Hello.
This D'Mello podcast is part of a six-part series.
Each podcast consists of three parts.
The first part is a talk given by Anthony D'Mello that's roughly five minutes long.
The second part invites you to do a five-minute meditation at the end of his talk.
And the third part is a spiritual story of one to two minutes that relates back to the talk that D'Mello just gave.
True happiness is only discovered when one has discovered the joys of solitude and aloneness.
The exercise that follows may help you find this.
It is called the desert.
Look in imagination at Jesus in his agony on the night before he died.
You are standing close to him and you watch him reaching out for human help.
But nobody can reach him now.
He is entirely on his own before he dies.
Contrast this scene with the warmth and closeness of the supper room where he had been a little while before with his friends.
As you watch these contrasting scenes,
You realize that you will ultimately come to terms with God,
With destiny and with yourself only when you dare to be alone.
Would you like to give yourself a taste of what it means to be alone?
Then imagine that you are living in a desert.
You do not have a single book with you,
No occupation with which to distract yourself,
And you never hear the sound of a human voice for a whole day,
No for a week,
Or better still for months.
Observe how you react when you are thrown back on your own resources,
When you are stripped of the two things that you ordinarily use as an escape from looking at yourself,
Namely work and human company.
Or try this.
Imagine you are in a solitary prison cell.
The walls are soundproof.
The room is narrow.
There is a dim bulb that lights the room all day and night.
Never the glimpse of a human face,
Or of any living thing,
Or of sun or sky.
Never a sound of human voice or nature for weeks,
For months on end.
And you do not know when it will end.
So here is something else you might do to give yourself a taste of what it means to be alone.
Imagine you have lapsed into a coma.
You can hear the words of people.
You can feel their touch.
But you cannot reach them.
Stay with any one of these scenes,
The desert,
The prison,
The coma,
For quite a while.
Then return to life,
To your worries and your work,
To your comforts and attachments,
To the world of human beings.
As you do this,
You begin to realize that you are not the same,
For you have been exposed to the rigors of aloneness.
Something has snapped within you.
Something has changed.
And every now and then,
Your heart returns to Jesus in his agony.
You watch him as he grapples with his God and with his destiny.
And the sight seems to give you a wisdom that thinking never could,
No matter how deep and profound the thinking.
So you just linger there in the garden and look.
Here's a story from Anthony DeMello about what it means to be a Christian.
Brownie,
Our dog,
Sat looking up the tree,
Ears cocked,
Tail tensely wagging.
He was attending to a monkey.
No thought disturbed his total concentration.
No worry for tomorrow.
Brownie was the nearest thing to pure contemplation that I've ever seen.
You may have experienced some of these yourself when you were totally absorbed watching a cat at play.
Here's a formula for contemplation.
As good as any I know,
Be totally in the present.
Drop every thought of the future.
Drop every thought of the past.
Drop every image and abstraction and come into the present.
Contemplation will arise.
After years of training,
The disciple begged his master to give him enlightenment.
The master led him to a bamboo grove and said,
See that bamboo?
How tall is it?
See that other one there?
How short is it?
And the disciple was enlightened.
They say Buddha practiced every form of aestheticism known to the India of his times in an effort to attain enlightenment.
It was all in vain.
One day he sat under a Bodhi tree and enlightenment occurred.
He passed on the secret of enlightenment to his disciples in words that must seem strange to the uninitiated.
The Buddha said,
When you draw in a deep breath,
O monks,
Be aware that you are drawing in a deep breath.
When you draw in a shallow breath,
O monks,
Be aware that you are drawing in a shallow breath.
And when you draw in a medium-sized breath,
O monks,
Be aware that you are drawing in a medium-sized breath.
Awareness.
Attention.
Absorption.
This kind of absorption one observes in little children.
They are close to the kingdom.
