Many of you who monitor the MGTOW forum may have noted that I often quote or refer to the former Indian Catholic Jesuit priest, Anthony de Mello. It was not his religion, but his insights from his work as a psychiatrist, that I have found interesting.
Here are some excerpts from de Mello or about de Mello.
Anthony de Mello
The Way to Love [By love, he means freedom]
pages 4-5
Do you know what causes this unhappiness? You will probably say loneliness or oppression or war or hatred or atheism. And you will be wrong. There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. Because of these false beliefs you see the world and yourself in a distorted way. Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way.
But you have also been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into you by your tradition, your culture, your society, your religion. And if you are not happy, you have been trained to blame yourself, not your programming, not your cultural and inherited ideas and beliefs.
page 10
If you take a look at the way you have been put together and the way you function you will find that inside your head there is a whole program, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be and what you should want.
Who is responsible for the programming? Not you.
It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, your past experiences who fed the operating instructions into your computer.
page 11
If the demands are met, the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy. If they are not met, even though it be through no fault of yours, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer.
page 15
Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed to be unhappy and so no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail?
If you wish to be happy the first thing you need is not effort or even goodwill or good desires but a clear understanding of how exactly you have been programmed. [which MGTOW provides] This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things.
page 16
Once you swallowed your belief you naturally developed and attachment to this person or thing you were convinced you could not be happy without.
Once your attachment had you in its grip you began to strive might and main, every waking minute of your life, to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment.
= = = = = =
Carlos G. Valles
Mastering Sadhana: On Retreat with Anthony de Mello
page 28-29
We never really love a person, but the image of the person we have created in our own minds.
Then comes the crisis. When that person, whom I had idealized in my mind, loses, through age or routine or just closer contact, the qualities that had attracted me to him (or her), I feel shaken and confused.
“You see, married people find this out much faster than we religious do. A man and woman fall in love (with their respective images, of course), marry, and since they now live together all the time, they soon discover the reality behind the glamour and wonder what they have done. They are now united by the bond, and family and society help them to stay together (at least in some cultures), but they know very well that their mutual love is not anymore what it had appeared in the beginning and promised to be forever.”
“The universal folklore about love, fidelity, and romance, which we too have imbibed, prevents us from seeing this and admitting it to ourselves, but that is the case.”
Badger 1 year, 7 months ago.
