The great Karl Rahner, in one of his last letters, wrote to a young German
drug addict who had asked him for help.  The addict had said, "You
theologians talk about God, but how could this God be relevant in my
life?  How could this God get me off drugs?  Rahner said to him, "I must
confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been
absolute mystery.  I do not understand what God is; no one can.  We have
intimations, inklings; we make faltering, inadequate attempts to put
mystery into words.  But there is no word for it, no sentence for it."  And
talking to a group of theologians in London, Rahner said, "The task of the
theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as
unexplainable."  Unexplainable mystery.  One does not know, one cannot
say.  One says, "Ah. . .   Ah .  .  ."

Words are pointers, they're not descriptions.  Tragically, people fall into
idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the
thing.  How could you get so crazy?  Can you be crazier than that?  Even
where human beings are concerned, or trees and leaves and animals, the word
is not the thing.  And you would say that, where God is concerned, the word
is one thing?  What are you talking about?  An internationally famous
scripture scholar attended this course in San Francisco, and he said to me,
"My God, after listening to you, I understand that I've been an idol
worshipper all my life!"  He said this openly.  "It never struck me that I
had been an idol worshipper.  My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was
a mental idol."  These are the more dangerous idol worshippers.  They use a
very subtle substance, the mind, to produce their God.

What I'm leading you to is the following: awareness of reality around
you.  Awareness means to watch, to observe what is going on within you and
around you.  "Going on" is pretty accurate: Trees, grass, flowers, animals,
rock, all of reality is moving.  One observes it, one watches it.  How
essential it is for the human being not just to observe himself or herself,
but to watch all of reality.  Are you imprisoned by your concepts?  Do you
want to break out of your prison?  Then look; observe; spend hours
observing.  Watching what?  Anything.  The faces of people, the shapes of
trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow.  Get in
touch with things, look at them.  Hopefully you will then break out of
these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and
our words have imposed on us.  Hopefully we will see.  What will we
see?  This thing that we choose to call reality, whatever is beyond words
and concepts.  This is a spiritual exercise-connected with
spirituality-connected with breaking out of your cage, out of the
imprisonment of the concepts and words.

How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a
child.  This doesn't mean you should drop your concepts totally; they're
very precious.  Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive
function.  Thanks to them we develop our intelligence.  We're invited, not
to become children, but to become like children.  We do have to fall from a
stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an
"I" and a "me" through these concepts.  But then we need to return to
paradise.  We need to be redeemed again.  We need to put off the old man,
the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the state of the child
but without being a child.  When we start off in life, we look at reality
with wonder, but it isn't the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it's the
formless wonder of the child.  Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom,
as we develop language and words and concepts.  Then hopefully, if we're
lucky, we'll return to wonder again.

Something more about words.  I said to you earlier that words are
limited.  There is more I have to add.  There are some words that
correspond to nothing.  For instance, I'm an Indian.  Now, let's suppose
that I'm a prisoner of war in Pakistan, and they say to me, "Well, today
we're going to take you to the frontier, and you're going to take a look at
your country."  So they bring me to the frontier, and I look across the
border, and I think, "Oh, my country, my beautiful country.  I see villages
and trees and hills.  This is my own, my native land!"  After a while one
of the guards says, "Excuse me, we've made a mistake here.  We have to move
up another ten miles."  What was I reacting to?  Nothing.  I kept focusing
on a word, India.  But trees are not India; trees are trees.  In fact,
there are no frontiers or boundaries.  They were put there by the human
mind; generally by stupid, avaricious politicians.  My country was one
country once upon a time; it's four now.  If we don't watch out it might be
six.  Then we'll have six flags, six armies.  That's why you'll never catch
me saluting a flag.  I abhor all national flags because they are
idols.  What are we saluting?  I salute humanity, not a flag with an army
around it.

Flags are in the heads of people.  In any case, there are thousands of
words in our vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all.  But do
they trigger emotions in us! So we begin to see things that are not
there.  We actually see Indian mountains when they don't exist, and we
actually see Indian people who also don't exist.  Your American
condi-tioning exists.  My Indian conditioning exists.  But that's not a
very happy thing.  Nowadays, in Third World countries, we talk a great deal
about "inculturation."  What is this thing called "culture"?  I'm not very
happy with the word.  Does it mean you'd like to do something because you
were conditioned to do it?  That you'd like to feel something because you
were conditioned to feel it?  Isn't that being mechanical?  Imagine an
American baby that is adopted by a Russian couple and taken to Russia.  It
has no notion that it was born American.  It's brought up talking Russian;
it lives and dies for Mother Russia; it hates Americans.  The child is
stamped with his own culture; it's steeped in its own literature.  It looks
at the world through the eyes of its culture.  Now, if you want to wear
your culture the way you wear your clothes, that's fine.  The Indian woman
would wear a sari and the American woman would wear something else, the
Japanese woman would wear her kimono.  But nobody identifies herself with
the clothes.  But you do want to wear your culture more intently.  You
become proud of your culture.  They teach you to be proud of it.  Let me
put this as forcefully as possible.  There's this Jesuit friend of mine who
said to me, "Anytime I see a beggar or a poor person, I cannot not give
this person alms.  I got that from my mother."  His mother would offer a
meal to any poor person who passed by.  I said to him, "Joe, what you have
is not a virtue; what you have is a compulsion, a good one from the point
of view of the beggar, but a compulsion nonetheless."

I want to say one more thing about our perception of reality.  Let me put
it in the form of an analogy.  The President of the United States has to
get feedback from the citizens.  The Pope in Rome has to get feedback from
the whole Church.  There are literally millions of items that could be fed
to them, but they could hardly take all of them in, much less digest
them.  So they have people whom they trust to make abstracts, summarize
things, monitor, filter; in the end, some of it gets to their desk.  Now,
this is what's happening to us.  From every pore or living cell of our
bodies and from all our senses we are getting feedback from reality.  But
we are filtering things out constantly.  Who's doing the filtering?  Our
conditioning?  Our culture?  Our programming?  The way we were taught to
see things and to experience them?  Even our language can be a
filter.  There is so much filtering going on that sometimes you won't see
things that are there.  You only have to look at a paranoid person who's
always feeling threatened by something that isn't there, who's constantly
interpreting reality in terms of certain experiences of the past or certain
conditioning that he or she has had.

But there's another demon, too, who's doing the filtering.  It's called
attachment, desire, craving.  The root of sorrow is craving.  Craving
distorts arid destroys perception.  Fears and desires haunt us.  Samuel
Johnson said, "The knowledge that he is to swing from a scaffold within a
week wonderfully concentrates a man's mind."  You blot out everything else
and concentrate only on the fear, or desire, or craving.  In many ways we
were drugged when we were young.  We were brought up to need people.  For
what?  For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause -- for what they
called success.  Those are words that do not correspond to reality.  They
are conventions, things that are in-vented, but we don't realize that they
don't correspond to reality.  What is success?  It is what one group
decided is a good thing.  Another group will decide the same thing is
bad.  What is good in Washington might be considered bad in a Carthusian
monastery.  Success in a political circle might be considered failure in
some other circles.  These are conventions.  But we treat them like
realities, don't we?  When we were young, we were programmed to
unhappiness.  They taught us that in order to be happy you need money,
success, a beautiful or handsome partner in life, a good job, friendship,
spirituality, God -- you name it.  Unless you get these things, you're not
going to be happy, we were told.  Now, that is what I call an
attachment.  An attachment is a belief that without something you are not
going to be happy.  Once you get convinced of that -- and it gets into our
subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being -- you are
finished.  "How could I be happy unless I have good health?" you say.  But
I'll tell you something.  I have met people dying of cancer who were
happy.  But how could they be happy if they knew they were going to
die?  But they were.  "How could I be happy if I don't have money?"  One
person has a million dollars in the bank, and he feels insecure; the other
person has practically no money, but he doesn't seem to feel any insecurity
at all.  He was programmed differently, that's all.  Useless to exhort the
first person about what to do; he needs understanding.  Exhortations are of
no great help.  You need to understand that you've been programmed; it's a
false belief.  See it as false, see it as a fantasy.  What are people doing
all through their lives?  They're busy fighting; fight, fight,
fight.  That's what they call survival.  When the average American says he
or she is making a living, it isn't a living they're making, oh no!  They
have much more than they need to live.  Come to my country and you'll see
that.  You don't need all those cars to live.  You don't need a television
set to live.  You don't need makeup to live.  You don't need all those
clothes to live.  But try to convince the average American of
this.  They've been brainwashed; they've been programmed.  So they work and
strive to get the desired object that will make them happy.  Listen to this
pathetic story-your story, my story, everybody's story: "Until I get this
object (money, friendship, anything) I'm not going to be happy; I've got to
strive to get it and then when I've got it, I've got to strive to keep
it.  I get a temporary thrill.  Oh, I'm so thrilled, I've got it!"  But how
long does that last?  A few minutes, a few days at the most.  When you get
your brand-new car, how long does the thrill last?  Until your next
attachment is threatened!

The only way to change is by changing your understanding.  But what does it
mean to understand?  How do we go about it?  Consider how we're enslaved by
various attachments; we're striving to rearrange the world so that we can
keep these attachments, because the world is a constant threat to them.  I
fear that a friend may stop loving me; he or she may turn to somebody
else.  I have to keep making myself attractive because I have to get this
other person.  Somebody brainwashed me into thinking I need his or her
love.  But I really don't.  I don't need anybody's love; I just need to get
in touch with reality.  I need to break out of this prison of mine, this
programming, this conditioning, these false beliefs, these fantasies; I
need to break out into reality.  Reality is lovely; it is an absolute
delight.  Eternal life is now.  We're surrounded by it, like the fish in
the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all.  We're too distracted
with this attachment.  Temporarily, the world rearranges itself to suit our
attachment, so we say, "Yeah, great! My team won!"  But hang on; it'll
change; you'll be depressed tomorrow.  Why do we keep doing this?

Do this little exercise for a few minutes: Think of something or someone
you are attached to; in other words, something or someone without which or
without whom you think you are not going to be happy.  It could be your
job, your career, your profession, your friend, your money, whatever.  And
say to this object or person, "I really do not need you to be happy.  I'm
only deluding myself in the belief that without you I will not be
happy.  But I really don't need you for my happiness; I can be happy
without you.  You are not my happiness, you are not my joy."  If your
attachment is a person, he or she is not going to be very happy to hear you
say this, but go ahead anyway.  You can say it in the secrecy of your
heart.  In any case, you'll be making contact with the truth; you'll be
smashing through a fantasy.  Happiness is a state of non-illusion, of
dropping the illusion.

Or you could try another exercise: Think of a time when you were
heartbroken and thought you would never be happy again (your husband died,
your wife died, your best friend deserted you, you lost your money).  What
happened?  Time went on, and if you managed to pick up another attachment
or managed to find somebody else you were attracted to or something else
you were attracted to, what happened to the old attachment?  You didn't
really need it to be happy, did you?  That should have taught you, but we
never learn.  We're programmed; we're conditioned.  How liberating it is
not to depend emotionally on anything.  If you could get one second's
experience of that, you'd be breaking through your prison and getting a
glimpse of the sky.  Someday, maybe, you will even fly.

I was afraid to say this, but I talked to God, and I told Him that I don't
need Him.  My initial reaction was: "This is so contrary to everything that
I've been brought up with."  Now, some people want to make an exception of
their attachment to God.  They say, "If God is the God that I think He
ought to be, He's not going to like it when I give up my attachment to
Him!"  All right, if you think that unless you get God you're not going to
be happy, then this "God" you're thinking of has nothing to do with the
real God.  You're thinking of a dream state; you're thinking of your
concept.  Sometimes you have to get rid of "God" in order to find
God.  Lots of mystics tell us that.

The heart in love remains soft and sensitive.  But when you're hell-bent on
getting this or the other thing, you become ruthless, hard, and
insensitive.  How can you love people when you need people?  You can only
use them.  If I need you to make me happy, I've got to use you, I've got to
manipulate you, I've got to find ways and means of winning you.  I cannot
let you be free.  I can only love people when I have emptied my life of
people.  When I die to the need for people, then I'm right in the
desert.  In the beginning it feels awful, it feels lonely, but if you can
take it for a while, you'll suddenly discover that it isn't lonely at
all.  It is solitude, it is aloneness, and the desert begins to
flower.  Then at last you'll know what love is, what God is, what reality
is.  But in the beginning giving up the drug can be tough, unless you have
a very keen understanding or unless you have suffered enough.  It's a great
thing to have suffered.  Only then can you get sick of it.  You can make
use of suffering to end suffering.  Most people simply go on
suffering.  That explains the conflict I sometimes have between the role of
spiritual director and that of therapist.  A therapist says, "Let's ease
the suffering."  The spiritual director says, "Let her suffer, she'll get
sick of this way of relating to people and she'll finally decide to break
out of this prison of emotional dependence on others."  Shall I offer a
palliative or remove a cancer?  It's not easy to decide.

A person slams a book on the table in disgust.  Let him keep slamming it on
the table.  Don't pick up the book for him and tell him it's all
right.  Spirituality is awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness,
awareness, awareness.  When your mother got angry with you, she didn't say
there was something wrong with her, she said there was something wrong with
you; otherwise she wouldn't have been angry.  Well, I made the great
discovery that if you are angry, Mother, there's something wrong with
you.  So you'd better cope with your anger.  Stay with it and cope with
it.  It's not mine.  Whether there's something wrong with me or not, I'll
examine that independently of your anger.  I'm not going to be influenced
by your anger.

The funny thing is that when I can do this without feeling any negativity
toward another, I can be quite objective about myself, too.  Only a very
aware person can refuse to pick up the guilt and anger, can say, "You're
having a tantrum.  Too bad.  I don't feel the slightest desire to rescue
you anymore, and I refuse to feel guilty."  I'm not going to hate myself
for anything I've done.  That's what guilt is.  I'm not going to give
myself a bad feeling and whip myself for anything I have done, either right
or wrong.  I'm ready to analyze it, to watch it, and say, "Well, if I did
wrong, it was in unawareness."  Nobody does wrong in awareness.  That's why
theologians tell us very beautifully that Jesus could do no wrong.  That
makes very good sense to me, because the enlightened person can do no
wrong.  The enlightened person is free.  Jesus was free and because he was
free, he couldn't do any wrong.  But since you can do wrong, you're not free.

There is a difference between knowledge and awareness, between information
and awareness.  I just said to you that one cannot do evil in
awareness.  But one can do evil in knowledge or information, when you know
something is bad.  "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do."  I would translate that as "They're not aware of what they are
doing."  Paul says he is the greatest of sinners because he persecuted the
Church of Christ.  But, he adds, I did it unawares.  Or if they had been
aware that they were crucifying the Lord of Glory, they would never have
done so.  Or: "The time will come when they will persecute you and they
think they are doing a service to God."  They aren't aware.  They're caught
up in information and knowledge.  Thomas Aquinas puts it nicely when he
says, "Every time someone sins, they're sinning under the guise of
good."  They're blinding themselves; they're seeing something as good even
though they know it is bad; they're rationalizing because they're seeking
something under the pretext of good.

Someone gave me two situations in which she found it difficult to be
aware.  She was in a service industry where many people were lined up, many
phones were ringing, and she was alone and there were distractions coming
from a lot of uptight, angry people.  She found it extremely difficult to
maintain serenity and calm.  The other situation was when she was driving
in traffic, with horns blowing and people shouting four-letter words.  She
asked me whether eventually that nervousness would dissipate and she could
remain at peace.

Did you pick up the attachment there?   Peace.  Her attachment to peace and
calm.  She was saying, "Unless I'm peaceful, I won't be happy."  Did it
ever occur to you that you could be happy in tensions?   Before
enlightenment, I used to be depressed, after enlightenment, I continue to
be depressed.  You don't make a goal out of relaxation and
sensitivity.  Have you ever heard of people who get tense trying to
relax?   If one is tense, one simply observes one's tension.  You will
never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself.  The harder you
try to change yourself, the worse it gets.  You are called upon to be
aware.  Get the feel of that jangling telephone; get the feel of jarred
nerves; get the sensation of the steering wheel in the car.  In other
words, come to reality, and let tension or the calmness take care of
itself.  As a matter of fact, you will have to let them take care of
themselves because you'll be too preoccupied with getting in touch with
reality.  Step by step, let whatever happens happen.  Real change will come
when it is brought about, not by your ego, but by reality.  Awareness
releases reality to change you.

In awareness you change, but you've got to experience it.  At this point
you're just taking my word for it.  Perhaps also you've got a plan to
become aware.  Your ego, in its own cunning way, is trying to push you into
awareness.  Watch it!  You'll meet with resistance; there will be
trouble.  When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can
spot the mild anxiety.  They want to be awake, to find out if they're
really awake or not.  That's part of asceticism, not awareness.  It sounds
strange in a culture where we've been trained to achieve goals, to get
somewhere, but in fact there's nowhere to go because you're there
already.  The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: "The day you cease to
travel, you will have arrived."  Your attitude should be: "I want to be
aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens
happen; if I'm awake, fine, and if I'm asleep, fine."  The moment you make
a goal out of it and attempt to get it, you're seeking ego glorification,
ego promotion.  You want the good feeling that you've made it.  When you do
"make it," you won't know.  Your left hand won't know what your right hand
is doing.  "Lord, when did we do this?   We had no awareness."  Charity is
never so lovely as when one has lost consciousness that one is practicing
charity.  "You mean I helped you?   I was enjoying myself I was just doing
my dance.  It helped you, that's wonderful.  Congratulations to you.  No
credit to me."

When you attain, when you are aware, increasingly you will not be bothered
about labels like "awake" or "asleep."  One of my difficulties here is to
arouse your curiosity but not your spiritual greed.  Let's come awake, it's
going to be wonderful.  After a while, it doesn't matter; one is aware,
because one lives.  The unaware life is not worth living.  And you will
leave pain to take care of itself.

In my country, lots of men grow up with the belief that women are
cattle.  "I married her," they say.  "She's my possession."  Are these men
to blame?  Get ready for a shock:  They aren't.  Just as many Americans are
not to blame for the way they view Russians.  Their glasses or perceptions
simply have been dyed a certain color, and there they are; that's the color
through which they look at the world.  What does it take to make them real,
to make them aware that they're looking at the world through colored
glasses?  There is no salvation till they have seen their basic prejudice.

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished.  No
reality fits an ideology.  Life is beyond that.  That is why people are
always searching for a meaning to life.  But life has no meaning; it cannot
have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes
sense to the mind.  Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into
something that destroys the sense you made.  Meaning is only found when you
go beyond meaning.  Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery
and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

I don't say that adoration isn't important, but I do say that doubt is
infinitely more important than adoration.  Everywhere people are searching
for objects to adore, but I don't find people awake enough in their
attitudes and convictions.  How happy we would be if terrorists would adore
their ideology less and question more.  However, we don't like to apply
that to ourselves; we think we're all right and the terrorists are
wrong.  But a terrorist to you is a martyr to the other side.

Loneliness is when you're missing people, aloneness is when you're enjoying
yourself.  Remember that quip of George Bernard Shaw.  He was at one of
those awful cocktail parties, where nothing gets said.  Someone asked him
if he was enjoying himself.  He answered, "It's the only thing I am
enjoying here."  You never enjoy others when you are enslaved to
them.  Community is not formed by a set of slaves, by people demanding that
other people make them happy.  Community is formed by emperors and
princesses.  You're an emperor, not a beggar; you're a princess, not a
beggar.  There's no begging bowl in a true community.  There's no clinging,
no anxiety, no fear, no hangover, no possessiveness, no demands.  Free
people form community, not slaves.  This is such a simple truth, but it has
been drowned out by a whole culture, including religious
culture.  Religious culture can be very manipulative if you don't watch out.

Some people see awareness as a high point, a plateau, beyond experiencing
every moment as it is.  That's making a goal out of awareness.  But with
true awareness there's nowhere to go, nothing to achieve.  How do we get to
this awareness?  Through awareness.  When people say they really want to
experience every moment, they're really talking awareness, except for that
"wanting."  You don't want to experience awareness; you do or you don't.

A friend of mine has just gone to Ireland.  He told me that though he's an
American citizen he's entitled to an Irish passport and was getting one
because he is scared to travel abroad on an American passport.  If
terrorists walk in and say, "Let me see your passport," he wants to be able
to say, "I'm Irish."  But when people sit next to him on the plane, they
don't want to see labels; they want to taste and experience this person, as
he really is.  How many people spend their lives not eating food but eating
the menu?  A menu is only an indication of something that's available.  You
want to eat the steak, not the words.