From Anthony DeMello in Awareness:
“And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away? How ready are you to think of something unfamiliar?”
I love that sentence: “The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.” Note that isn’t saying that I actually need to learn something new, only that I need to be ready to learn something new. It occurs to me that in this Information Age, it is increasingly a challenge to “be ready to learn something new.” While I have always had a tendency to hang with people who look, act, and think like I do, now someone much smarter than me has created a magical algorithm that feeds to my devices with information that reaffirms my existing thoughts and beliefs. That algorithm not only shields me from “something new” but also arms me with information that allows me to do battle with those with those who (go figure!) dare to disagree with me. (Of course, as its actual reason to be, that algorithm also offers me opportunities to buy “aligned” goods and services.) Yet in all this, as DeMello puts it, I need to expose myself to “something unfamiliar,” or, in Paulinian terms (Romans 12:2), I need to resist the urge to “conform to the patterns of this world” in order to be “transformed” by the renewing of my mind.
All which points to DeMello’s question: “How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away?” Yikes!
It occurs to me... 