A Change Is as Good as a Red

“Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from. The doctor says, “Very well, I’ve understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbour!” The patient replies, “Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better.””

Anthony De Mello, Awareness (1990: Zondervan)

Inside our inner cinema the story goes something like this…if my wife was just like that film star; if my brilliance was just understood by the world; if my friends could just see how I am right about everything; if my children respected me…then I would be…

What? Happy maybe. Anthony De Mello (a Jesuit priest whose was alternately sanctioned and slated by his church) was clear about one thing: we do not want to be happy, because to be happy means we would have to sit up and recognise who we are and what is going on inside our heads…to be happy is to awake and we are all rather cosy inside our thick duvets of muddled thinking and projected need.

We ascribe meaning all over: to other people, to exterior things, events…if I could just get enough money; if I just read (and understand) the complete works of Western Civilisation; if I could just get that pretty girl/guy (delete as appropriate) on the street to take me in their mouth; if I was just as handsome and successful as that inner movie script said I could be…then what? Then what next?


De Mello is clear, we are not in love with someone but with our idea about someone (and a darn hopeful one at that); we are not sacrificing ourselves for others unless we want to (and we do for our own need, our own selfish generosity our own mutated crucifix); we are not a great person and we do not want to wake up…even as we sit on the meditation cushion for day 2 of the ever-so-long retreat we planned for months before - we do not want to wake up, we do not want to let go, because it is just too convenient to find meaning in anything, anything, but our own state of mind, our own being. Anything but that rag and bone shop, anything but the litter of myself strewn across the park of my biography, anything but that.

The martyr in my mind is but a sick point to prove to all those that crossed me…the pain in my body as I sit is my mind painting Rorschach sulks on my subtle skin. I do not want to wake up, and when I do want to wake up, I still do not want to wake up - for somewhere the fantasy remains that I will not have to let go of what I do not really want to (this is the negotiation we undertake as we endeavour to spiritualize… “surely now I am being too good to have to change that…”).

Without this real dark soil, the terra preta, the heaps of black Gold in the open cast mine of our selfish wisdom then the whitening will never really whiten. Without the whitening as pure as snow, as pure as the TV soap powder wet white dream then the chance to change and become red and full of life again will simply become a pressure against change, a funnel of everything about life we hadn’t tainted – discharged down the drain. If I then really try, my brothers, really try to do good in the world, and meditate and change for the benefit of sentient beings, if I always really try - then how trying will I become, if I do not give up on trying…?


So if I love sleeping - can I love sleeping so purely (with such white emotion) that sleeping becomes transparent? If I love sleeping - can I dream in such vivid Technicolor that the moths of the past bleach in front of the rainbow windows?…that the moths of the past change again into dreams which are happy to disappear against the midnight blue sky?…If so, then now what might I become? Or not become?


This is for Anthony De Mello whom I encountered for the first time yesterday (and for James whom read him to me) and who could, even in that short acquaintance on the page, inspire a sense of genuine loss when I read of his ‘untimely death’. This is also for Patrick whose decision to delay our meeting in order to meditate produced this fragment.

Mark Jones

IMAGES: Moonflower and Moth (c.2005) by Anita Munman, Meditation at Sunrise on the Varanasi Ghats, Uttar Pradesh, India by Olivier Follmi, Moth Prayer (2002) by Elizabeth Gómez Freer, Anthony De Mello [photographer & date unknown].