Evolution of love

MOTHER KNOCKING

Many people never get to their rage because right above it is fear. Fear usually works. Most people who are terribly afraid will run away. But the few people who go through their fear will come out of it feeling like there is something seemingly tremendously destructive underneath. And if you can keep going through that tornado, you will find there is an existential grip, usually in the pit of the gut, which can survive even very profound spiritual awakenings. The fear may or may not survive, and the rage may or may not survive. Often they don't. But the grip sometimes does survive in its most elemental form.

That's why I suggested that you imagine what it would be like if you were totally without any movement of control within you, any desire to control, any ideas to control— whether on a very obvious level or on the most profound level of your own experience. Imagine what it would be like for the desire to control to be completely absent from your system.

This desire to control is, ultimately, our unwillingness to be fully awake. There is a wonderful little story told by Anthony DeMello. He was a spiritually awakened Jesuit priest who lectured and wrote books and who died in the 1980s.

He tells the story of a mother knocking on the door of her son's room saying, "Johnny, you've got to wake up. It's time to go to school."
Johnny answers, "I don't want to wake up." Mom repeats, "Johnny, you've got to wake up!"
"I am awake!"
"Johnny, you've got to get up, and get out of bed, and go to school!"
"I don't want to get out of bed." Does this sound familiar?
"I don't want to go to school. I'm tired of school. Why should I have to go to school?"

She answers him, ''I'll give you three reasons why you have to go to school. Number one, because it's time to go to school. Number two, because there is a whole school full of students depending on you. And number three, because you're forty years old and you're the headmaster."