So where better to start the ball rolling on the Journey to the Center of Me than with a YouTube video – especially if it is a grainy, buzzing video of a video of a television programme.
But … and this is the most important thing … presentation should not matter. A key, or even a part of a key, could lie anywhere. One of the reasons that I’ll be getting hold of a copy of Nisargadatta Maharaj’s I am That is because my reservations are based on his presentation so that is exactly the reason why I should push back at myself. We shall see.
Here is the link by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im4ktlkyJSo
Three things struck me in the in the first 30 minutes. \Firstly he annoyed me immensely with what I perceived to be his vanity. Swinging on his chair and laughing, completely relaxed, it ground my nerves.
Secondly he seemed to revel in the build up. “I’m going to tell you the secret, it will only take two minutes” he kept saying and then delaying it with a story or some nonsensical line like “When I tell you, you will attack me”.
I used to get annoyed about people who told me how I was going to react before they had told me the thing I was going to react to. Like those links on websites that say “This [insert person or animal who saw or did something] and you won’t believe what happened next”.
Excuse me? Who are you to tell me I won’t believe it? Of course that’s exactly why they title them that way and why I didn’t click through. I was trying to say “I probably will” to someone who couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t care if they did!
Thirdly he was sooooo slow. Repeating the same point over and over again – perhaps in different ways through stories and jokes – but grindingly slow it was.
With De Mello I was completely and utterly wrong on all counts.
As I was to figure out later, he wasn’t being vain, he was happy. He wasn’t trying to spin the presentation out with a build up, he was trying to lay the ground work that would help you hear the message without some subconscious mental knee jerk reaction burying it or drowning it out with noise.
De Mello had obviously learnt very well before this film was made, telling people the concept without mentally preparing them does lead to you being attacked.
People would quite literally shout me down rather than question what I meant and try to get a fuller understanding – and I was only trying to explain it, not sell it!
He is insanely repetitive because people don’t hear. During the film he takes questions from the audience and from people phoning in. I was stunned how often they asked about something he had, in my mind, made clear several times.
So De Mello prepared his audience, I had better do the same.
OK, so the premise goes that your life is in a mess and you don’t want to change it. Both parts of that sentence are highly attackable but if you are reading something like this you probably agree with the first part – your life is in a mess.
“You don’t want to change it” – well why would I be tracking down information on Anthony De Mello, knowing my life was in a mess but actually not want to change it?
Because, as he rightly points out, most of us just want relief. Discovering self awareness can be painful but still we want the mess sorted out. Here is the gap that therapists fill. Never fully helping you, never taking you to complete self awareness, just offering relief.
When the eye is unobstructed the result is sight.
So what is the idea that you’re going to attack and that most people reading this will not actually want? It is basically this:
People are sad because they attach happiness to things or people. “If I could do that I would be happy”, “If I could buy that I would be happy”, “If I could be with that person I would be happy”.
If you stop attaching happiness to things or people you actually achieve happiness. If you don’t feel the need for ‘something’ or ‘someone’ or ‘some event’ to make you happy, you can be happy. His core argument is:
The world is full of sorrow. The cause of sorrow is attachments. If you have no attachments you have no sorrow.
Further if you are happy because you have that ‘something’ or ‘someone’ then you make that thing or person responsible for your happiness. When it or they are gone, you are unhappy. You then need to blame it or them for your unhappiness even though it or they never caused it.
This simple (on the surface) approach means you can also avoid loneliness, frustration and a whole fruit bowl of other negative emotions.
By inference then you are happy by default, you just block it with attachments to things, people or events. You do not need to do anything to be happy, you just need to remove the obstruction. As De Mello puts it, someone who is not blind does not need to do anything to have sight, if they cannot see they just need to remove the obstruction.
Well … sounds straight forward enough but it seems to have a few flaws which are probably already flooding into your head.
If you are just happy all the time does that mean you have to be passive, a grinning vegetable that anyone can do anything to because you won’t get upset? And what about Love, surely love is about missing people when they aren’t there and feeling happy when they are? And what about loss and grieving?
I’ll go through these one by one.
In the film he asks you to imagine something that upsets you. Mine was people parking on the grass outside our block. That might seem petty compared to whatever has popped into your head but it reflected the massive defences of my mind when it came to emotional matters.
I wasn’t prepared to consider something truly and wholly upsetting, even to a laptop screen playing a film. Besides with a fairly loose grasp on my emotions I wasn’t always sure if something really did upset me, or just that it should upset me ( a lot more on this later!).
Back to the badly parked car. In my fantasy I had a bazooka with which to take out anyone whose car had wheels on the green stuff. The grass isn’t exactly a manicured lawn. Far from it, it is pretty rough and ready with trees and bushes often left to their own devices.
My point was, did they have to make it even worse because they couldn’t be bothered to walk an extra fifty or seventy meters to their door from a nearby vacant space by the tarmacked road? Wasn’t that just pure selfishness?
De Mello is very clear on this. Take Action (I’m reaching for the bazooka again!). Yes, take action. You can passionately pursue something, just don’t tie your happiness to the outcome because by doing so you block happiness until you have the outcome you desire and if that outcome never happens you block happiness forever – or until you forget that desire.
Seek justice, but don’t tie your happiness to its outcome. Work hard to advance your career, but do not tie happiness to a promotion. And so on.
More importantly unhappiness drains your energy. Being upset wastes power that you could be putting into addressing the situation.
This chimed with me, it made a whole lot of sense … if it were possible. More on that later.
And what about Love? De Mello argues that once you are happy, once you have stopped blocking happiness you will be able to love truly because you are no longer placing responsibilities on others and making expectations that they must live up to otherwise you can’t be happy.
And grieving? Why are you sad, who are you grieving for? Yourself. And you do so because you made another person define your happiness. In your mind, therefore, once they have gone your happiness is blocked.
At this point I wholeheartedly agree. A funeral should be a celebration of a person’s life, not a sadness at their passing unless it was cut short by some tragedy like a car accident.
Love and grieving are explored further in the film and in a subsequent one. I won’t dwell on them here as this is more about the basic principle of unblocking happiness.
De Mello argues it is the system (aka society) that teaches us to want. It is the system that teaches us when to block happiness. All we have to do is wake up to that, reject it and we are on our way.
So what do I make of it?
It took a few days for Rediscovering Life to sink in.
This, I thought, was me. I’m up for going on holiday this year, but I’ll be fine if I don’t. I enjoy meeting people and the company of people but I’m perfectly content without them. Had I just confirmed that I had already achieved Enlightenment with my first YouTube video?
I should be so lucky. One of the pitfalls I wanted to remain aware of in this kind of journey is hearing what you want to hear and glossing over the bits which don’t fit. Like trying to say “Ooooh yes that’s me” when you read the horoscope and then add “except that bit about being greedy!”
As De Mello said, don’t listen to what he says – analyse it, argue with it, think about it, disagree with it.
While I mulled his message and mentally tried his approach I did notice a definite calmer feeling. I work for myself and my job involves problem solving. In this I used to have two states of mind. Frustration when the problem wasn’t solved and Jubilation when it was.
Alternatively I often have to do tasks which I know how to do (or I know are possible and I just have to learn how to do them). Frustration while I’m doing them, Jubilation when they’re done.
I was a two emotion pendulum. I might work on half a dozen tasks in a day. That’s half a dozen periods of frustration followed by jubilation.
But why be frustrated I thought. I know the problem will be solved, even if it is to admit that I cannot solve it and track down someone who can. So why block being happy while I’m doing it?
Every so often as I write this a bubble of frustration appears because it isn’t finished yet. But I remind myself: It will be, I’m doing it as fast as I can, so why block happiness while I work.
By day two I certainly felt much calmer in my work and as evening approached I suddenly realised that I had smoked half the cigarettes I usually did. What’s more I was smoking differently.
Instead of looking like someone intent on dragging every ounce of nicotine out of a cigarette I was just puffing a smoke now and then.
I haven’t tied Journey to the Center of Me with giving up smoking. I’m not even that uncomfortable that I smoke a packet a day bit I knew it was beginning to have an effect on the energy that my 40 something year old body could offer.
I became massively self aware of this change in behaviour and a little too obsessed with how long it had been since my last cigarette that it began to overshadow the unblocking of happiness.
This, I thought, was part of the exact same issue. I was tying happiness to smoking less, or even quitting altogether. So I tried to put it to one side for a while.
I also had an incredibly sweet tooth and all too often end up buying a chocolate bar every time I’m in a shop. That stopped dead. I just didn’t fancy sweet things. Perhaps some sort of comfort eating for an underlying stress. Not sure at the moment, just off the cakes and chocolate bars for the time being!
As I said I thought I didn’t tie my happiness to people or things anyway – happy to go on holiday this year, happy of we don’t. But when I really thought about it there were other things that were upsetting me and blocking my happiness.
For example, when a colleague was having a rant at me I would remain calm and take it all in. The person in question is a passionate woman by nature and that’s one of the qualities I love in her but when she’s having a rant she can be pretty cutting!
So often she’s not even ranting about the person she’s ranting out, its just she needs to rant because something else is driving her up the wall.
By taking it in and bottling it up I was ‘in control’ of my emotions but wasting energy trying to control them as you would do if you fought a particularly troublesome octopus that didn’t want to get back in the aquarium. I had felt she was upsetting me but I wouldn’t make the situation worse by reacting.
Wrong. As De Mello points out, I was upsetting me. As soon as I stopped myself from doing that I was instantly calmer. That helped me understand better what her true frustration was and avoid any resentment I would normally have felt.
The film also helped me connect two dots. Aggression rarely, if ever, occurs on its own according to De Mello. It usually is, or is, a side effect of fear.
I hadn’t not known this. A few years back I attended a pro-democracy rally in the city where I lived. The rally had also attracted a large group of nationalists who saw the pro-democracy supports as liberals who encouraged homosexuality, immigration, integration with other countries and all sorts of other activities that would weaken the country and its ‘purity’.
They carried large flags and banners about the greatness of their nation and formed up near the stage where they sang patriotic songs in order to drown out the speakers of the legitimate meeting.
I walked round to look at them. I walked right up to them and considered the crowd. They were turned out aggressively to. Short hair or skin heads, anger in their faces. But I looked again. They were almost all males in their twenties or thirties, the leaders of individual groups were all males.
There may have been anger in their faces but when I had looked closer … there was fear in their eyes.
This Central European country had moved too quickly for them. From a strict dictatorship that had been coupled with an orthodox religion to a liberal capitalist state. These men had spent their childhoods grappling with a constantly changing set of values while their female counterparts had experienced liberation.
What was not acceptable when they were 7 was perfectly acceptable by the time they were 13. They had been aware of a time when men’s expectations of women were clear and the only expectation a women might have of a man was that he earned for the family and protected it against physical harm.
Now women had all sorts of other expectations be it in the bedroom, within the family unit or in their thinking. An uncomfortable change.
These men now had to compete, be it for jobs or partners, with people from other countries who had travelled and seen what scared them as the great unknown.
Life had been turned on its head and these men were scared. They sang louder to drown out the pro-democracy speakers like a child who covers their ears and says “La La I can’t hear you” because they didn’t want to hear what might stoke their fears higher or because they didn’t want others to hear pro change messages that might make the source of their fears ever greater.
As it happens someone I knew did have rant a couple of days after I watched the film and this time I questioned the source of her rant, and the source of that, and the source of that. Ultimately it boiled down to a fear over an upcoming doctors appointment.
Being reminded that aggression is actually fear was useful, the key is ensuring I don’t forget again.
The big justice question
One thing I couldn’t quite square was justice. “I won’t be happy until he’s arrested” followed by “I won’t be happy until he’s in jail” followed by “I wasn’t happy with the judge’s sentence”.
As I understand De Mello’s approach we should pursue justice with passion but not tie our happiness to it. That make a lot of sense because rarely does justice live up to our expectations, especially when we are the victims.
Our sense of justice also varies from one person to the next. While I want to take out grass parking cars with a shoulder powered firearm my neighbour might find a wheel clamp a totally acceptable form of punishment.
The car owner on the other hand might see the wheel clamp as excessive for something so trivial. I mean, hey, they’re more weeds than grass.
Sometimes justice is non-existent. The reason I want to send missiles from my kitchen window is because the estate I live on doesn’t really have any response for people who park on the grass. There are no wheel clampers. Instead they work progressively to design it out by building mini walls or decorative boulders … they just haven’t got to my patch of grass yet.
But think of something more serious. What about a child who is being physically abused in a society where it is not a crime and so he or she has no hope of justice except for hoping another might physically harm their abuser.
De Mello was a Catholic although he took many of his teachings from Buddhism and other religions. Ultimately though it meant that he believed in an afterlife of some sort so I assume he also believed there would be a time when justice, to everyone’s satisfaction, would finally be served.
All religions hold out this concept as a carrot to help sign up potential believers. I hover somewhere between Agnostic and Atheist. I don’t believe there must be something else but I do believe their might be something else.
Watching The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy when I was a teenager gave me a tremendous sense of relief. It was the first time someone has presented an alternative to our existence beyond the two alternatives – One, there’s some sort of God or Gods; Two, there is nothing more than what you see now in the physical universe around you and trying to explain the unexplainable by making up a God or an Allah or whatever might be a useful crutch to some but no more than that.
But can a child, who is being physically abused, and does not believe in an afterlife really also be happy? Difficult question.
Potentially they could believe in a Karma – what comes around, goes around – but it is also no more than comfort talk to the strict athiest.
That I will need to ponder.
Why is it so hard to be happy?
Or rather why is it so easy to block happiness. De Mello argues this is just the way we are bought up and the way society functions – what he calls our ‘programming’.
We are programmed to want and programmed to be happy if we get. Frankly, having worked in marketing, I give this a lot of credence. It is always easier to sell the idea of happiness rather than an actual product.
Who wants a new phone every year? Ah! So lets show how happy people are when they have a new phone every year. Sorted.
Why do you need to wear the latest fashion? Ah! So lets show how unhappy people are when they are not wearing the latest gear.
It is amazing having watched this film to listen again to advertisements on the radio and see how many of them focus on your happiness, not the merits of the actual product.
De Mello also points out an interesting concept. Much of what we want (and that we don’t have so it is making us unhappy) is determined by what we think others expect of us – physically, emotionally, mentally.
In recent decades this has spawned multi-billion dollar industries in cosmetics, plastic surgery, therapy, self success courses and a whole landslide more. It has also moved marketing from a “Our product is great” message to a “People will think you are great if you have our product” chant.
Servicing our unhappiness has become big business beyond what most of us can comprehend.
If we can stop thinking this way, if we can break out of this cycle, if we can stop caring about what others think … then we can be free and we can be happy.
This might also explain why many of those who seem happy in life have a hipster type look. They no longer feel the need for the latest fashion, the latest hair care product, a trip under the knife to straighten up a nose, and so on.
Now I’m not yet one to start believing in the Deep State or that sort of thing but it is true to say that if such real hipster (not fashion hipster) thinking ever did begin to take hold seriously the economic consequences for society as we have set it up are enormous.
What if we all decided we would just like some really well made shirts that would last us ten or fifteen years?
Frankly I don’t think big business has given it much thought, they are fairly confident it isn’t going to happen and they’re probably right.
Interestingly and subtly though society has painted those who do not fit in to this model, those who have stepped outside of its requirements, as ‘the mad old coot’. In any film the man with the wild hair and shabby clothes is the crazy guy. He might say the odd wise thing but he isn’t the message of the film.
Never is obtaining the position of the mad old coot the overall message of the film – even if the mad old coot is free and happy and not really mad at all, it is the rest of us who are.
But what does it mean to stop caring what other people think about us? Does this mean we don’t need to bother washing? Should we just cut some holes in a potato sack so we are clothed?
De Mello doesn’t cover this here. I think there is a difficult line between being civil (basic personal hygiene) and doing things to please others. There is respecting others by, for example, having a shave before going to meet someone new and there is doing it because you want that new person to like you because that will make you feel happy … for a while.
I have a fast receding hairline but I wouldn’t consider a hair transplant. I’ve never bought any magic hair growing gel or some such stuff. Judging by the adverts I see it bothers others enough to pay and even go through pain in order to reverse the hairy retreat.
A neighbour of mine, before she passed away a couple of years back, had more teeth missing than remaining. What clung on did so in odd and unordered ways. It didn’t stop her smiling and laughing in abundance. I know others with far better, but not society perfect, dental work who are afraid to smile.
Their worry is judgement. That others will judge them. Not always is this a judgement about personal wealth. It can be a judgement about how well they have cared for their bodies or a judgement about how much effort they are prepared to put in to ‘repairing’ their bodies.
A judgement about how much they respect others by being well turned out in the right shape, with the right teeth, within the right attire that the society of the day defines as right.
Going full circle they are blocking their happiness because they attach importance to other people’s judgements, even the judgements of people they have never yet met.
My take is to ensure your personal hygiene is reasonable and dress in a comfortable but respectful way or as needed for any job you do. What I do think society suppresses is that truly happy people are popular people, with or without the latest set of trainers. But there is no profit in the latter so we have been trained that popularity (via happiness) will come when we don the right footwear.
Where next?
As you might have gathered, after 4,000+ words, Anthony De Mello impresses me. His way of seeing things makes perfect sense to me and I’ll be following him further. The next step is an 8 hour recording: “Enlightenment”