“If you wish to love
you must learn to see again.”
The sentence could have come straight out of a Krishnamurti
reader but that was not where I found it. I’ve been reading this book which
Dwight gave me just before returning to Canada. It is called "The Way Of Love", a collection of last meditations written by Anthony de Mello just before he died. You wouldn't expect a Jesuit priest to be quite as iconoclastic as Tony de Mello (as his colleagues referred to him), is, yet the wisdom contained in "The Way Of Love" is like something straight out of Tao or Zen or Sufi literature.And why
shouldn’t it be! Innate human wisdom is not something which is copyrighted and which only a few select teachers or writers have a right to express.
What sets Anthony De Mello apart from most spiritual leaders
is this. Most gurus, regardless of which religion or sect they owe their
allegiance to, are not only blatantly full of themselves, but love to tell you
how it is in life and what you should do. A lot of their “gyan” is nothing more
than the imparting of rules and regulations, of do’s and don’ts which further
enslave you. Anthony De Mello, incidentally best known for his inspiring
compilation of folk wisdom and stories related to enlightenment, “The Prayer Of
The Frog”, has none of the regular do’s
and don’ts to offer. At least in “The Way Of Love” there is not much to identify him as a Catholic priest. What he emphasizes throughout, is the
importance of learning to “see.” It is the one thing we avoid in life, he says,
preferring as we do, to live with our illusions and our attachments in spite of
the fact that they cause us endless suffering.
Why is it so important to open our eyes and see? The logic
is simple. When you open your eyes you see things the way they are. You see
them in their place, so to speak. You see the place of love, in this whole
phenomenon we call “life” and you realize that life without love is not only not worth much, it is
inconceivable. It is akin to a flower which refuses to open out and bloom. At
some level we all know this and whether or not we are aware of it, are in
search of what we call “love”. But in the absence of awareness we are not
even in a position to know what love is. We want desperately to be loved
without ourselves being really capable of it. What we call love in hindsight
turns out only to be greed, possessiveness and insecurity in disguise.
The reason we cannot love, De Mello says, is because we
cannot and do not want “to see.” And of course, the “seeing” he refers to, is something which
goes far beyond the physical or intellectual understanding we normally connect
it with. Seeing in this context, has an immediacy to it and is necessarily
untainted by our conditioning, by our
prejudices and other concocted notions. Since most of us live within the cells
of our own conditioning we are blind to actual reality.
We may think we
love someone for example, but if we don’t see them as they are, how can we possibly
love them, argues De Mello. Because most of the time, what you think you love,
is nothing more than an image, a pretty picture you carry in your head about
the person or thing you love. It is a sobering thought, he goes on to say, that
the finest act of love you can perform, is not an act of service but an act of
contemplation, of seeing. “When you serve people you help, support, comfort,
alleviate pain. When you see them in their inner beauty and goodness you
transform and create.” Not only does the act of seeing give birth to love, but it helps us to live in the
moment – which is really the same thing.
Is this why, in spite of there being so many social workers
in the world and so many institutions dedicated to helping mankind, real
transformation seems out of reach? Because so many of us are doing “good work”
to appease our conscience, to ensure a place in heaven when we die (or if you
happen to be a Hindu and believe in reincarnation, to ensure that all goes well
in the next lifetime). Or do the good deeds come out of the same greed and
ambition which powers most people in the world of business or politics though
in a different context? Or do we do what we do to take the edge off our boredom
or anxiety, and not because we genuinely “see” what the right thing is, to do?
“Think of the terror that comes to a rich man when he sets
out to really see the pitiful condition of the poor,” says De Mello, “to a
power-hungry dictator when he really looks at the plight of the people he
oppresses, to a fanatic, a bigot, when he really sees the falsehood of his
convictions when they do not fit the facts.”
This terror, according to De Mello has to do with the
destruction of the valued illusions and images which make up our world and on
which our lives are based. “That is why the most painful act the human being
can perform, the act that he dreads the most is the act of seeing.”
But it is in the very act of seeing that love is born, De
Mello tells us, or to put it more
accurately, “that act of seeing is
Love.”
Uma
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