The World is Not Problematic - Anthony de Mello

Written on May 12, 2008 by Tom Stine / 2 Comments »


“There is no explanation you can give that would explain away all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world! You’ll never explain it. You can try gamely with your formulas, religious and otherwise, but you’ll never explain it. Because life is a mystery, which means your thinking mind cannot make sense out of it. For that you’ve got to wake up and then you’ll suddenly realize that reality is not problematic, you are the problem.”

—Anthony de Mello



Creative Commons License credit: ktylerconk
Did you enjoy this article? Please share it with others. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • e-mail
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis

 

Living from Consciousness Newsletter

Free! A newsletter filled with exclusive articles on living from consciousness, awakening and spirituality. Support yourself via your inbox several times each month. (And fear not, your email address is never sold or spammed.) Sign-up and receive a special bonus.





Best of Tom Stine


Recent Posts


Categories


Twittering...


Subscribe to Articles

  Get Articles by Email:


Tom Recommends


Guru Quotes

All of our thoughts are conditioned. We all are thinking exactly along the lines we are conditioned to think. Programmed like a computer. Anybody who thinks they are actually choosing of their own free will the line of thinking that they have is completely deluded by their thinking.

—Adyashanti


Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you’re not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn’t someplace else; it’s the naturally occurring human state. It doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s who we all are. Spiritual practices also set up many pictures of what this state looks like. For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn’t in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it’s there too in the vastness of who we are.

—Suzanne Segal

In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.

—Jack Kornfield

Those who awaken never rest in one place.
Like swans, they rise and leave the lake.
On the air they rise and fly an invisible course.
Their food is knowledge.
They live on emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.
Who can follow them?

—Siddhārtha Gautama, The Dhammapada

We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good. But has it ever struck you that even if your wife changes or your husband changes, what does that do to you? You’re just as vulnerable as before; you’re just as idiotic as before; you’re just as asleep as before. You are the one who needs to change, who needs to take medicine. You keep insisting, “I feel good because the world is right.” Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying.

—Anthony de Mello