#3: Anthony de Mello

If it all began with wonder (Socrates) and continued with dreams (Richad Bach) then it was time for awakening. That is the part we do not like about because dreams can be very sweet and comforting. Usually it is very painful to wake up. The pain comes from realizing that everything one believed in was just illusions. That one has lived all life in Matrix. After immediate realization life is never same again. That awakening is not some idea that just can disappear or change into some other idea. It is like blind person getting eyes. One must first die to reborn.

Though there is no common cause in awakening, it seems that people who are having some critical situation in their life may come up with it. De Mello put it like “it’s only when you’re sick of your sickness that you get out of it”. That was the case with myself. I was asking same questions in my mind every day. I felt like my heart was in pieces. All my beliefs had vanished. And then, accidentally as always, one person recommended me to read Anthony de Mello’s book Awareness saying that I should be careful if I read it, it may change my life. That was correct guess. After reading de Mello I became familiar with spirituality that is the essence of all religions. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I started to understand spirituality which was there all along.

The book started like this:

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air. Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.

That’s his description of Matrix. We are not what we think we are, we are not what others tell us that we are. We live in a cage that we have built ourselves. We fail to see the beauty of the world because we fail to see what we really are.

Anthony was a Jesuit priest who also worked as psychotherapist. He is usually seen as a teacher who was melting eastern and western wisdom together. Most people, he said, are asleep. They need to wake up, open up their eyes, see what is real, both inside and outside of themselves. He also said that the greatest human gift is to be aware, to be in touch with oneself, one's body, mind, feelings, thoughts, sensations. Of course the church saw him as rebel and a threat so current pope himself when he was still cardinal said that de Mello’s teachings are “incompatible with the Catholic faith and can cause grave harm.”. Despite this, his writings are very popular among Christians as well as others.

Here are two great quotes from him:

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”

“It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth, in which alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear!”

#2: Richard Bach

One of the things that I wondered a lot in my youth was why do people live like this. Why do we automatically go to schools, get professions, work, create families, buy houses and so on. Why do we live according to such pattern? That did not sound nice to me. It seemed so obvious that we should live the way we would like to, to fullfill all our dreams, to be free of all systems, to have adventures! Why is everybody looking so serious and trying to just get new material toys into their daily routineous life? One of Richard's books started like this:

“We think, sometimes, there’s not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests … What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure … not only are they here-and-now, they’re all that ever lived on earth! Masters of reality still meet us in dreams to tell us that we’ve never lost the shield we need against dragons, that blue-fire voltage arcs through us now to change our world as we wish. Intuition whispers true: We’re not dust, we’re magic!”

So one can easily understand why I loved getting acquainted with books of Richard Bach. At that time I was studying (namely studying, actually I spent 1% of my time in school studying) a profession I didn't care about and met a wise fellow in virtual world. In some of our discussions he mentioned that I would probably like a lot Richard Bach's books so I went to library to borrow Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is his most famous book. After that I read all his books. It was perfect material for dreamer. His quote "You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true." became my favourite.

Richard was a fomer air force pilot and he was living "on the road" type of life by giving flights to people in his small airplane. He slept in his plane and wrote about his "philosophy" in a story-like way. He was just enjoying life day by day. However he had his dream, which was about finding true love, a soulmate. He had divorced his first wife (I assume that's when he left on the road) but still believed in his dream. And he did meet his dream - although as always, things were little different than he believed in. Since my biggest dream (nowadays I would call it desire) was the same than Richard's, it gave me lots of belief in his idealism. And as Richard's, my dream came true as well.

Of course I didn't always agree with him. In some issues (like out of body experiences) he went too far for my taste but his core understanding was pretty good, even when I observe it nowadays. He understood non-dualism & ISness even though he seemed to put it aside at times when it did not suit him. From his later writings I could see that he learnt a lot and even more importantly, unlearned lots of his former beliefs. These next two excellent quotes are late writings of him.

First one:

"I used to think that the purpose of language was to communicate. That if we were clear enough and careful enough, we could make anyone understand anything we write, make them see anything we see. Not so, I found.

The only people who can understand us are the ones who already know what we want to tell them, and then the best of our writing can merely remind, can simply whisper, "I know that, too."

Have you ever wondered why some readers love a book and others just don't get it? I'll tell you why (but you'll understand only if you already know):

Some readers love a book because they enjoy remembering what it brings back to them. The ones who don't love it either don't know what it says, don't care what it says, or would rather not be reminded. They have different enjoyments than chasing once again the ideas a book brings out to play."

And second:

"Each of us discovers our own definition for "soulmate." These range anywhere from "A Meaningless Concept" to the pronouncing of our Significant Other's name.

For me, a soulmate is one with whom we've made a mutual decision before the beginning of any life experience, with whom we have an agreement to meet in spacetime and demonstrate for each other the best we know about sharing love.

In the highest sense we're all soulmates, one to another, we're all reflections of one light. But the highest sense renders the word impractical on our worlds of make-believe, and I resolved to lower the vibrations of my definition to embrace at least one and at most a very few soulmates in any focus of consciousness I call a lifetime.

Soulmates are not images of religious custom or cultural institution, of age or gender. Marriage does not define a soulmate, nor divorce dissolve one. No earthside connection affects that bond. We recognize each other when we meet by signals arranged at a time and place we half-remember from old dreams. The curve of a smile, fragments of shared memories, a phrase that two minds speak at just the same instant. And then we begin the dance we asked of each other before the music of time was written, and enter upon the lives we've customized for our education and our delight."

#1: Socrates

For me Socrates was the beginning. Before that I had the impression that philosophy was just about intellectuals who tried to confuse each other with fancy words. Then one day (I can't recall how old I was but if I had to guess I would say 15) I was in the library and grabbed some book of Plato and browsed it a bit. And it seemed interesting as it was one of the dialogues of Socrates. So I borrowed it and read it with enjoyment. Perhaps part of enjoyment was that I could really understand the points of discussions. Topics were very interesting, going through questions like "what is love?", "what is virtue?" and so on. I could not help admiring the way Socrates discussed with people. Most often, he started very innocently by inquiring something from person. Person would tell what he knew and little by little Socrates would ask more questions depending what person said and soon person would realize that he actually doesn't know the thing he thought he knew. That was always main point of Socrates. That if we open our eyes, we start to notice that all that "knowledge" which we have absorbed from various sources is far from actual truth/reality.

Socrates is named as father of philosophy but in my eyes he's a spiritual character just like many other religious characters. For example his (or Plato's) "theory of ideas" could come straight from zen master's mouth. Socrates was also rebellious character and as often happens with rebellious characters society eliminated him. Socrates did not write anything down (or at least nothing has survived to this day) so it's not clear how many of his dialogues actually happend in presented form or how much Plato affected to the content but that's not really important at all.

After reading dialogues of Socrates I became interested about philosophy and read some more (namely Plato, Aristotele, Diogenes, Descartes and Spinoza) but in the end it seemed like the "origin" of philosophy had the clearest vision. Still, it was only because of Socrates that I considered applying to university to study philosophy. At the end I didn't but that was because of laziness to read huge philosophy book which main content was such mixture of fancy words that in my humble opinion was missing the whole point altogether.

Here are few nice Socrates quotes:

If thou continuest to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

Doing nothing

One of the most difficults things for humans is doing nothing. Feel free to try it sometimes. Just stop whatever you were planning to do, sit on the floor and do not start thinking - just sit. Thoughts will appear but let them just come and go. That is meditation. However even the thought of doing nothing, just being, feels uncomfortable for the mind. Mind is very goal-oriented, always wanting to achieve something, always wanting to feel useful. That's why people are always busy with something. Even if they're not actually doing something concrete, their mind is busy in thinking what to do next. It is eternal circle of avoidance.

Japanese poet Basho expressed lots of wisdom with his haiku:

Sitting silently,
Doing nothing,
The spring comes
And the grass grows by itself.

For the next entries I'm going to write about seven spiritual characters who I have enjoyed most. The list (order being chronological to my encounter with each) is following:

1. Socrates
2. Richard Bach
3. Anthony de Mello
4. Siddhartha Gautama
5. Dogen
6. Osho
7. J.Krishnamurti

Loner

I see you
As a lone white wolf
Sitting in a field of snow
Silently waiting
As the cold bitter wind
Chases others underground
You feel nothing
In an already frozen soul
Soon you will move on
Always searching
Never finding
The elusive warmth
Of an honest heart
~Lady Ravenous

Nature

Long time ago I wrote a story where the main character becomes tired of seeing things around him and escapes the civilization by moving on a deserted island. I guess I have always felt that way, ready to take off. That's also why the situations I have enjoyed most have been without crowds of people. It's has been just me or me with single other person - and in some cases neither of those. I have always felt great in the nature - it does not matter whether it has been deep in the forest or top of the mountain or sitting at the front of lake in deep silence, only having birds chirping on the background and grashoppers playing their violins.

Mountains can wait for a while but I can hear forests and lakes calling me. It is time to wake up animal instincts - no, even more, it's time to become animal.