Story Time: A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who’s that?" he asked.
"That’s the eagle, the king of the birds, " said his neighbor.
"He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth--we’re chickens."
So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.
Intro: This story in the book instantly captured my attention & I borrowed the book. I could relate to the eagle-who-lived-like-a-chicken, bcos I had not woken up to realize who I am. With few pages of repeated reading ( you cant read it in a hurry, as at every sentence you have to stop to take home something!) I slowly began to see my erstwhile thoughts being challenged & most often changed. This book is a psycho-spiritual roller-coasting super thriller!
Book Contents : The book touches upon varied topics/chapters like :
On waking up
On wanting happiness
Is renunciation the solution
Listen & unlearn
Whats on your mind
Good, bad or lucky
Our illusion about others
Self observation
The illusion of rewards
Finding yourself
Stripping down to the “I”
Negative feeling towards others
How happiness happens
Fear – the root of violence
Awareness & contact with reality
Good religion – the antethesis of awareness
Obstacles to happiness
Four steps to wisdom
All’s right with the world
Sleepwalking
Writing Style: The book is wriiten in a way the likens it to a transcript of a audio talk. Feels the author is talking to you direct. One would imagine the contents are a lot abstract, but thanks to the storyteller he is, you rarely have to read 2 pages on the trot without a short story/anecdote – most of them making u smile. As you read through the book, one is exposed to newer ways of explaining the same old things!
About the Author: Fr. Anthony De Mello was a Jesuit priest, counselor, psychotherapist from Mumbai. He & his writings were much ahead of his time. He died young, but has left behind enough ‘wisdom’ that a university in west has a dedicated study centre for spirituality as seen by him. His other books include “Walking on water”, “way to love”, “one minute wisdom”, “one minute nonsense”, “the song of a bird” etc
Samples & excerpts: The book is small but the thoughts it provokes is like repeating tsunami. I will therefore leave you with some nice quotations & excerpts from the book.
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.
In today’s fear-based society, you may have forgotten what it feels like to be full of love and joy. "Happiness is our natural state, " He explains. "Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture."
"Awareness comes when we can step far enough back from our selves to drop our illusions and fantasies and reclaim the grace and magnificence of our creation.
If you take the time to step away from your ego, you’ll come to the realization that "Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality. Stop trying to change the other person. We spend all our time and energy trying to change external circumstances, trying to change our spouses, our bosses, our friends, our enemies, and everybody else. No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy.
Serenity
"Are there ways for gauging one’s spiritual strength?"
"Many."
"Give us one."
"Find out how often you become disturbed in the course of a single day."
You know you are a Mystic when you wake up one day and ask, am I crazy or or they?
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
I heard a story about this gentleman who knocks on his son’s door. "Jaime, " he says, "wake up!" Jaime answers, "I don’t want to get up, Papa." The father shouts, "Get up, you have to go to school." Jaime says, "I don’t want to go to school." "Why not?" asks the father. "Three reasons, " says Jaime. First, because it’s so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school. And the father says, "Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the headmaster." Wake up! Wake up! You’ve grown up. You’re too big to be asleep. Wake up! Stop playing with your toys.
Waking up is unpleasant, you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It is irritating to be woken up.
There’s nothing so delightful as being aware. Would you rather live in darkness? Would you rather act and not be aware of your actions, talk and not be aware of your words? Would you rather listen to people and not be aware of what you’re hearing, or see things and not be aware of what you’re looking at? the great Socrates said, "The unaware life is not worth living."
Most people don’t live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts--generally somebody else’s--mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions.
Do you want to see how mechanical you really are? "My, that’s a lovely shirt you’re wearing." You feel good hearing that. For a shirt, for heaven’s sake! You feel proud of yourself when you hear that. People come over to my center in India and they say, "What a lovely place, these lovely trees" (for which I’m not responsible at all), "this lovely climate." And already I’m feeling good, until I catch myself feeling good, and I say, "Hey, can you imagine anything as stupid as that?" I’m not responsible for those trees; I wasn’t responsible for choosing the location. I didn’t order the weather; it just happened. But "me" got in there, so I’m feeling good. I’m feeling good about "my" culture and "my" nation. How stupid can you get?
thanks for reading.