I continue to get some pretty amazing emails from people who still admire and follow my brother's philosophy, now more than twenty six years after his death. Here is one such email I have received.
It is articulate and the content wholesome. Food for spiritual thought so to speak:
Reflections
On Modern Living
James
Williams
If
Anthony de Mello were alive today, what would he make of 21st
century Westernized civilizations?
Human Suffering
Mental
and emotional suffering is more prolific now, and the mass prescription of
anxiety and depression medications has done nothing to eliminate the causes of
suffering. These medications were initially designed and trialled as short-term
support mechanisms to be used in combination with therapeutic approaches, yet
nowadays therapy is skipped, and pills are prescribed and swallowed for
decades. Rather than acknowledging and fully feeling our suffering in the
moment, medical and pharmaceutical ‘ technologies’ have simply facilitated our psychological
repression and done nothing to help us master and experience the suffering of
the self.
Outside
of the medical realm, mobile ‘phone companies advertise that their services are
connecting people, yet often this is only through words on a screen instead of
heartfelt, person-to-person contact. Loneliness, heart ache, emptiness, depression,
and despair are not transformed by contact from other people using mobile
devices; they are transformed by connecting with the reality of the situation
that we have created for ourselves, fully tuning into our feelings, and then,
if need be, to act differently.
Illusory
Happiness
Comfort,
speed, entertainment, and education are more readily available in a greater
number of countries now, yet these can interfere with our ability to accurately
perceive reality. A more comfortable
home, car, or work environment does nothing to permanently change the
perception-distorting despair we feel about the inadequacy of our communication
skills in interpersonal relationships, or the failure of our business ventures.
Comfort
provides additional sensory stimulation and pleasure, yet these experiences of
pleasure are very short-lived; our underlying anxiety, depression, or tension
will resurface, and moves our awareness away from the perception of comfort
back to the distress that is begging to be experienced in that moment. Faster vehicles, speedier service, and faster
Internet download speeds may save seconds, yet they do nothing to prevent us
from wasting years living with a stressed mind, and missing out on the experience
of happiness that is available in each moment.
Even
a university education is perceived as a means to an end; a means to acquire a
‘better’ job after graduating (better than what, or who?); to get more money,
which can then purchase the distractions of “comfort, speed, [and]
entertainment,” that a higher salary can pay for. Still today, many people
equate financial wealth and material comfort with happiness; these are often
the same people taking the antidepressants and other medications. Yet happiness
cannot be acquired through external means, let alone through a pill because
happiness is our innate state.
Rather
than using education as a vehicle to fuel personal growth, and to discover how
one can serve and love the world, education has become an illusory trap. People
believe that they need to acquire higher and higher levels of education to be
able to contribute to the planet. Acquiring knowledge and degrees is no
substitute for showing the ability to love.
Entertainment and Greed
Entertainment
has become a significant distraction from experiencing the present moment. We
may choose to watch films and television programs - and even participate in
computer games - that depict graphic scenes of action, violence, drug use,
power trips, and sex, and these hook the unconscious mind into a false sense of
reality. Such forms of media can be so absorbing that we disengage our
connection with what reality truly is. Researchers have already observed
increases in stress in the human body while people watch gang violence in a
movie, and aggressive words and behaviors by on-screen characters is also known
to reinforce existing beliefs that behaving in this way, real life is
acceptable.
Entertainment
is also not bringing people together in the presence of reality; when two or
more people watch television or a film together, more often than not, each
person is watching the screen with little to no awareness of the other person’s
experience; entertainment is becoming a solitary affair, and yet it can also be
lovely by inviting meaningful and loving, present-moment engagement and
interaction between people.
On
fighting, cruelty, and greed, might Tony say that we have simply become more
technologically sophisticated, and more emotionally-aloof from the consequences
of our behaviour? Governments in certain countries continue to use false logic
and then military force to achieve their goals to acquire resources from other
lands for corporate shareholder profit. Greed has become commonplace through
lobbyist-stimulated policy loopholes, turn-a-blind-eye operating practices in
the financial sector, and institutional hierarchies rewarding the CEO or
president, while paying the worker on the ground a minimum wage.
The CEO fails
to see their interdependence on the ground-level worker, without whom, there
would be no business and no profits to earn a bonus from.
Tony probably would be unsurprised at all of the
changes that have occurred during the last 26 years since his passing. He would
maybe quote Julian of Norwich and say that: “All shall be well, and all shall
be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The reality is perhaps that society in
Western countries has made no progress in reducing human suffering during the
last 26 years, and yet in this present moment, as you read these words, all is
indeed well.
