“When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness. Wakefulness, happiness – call it what you wish, is the state of non-delusion, where you can see things not as YOU are, but as THEY are, insofar as this is possible for a human being. To drop illusions, to see things, to see reality.
It is that addition that makes you unhappy. I repeat: You have added something…a negative reaction in you. Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction. You have added something by your reaction. And if you examine what you have added, there is always an illusion there, there’s a demand, an expectation, a craving. Always.
Examples of illusions abound. But as you begin to move ahead on this path, you’ll discover them for yourself. For instance, the illusion, the error of thinking that, by changing the exterior world, YOU will change. You do not change if you merely change your exterior world. It’s like imaging that you change your handwriting by changing your pen. Or that you change your capacity to think by changing your hat.”
Anthony DeMello, S.J., in “Awareness”
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Jeff Maziarek, author of Spirituality Simplified and Codi’s Journey, launched Pondercentral.com in April 2007 as a Web-based forum for “PONDER on THIS,” a series of weekday inspirational email messages he began sending to subscribers in March 1999. A FREE service since its inception, “PONDER on THIS” provides subscribers with meaningful content to assist them on their individual paths of spiritual growth. In addition, it benefits subscribers, authors, and publishers by including links to Amazon.com where subscribers can learn more about the book being quoted, and also purchase it.
