The Daily Stoic - How to Enjoy Life Fully

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Today’s reading features an excerpt from The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello. Anthony was an Indian Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, and spiritual teacher, writer, and public speaker who wrote several books on spirituality, including this collection of his last meditations on love and awareness. In today’s excerpt, Anthony explores the origins of our wants and desires, and how they translate into our quest for love.This book is published by the Center for Spiritual Exchange, and you can buy your copy at The Painted Porch.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, from the Stoic texts, audio books that we like here recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy and most importantly that you're able to apply it to actual life. Thank you for listening. of life. Thank you for listening. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's episode actually comes to us from a friend of mine, indirectly, the great Chocasmart, formerly the head basketball coach at University of Texas, now at Marquette.

We were having lunch in Austin several years ago and he recommended this little book he was reading Chaka Smart, formerly the head basketball coach at University of Texas, now at Marquette. We were having lunch in Austin several years ago and he recommended this little book he was reading, The Way to Love by Anthony Dimeo, also known as Tony Dimeo, who was an Indian Jesuit priest and a psychotherapist. He wrote these beautiful, in this case, a very little book on spirituality. The Way to Love is a collection of Dimeo's last meditations on love and awareness in your life deals with a very stoic idea, the idea of attachments, right? And how they can make us do irrational things. And that

love is something different, I guess, than attachments. Anyways, it's beautiful. I won't try to explain it. I'll just let it speak for itself. This audiobook was published by the Center for Spiritual Exchange. It's a beautiful little book. We actually carry the book itself at the painted porch. I'll link to that in today's episode. But we'll title this one, How to Enjoy Life Fully.

And it's an excerpt from the Way to Love, which I am absolutely proud to bring to you, because it's just so, so very good. If you take a look at the way you have been put together and the way you function, you will find that inside your head there is a whole program, a set of demands about how the world should be, how you should be and what you should want. Who is responsible for the programming? Not you, it isn't really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and

so-called needs. Your values, your tastes, your attitudes. It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, your past experiences, who fed the operating instructions into your computer. Now however old you are, or wherever you go, your computer goes along with you and is active in operating at each conscious moment of the day, empirously insisting that its demands be met by life, by people and by you. If the demands are met, the computer allows you to be peaceful and happy. If they are not met, even though it be through no fault of yours, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer. For instance, when other people don't live up to your computer's expectations, it torments you with frustration

or anger or bitterness. Another instance, when things are not under your control or the future is uncertain, your computer insists that you experience anxiety, tension, worry. Then you expend a lot of energy coping with these negative emotions. And you generally cope by expanding more energy trying to rearrange the world around you so that the demands of your computer will be met. If that happens you will be granted a measure of precarious peace. Precarious because at any moment some trifle, a delayed train, a tape recorder that doesn't work, a letter that doesn't arrive, anything is going to be out of conformity with your computer's programming and the computer will insist that you become upset again.

And so you live a pathetic existence, constantly at the mercy of things and people, trying desperately to make them conform to your computer's demands. So that you can enjoy the only piece you can ever know. A temporary respite from negative emotions, courtesy of your computer and your programming. Is there a way out? Yes, you are not going to be able to change your programming all that quickly, or perhaps ever, and you don't even need to. Pray this. Imagine you are in a situation, over the person that you find unpleasant and that you would ordinarily avoid.

Now observe, are your computer instinctively becomes active, insisting that you avoid this situation and try to change it. And if you stay on there and refuse to change the situation, observe how your computer insists that you experience irritation or anxiety or guilt or some other negative emotion. Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn't they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just being themselves doing their thing with a right or wrong good or bad. It is your computer that thanks to your programming insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming, when faced with this same situation or person or event

would react quite calmly, even happily. Don't stop till you have grasped this truth. The only reason why you two are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all this from the outside, so to speak, and see the marvelous change that comes about in you. Once you have understood this truth, and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions, you may take any action you deem fit. You may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person, or you may try to change them, or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected.

You may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your reaction will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or to conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotions it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words. If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him too. Or it will have become evident to you that real oppression comes not from people who fight

you in court or from authority that subjects you to slave labor, but from your computer, whose programming destroys your peace of mind, the moment outside circumstances, failed to conform to its demands. People have been known to be happy, even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp. It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated. Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed to be unhappy? And so no matter what you do to become happy, you are bound to fail. If you wish to be happy, the first thing you need is not effort or even good will or good desires, but a clear understanding of how exactly you have been programmed. This is what happened.

First, your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you. Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things, money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God, they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination? But they cannot be happy.

What is your particular combination? Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. There y'all! I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. I'm just the name of you. Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki

Kippa Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind.

What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know, so I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits.

Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey Prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Once you swallowed your belief, you naturally developed an attachment to this person or thing. You were convinced you could not be happy without. thing, you were convinced you could not be happy without. Then came the efforts to acquire your precious thing or person, to cling to it once it was acquired, and to fight off every possibility of losing it. This finally led you to object emotional dependence, so that the object of your attachment had the power

to thrill you when you attained it and to make you anxious, lest you be deprived of it and miserable when you lose it. Stop for a moment now and contemplate and horror the endless lists of attachments that you have become a prisoner to. Think of concrete things in persons, not abstractions. Once your attachment had you in its grip. You began to strive might and main every waking minute of your life to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of

your attachment. This is an exhausting task that leaves you little energy for the business of living and enjoying life fully. It is also an impossible task in an ever-changing world that you simply are not able to control. So instead of a life of serenity and fulfillment, you are doomed to a life of frustration, anxiety, worry, insecurity, suspense, tension. For a few fleeting moments, the world does indeed yield to your efforts and rearrange itself to suit your desires.

Then you become briefly happy. Or rather, you experience the flash of pleasure which isn't happiness at all, for it is accompanied by the underlying fear that at any moment this world of things and people that you have so painstakingly put in place will slip out of your control and let you down, which it never fails to do sooner or later. And here is something else to ponder on. Each time you are anxious and afraid it is because you may lose or fail to get the object of your attachment isn't it and each time you feel jealous isn't it because someone may take off with what you are attached to and almost all your anger comes from someone standing in the way of your attachment, doesn't

it? And see how paranoid you become when your attachment is threatened. You cannot think objectively. Your whole vision becomes distorted, doesn't it? And every time you feel bored, isn't it because you are not getting a sufficient supply of what you believe will make you happy, of what you are attached to? And when you are depressed and miserable, the cause is there for all to see. Life is not giving you what you have convinced yourself, you cannot be happy without.

Almost every negative emotion you experience is the direct outcome of an attachment. So there you are loaded down by your attachments and striving desperately to attain happiness precisely by holding on to the load. The very notion is absurd. The tragedy is that this is the only method that everyone has been taught for attaining happiness. has been taught for attaining happiness, a method guarantee to produce anxiety, disappointment and sorrow. Hardly anyone has been told the following truth. In order to be genuinely happy, there is one and only one thing you need to do. Get deep programmed.

Get rid of those attachments. When people stumble upon the self-evident truth, they become terrified at the thought of the pain involved in dropping their attachments. But the process is not a painful one at all. On the contrary, getting rid of attachments is a perfectly delightful task. If the instrument you use to rid yourself of them

is not willpower or renunciation but sight. All you need to do is open your eyes and see that you do not really need the object of your attachment at all. That you were programmed, brainwashed into thinking that you could not be happy or you could not live without this particular person or thing. Remember how heartbroken you once were, how you were certain you never would be happy again because you lost someone or something that was so precious to you. But then what happened? Time passed and you learned to get on pretty well.

Did you not? That should have alerted you to the falseness of your belief, to the trick your program mind was playing on you. An attachment isn't a fact. It is a belief, a fantasy in your head acquired through programming. If that fantasy did not exist inside your head, you would not be attached. You would love things and persons and you would enjoy them thoroughly, but liking the belief you would enjoy them on a non-attachment basis. As a matter of fact, and to each person or object that comes to mind say, I am not really attached to you at all.

I am merely deluding myself into the belief that without you I will not be happy. Just do this honestly and see the change that comes about within you. Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Just a reminder we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke Store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Ops goes the way. You go as the enemy, stillness is the key. The leather bound edition of the Daily Stoke. We have them all in the Daily Stoke Store, which you can check out at store.dailystoke.com. Hey, members you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music, download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple

podcasts. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions.

What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement, dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling

parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app.