrassed and called him back again the next day.

This time, when he asked the same question, the people replied "yes".

So Nasreddin said, "Well, since you already know what I am going to say, I won't waste any more of your time!" and left.

Now the people were really perplexed.

They decided to try one more time and once again invited the Mullah to speak the following week.

Once again he asked the same question –

"Do you know what I am going to say?"

Now the people were prepared and so half of them answered "yes" while the other half replied "no".

So Nasreddin said "Let the half who know what I am going to say, tell it to the half who don't," and left.



Climate

Weather

This is lovely climate.

I don't order the weather; it just happened.



Traveller; "What kind of weather are we going to have today?"

Shepherd: "The kind of weather I like."

"How do you know it will be the kind of weather you like?"

"Having found out, sir, that I cannot always get what I like, I have learnt always to like what I get.

So I am quite sure we will have the kind of weather I like."



Happiness and unhappiness are in the way we meet events, not in the nature of those events themselves.

PRAYER OF THE FROG PART 2

Anthony de Mello

To you and for you!

To you and for you!

If only you were aware… o moon

You, who are you…?

You…

You… are all humans!

Education

Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire

W.B.Yeats

(13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of [the] radical nationalist, classical liberal, reactionary
conservative and millenarian
nihilist".

Between friendship and solitude

Between solitude and friendship

It will never be my view that solitude is disturbed by the presence of a friend,

but that it is enriched.

If I had the choice of doing without one or the other,

I should prefer to be deprived of solitude rather than of my friend.

On the solitary life

Petrarch

Francesco Petrarca
(July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374)

Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism". In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch's works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio and, especially, Dante Alighieri. This would be later endorsed by the Accademia della Crusca. His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to refer to the Dark Ages.

Bring Me the Flute and Sing!

Bring me the flute and sing

Bring me the flute and sing

for song is the secret of eternity...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of existence...

Have you taken the forest

rather than the palace

to be your home?

Have you climbed up the creeks and the rocks?

Have you bathed in perfume

and then dried yourself with sunlight?

Have you tasted the wine of the early morning

from goblets of ether?

Bring me the flute and sing

that is the secret of eternity...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of life...

Have you sat alone at dusk among the grapevines...

Among their clusters hanging like chandeliers of gold...?

Have you made the grass your night-time bed?

Have you wrapped yourself in the evening air

with the sky for a blanket?

So that you can allow the future to come

and let go of the past?

Bring me the flute and sing

so our hearts may be in balance...

And the wailing of the flute remains

even after the end of all sins...

Bring me the flute and sing

forget maladies and their cures…

For people are but lines of poetry

written, but with water.

Kahlil Gibran

(1883-1931)

Khalil Gibran (born Gubran Khalil Gubran bin Mikhā'īl bin Sa'ad; Arabic

جبران خليل

جبران بن ميخائيل بن سعد, January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) also known as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese American

artist, poet, and writer. Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman Mount Lebanon mutasarrifate), as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career. He is chiefly known for his 1923 book The Prophet, a series of philosophical essays written in English prose. An early example of Inspirational fiction, the book sold well despite a cool critical reception, and became extremely popular in the 1960s counterculture. Gibran is considered to be the third most widely read poet in history, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

Who earns more?

19

Who earns more?

Did you hear about the lawyer who was presented with a plumber's bill?

He said to the plumber, "Hey, you're charging me two hundred dollars an hour.

I don't make that kind of money as a lawyer."

The plumber said, "I didn't make that kind of money when I was a lawyer either!"

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Self-Satisfaction

7

Self-Satisfaction

If I had a dollar for every time I did things that gave me a bad feeling,
I'd be a millionaire by now.


You know how it goes.
"Could I meet you tonight, Father?"
"Yes, come on in!"
I don't want to meet him and I hate meeting him.
I want to watch that TV show tonight, but how do I say no to him?
I don't have the guts to say no.
"Come on in," and I'm thinking,
"Oh God, I've got to put up with this pain."
It doesn't give me a good feeling to meet with him and it doesn't give me a good feeling to say no to him, so I choose the lesser of the two evils and I say, "O.K., come on in."
I'm going to be happy when this thing is over and I'll be able to take my smile off,
but I start the session with him: "How are you?"
"Wonderful," he says, and he goes on and on about how he loves that workshop,
and I'm thinking, "Oh God, when is he going to come to the point?"
Finally he comes to the point, and I metaphorically slam him against the wall and say, "Well, any fool could solve that kind of problem," and I send him out.
"Whew! Got rid of him," I say.
And the next morning at breakfast (because I'm feeling I was so rude)
I go up to him and say, "How's life?"
And he answers, "Pretty good."
And he adds, "You know, what you said to me last night was a real help.
Can I meet you today, after lunch?" Oh God!

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

On Fear and Love

Fearlessness

"What is love?"

"The total absence of fear," said the Master.

"What is it we fear?"

"Love," said the Master.

ONE MINUTE WISDOM

Anthony de Mello

Happiness

Happiness

A woman once told me that when she was a child her Jesuit cousin gave a retreat in the Jesuit church in Milwaukee.

He opened each conference with the words:

"The test of love is sacrifice, and the gauge of love is unselfishness."

That's marvelous!

I asked her, "Would you want me to love you at the cost of my happiness?"

"Yes," she answered.

Isn't that delightful? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

SHE would love me at the cost of HER happiness

and I would love her at the cost of MY happiness,

and so you've got two unhappy people,

but LONG LIVE LOVE!

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

One Minute Wisdom

One Minute Wisdom 

"Is there such a thing as One Minute Wisdom?"
"There certainly is," said the Master.
"But surely one minute is too brief?"
"It is fifty-nine seconds too long."


To his puzzled disciples the Master later said,
"How much time does it take to catch
sight of the moon?"
"Then why all these years of spiritual endeavor?"
"Opening one's eyes may take a lifetime.
Seeing is done in a flash."

ONE MINUTE WISDOM

Anthony de Mello

Simplicity

Simplicity

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Nothing is better than simplicity—nothing can make up for excess, or for the lack of definiteness.

Leaves of Grass (Preface)

Walt Whitman

Be my friend!

Be my friend!

How beautiful it would be if we remained friends!
Every woman needs a friend's hand
Needs to hear good words
Be my friend!
I need sometimes to walk with you in a park
To read together poems
I - as a woman - I am happy to hear you
Be my friend!
My hobbies are little
My interests are small
And all my ambition lies:
to walk for hours with you under the rain
When the melody makes me cry
And I'm in sorrow
So why are you interested only in my appearance
And don't look to my brain?
I am very much in need of a harbour of peace...
I am bored of love stories and news
Talk!
Why do you forget half of the words when you meet me?
Be my friend!
There is no diminution of masculinity
However, the men don't accept but the main role!

Suad al-Sabah

Poet, economist, publisher, activist in social change affecting women and children.

Suad Muhammad al-Sabah (also spelled Souad alSabah or Suʿad al-Sabah) was born in 1942 in Kuwait as a member of the ruling family. She graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University in 1973. She obtained a doctorate in economics from Sari Guilford University in the United Kingdom in 1981. She later returned to Kuwait and established the Suad alSabah Publishing and Distribution House. She has published several books of poetry and established a literary prize that carries her name. She also has written hundreds of economic and political essays as well as popular articles in several Arabic local and international newspapers and magazines. Her poetry has been translated into many languages, including English.
Al-Sabah is the director of Kuwait Stock Exchange and a member of the Higher Council for Education, the executive committee of the World Muslim Women Organization for South East Asia, and the board of trustees and the executive committee of the Arab Intellect Forum. She is also a founding member of the Arab Cultural Establishment, the executive committee of the Arab Human Rights Organization, and the Arab Council for Childhood and Development. Her poetry has captured the attention of popular artists as well as university researchers in many countries. Her literary publications include Wamdatt Bakira (Early blinks) and Lahathat min Umri (Moments of my life, 1961). Her scientific works in English include Development Planning in an Oil Economy and the Role of the Woman (1983) and Kuwait: Anatomy of a Crisis Economy (1984).

Concurrence

Competition

That award was a result of competition, which can be cruel if it is built on hatred of oneself and of others.
People get a good feeling on the basis of somebody getting a bad feeling; you win over somebody else.


Isn't that terrible? Taken for granted in a lunatic asylum!

There's an American doctor who wrote about the effect of competition on his life.
He went to medical school in Switzerland and there was a fairly large contingent of Americans at that school.
He said some of the students went into shock when they realized that there were no grades, there were no awards, there was no dean's list, no first or second in the class at the school.
You either passed or you didn't.
He said, "Some of us just couldn't take it. We became almost paranoid. We thought there must be some kind of trick here."
So some of them went to another school.
Those who survived suddenly discovered a strange thing they had never noticed at American universities: students, brilliant ones, helping others to pass, sharing notes.
His son goes to medical school in the United States and he tells him that, in the lab, people often tamper with the microscope so that it'll take the next student three or four minutes to readjust it.

They have to succeed, they have to be perfect.
And he tells a lovely little story which he says is factual, but it could also serve as a beautiful parable.

There was a little town in America where people gathered in the evening to make music.
They had a saxophonist, a drummer, and a violinist, mostly old people.
They got together for the company and for the sheer joy of making music, though they didn't do it very well.
So they were enjoying themselves, having a great time, until one day they decided to get a new conductor who had a lot of ambition and drive.
The new conductor told them, "Hey, folks, we have to have a concert, we have to prepare a concert for the town."
Then he gradually got rid of some people who didn't play too well, hired a few professional musicians, got an orchestra into shape, and they all got their names in the newspapers.
Wasn't that wonderful?
So they decided to move to the big city and play there:
But some of the old people had tears in their eyes.
They said, "It was so wonderful in the old days when we did things badly and enjoyed them."
So cruelty came into their lives, but nobody recognized it as cruelty.

See how lunatic people have become!

Awareness

Anthony de Mello

Eschatology

Eschatology

Of the great Zen Master Rinzai
it was said that each night the last thing he did before he went to bed was let out a great big belly laugh that resounded through the corridors and was heard in every building of the monastery grounds.
And the first thing he did when he woke at dawn was burst into peals of laughter so loud they woke up every monk no matter how deep his slumber.
His disciples asked him repeatedly to tell them why he laughed but he wouldn't.
And when he died he carried the secret of his laughter with him to the grave.


The Master was in an expansive mood so his disciples sought to learn from him the stages he had passed through in his quest for the divine.
"God first led me by the hand," he said, "into the Land of Action and there I dwelt for several years.
Then He returned and led me to the Land of Sorrows; there I lived until my heart was purged of every inordinate attachment.
That is when I found myself in the Land of Love whose burning flames consumed whatever was left in me of self.
This brought me to the Land of Silence where the mysteries of life and death were bared before my wondering eyes."
"Was that the final stage of your quest?" they asked.
"No." The Master said,
"One day God said.
Today I shall take you to the innermost sanctuary of the Temple, to the heart of God himself.'
And I was led to the Land of Laughter."

THE PRAYER OF THE FROG 1

Anthony de Mello