“After many miles of driving a car, a man heard some unusual sounds from the engine. He turned up the music so he would not be disturbed by those sounds. When an indicator light flashed red, he had it disabled. On his next trip out he was stranded on the motorway and he could not understand why the car would let him down.”

Some of the listeners asked for an explanation.

So the sage continued, “Most of us are sleepwalking through life. So we hardly observe what is going on within us and around us. And then we wonder why we are unhappy.”

(Francis J. Padinjarekara: A DEWDROP IN THE OCEAN – Wisdom Stories for Turbulent Times. Awareness Arc, 2009. pg. 39)

One of the the biggest problems we face in our time is our difficulty being still. We are surrounded by noise, entertainment and the clamour of all that claims our attention. Being surrounded by noises of all kinds can be not only tiresome but addictive because its absence leaves a space that is hard to endure. This includes music, television, or the chatter of people, all good things. Some people find it difficult to study without listening to music, some cannot work without television on, many people find it difficult to spend time without listening to human voices all the time. When sounds fill our lives, there is no room for silence and quiet that are necessary to nourish us. Yet the sounds we hear are more enjoyable against the stillness in which they are framed.

Another problem that most of us suffer is the over emphasis on activities of all kinds leaving little time for rest. Even when we know we need to stop, there is just that one more thing to do. If it is not work of all kinds, there is the mind that is over active, chattering and planning. One sure sign of a neurotic mind is its inability to be still. Activities that are surrounded by stillness and quiet are wholesome.

Space within and space without are essential for the wholeness of life. A page can be read only when the words in print are sounded by space whereas a page full of black ink is not legible. The words we speak are intelligible only when there is space between words, pauses between sentences. There is music only when notes are followed meaningfully by spaces.

Meditation is the awareness of the space within and the space between things. Meditation is discovery of the space between notes so that music is heard. It is listening to sounds so that silence makes sense. Meditation is the understanding of life in the coming and going, in the arising and falling and in the spaces between.

The Master must have known that his words were frequently beyond his disciples’ comprehension. He spoke them nonetheless in the knowledge that a day would surely come when they would take root and blossom in the hearts that heard him.

One day he said: “Time always seems too long when you wait – for a vacation, an examination, for something yearned for or dreaded in the future. But to those who dare to surrender to the experience of the present moment – with no thought about the experience, no desire that it return or be avoided – time is transformed into the radiance of Eternity.” (Anthony de Mello: One Minute Nonsense. Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, Anand, India. 1992)

J. Krishnamurti made a clear distinction between chronological time and psychological time. Chronological time is the time measured by clocks and calendars, what we refer to by minutes, hours, days and years. This convention of time and its division into units is necessary for day to day living.

Psychological time belongs to the realm of the mind. We refer to the past and future, what has been, what may be and what ought to be. This is the time that Tony is referring to in his story.

As long as we live by psychological time, we are the prisoners of the past and future neither of which in reality exists. What is there is the now, this moment of awareness. There is great freedom in the understanding of the significance of time, its unreality and its impact on us.

All of us, except for the genuinely free, carry our past with us. Many of us live there with the consequences of guilt, nostalgia, hurt feelings and so on. We live in the future hoping perhaps for the repetition of the pleasurable experiences of the past and the dread of the repetition of painful ones. So many of us are affected by what psychologists refer to as unfinished businesses, namely those experiences that were incomplete in the past and still affect them in the present. Most of us are hardly aware of the influence of the past on us. Many of us not only build castles in the air but we also live in them.

In recently years there has been a great deal of interest in the power of now and the freedom and transformation that it brings. Many of us now recognize the level of bondage that time involves and extent of freedom that is available to us.

Liz Dillon introducing the author began with the impact of Tony de Mello on Francis’ life, his work as Director of Sadhana after Tony’s death. She spoke of the quiet way in which over many years she had been bringing awareness into her own life and the transformation she had experienced as a result in her life and her work with children. She commented also on the legacy of Tony carried from Sadhana to Awareness Arc and spreading to Ireland and America.

Liz Dillon introduced the speaker beginning with the impact of Tony de Mello on Francis’ life, his work as the Director of Sadhana Institute and the progress of their work together teaching awareness in Ireland, India and America. In a moving presentation Liz told the story of her own transformation through awareness and her complete commitment to bringing this work into daily living. She described the profound changes in her family as well as her work with children because of her understanding of awareness and her readiness to open herself to change.

Francis described how his relationship with Tony de Mello had turned his life upside down and initiated changes that were profound, frightening and essential. Little had he known then that this would amount to preparing him one day to succeed Tony as director of Sadhana and to carry on his legacy and continue his work in Awareness. The book, he said, is a tribute to that legacy.

The book has a contemporary relevance as people everywhere are going through turmoil and turbulence. Behind the stories is a life time of experience and quite a lot of turbulence experienced by the author and others. There is also a testimony to the power of awareness that makes it possible for a person to be happy and peaceful in the midst of life’s problems and sufferings.

Every page in this book can be a meditation evoking quiet reflection and inner change. They can help to wake the reader up. It contains awareness stories that are tools for transformation.

Fran O’Reilly, CEO of Amaze, skilfully facilitated the celebration making sure an atmosphere of warmth and sacredness prevailed. His meticulous planning and hard work contributed to creating a wonderful evening that everyone present will long remember.

I came across a recent book, A Dewdrop in the Ocean: Wisdom Stories for Turbulent Time, by Francis J Padinjarekara. It co-ntains life-transforming wisdom capsules for contemporary men and women.
Here are some selected gems: “Suffering transforms human beings,” co-mmented the sage…“Ultimately it is not what happens to us but what happens in us that counts.” “Judgements are most inefficient,” the sage stated. “And a major waste of energy.”… Intelligence involves appropriate response to situations — like calling attention to being unduly delayed or a decision to let something be… Or you can be judgemental, get angry, create distance or start a fight.”

“Among the sage’s friends and acquaintances were celebrities, business tycoons and other wealthy people. However, his li-fe was very simple and none of the glitter has entered his home or life. When someone asked him why his lifestyle remained unaffected, a disciple spoke: “When a rose is set beside a diamond necklace, the rose doesn’t shine, but the necklace may recei-ve some of the perfume.”

The insights offered are meditational, and even transformational. No book can save us unless we allow its insights to touch us. This book enables perceptive readers to have an “expansive sense of wonder” that one experiences when life’s truths are disclosed. Each message is different from the other yet so beautifully linked because of its deep comprehension into the nature of life and reality.
Following the tradition of great spiritual masters such as Rajneesh or Anthony de Mello, the author attempts to spread transforming spiritual experiences in a non-invasive and welcoming manner. The wisdom in this book — like in a classic of any tradition — is subtle, yielding only to sustained inquiry. The relevance of topics and the utter simplicity with which profound truths are conveyed are masterly.

“The foundation and the basic test of any spirituality is not just how beautiful and uplifting it appears but how practical it is and how it enables us to live our lives and find our happiness in the world.” In this sense, the author urges the practitioners to have both inner freedom and external commitment. Freed from the compulsions of ego, a healthy spirituality reaches out to others in joy and service. In such a process, the divine is encountered and awakening happens. Awakening just is. It is not the result of persistent planning and hard work.

Perceived thus, human life can very well be understood and appreciated as a “dew drop in the ocean.” I am not the oc-ean. I do not have control over everything, including myself. Yet, in my never-ending quest for the unfolding truth, I am a puny little dew that makes up the ocean. I am aware of it and am part of it. Precisely therein lies my greatness.

Such an awareness opens me to see the ordinary things in my life in an extraordinary manner. Contemplation of such existence enables me to see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour, As poet William Blake has immortalised in his “Auguries of Innocence.” Blake reminds us further: “A Robin Red breast in a Cage/ Puts all Heaven in a Rage/ A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate/ Predicts the ruin of the State.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ The writer is professor of science and religion and director of Jnanam, Pune

Francis spoke about his relationship with Tony de Mello and the profound impact of Tony and his teaching on his life. The book and its sequel were born out of the experience of awareness and its transformative power.

The event was organised by Yogesh Sharma of Zen Publications and was well attended by a capacity audience. The book, distributed by Zen Publications, is now available in major bookstores in India. We await the launch of the book in Dublin in August.

The stories contained in this book are all linked to the over-arching theme of Awareness. They are also related to various aspects of daily living so that Awareness does not remain a mere idea but can become a part of our own experience. That is why experience and resonance are two strong points of this book.

The book is made up of a large number of stories thematically organised under various topics of daily living such as relationships, emotions, judgments, helping, suffering, leadership, stillness, and so on. The diversity of stories under each theme covers different aspects and offers and numerous perspectives to interest and benefit a large variety of readers.

The stories centre around the sage who is not a single individual but someone who gives expression to the collective wisdom of humanity. So he is a Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist and so on. His voice carries the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus, Ramesh Balsekar, J Krishnamurti, Tony de Mello and a host of others.

Though these stories carry perennial wisdom, it takes a considerable depth of understanding and creativity to make the sage speak to the experience of people in our time. That is why the stories indeed have a great resonance for readers and are capable of evoking experience of quiet reflections and transformations.

There are many gems here for daily living. Here is a story about relationships.

A woman told the sage that she had had a series of relationships that had ended in hurt and pain. Some of her partners had been possessive, some uncaring, some harsh.
“It is only now I realise that none of that was love,” she sobbed.
“Discovering what love is not, is a good introduction to what it is,” the sage said. (page 147)

A book of this kind can be a great source of inspiration and a powerful tool for personal transformation.

Publisher: Awareness Arc (www.Awarenessarc.org)
Distributor (S.Asia): Zen Publications (www.Zenpublications.com)
Pages: 306

While there is an insistent clamour for change, there is also a growing realization that the very people who have presided over the financial or political disasters are not likely to be the ones who will get us out of the mess. Their inability to be positive forces of change is not based necessarily on their lack of earnestness. It is based on a basic principle of life. The chaos and troubles we are facing in the outer world are reflections of the problems and conflicts we are experiencing in our inner world.

The familiar ways of dealing with problems is only to look outside for solutions. We will find lasting resolution only by looking within. We tend to look outside for clues, but we now have look inside for answers. We look outside for the means to achieve our goals, but have to we look inside for resources.

Of the many possible approaches to the difficulties we face in the outer world, the primary and essential is the inner world. How we deal with the global crisis depends on our ability to match the outer world to the inner world. What is within is necessarily reflected without. That is why finding peace in our world is not possible without discovering stillness within.

The dominant icons of our world have all along been mostly the ones who made it out in the world through the acquisition of money, fame or power. We admire them and hope to replicate their success in our own lives. The heroes of the emerging world of a deeper consciousness will be the ones who have discovered the secrets of the inner world.

The exploration of the outer world was accomplished through travels that took people across the globe and to the outer space. The exploration of the inner space is a journey without distance through awareness and self-understanding. While the conquest of the world has been achieved through the rattle of sabres, the blasts of bombs and the subjugation of peoples and nature, the mastery of the inner world is accompanied only in stillness and peace.

In the world of business and politics it is the rare exceptions like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela who have worked from the inside out. Perhaps the time has come for humanity to make that essential shift towards this way of living. This is vital for our survival and happiness but may be too difficult to happen without a shift in our very consciousness. Awareness is what makes it possible.

On Boxing Day, 1971 a group of Australian Kangaroo hunters claimed to have seen a beautiful young half-naked blonde woman among kangaroos on the semi-arid plains of Nullarbor, South Australia. The claim was supported by a film footage of a woman holding a kangaroo by the tail. A huge round of publicity saw many visitors descending upon the town of Eucla with a population of 8 people at that time.

Later the hunters confessed that they had cooked up the story over a few drinks and had a local woman dressed up in kangaroo skins for the pictures just to get some publicity and tourists into their obscure town. One of the hoaxers said, “It amazed us how it kept going and we got bloody sick of it in the end.”

The Nullarbor Nymph may never have existed but that did not stop a sculpture of her being created and poems being written.

Amazing indeed how some stories and beliefs keep going on and on in spite of it not having a basis in reality. This is true in different areas of life where accepted beliefs become self-evident and gets a canonical status which puts it beyond questioning. This is not only true of religious beliefs and traditions but also of science where many myths are busted and new ones created. It takes awareness to turn the light on oneself to question the value and truth of one’s own beliefs and practices or even to trace their reasons and origins.

Tony de Mello’s story of the Guru’s Cat is relevant here.

Each time the guru sat for worship with his students the ashram cat would come in to distract them, so he ordered them to tie it when the ashram was at prayer.

After the guru died the cat continued to be tied at worship time. And when the cat expired, another cat was brought into the ashram to make sure that the guru’s orders were faithfully observed at worship time.

Centuries passed and learned treatises were written by the guru’s scholarly disciples on the liturgical significance of tying up a cat while worship is performed. (Anthony de Mello: Song of the Bird)

Proximity to death has a way of instilling wisdom and providing a clarity of perspective that the rest of life often does not provide. There is also an intensification of life that comes with the awareness of one’s approaching end. We may know people who have reported or appeared being the happiest during the interval between being told that they would have only a limited time to live and their death. They use the time to take a look at their bucket list.

What is the process that makes this possible in such a critical time as the spectre of one’s impending death? Perhaps the more appropriate question is: Why do we not live the entire lifetime that precedes the nearness of death with awareness and intensity? The answer could be summed up briefly – the mind. The mind that is so powerful and so necessary in daily life becomes an obstacle when it moves from its function of helping us live efficiently and intelligently into the past and future and takes up residence there. Without the present moment experience, and without the power of our senses available to us, life is dull, boring and wearisome. Imagine the vast difference between tasting a fruit and thinking or talking about it. Think of the difference between enjoying today’s beautiful sunset without thinking of the magnificent one of yesterday.

Closely related to this is also the psychological fact of desires, longings and fears that prevent us from experiencing the present moment. Our senses work only in the moment, our minds take flight in time. For us to experience aliveness, our senses have to be awake and present. There is great relevance to the call to lose your mind and come to your senses! For once we get caught in mental games, we do not enjoy what is present. It is no wonder having much comes with no assurance of great happiness. It is not necessarily those who have all they want who enjoy all they experience. Mark Nepo offers this brilliant line: The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.