Posted on 22 Sep, 2011 -
The Tyranny of our Egos
Why happiness is your natural state - and how you can blow all the clouds away!
Relying on praise for happiness is one of the biggest dangers
Call yourself “an ass” says de Mello and you will be a lot happier...
Dear Reader,
“Happiness”, said the great psychotherapist, priest and spiritual leader, Anthony De Mello “is our natural state.”
Happiness is something you already have within you - rather than something you have to require. To be in a state of happiness or to become a happier person does not require that you acquire anything that you don’t already have. All that is required is that you lose or drop certain things.
“Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels.”
Feeling happy because we’ve been praised is the shakiest kind of happiness of all
Perhaps the worst illusion of all is the reliance we often have on praise.
Living in the world that we do comes with its comforts and its glories. In a world in which there is such emphasis on both human and individual achievement and improvement we are blessed with great literature and art. Great architecture and science. Our lives are made comfortable. We are kept alive by great medicine.
But this comes with its downsides. Driven as we are by competition, productivity and achievement, our individual egos - our image of our self… our ‘me’ or ‘I’ - can become cut off and isolated, falsely puffed up or battered.
A great deal of our sense of happiness can come to rely on the amount of praise we get from others - or from how happy we are with the way we perceive others must think of us.
The pitfalls of praise
Whenever we are praised or approved or accepted, there is a certain feeling of happiness that floods us. We feel this happiness when we are successful, when we’re doing well… or when we have simply won some little game or a petty argument.
The reverse side of this, of course, is that we feel bad when the praise is not forthcoming. When we feel ignored or slighted. When we have lost. Or failed. Or just because of the tiniest little slip-up in our otherwise impeccable performance…
This sense of ‘happiness’ says de Mello comes from self-glorification and self-promotion. It is different from the more soulful happiness we get when we are watching the flight of an eagle, are absorbed in an engaging action or the easy company of friends.
A whole day can be ruined by a single sentence of criticism
We are all of us prone to this kind of ‘self-rating’. We all know that a whole day can be ruined just because of a small perceived failure… a faux-pas that we believe others may judge us negatively for… or because something we’ve been working on has not been positively acknowledged by others.
This kind of reversal of fortune or change of mood, however, are only made possible because we have taken such pleasure in a sense of achievement or in the positive self image that we have of ourselves.
A lot of our impediments to happiness, says de Mello, come from the fact that we have “identified with all kinds of labels”.
We take pleasure in thinking ourselves to be kind, beautiful, adventurous, successful, wealthy, wise, funny, fun, charming and so on. We take pleasure in the fact that we might be seen as a good mother, a good catch… a lawyer, a talent, a millionaire… or whatever it is that you personally feel proud of.
But this kind of pleasure is as precarious as a ruler balanced on our finger. One tiny tip to the scales and you’re up - one tiny tip to the scales and you’re down.
Why it can be better to call yourself ‘an ass’!
“If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you’re O.K, you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you’re not good.”
De Mello even goes so far as to say “I’m going to write a book someday and the title will be I’m an Ass, You’re an Ass. That’s the most liberating, wonderful thing in the world, when you openly admit you’re an ass. It’s wonderful. When people tell me, “You’re wrong.” I say, “What can you expect of an ass?”
Which I think is wonderful. The more you allow yourself to feel pride, the more you’re setting yourself up for a fall. The only way out of the trap is to stop allowing your happiness to be swayed by the image you have of yourself or by what you think others think of you.
We are surrounded by joy, by happiness and with love. Don’t allow that to be clouded over by a desire to be seen as perfect.
ALL of us are a mixture of good and bad. Attractive and unattractive. Stupid and wise.
Nobody is that good. Nobody is perfect. You are neither OK nor no OK. Brush aside those illusions and worries, however, and what you can be is happy…
Best wishes
