Changing faces with a smile - Talita

Well shipmates, I hope you are all well. Many things have I read and seen and experienced that almost made me come out of blog retirement and perhaps I shall get around to sharing them too. But this is the one that did it.
You are in for a treat. What you are going to see is nothing less than the beauty of the world.

Finally, brothers, whatever things are true, whatever things are honest, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Philippians 4:8

For more info about 'Operation Smile' or if you would like to make a donation click here.

Laugh with Moymoypalaboy – If you wanna be my lover

These guys look like they are having a ball, as well as making us roll on the floor. (There’s a mixed metaphor in there somewhere).

Lots more here at Carambabr’s Channel

Laughter, the best medicine - Marima by Moymoypalaboy

These guys are great. If they don’t make you laugh, you are in big trouble.

Lots more here at Carambabr’s Channel

How to be alone

Well shipmates, you are in for a little treat. You know the music vid, now know the poem vid. A beautiful, refreshing little video called ‘How to be Alone’ by Tanya Davis. My blog has a contractual obligation to post anything called ‘How to be Alone’.

I will not spoil the surprise for you by making any other comments, but you can trust me, its great.

Yiddish proverbs - love

Love is blind; jealousy sees too much.

Love tastes sweet, but only with bread.

A heart is a lock: you need the right key for it.

Love enters a man through his eyes, a woman through her ears.

For a little love, you pay all your life.

Thieves and those in love both love darkness.

When the heart is full, the eyes overflow.

The eyes are the mirror of the soul.
You can't force anyone to love you or lend you money.

A maiden is like velvet - come on, fondle her!
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'Thought moments' by Michael Simon Toon

I came across the following video a few months ago. An interviewer asks people in the street some simple questions about life, and some perhaps more difficult. The interviewees are suddenly called upon to reflect on whom they love most for example, something they may not have done before. We then observe them as they think and we can almost hear the wheels turning in their heads. It is a strangely moving experience for us too, as we watch them discover and share with us their life beliefs in a matter of seconds.

Watching this video, I understand that we are all bound together more by our similarities than we are separated by our differences. People are the same wherever you go. We all want to be happy, we all want to love and be loved. Only the details change. It is heartening to see what similar, common loves and hopes and virtues are to be found in everyone around us, people like you and me, passing by in the street.

Saying goodbye to mother

Once when I was 2 or 3 years old, my mother pretended to be unconscious or dead. Of course I called out and fretted and shook her and just before I got too upset she of course ‘woke up’ and hugged me. She told me if it ever happens again I must go and get the neighbours. She would have been 23 or 24, a young mother playing games with her son.

My mother died last week, aged 73, far from me in England, surrounded by her other ‘children’ (all of them grandparents). I live in Montreal Canada and I saw her last in September. It was the first time we really spoke for several years following an estrangement. She had been ill for a long time, so we knew this was probably the last time we would see each other. There was no drama about it really. We spoke as if there would be more times, knowing there would not. We kissed goodbye like I was going to school, only further. Or perhaps like she was going to school, only further.

I know she loved me and was proud of me. She was always proud of me. I brought her a lot of joy I know. But whereby we get our joy we also get our pain and I fear I brought her much sadness too, in the later years. I feel that more than ever today. I wish I had not. I love you mam.

Top image: Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount-Royal

Mother

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. Rajneesh

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children. William Makepeace Thackeray

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers. Jewish proverb

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy. Spanish proverb

The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom. Henry Ward Beecher

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. Pearl S. Buck

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men - from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. Oliver Wendell Holmes

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness. Honoré de Balzac

A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy, the smile that accepts a lover before words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first born babe, and assures it of a mother's love. Thomas C. Haliburton

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime. Shakespeare/De Vere

The best conversations with mothers always take place in silence, when only the heart speaks. Carrie Latet

He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers. Harry Emerson Fosdick

Men are what their mothers made them. Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it. W. D. Howells

Courage, remembered

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

'For The Fallen', by Laurence Binyon

Image by daliscar

Duffy's 'Stepping Stone'

I recently heard snatches of a hauntingly beautiful song. It reminded me of Rose Royce’s ‘Wishing on a star’ from the seventies, a song that has powerful nostalgia for me. I found out it was Duffy’s ‘Stepping Stone’. I pulled up the video and the lyrics and saw and heard Duffy for the first time. What a voice, what a song, what lyrics! Many talents all come together in this performance to create a once in a lifetime moment. I defy you to experience this song and not be moved.

Gentlemen, gentleness and greatness

I received an interesting comment today on my post On being a gentleman which I thought it would be a good idea to share with you:

I read all your posts on this subject, and it's a topic I have a deep interest in, as I was always taught that this was something to aspire to.
A few of the quotes you have mention the behaviour of great men. But while some great men were gentlemen, I would argue that few gentlemen were great men. Gentleness and great accomplishment rarely go hand in hand.
Along the same vein, a certain moral righteousness is associated with the term of gentleman. But I've come to meet many men, especially in my time in the military who are "good" men, living by their own Spartan code, but could not be called "gentlemen" in the most liberal interpretation of the term.
I associate the term now mostly as a white-collar social affectation. It may be a sign of "good breeding", but not the standard by which I judge myself or others. Personally I've always admired Kipling's view on manhood as expressed in "If". But that's just my 2 cents. Dave Oaks

Well, Dave, good comment, and you are absolutely right to have a deep interest in this subject because it is in my opinion the most important subject you could possibly think about and what you decide about it will have important consequences for you and all those around you.

Up until a few years ago, I thought I knew what a gentleman was. I also had associated the term as an upper-class social title referring to someone from the right family, well-educated, cultivated and acquainted with all rules of etiquette and letter-writing etc. Added to this, I vaguely saw my gentleman as a moral animal, who knew right from wrong and had the courage to defend his moral principles. That was about it.
I think this pretty well sums up most people’s idea of a gentleman and it is this limited definition that most people wish to refer to when they use the term. It is the limited definition that comes down to us from the Victorian era, when the term was most in use.
Then I read A Gentleman’s Code, a compilation of quotes from the East (and some from the West) edited by Philip Chew Kheng, and I saw that my previous definition of a gentleman was too narrow and above all, too culturally narrow. I say gentleman, you say wise man, he says holy man and they say good man. All cultures know the ‘gentleman’, they just don’t name him the same way. And they are not talking about a chap with a bowler hat and an umbrella. All cultures look up to the ‘gentleman’, as an ideal, as an example and even as a moral obligation.
Now, Dave says ‘Few gentlemen were great men’. I would disagree and say, within a wider definition of the gentleman, all great men were gentlemen. Of course, what do you mean by great? Noteworthy? Admirable? I would say that all gentlemen are by definition great men even if the world does not know about them. And I would say that men who were not gentlemen are by definition not great men even if everyone knows them.
‘Gentleness and great accomplishment rarely go hand in hand’. I would absolutely disagree. You need to read the Tao Te Ching. The example that immediately comes to mind is the gentleness of Ghandi in the peaceful overthrow of the British Empire in India. Then again, what do we mean by gentleness? We don’t mean spinelessness, but gentleness as in love and respect. And you can’t achieve anything without that. Not anything worthwhile. Nothing good or worthwhile was ever acheived without gentleness, in this wider sense.

The quote that really made the penny drop for me about what it means to be a gentleman is this one by Oscar Wilde:

If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

Being a gentleman is not about knowing things, manners, etiquette. Nor has it anything to do with breeding. It is a moral attitude, a philosophy of life that can be practiced by people from any country and any social stratum. It is a being, not a knowing.

What do you think? I would welcome a discussion here. Anyone agree or disagree passionately?

Update 7 October 2010:

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous. Benjamin Franklin

To understand all is to forgive all

When you lose in love, things are very confusing. The joke about being the last to know is based on truth. We see what we want to see, we ignore the rest. We project our feelings of love onto our beloved and we believe that they are experiencing the same thing. Of course they are not. We don’t see the end coming. And when it hits us we are not ready. When it hit me I had to understand.
I pulled out my agenda and reconstructed the play: Act 1, Act 2 and the devastating Act 3. I had to understand what happened and how it happened. In hindsight I revisited the conversations, the scenes and the places and I had to admit to myself that the signs were there, I just refused to see them. Eventually, I understood pretty much what happened and this allowed me to gain a modicum of peace of mind.
Anger remained and remains still a little, if I give it any thought, in my heart if not in my head. Strange how love can turn to anger. Over time, with the help of the philosophy of Anthony de Mello and others, I understood more. Until one day I read this quote from Spinoza.

To understand all is to forgive all.

This was a powerful insight for me. I saw that the only reason I still harboured anger and hatred was because of my incomplete understanding. I saw that even if I did not have the power to understand all yet, still forgiveness would be correct. I should not deprive myself of peace of mind and the liberation of forgiveness because of my incomplete understanding.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

Because when you understand you can accept, and you can forgive. Marcus Aurelius helped me further along this path of understanding:

Whatever man thou meetest with, immediately say to thyself:
What opinions has this man about good and bad? For if with respect to pleasure and pain and the causes of each, and with respect to fame and ignominy, death and life he has such and such opinions, it will seem nothing wonderful or strange to me, if he does such and such things; and I shall bear in mind that he is compelled to do so.

That I would lose my love was plain for others to see. I blinded myself to the possibilities. If I had been able to keep my wits about me as Marcus Aurelius suggests, I would have understood the situation as it was happening. As it was, I had to understand in hindsight, whilst sorting through my negative emotions.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. Anthony de Mello

My love was compelled to act in the way she did. I was compelled to act in the way I did. That’s life.

To understand is to transform what is. Krishnamurti

Love - the Prologue of 'The Alchemist'

In my first post about love, Love (lost), I shared with you the insight that the love we feel for someone, the beauty we see in them, is our own creation: it is all in our head. It is a bit like the famous zen koan: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? If a woman enters the room and nobody gives her a second glance, is she beautiful? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Besides finding our love beautiful, we are linked to our love by the way our love makes us feel about ourselves. We see in our love qualities that we admire, qualities that thrill us, qualities that we possess also perhaps, but to a lesser degree; or that we would like to possess. Our love has a way of making us feel that we too possess these qualities. Being with our love is, in a way, the next best thing we can do to actually being our love. (See this post for a technique about imagining being our love). So being in love has a component of ‘reflected glory’ in it, which makes us feel good about ourselves.
‘Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror’ said Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps this quote was the inspiration for Paulo Coelho’s prologue to ‘The Alchemist’.

The Alchemist picked up a book that someone in the caravan had brought. Leafing through the pages, he found a story about Narcissus. The Alchemist knew the legend of Narcissus, a youth who daily knelt beside a lake to contemplate his own beauty. He was so fascinated by himself that, one morning, he fell into the lake and drowned. At the spot where he fell, a flower was born, which was called the narcissus.
But this was not how the author of the book ended the story. He said that when Narcissus died, the Goddesses of the Forest appeared and found the lake, which had been fresh water, transformed into a lake of salty tears.
"Why do you weep?" the Goddesses asked.
"I weep for Narcissus," the lake replied.
"Ah, it is no surprise that you weep for Narcissus," they said, "for though we always pursued him in the forest, you alone could contemplate his beauty close at hand."
"But..... was Narcissus beautiful?" the lake asked.
"Who better than you to know that?" the Goddesses said in wonder, "After all, it was by your banks that he knelt each day to contemplate himself!"
The lake was silent for some time. Finally it said:
"I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected."
"What a lovely story," the Alchemist thought.

Love and the Tao

Ask yourself this: do you want to be loved for who you are or because of all the efforts you made to win your love? Sooner or later, your love will find out who you really are, and then what?
If you have to try hard all the time to fascinate and beguile, you are playing a losing hand. You can’t fascinate and beguile forever. When you run out of ideas, then what?
A woman who is not in love will not be happy with a bed of silk sheets and rose petals. A woman who is in love will happily sleep on a board to be with her man.

To keep full what will overflow, better not to try. A blade too sharp cannot keep its edge. A room full of gold and precious stones cannot be guarded. Tao Te King (9)

He who walks on tiptoe cannot stay upright very long. Tao Te King (24)

He who knows how to guard well closes without a lock, and no one can open; he who knows how to tie up well uses no ties, and no one can untie. Tao Te King (27)

Be your authentic self. Sincere, natural, and real. Then if love comes along, it really is meant for you.

Love, no risk free trial

If you have been following my posts on love, you will know that love and non-desire are not contradictions in terms. Love, as opposed to attachment, is a free, independent choice or it is nothing. Don’t take my word for it. You will find this theme in all philosophies and all religions.

In Taoism for example:

There is no greater mistake than wishing to satisfy one’s desires;
there is no greater unhappiness than not being self-sufficient.
There is no greater calamity than the desire to possess.
Tao Te Ching 46 (my translation from Tao Te King)

In Zen:

One major obstacle in living a life of love is the tendency to hold on. We grasp and cling to each other, preventing the freedom of love from rising on its own. Zen asks us to let go.
When someone comes into your life, let him come. Welcome the person, whoever he is. Enjoy what it is he brings, even if it's only for a short time.
When it is time for a person to go away, let him go. Do not turn the person's leaving into an experience of rejection, loss or abandonment. Realize that his leaving has nothing to do with you. It is simply time for him to go.
Do this with yourself as well. Let yourself come and go freely in life, and don't get caught in unnecessary chains. The more you free yourself and others, the more easily you fall in love.
From an article by Brenda Shoshana, author of Zen and the Art of Falling in Love

In the Bhagavad Gita:

The liberated man receives what the Divine Will brings him, he does not long for anything, is jealous of no one: what comes to him, he accepts without repulsion nor attachment; what goes away, he lets go, to rejoin the whirlpool of existence, without regret, nor affliction, nor feeling of loss.
Sri Aurobindo, The Bhagavad Gita and its message (my translation from Tao Te King)

In the Christian tradition:

Nothing renders man more like God than this implacable detachment. For what makes God God is his implacable detachment: from this springs forth his purity, his simplicity and his immutability… This resemblance must be achieved by the grace that elevates man above the temporal and purifies him of everything that is impermanent.
Master Eckhart (my translation from Tao Te King)

Love from a position of detachment allows us to enjoy and appreciate what comes into our life and saves us from the pain and feeling of loss for what goes out of our life. Not only that, but good things and people are more likely to come into our life if they are free to come and go as they please. And, once here, they will likely stick around longer.

The Samurai of Love

By the Way of the warrior is meant death. The Way of the warrior is death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. It means nothing more than this. It means to see things through, being resolved. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

There comes a time in a budding love relationship when our partner will test us. A careless remark. A certain lack of response. Or something more blatant. I’m not even sure if they do it consciously or not. But what it boils down to is seeing what you will put up with. If you go along then it will eventually get worse as they realise you are hopelessly in love and they can pretty much get away with anything and you will still be around. From there it is not far to their losing interest in you and finally they leave you.
Of course I am talking about my own experience but perhaps you can relate to it.
So there comes a time when you have to be able to stand the test by standing your ground, walking away, saying no or whatever it is that your love does not think you will have the guts to do. You have to be able to ‘kill your love’ or ‘die the death of love’ like a samurai.
We have seen in my posts on love that ‘you can’t love someone you can’t live without’. That is merely attachment, infatuation. Real love can only come from a position of strength and independence. You have to be able to choose to love. This means you have to be able to walk away.
Ironically, it is your ability to walk away which gives you the better chance to win your love.

Those who cling to life, die; those who defy death, live. Uyesugi Kenshin

You have surely been in the situation where someone is in love with you and trying too hard. Or at least you have known people who try too hard to be loved, to be liked, to impress. And it always backfires on them. Trying too hard is unattractive. Clinging is unattractive. We just want to run away.
So when our love turns cooler on us, the answer is not to cling more but to cling less, and, like a samurai of love, prepare our soul to face ‘death’. And defying the death of love, perhaps we may see it live.

Photo from Wikimedia: Yamana Tokoyuni

Sit on top of the world

Touch my skin and tell me what you’re thinking,
take my hand and show me where we’re going.
Lie down next to me, look into my eyes
and tell me, oh tell me what you’re seeing.
So sit on top of the world and tell me how you’re feeling,
what you feel is what I feel for you.
Take my hand and if I’m lying to you,
I’ll always be alone if I’m lying to you.

These words are the lyrics of a song that for me most completely embodies the feeling of a person in love (who is uncertain of the feelings of the beloved). They come from the song ‘Take my hand’ from Dido’s album ‘No Angel’. I will not try to comment on the beautiful musical score or the flawless voice and execution of Dido. But the words… listen to the words.
Here you have the attention, the complete attention of the person in love. The need for information, the need to know the heart of the beloved. Here you have sincerity and the grace and poetry born of sincerity. Sit on top of the world, she says – that’s how I feel about you. If only she could make you understand how she feels. She is not exaggerating - here you have the solemn invocation and vow of truth – she’ll always be alone if she’s lying to you. Later she adds ‘Take your time’. Love is patient. Take your time. Have you ever said that to someone?

From what we have seen about love thus far, we know this person is ‘in deep’. She has a beautiful love, in her head. Perhaps it will be alright. Sometimes love is reciprocated and the magic happens. We hope it works. We believe in the singer’s hope and earnestness. Sometimes we need to believe.
(If it doesn’t work, we hope a friend tells her about Anthony de Mello, and Healing Philosophy).

The Way to Love (3) – The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part three)

You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate. Because when you look at life it is these attachments and fears that will decide what you will notice and what you block out.

When we are in love we are seeing the beloved not as they are but as we are. We are projecting our own qualities into this person. Rabindranath Tagore said it so well:

Beauty is truth’s smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

We are seeing an idealized projection of our own self, magnified to a perceived perfection in this person. They are a beautiful creation, a work of art, in our head. This reminds me of a technique for helping one get over a lost love (I forget the source) that consists in meditating and imagining oneself to be the person one loves. The power of the technique resides in showing us through the meditation that we have the same qualities as the person we love, because we see them, we feel them, we know them. Thus we need not miss the person, for we ‘contain’ all the qualities that we loved.
Getting back to de Mello, we see through attachment-coloured glasses. Love is not blind, it is attachment that is blind. Love sees clearly because love encompasses everyone and everything, whereas attachment encompasses very little: it excludes everyone and everything except the object of its attachment.

You were in love and you felt rejected or jealous; suddenly all your mind and heart became focused on this one thing, and the banquet of life turned to ashes in your mouth.

I remember when I was going through my ‘attachment’ how it killed my enjoyment of everything else. I could hardly concentrate on the karate instructor, I could hardly read three paragraphs of a book, I could hardly enjoy the presence of my children. This is not love: it is slavery.

How can you love someone whom you are a slave to? How can you love someone whom you cannot live without? …Love is to be found only in fearlessness and freedom.

De Mello shows us the path out of slavery: awareness of the folly of our dependence, our addiction to this person or to anyone. The path to freedom comes from cultivating activities that we love, activities that we engage in without regard to society or the opinions of other people, activities that are our true passion.

The royal road to mysticism and to Reality does not pass through the world of people. It passes through the world of actions that are engaged in for themselves without an eye to success or to gain – or profit actions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the cure for lovelessness and loneliness is not company but contact with Reality. The moment you touch this Reality you will know what freedom and love are. Freedom from people – and so the ability to love them.

The Way to Love (2) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello (part two)

In my post Love (lost) I told you that the love I knew was all in my head. It must be so otherwise everyone my love meets would fall in love with her. In fact, my friends would have varying reactions to her from ‘She’s bad news’ to ‘I don’t know what you see in her’ to ‘She’s kinda cute’. When things were going ‘well’ and I was sitting on top of the world, it was all in my head. And when things broke down and I was filled with negative emotions, they were all in my head too. Feelings of anger, betrayal, jealousy, revenge rose and fell in me like a stormy sea. But reading de Mello I found, if not immediate peace and calm, then at least the direction to and the sight of peace and calm. And that is a lot when you are emotionally cast adrift on that cruel sea.

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they who are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions.

And the clinching argument:

You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily… The way to be in charge of this situation is to be in charge of yourself, which you are not. How does one achieve this mastery? All you have to do is to understand there are people in the world who, if they were in your place, would not be negatively affected by this person. They would be in charge of the situation, above it, not subject to it as you are. Therefore your negative feelings are caused, not by this person, as you mistakenly think, but by your programming.

Yes, someone with better relationship skills, someone with more clarity, someone with better self-control, someone with better understanding, someone who loves from a position of independence and non-attachment, someone who loves truly – such a person would react very differently than I did.
Thus there are no excuses – the answer lies within. We must change the programming. Our pain is the light showing us the way we need to change. We must become that person who is master of himself and the situation. Then, one day, we will know the way to love.

More to come in part three

The Way to Love (1) - The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

The title of this little book has at least two meanings: the way to love in the sense of how we should love, and the Way to love in the sense of the spiritual path to love. They are the same.
The lessons of this little book are not easy to swallow when we are reeling from the loss of a love. But they are the necessary lessons that we need to learn in order to heal and to pass to the next level of love. My copy is dog-eared and many passages are underlined. I think I had a lot of lessons to learn.
De Mello’s message is that love is basically a nightmare. Or rather attachment is a nightmare, which in many of our cases is the same thing because we don’t know what love really is.

If you wish to attain lasting happiness, you must be ready to hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions. Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the nightmare they are; and then, whether you keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over you, their power to hurt you, and you will be out of your dream at last, out of your darkness, your fear, your unhappiness.

De Mello shows us that we are programmed by our upbringing and by society to believe we cannot be happy without certain things – money, power, love etc. We exhaust our energies trying to rearrange reality around us to conform to our programming. Sometimes we succeed briefly, but not for long. It is an impossible task. We must change the programming instead. This reminds me of the Buddhist saying: we cannot cover the world with leather, but if we cover our feet with leather it will be the same as covering the world with leather.

On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task if the instrument you use to rid yourself of them is not willpower or renunciation but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all…

Attachment is a false belief, a fantasy in your head. Think of your previous loves that you thought you could never live without, says De Mello, and how you got over them. De Mello suggests this affirmation to ‘give the order’ to your subconscious to change the programming:

I am not really attached to you at all. I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy.

De Mello is pitiless in hammering the message home that the ‘battle of attachments’ can never be won. If we don’t get what we want we are unhappy, but if we get what we want, the minds dwells on the one thing we didn’t get. This reminds me of what we saw in my posts on gratitude: if we are not grateful for what we already have, we are unlikely to be grateful for what we will have. When we get what we want, without gratitude we soon become bored and start wanting something else and the battle of attachments wages on. De Mello enjoins us to enjoy things without becoming attached to them, without clinging to them, without believing that we can’t live without them (because we can and do live without them).

If you learn to enjoy the scent of a thousand flowers you will not cling to one or suffer when you cannot get it.

This brings us in fact to the right way to love: loving in a non-attached way, with no strings ‘attached’, loving from a position of independence. This goes against the way we normally love: we in effect say to the person ‘if you want to be especial to me you must meet my conditions’. Likewise, if we want to be ‘especial’ to someone we must ‘pay a price in lost freedom’.

Again these are hard lessons, when you are hurting, when you would willingly pay any price to get your lost love back. But our lost love is not coming back and usually it is better that way. And our path to healing passes through the realisation that it is better that way and why. De Mello gives us a striking way to see clearly through our pain by saying to the object of our attachment:

I leave you free to be yourself, to think your thoughts, to indulge your tastes, follow your inclinations, behave in any way that you decide is to your liking.

Once we say those words, we will either disagree with them and reveal our clinging, exploiting, deluded self or agree with them, sincerely, in which case we will feel all our attachment and dependence drop. It is likely we will not agree, in which case those words will serve as an affirmation to lead us to that place where they will become true.

I used these affirmations and I can say they help. It is a cruel medicine and it doesn’t work overnight, but it is what the doctor ordered.

More to come in part two