In making the distinction between "I" and "me," it's a great help to
disidentify what is going on.  Let me give you an example of this kind of
thing.  A young Jesuit priest comes to see me; he's a lovely,
extraordinary, gifted, talented, charming, lovable man -- everything.  But
he had a strange kind of a kink.  With employees he was a terror.  He was
even known to assault them.  It nearly became a matter for the
police.  Whenever he was put in charge of the grounds, the school, or
whatever, this problem would keep coming up.  He made a thirty-day retreat
in what we Jesuits call a Tertianship, where he meditated day after day on
the patience and love of Jesus for those who were underprivileged,
etc.  But I knew it wasn't going to have an effect.  Anyway, he went home
and was better for about three or four months.  (Somebody said about most
retreats that we begin them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit, and we end as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever
shall be, world without end.  Amen.) After that, he was right back to
square one.  So he came to see me.  I was very busy at the time.  Though he
had come from another city in India, I couldn't see him.  So I said, "I'm
going for my evening walk; if you want to come with me on the walk, that's
fine, but I don't have any other time."  So we went for a walk.  I'd known
him before, and as we were walking, I had a strange feeling.  When I get
one of these strange feelings, I generally check it out with the person in
question.  So I said, "I have a strange feeling that you're hiding
something from me.  Are you?"  He became indignant.  He said, "What do you
mean, hiding?  Do you think I'd undertake this long journey and come to ask
for your time in order to hide something?"  I said, "Well, it's a funny
feeling I had, that's all; I thought I should check with you."  We walked
on.  We have a lake not far from where I live.  I remember the scene
distinctly.  He said, "Could we sit down somewhere?"  I said, "O.K."  We
sat on a low wall that skirts the lake.  He said, "You're right.  I am
hiding something from you."  And with that he burst into tears.  He said,
"I'm going to tell you something I've never said to anybody since I became
a Jesuit.  My father died when I was very young, and my mother became a
servant.  Her job was to clean lavatories and toilets and bathrooms, and
sometimes she'd work for sixteen hours a day to get the wherewithal to
support us.  I'm so ashamed of that that I've hidden it from everybody and
I continue taking revenge, irrationally, on her and the whole servant
class."  The feeling got transferred. No one could make sense of-why this
charming man was doing this, but the moment he saw that, there was never
any trouble again, never.  He was all right.

One red-letter day in my life occurred in India.  It was a great day,
really, the day after I was ordained.  I sat in a confessional.  We had a
very saintly Jesuit priest in our parish, a Spaniard, whom I had known even
before I went to the Jesuit novitiate.  The day before I left for the
novitiate, I thought I'd better make a clean breast of everything so that
when I got to the novitiate I'd be nice and clean and wouldn't have to tell
the novice master anything.  This old Spanish priest would have crowds of
people lined up at his confessional; he had a violet-colored handkerchief
which he covered his eyes with, and he'd mumble something and give you a
penance and send you away.  He'd only met me a couple of times, but he'd
call me Antonie.  So I stood in line, and when my turn came, I tried
changing my voice as I made my confession.  He listened to me patiently,
gave me my penance, absolved me, and then said, "Antonie, when are you
going to the novitiate?"

Well, anyway, I went to this parish the day after my ordination.  And the
old priest says to me, "Do you want to hear confessions?"  I said, "All
right."  He said, "Go and sit in my confessional."  I thought, "My, I'm a
holy man.  I'm going to sit in his confessional."  I heard confessions for
three hours.  It was Palm Sunday and we had the Easter crowd coming in.  I
came out depressed, not from what I had heard, because I had been led to
expect that, and, having some inkling of what was going on in my own heart,
I was shocked by nothing.  You know what depressed me?  The realization
that I was giving them these little pious platitudes: "Now pray to the
Blessed Mother, she loves you," and "Remember that God is on your
side."  Were these pious platitudes any cure for cancer?  And this is a
cancer I'm dealing with, the lack of awareness and reality.  So I swore a
mighty oath to myself that day: "I'll learn, I'll learn, so it will not be
said of me when it is all over, 'Father, what you said to me was absolutely
true but totally useless.'"

Awareness, insight.  When you become an expert (and you'll soon become an
expert) you don't need to take a course in psychology.  As you begin to
observe yourself, to watch yourself, to pick up those negative feelings,
you'll find your own way of explaining it.  And you'll notice the
change.  But then you'll have to deal with the big villain, and that
villain is self-condemnation, self-hatred, self-dissatisfaction.

How would I describe love?  I decided to give you one of the meditations
I'm writing in a new book of mine.  I'll read it to you slowly; you
meditate on it as we go along, because I've got it put down in short form
here so I can get it done in three or four minutes; otherwise it would take
me half an hour.  It's a comment on a gospel sentence.  I had been thinking
of another reflection, from Plato: "One cannot make a slave of a free
person, for a free person is free even in prison."  It's like another
gospel sentence: "If a person makes you go one mile, go two."  You may
think you've made a slave out of me by putting a load on my back, but you
haven't.  If a person is trying to change external reality by being out of
prison in order to be free, he is a prisoner indeed.  Freedom lies not in
external circumstances; freedom resides in the heart.  When you have
attained wisdom, who can enslave you?  Anyhow, listen to the gospel
sentence I had in mind earlier: "He sent the people away, and after doing
that he went up to the mountain to pray alone.  It grew late and he was
there all by himself."  That s what love is all about.  Has it ever
occurred to you that you can only love when you are alone?  What does it
mean to love?  It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really
is, not as you imagine it to be.  And to give it the response it
deserves.  You can hardly be said to love what you do not even see.  And
what prevents us from seeing?  Our conditioning.  Our concepts, our
categories, our prejudices, our projections, the labels that we have drawn
from our cultures and our past experiences.  Seeing is the most arduous
thing that a human can undertake, for it calls for a disciplined, alert
mind.  But most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than
take the trouble to see each person, each thing in its present moment of
freshness.

Now you need awareness and you need nourishment.  You need good, healthy
nourishment.  Learn to enjoy the solid food of life.  Good food, good wine,
good water.  Taste them.  Lose your mind and come to your senses.  That's
good, healthy nourishment.  The pleasures of the senses and the pleasures
of the mind.  Good reading, when you enjoy a good book.  Or a really good
discussion, or thinking.  It's marvelous.  Unfortunately, people have gone
crazy, and they're getting more and more addicted because they do not know
how to enjoy the lovely things of life.  So they're going in for greater
and greater artificial stimulants.
In the 1970s, President Carter appealed to the American people to go in for
austerity.  I thought to myself: He shouldn't tell them to be austere, he
should really tell them to enjoy things.  Most of them have lost their
capacity for enjoyment.  I really believe that most people in affluent
countries have lost that capacity.  They've got to have more and more
expensive gadgets; they can't enjoy the simple things of life.  Then I walk
into places where they have all the most marvelous music, and you get these
records at a discount, they're all stacked up, but I never hear anybody
listening to them -- no time, no time, no time.  They're guilty, no time to
enjoy life.  They're overworked, go, go, go.  If you really enjoy life and
the simple pleasures of the senses, you'd be amazed.  You'd develop that
extraordinary discipline of the animal.  An animal will never
overeat.  Left in its natural habitat, it will never be overweight.  It
will never drink or eat anything that is not good for its health.  You
never find an animal smoking.  It always exercises as much as it needs --
watch your cat after it's had its breakfast, look how it relaxes.  And see
how it springs into action, look at the suppleness of its limbs and the
aliveness of its body.  We've lost that.  We're lost in our minds, in our
ideas and ideals and so on, and its always go, go, go.  And we've got an
inner self-conflict which animals don't have.  And we're always condemning
ourselves and making ourselves feel guilty.  You know what I'm talking
about.  I could have said of myself what one Jesuit friend said to me some
years ago: Take that plate of sweets away, because in front of a plate of
sweets or chocolates, I lose my freedom.  That was true of me, too; I lost
my freedom in front of all kinds of things, but no more!  I'm satisfied
with very little and I enjoy it intensely.  When you have enjoyed something
intensely, you need very little.  It's like people who are busy planning
their vacation; they spend months planning it, and they get to the spot,
and they're all anxious about their reservations for flying back.  But
they're taking pictures Al right, and later they'll show you pictures in an
album, of places they never saw but only photographed.  That's a symbol of
modem life.  I cannot warn you enough about this kind of asceticism.  Slow
down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive.  If you
want a royal road to mysticism, sit down quietly and listen to all the
sounds around you.  You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them
all.  Oh, you'll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses come
unclogged.  That is extremely important for the process of change.

I've often said to people that the way to really live is to die.  The
passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave.  Imagine that
you're lying in your coffin.  Any posture you like.  In India we put them
in cross-legged.  Sometimes they're carried that way to the burning
ground.  Sometimes, though, they're lying flat.  So imagine you're lying
flat and you're dead.  Now look at your problems from that
viewpoint.  Changes everything, doesn't it?

What a lovely, lovely meditation.  Do it every day if you have the
time.  It's unbelievable, but you'll come alive.  I have a meditation about
that in a book of mine, Wellsprings.  You see the body decomposing, then
bones, then dust.  Every time I talk about this, people say, "How
disgusting!"  But what's so disgusting about it?  It's reality, for
heaven's sake.  But many of you don't want to see reality.  You don't want
to think of death.  People don't live, most of you, you don't live, you're
just keeping the body alive.  That's not life.  You're not living until it
doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die.  At that
point you live.  When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.  But if
you're protecting your life, you're dead.  If you're sitting up there in
the attic and I say to you, "Come on down!"  and you say, "Oh no, I've read
about people going down stairs.  They slip and they break their necks; it's
too dangerous."  Or I can't get you to cross the street because you say,
"You know how many people get run over when they cross the street?"  If I
can't get you to cross a street, how can I get you to cross a
continent?  And if I can't get you to peep out of your little narrow
beliefs and convictions and look at another world, you're dead, you're
completely dead; life has passed you by.  You're sitting in your little
prison, where you're frightened; you're going to lose your God, your
religion, your friends, all kinds of things.  Life is for the gambler, it
really is.  That's what Jesus was saying.  Are you ready to risk it?  Do
you know when you're ready to risk it?  When you've discovered that, when
you know that this thing that people call life is not really life.  People
mistakenly think that living is keeping the body alive.  So love the
thought of death, love it.  Go back to it again and again.  Think of the
loveliness of that corpse, of that skeleton, of those bones crumbling till
there's only a handful of dust.  From there on, what a relief, what a
relief.  Some of you probably don't know what I'm talking about at this
point; you're too frightened to think of it.  But it's such a relief when
you can look back on life from that perspective.

If we really dropped illusions for what they can give us or deprive us of, we would be alert.  The consequence of not doing this is terrifying and unescapable.  We lose our capacity to love.  If you wish to love, you must learn to see again.  And if you wish to see, you must learn to give up your drug.  It's as simple as that.  Give up your dependency.  Tear away the tentacles of society that have enveloped and suffocated your being.  You must drop them.  Externally, everything will go on as before, but though you will continue to be in the world, you will no longer be of it.  In your heart, you will now be free at last, if utterly alone.  Your dependence on your drug will die.  You don't have to go to the desert; you're right in the middle of people; you're enjoying them immensely.  But they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable.  That's what aloneness means.  In this solitude your dependence dies.  The capacity to love is born.  One no longer sees others as means of satisfying one's addiction.  Only someone who has attempted this knows the terrors of the process.  It's like inviting yourself to die.  It's like asking the poor drug addict to give up the only happiness he has ever known.  How to replace it with the taste of bread and fruit and the clean taste of the morning air, the sweetness of the water of the mountain stream?  While he is struggling with his withdrawal symptoms and the emptiness he experiences within himself now that his drug is gone, nothing can fill the emptiness except his drug.  Can you imagine a life in which you refuse to enjoy or take pleasure in a single word of appreciation or to rest your head on anyone's shoulder for support?  Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore.  You refuse to need any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call anyone your own.  The birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through life.  If you ever get to this state, you will at last know what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire.  Every word there is measured.  To see at last with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire.  You will know what it means to love.  But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone.

How would you ever get there?  By a ceaseless awareness, by the infinite patience and compassion you would have for a drug addict.  By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug.  What good things?  The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and intimacy with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not depend emotionally but whose company you enjoy.  It will also help if you take on activities that you can do with your whole being, activities that you so love to do that while you're engaged in them success, recognition, and approval simply do not mean a thing to you.  It will help, too, if you return to nature.  Send the crowds away, go up to the mountains, and silently commune with trees and flowers and animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars.  I've told you what a spiritual exercise it is to gaze at things, to be aware of things around you.  Hopefully, the words will drop, the concepts will drop, and you will see, you will make contact with reality.  That is the cure for loneliness.  Generally, we seek to cure our loneliness through emotional dependence on people, through gregariousness and noise.  That is no cure.  Get back to things, get back to nature, go up in the mountains.  Then you will know that your heart has brought you to the vast desert of solitude, there is no one there at your side, absolutely no one.

At first this will seem unbearable.  But it is only because you are unaccustomed to aloneness.  If you manage to stay there for a while, the desert will suddenly blossom into love.  Your heart will burst into song.  And it will be springtime forever; the drug will be out; you're free.  Then you will understand what freedom is, what love is, what happiness is, what reality is, what truth is, what God is.  You will see, you will know beyond concepts and conditioning, addictions and attachments.  Does that make sense?

I began by saying that people are asleep, dead.  Dead people running governments, dead people running big business, dead people educating others; come alive!  Worship must help this, or else it's useless.  And increasingly -- you know this and so do I -- we're losing the youth everywhere.  They hate us; they're not interested in having more fears and more guilts laid on them.  They're not interested in more sermons and exhortations.  But they are interested in learning about love.  How can I be happy?  How can I live?  How can I taste these marvelous things that the mystics speak of?  So that's the second thing -- understanding.  Third, don't identify.  Somebody asked me as I was coming here today, Do you ever feel low?  Boy, do I feel low every now and then.  I get my attacks.  But they don't last, they really don't.  What do I do?  First step: I don't identify.  Here comes a low feeling.  Instead of getting tense about it, instead of getting irritated with myself about it, I understand I'm feeling depressed, disappointed, or whatever.  Second step: I admit the feeling is in me, not in the other person, e.g., in the person who didn't write me a letter, not in the exterior world; it's in me.  Because as long as I think it's outside me, I feel justified in holding on to my feelings.  I can't say everybody would feel this way; in fact, only idiotic people would feel this way, only sleeping people.  Third step: I don't identify with the feeling.  I is not that feeling.  I am not lonely, I am not depressed, I am not disappointed.  Disappointment is there, one watches it.  You'd be amazed how quickly it glides away.  Anything you're aware of keeps changing; clouds keep moving.  As you do this, you also get all kinds of insights into why clouds were coming in the first place.

I've got a lovely quote here, a few sentences that I would write in gold.  I picked them up from A. S. Neils book Summerhill.  I must give you the background.  You probably know that Neill was in education for forty years.  He developed a kind of maverick school.  He took in boys and girls and just let them be free.  You want to learn to read and write, fine; you don't want to learn to read and write, fine.  You can do anything you want with your life, provided you don't interfere with the freedom of someone else.  Don't interfere with someone else's freedom; otherwise you're free.  He says that the worst ones came to him from convent school.  This was in the old days, of course.  He said it took them about six months to get over all the anger and the resentment that they had repressed.  They'd be rebelling for six months, fighting the system.  The worst was a girl who would take a bicycle and ride into town, avoiding class, avoiding school, avoiding everything.  But once they got over their rebellion, everybody wanted to learn; they even began protesting, Why don't we have class today?  But they would only take what they were interested in.  They'd be transformed.  In the beginning parents were frightened to send their children to this school; they said, How can you educate them if you don't discipline them?  You've got to teach them, guide them.  What was the secret of Neill's success?  He'd get the worst children, the ones everybody else had despaired of, and within six months they'd all be transformed.  Listen to what he said -- extraordinary words, holy words.  Every child has a god in him.  Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.  Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad tempered.  In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil.  These are amazing words coming from a man whose school in Britain is regularly inspected by people from the Ministry of Education, by any headmaster or headmistress or anyone who would care to go there.  Amazing.  It was his charisma.  You don't do this kind of thing from a blueprint; you've got to be a special kind of person.  In some of his lectures to headmasters and headmistresses he says, Come to Summerhill and you'll find that all the fruit trees are laden with fruit; nobody's taking the fruits off the trees; there's no desire to attack authority; they're well fed and there's no resentment and anger.  Come to Summerhill and you'll never find a handicapped child with a nickname (you know how cruel kids can be when someone stammers).  You'll never find anyone needling a stammerer, never.  There's no violence in those children, because no one is practicing violence on them, that's why.