Rediscovering Life: Awaken to Reality by Anthony de Mello

Author:Anthony de Mello [Mello, Anthony de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-98495-1
Publisher: Image
Published: 2012-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

It’s Your Programming That Causes the Upset

Now, let’s work this out concretely. Somebody broke a promise, okay? You’re upset. What do you think upset you? Broken promise? Hmm-mm. I could bring another individual here in your place who is also faced with a broken promise but is not upset. How come you got upset? Now, you were trained to think that it was the broken promise that upset you. But it wasn’t the broken promise: It was your programming. It was your training. You’ve been trained to upset yourself every time you’re faced with a broken promise.

You’re planning a picnic on Sunday and the picnic gets rained out. Where do you think the upset is—in the rain or in you? In the rain—or in your reaction to the rain? The upset feeling is not caused by the rain, but by your reaction to the rain. Someone else would react differently: no upset. If you had not made your happiness depend on its not raining, you wouldn’t react this way, right? But you and I have been trained to make our happiness depend on certain things, and so when those things don’t happen, thanks to our training, thanks to our programming, thanks to that false belief If this doesn’t happen, I’m not going to be happy, well, what do you know? We upset ourselves.

There are some very interesting examples of this; let me give you examples from other cultures. Last summer, a friend of mine here in New York gave me a little anthropological detail of a tribe in Africa. He said, “Their method of awarding the death penalty is the following: They don’t have any electric chair, they don’t have death by hanging. They have death by banishment. So, you belong to the tribe and if you have committed a capital offense, you’re banished.”

And this friend of mine said, “When the sentence of banishment is read, within a week or so, the person dies.” Would you die if somebody read a sentence of banishment on you? I wouldn’t. I don’t think you would, either, would you? What do you think? I mean, we might feel terrible if we were banished to another place. But we wouldn’t die, for heaven’s sake. They die. Literally.

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