Inevitable
“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.
Now the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.You will say, “Can’t I keep just one attachment?” Of course. You can keep as many as you want. But for each attachment you pay a price in lost happiness. Think of this: The nature of attachments is such, that even if you satisfy many of them in the course of a single day, the one attachment that was not satisfied will prey upon your mind.
If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else. “I know… an overwhelming passion for it.” “No. An unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong.
When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding... you can be yourself. Relaxed. You'll no longer be driving with your brakes on.
Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.
The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It's called self-observation.
You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.
What’s the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?”
-Anthony de Mello