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

The Way of Love

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

Some translations have ‘Love never fails’ instead of ‘Love never ends’. 'Love never ends' would seem better, because sometimes love does fail, doesn’t it? But then we might ask, was it love that failed or was it something other than love? Attachment maybe? Infatuation? Perhaps love never does fail. For if it is really love, it ‘insists not on its own way’, but merely is. In that sense love can never fail. Like sincerity, love is never wrong.

Love at the edge of doom

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Shake-speare (De Vere) - Sonnet 116

If you are suffering from the loss of a love, you may have found little solace in my last post Love (lost). Your reasoning mind may have found it mildly interesting but your heart will have dismissed it in an instant with a 'But you don't understand'. I quote this powerful verse from Shake-speare (De Vere) by way of saying that I do understand.
When we are in love, and lose that love, there can be no solace for the heart in the short term. This has been my experience anyway. Perhaps it is a psycho-physiological trick of nature to keep couples together to ensure the survival of the species. In my case, only time (many years) has faded the memory without erasing it completely.
But there is nothing bad but thinking makes it so, the bard also said. And if you are a regular reader you are familiar with the Taoist philosophy of facing up sincerely to the times and learning its lessons. There is also the Taoist philosophy that everything we are living now we created ourselves by our past actions. We are responsible for manifesting everything around us. There is the philosophy that everything we are living now is exactly appropriate for us at this moment and is exactly what we need to experience now in order to grow. There is also the philosophy that we already have everything we need here and now (gratitude) and wishing for things to be exactly the way they are now allows us to appreciate them. These are important ideas for they can help us in changing our viewpoint from that of a victim of other people’s actions to active engineers of our own experience.
To activate that change of viewpoint, one of the best ways is to use affirmations. Yes, I know your heart is groaning ‘Is that all you’ve got?’ But there is untold power in the word as it becomes true for the subconscious. For the subconscious creates for us what we believe to be true and cannot tell the difference between what we experience in reality and what we concentrate on in our mind. Concentrate on sorrow or concentrate on transformation, and your subconscious will create it. Here are some powerful affirmations from ‘Manifesto’ by my favourite modern-day Taoist master, Stephen Russel.

All internal psycho-emotional discomfort evaporates now and I find myself at peace.

I acknowledge myself for having the courage and endurance to carry on.

I am cheerful no matter what.

I determine what kind of life I have – no one and nothing else.

I create my own reality according to which set of beliefs I subscribe to now. I now alter the very foundations of my reality and thus build myself a different and more useful belief structure that even now is producing magnificent results.

I take full responsibility for myself and my moment-by-moment experience of life from this moment on.

I am alive.