On the morning of 1 June 1987, Father Anthony De Mello was found dead on the floor of his room. He had arrived at Fordham University, New York, just the evening before, two days before a highly anticipated tour in which he was to speak to thousands of students from across the United States. The official death certificate stated heart attack; quite strange given he was found furled up in the foetal position, holding his stomach. Even odder was that De Mello, aged 55, had no history of heart disease. Indeed, two of the top cardiac physicians in the world had given him a clean bill of health just a few months earlier. Despite this, no autopsy was ever carried out. His body was flown back to India, where it was buried, within a week.

A rising star in the Catholic church, De Mello was a highly respected priest and spiritual director within the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits).

An historic order famed for its contributions to science just as much as its contemplative and meditative traditions. Having skilfully combined Jesuit practices with modern psychology techniques as well as more esoteric disciplines derived from the spiritual smorgasbord of India, his name and fame had grown on a global scale. Many considered him – and even more do today – among the great mystics of the modern era.

De Mello had sought to inject practicality and personality into the stuffy dogma and rituals of Catholicism. After many years instructing the thouusands of people from all around the world who flocked to his retreat centre just north of Mumbai, he had developed a system for empowering them to work towards their own awakening, not to depend on external crutches such as the church and its clergy. Doing all this under the banner of the prelate was not in the least ironic to De Mello – he believed that religious structures existed to serve the faithful, not the other way around.

While the approach was proving increasingly popular, especially among young Catholics, De Mello was creating enemies. Chief amongst them was Cardinal Ratzinger, the future pope and head of the Vatican’s powerful cadre of cardinals known as ‘The Curia’. Through this office, Ratzinger and his conservative cronies carved out the red lines of church doctrine, the rigidity of which, they believed, kept the whole structure in place (as well as the Curia in control). They developed a particular derision for the diversion from dogma and Eastern philosophies that De Mello was popularizing, and eventually they had enough. A formal notification was issued to the global congregation warning of ‘grave errors’ in De Mello’s writings which, they cautioned, could not to be trusted. He was dismissed and labelled an ‘oriental’ crackpot.

De Mello’s crime was simple. He had revealed an ancient secret that people in power prefer to keep to themselves: that personal transformation can only take place at a personal level. That every human being has the power within themselves to attain self-awareness, wisdom, salvation, inner peace, freedom, fulfilment, or whatever else you might want to call it. As you will see later, the term doesn’t matter. By doing so however, he was suggesting that heaven and hell were not external destinations to attain or avoid, but states within the hearts and minds of every human being.

That God and Satan, their legions of angels and demons, were not external entities to be personified, worshiped or disdained, but aspects of ourselves to be reckoned with, parts of the psyche to assimilate. This message went against the grain. The Vatican doesn’t like distributing power.

HOW TO HUNT DEMONS

But this book is not about De Mello’s death, nor is it about his enemies or potential mistreatment. After all, he’s not the first purveyor of truth to suffer persecution for unorthodox ways. Neither is he the first to share this message. Throughout the ages it’s found its way into countless folklore, fables, myths and legends. It’s been passed down from generation to generation via mystics, shamans, seers, sages and healers. In more recent millennia, it’s been written and distributed in many forms, for it’s the central tenet of most spiritual practices, religions and modern psychotherapies.

What is this message?

De Mello captured this wisdom of the ages with the following words:

The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see…We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change…If you look you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youth fulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.

He concluded with this simple yet most profound of maxims:

The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.

In this single line is the secret to freedom and personal transformation; to waking up and entering a state of aliveness which means experiencing life without the filters of conditioning. It summarises what’s required to become whole, fully integrated and free from the past. In essence, De Mello was telling us that to achieve all these things, we must do one thing, and one thing only: hunt down and face up to all our fears, all our inner demons, without running away.

T.J. CONNOLLY

Of course, we’re not talking about the boogey man here. We’re talking about the symptoms and manifestations of repressed memories, suppressed emotions, complexes, traumas, shame, low self-worth and the inner critic, to name but a few. All that subconscious stuff that’s holding us back, self-sabotaging sure successes, and forever pushing that elusive state of ‘happiness’ around the corner. Then the next.

Yes, life has many moments of happiness and joy, but it’s also full of suffering, pain and uncertainty. Together these form the bedrock and foundations of human experience. Yet most of us go to great lengths to avoid this reality. Why? Quite simply, because it’s painful. What De Mello and so many great sages before him – from Socrates, Buddha and Jesus to Frankl, Freud and Jung – pointed to was an alternative way to deal with this reality.

They spoke of a process that converts pain into a nuclear-grade source of energy, power and unrivalled peace. It centres on embracing everything we experience – suffering, fear, pain and everything else that surfaces on the spectrum of human experience – at whatever cost. Embracing reality, exactly as it is.

These wise folk professed, as the poet Rumi once put it, that ‘the cure for pain is in the pain.’ That everything we seek, everything we’ve ever dreamed of becoming, stems from first facing and embracing the dark energies within – the energy of our demons. This doesn’t mean we become like them or let them take over our lives; rather we work with them instead of against them. Partner with them so as to integrate their wisdom and facilitate their healthy expression in our lives. In this way, every painful event, emotion and memory becomes an opportunity to deepen our relationship with our demons. Catalysts for transforming their destructive nature into divine qualities of wisdom, awareness and wholeness. This is true power, divined from pain.