Explore every episode of the podcast The Happiness Podcast

 You are not your depression. You are not your anxiety or stress. That is but a strange kind of trick of the mind, a strange kind of illusion. You have deluded yourself into thinking— though you are not aware of it—that you are your depression, that you are your anxiety, that you are the thrills that you have. You so much more than a transient emotion.

I want to give you a taste of the difference between analysis and awareness, or information on the one hand and insight on the other. I want to show how information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary-General, put it so beautifully: “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason.” We don’t have to quarrel about a word, because “God” is only a word, a concept. One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, about concepts, about judgments. Drop them you will the reality of God everywhere.  

When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live.  Desire breeds anxiety but we don't want to see it. But when you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you will be ready to see it. 

If the eye is unobstructed, it results in sight; if the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing; if the nose is unobstructed, the result is a sense of smell; if the mouth is unobstructed, the result is a sense of taste; if the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom.

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Listening to this podcast could be the most important few minutes in your lives. If you could grasp it, you’d hit upon the secret of awakening. You would be happy forever. You would never be unhappy again. Nothing would have the power to upset you again. Nothing.

"Silence is the great revelation, " said Lao-tse. We are accustomed to think of Scripture as the revelation of God. And so it is.  I want you now to discover the revelation that silence brings. To take in the revelation that Scripture offers, you must expose yourself to Scripture. To take in the revelation that silence offers you must first attain silence. And this is not easy. Let us attempt to do this in this exercise.

One cannot say anything about the awakened state; one can only talk about the sleeping state. One hints at the awakened state. One cannot say anything about happiness. Happiness cannot be defined. What can be defined is misery. Drop unhappiness and you will know. Love cannot be defined; un-love can. Drop un-love, drop fear, and you will know. We want to find out what the awakened person is like. But you’ll know only when you get there.

Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. That is extremely important for the process of change. If you want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. Oh, you’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come back to life. 

We filter out life constantly, so much so that often we don’t see the reality of what is there. Where does the filtering come from? It's our conditioning, our culture, our programming.  It's the way we were taught to see things and to experience life. Even the words we choose function as filters. There’s another demon doing the filtering, distorting and destroying true perception, haunting us with fear.  It's the one called attachment. That filter is the root of all suffering.

The heart in love remains soft and sensitive. But when you’re hell-bent on getting this or that thing  or result or person, you become ruthless, hard, and insensitive. How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them. If I need you to make me happy, I’ve got to use you, I’ve got to manipulate you, I’ve got to find ways and means of winning you. I cannot let you be free. I can only love people when I have emptied my life of the need for people.

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Suppress your desire and you are likely to be tied to it. Whereas if you look at your desire and see it for what it is really worth, and how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into  a preference.  When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness.

Is psychology more practical than spirituality? Nothing is more practical than spirituality. What can the poor psychologist do? He can only relieve the pressure. I’m a psychologist myself, and I practice psychotherapy, and I have this great conflict within me when I have to choose sometimes between psychology and spirituality. I wonder if that makes sense to anybody here. It didn’t make sense to me for many years until I suddenly discovered that people have to suffer enough in a relationship so that they get disillusioned with all relationships.

I want to give you a taste of the difference between analysis and awareness, or information on the one hand and insight on the other. Information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.

Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance. The only tragedy there is in the world is un-wakefulness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else, but death is not a tragedy at all. Dying is wonderful; it’s only horrible to people who have never understood life. It’s only when you’re afraid of life that you fear death.

The only way to change is by changing your understanding. But what does it mean to understand? How do we go about it? Consider how we’re enslaved by various attachments; we’re striving to rearrange the world so that we can keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them. I fear that a friend may stop loving me; he or she may turn to somebody else. I have to keep making myself attractive because I have to get this other person. Somebody brainwashed me into thinking I need his or her love. But I really don’t. I don’t need anybody’s love; I just need to get in touch with reality.

Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change. But what do we generally do when we have a negative feeling? “He is to blame, she is to blame. She’s got to change.” No! The world’s all right. The one who has to change is you.

How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child. This doesn’t mean you should drop your concepts totally; they’re very precious. Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function. Thanks to them we develop our intelligence. We’re invited, not to become children, but to become like children. We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an “I” and a “me” through these concepts. But then we need to return to paradise.

Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation.  Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.

It’s quite false to think that the way to deny the self is to cause pain to the self, to go in for abnegation, mortification, as these were traditionally understood. To deny the self, to die to it, to lose it, to drop out of the rat race world of the ego is to understand your true nature. When you do that, the self will disappear; it will vanish. To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were. You thought you were at the center; now you experience yourself as satellite. You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance.

The first thing to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it. You want to stay in your nice warm bed made of illusions and false beliefs.

There is a point I want to make that has to do with happiness. It is one of my favorite stories. You know, sometimes a story says more than a whole day’s lecture because it speaks to the depths within us, and this one certainly speaks to mine. This is a story of about a villager in India who comes across a sannyasi, which is a person who, having attained enlightenment, understands that the whole world is his home and the sky is his roof, and God is his father Who will look after him, so he moves from place to place the way you and I would move from one room of our home to another.

Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death. There’s a story about some people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil perishing from thirst. They had no idea that the water they were floating on was fresh water from a river flowing out to sea with such force that it reached their raft.  But they had no idea. In the same way, we’re surrounded with joy, happiness, and love but most people have no idea of it whatsoever.

We’re scared about things that are not. We’re tied to things that don’t exist. They’re illusions. They’re falsehoods. They’re beliefs; they’re not realities. The agonies we go through over things that we have—we have convinced ourselves that our happiness depends upon them, but it doesn’t.

Look into your own heart. Can you say? Oh, there's anger and quarrels in my life but there is no rancor, no bitterness, no hatred. Can you say? Oh, there is pain and suffering in my life, but there is no inner turmoil and conflict. There is a great deal of activity in my life, but there's no stress. Can you say that? If you can, you are a lovely oasis of peace in the vast desert of this world.  If you can't, it's time to awaken the oasis within you.

"I discovered something about ten years ago," Anthony De Mello states, "and it revolutionized my life. I became a new man.  Later, having discovered it, I found it in all the major religious writings, and I was amazed. I mean, I was reading it, but I hadn’t recognized it. I wished to God I’d found this when I was younger. Oh, what a difference it would have made."

You were given a taste of various psychosocial addictions: approval, attention, success, making it to the top, prestige, getting your name in the paper, power, being the boss. Having a taste for these drugs, you became addicted and began to dread losing them. Recall the lack of control you felt, the terror at the prospect of failure or of making mistakes, at the prospect of criticism by others. So you became cravenly dependent on others and you lost your freedom.

To exterminate the darkness, pronounce the name over each part of your being that is in need of healing (your heart … your mind … your limbs … your senses …) and see each part become aglow, alive with grace.

How do you surrender. Begin by seeking silence. For this, come home to yourself. Come to the present. Ask yourself: Where am I right now? What am I doing? What am I thinking? What am I sensing in my body? What is the quality of my breathing?

Imagine you walk into a church. The candles on the altar are the only source of light. You rest your eyes upon the host at the altar that stands out clear and white against the darkness. The host is like a magnet, for it draws your eyes and being toward itself as to the center. Most of our life we focus on the outer surface, but here you gaze into the very heart of things, the center of your being and of the world. As you keep looking a silence falls upon you.

God says, “Give me your heart.” And then, in answer to our puzzlement, we might hear God say, “Your heart is where your treasure is.”

What treasure? Is it people … places … occupations … things … experiences of the past … the future’s hopes and dreams?  Or is it something entirely different that God wants from us?

Imagine that you walk into a desert to contemplate your life. Immediately, you see how frequently you rush outside yourself —to people, occupations, places, things— in search of strength and peace and meaning, forgetting that the source of all is here within your own heart, understanding that it is here where you must search. Each person carries thoughts that have the power to bring instant peace. In this podcast, De Mello offers a way to search for yours.

Imagine you are in the presence of Christ and you ask him to give you a list of everything in you he finds defective— each indication of selfishness, each area where you have yet to grow, each thing in you you need to change.  Then ask him which of these defects, in his opinion, needs the most urgent attention.  Do you have the will to rise above this defect?

If you could choose the circumstances of your death, what would you choose? When your life is coming to an end, how many experiences shall you look back to and say, “To have experienced that alone would have made my life worthwhile”?

In this next session of the Wellsprings Series, Anthony De Mello provides the simple,  foundational elements that lead to an enlightened life. When you awaken, the world, your family, your feelings, your body, even your neuroses remain the same — it is you that are the same no longer. You are more loving now, more accepting of what is undesirable. More peaceful, too, for having come to see that attack and defense cannot lead to lasting change —only love and understanding can.

Anthony De Mello takes your mind on a vacation to find the place inside of you that steps out to the vast stillness of Heaven.

In this podcast, Anthony De Mello introduces his Wellsprings Series and discusses the spiritual power it holds to transform your life experience.

Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? How do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding with no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.  When you say of someone, “He’s a Republican,” understanding has stopped at that moment. You slapped a label on him. “She’s a Democrat.” Understanding has stopped at that moment.  How are you going to understand what you disapprove of or what you approve of, for that matter?

All of this sounds like a new world, doesn’t it?

The first thing you need to do to wake up is get in touch with negative feelings that you’re not even aware of. Lots of people have negative feelings they’re not aware of. Lots of people are depressed and they’re not aware they are depressed. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they were. You can’t get rid of boll weevils on your farm if you’re not aware of their existence. To awaken, the first thing you need is awareness of your negative feelings

The great masters tell us that The Most Important Question in the world is: “Who am I?” Or rather: “What is ‘I’?” What is this thing I call “I”? What is this thing I call self? Who’s living in you as you? 

The harder you try to change, the worse it can get. Does this mean that a certain degree of passivity is all right? Yes, the more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. That’s the meaning, I think, of Jesus’ words: “When someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him your left as well.” You always empower the demons you fight. That’s very Oriental. But if you flow with the enemy, you overcome the enemy.

Some people make awakening a goal. They are determined to get there; they say, “I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened.” In that case, it’s better to be the way you are, simply to be aware of the way you are. Simple awareness is happiness compared with trying to react all the time. People react so quickly because they are not aware. You will come to understand that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in awareness. But as awareness grows, you react less and act more. It really doesn’t matter.

Anthony De Mello in a nutshell.

Do not suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless. You’d be without energy and that would be terrible. Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better. But don’t suppress desire, understand it. Understand it. Don’t seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire.  Know your preferences. When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re moving toward wakefulness

A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He’s not attempting to change them or train them or get anything out of them. He wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly.

Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand. and what you do not understand cannot change.

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it. You don’t want to be happy.

When you cling, life is destroyed; when you hold on to anything, you cease to live. Understand too, that happiness is not the same as excitement, it’s not the same as thrills. That’s another illusion, that a thrill comes from living a desire fulfilled. Desire breeds anxiety and sooner or later it brings its hangover. When you’ve suffered sufficiently, then you are ready to see it.

Love is generated through awareness and through no other way, no other way. Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you.

You’re never so centered on yourself as when you’re depressed. You’re never so ready to forget yourself as when you are happy. Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self.