DeMello: Are you Sleep Walking?

But even there we've got to make sure that you're not swinging into action simply to get rid of your negative feelings. Many people swing into action only to make things worse. They're not coming from love, they're coming from negative feelings. They're coming from guilt, anger, hate; from a sense of injustice or whatever.

You've got to make sure of your "being" before you swing into action. You have to make sure of who you are before you act. Unfortunately, when sleeping people swing into action, they simply substitute one cruelty for another, one injustice for another. And so it goes. 

Meister Eckhart says, "It is not by your actions that you will be saved" (or awakened; call it by any word you want), "but by your being. It is not by what you do, but by what you are that you will be judged." 

What good is it to you to feed the hungry, give the thirsty to drink, or visit prisoners in jail? 

Remember that sentence from Paul: 

"If I give my body to be burned and all my goods to feed the poor and have not love . . ." 

It's not your actions, it's your being that counts. Then you might swing into action. You might or might not. You can't decide that until you're awake. 

"Plunge into the heat of battle and keep your heart at the lotus feet of the Lord"

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are. 

When you finally awake, you don't try to make good things happen; they just happen. You understand suddenly that everything that happens to you is good. Think of some people you're living with whom you want to change. You find them moody, inconsiderate, unreliable, treacherous, or whatever. But when you are different, they'll be different. That's an infallible and miraculous cure. The day you are different, they will become different. And you will see them differently, too.

Put this program into action, a thousand times: 

(a) identify the negative feelings in you; 

(b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; 

(c) do not see them as an essential part of "I"; these things come and go; 

(d) understand that when you change, everything changes