The Path to Happiness (and Holiness)
True gems from Anthony De Mello
A few years ago when I did a digital detox, I often carried a book instead of my iPhone. The book was Anthony De Mello’s tiny treasure chest, The Way to Love. Today I want to share a few gems from the book that I highlighted during that time.
In this issue, everything in bold is a direct quote from the book.
The moment you become conscious of your happiness you cease to be happy. What you call the experience of happiness is not happiness at all but the excitement and thrill caused by some person or thing or event.
In other words, we tend to chase I’ll-be-happy-when-this-happens events. When… I find true love. When… everyone in my family is healthy. When… my country votes the way I want.
There’s no growth or maturity required for that sort of faux happiness. When everything goes right, you are “happy”. The only problem is that everything rarely goes right.
True happiness is uncaused. You are happy for no reason at all. And true happiness cannot be experienced. It is not within the realm of consciousness.
We tend to chase happiness in the physical, material world… where the flow of life often takes a left turn while you are hoping to go straight. For most of us, the formula. goes something like this » events in the physical world match our desires » which creates a feeling inside of us » we label that feeling as “happiness”.
But the physical world, filled as it is with beauty, can also be a shit show. Planes crash. Entire regions run out of food. Dictators impose their will on others.
The physical world is not the only world. Pure consciousness leads us to other worlds, other experiences.
So it is with holiness. The moment you are aware of your holiness it goes sour and becomes self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good as when you have no consciousness that it is good—you are so much in love with the action that you are quite unself-conscious about your goodness and virtue.
You don’t seek happiness to be happy. You don’t seek holiness to be holy.
You simply be the way you were born to be.
In fairness, this is not at all simple in our world, which elevates ego and material growth and endless motion.
Stripping away all the baggage we accumulate is a lifelong endeavor.
Or, perhaps, you can try this…
Leave the change, he writes, to Nature and Reality. Nature is creative. You will be a creator when there is abandonment in you—no greed, no ambition, no anxiety, no sense of striving, gaining, arriving, attaining. All there is, is a keen, alert, penetrating, vigilant awareness that causes the dissolution of all one’s foolishness and selfishness, all one’s attachments and fears.
If this sounds impossible given all the demands on you, consider this: how well is the commonly accepted, mainstream way of life going for you… or the rest of society?
There is another path. Just because you haven’t tried it yet doesn’t mean it’s not the right path for you.
The term that comes to mind in Arabic is Zaahid (one who detaches from the world). Not so much eschewing material things, but as the Islamic Sages would say it's "Being able to hold the world in your hands and not in your heart."
Thank you for sharing, Bruce. It calls us to a life of trust and grace. Always trusting that we are exactly where we are meant to be. And the grace that comes undeservedly and unsought, that reveals, "gives us" what we desire without having to find it outside ourselves. Simply beautiful 🌼