I felt compelled to revisit this Anthony de Mello short story about the societal drug we are given as children that turns us into sleeping robots. It’s powerful and has stuck with me for years!
The quotes/excerpts are below, but here’s a video clip if you want to watch Anthony de Mello deliver the message (watch it while you can because Anthony de Mello videos often get removed from YouTube due to copyright violations):
The Societal Drug keeping You a Sleeping Robot (Anthony de Mello Excerpt)
“There’s a mystic who says, ‘Human beings are born asleep, they live asleep, and they die asleep.’ But, that is so true! Maybe they’re not born asleep; they’re born awake. But, by the time they develop their brains, they fall asleep. And, they breed children in their sleep, they bring them up in their sleep, they go in for big business in their sleep, they go into government in their sleep, and they die in their sleep. They never wake up. That is what spirituality is all about: to wake up! You’re moving around in a drunken stupor. It’s as if you were hypnotized. You’re drugged. And, you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Think of a little child. It’s given a taste for drugs. As it grows up, the whole body of that child is craving for the drug. To live without the drug brings a pain and a suffering so great that it seems preferable to die. You and I, as children, were given a drug: it was called ‘approval,’ it was called ‘appreciation,’ it was called ‘praise,’ ‘success,’ ‘acceptance,’ ‘popularity.’ Once you took the drug, society could control you. The tentacles of society got into you.”
“You become a robot. You want to see what kind of a robot existence human beings live? Listen to this. You’ve got the robot who comes here, and I say, ‘My you’re looking pretty!,’ and the robot goes right up. I press a button called ‘appreciation,’ and right up it goes. Then I press another button called ‘criticism’—flat on the earth. Total control. We’re so affected by this, we’re so easily controlled by it. And, when we’re deprived of it, we become so terrified. We’re so frightened to make mistakes. We’re so frightened that people will laugh at us … ‘I like you,’ and the robot will automatically, mechanically react, ‘Oh, he’s good, he likes me.’ ‘I don’t like you,’ (and the robot will automatically, mechanically react) ‘He’s awful, he doesn’t like me.'”
“As a result of having taken this drug, you have lost your ability to love. You know why? Because you cannot see any human being anymore. You’re so conscious of whether they accept you or they don’t, whether they approve of you or they don’t. You’re seeing them as a threat to your drug or as a support to your drug. The politician frequently doesn’t see people at all; he sees votes. And, if you’re neither a threat nor a support to his getting votes, he doesn’t even notice you. The businessman sees big bucks; he doesn’t see people, he sees business deals. But, we’re no different if we’re under the effect of this drug … How can you love what you do not even see?”
“Do you think Jesus Christ was controlled by this kind of thing? By what people thought of him and what they said about him? Awake people break out of this drug.”
“You want to get rid of the drug? You have to tear those tentacles out of your system … by seeing what they are doing to you. If you’re able to do that, everything will be the same, but you will have dropped out. You will be in the world, but you will no longer be of the world.”
“Call the drug by its name, and be patient, the way you would with an addict.”
Anthony de Mello also mentions something similar in his book The Way to Love:
- “Think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs. As the drug penetrates the body of the child, it becomes addicted and its whole being cries out for the drug. To be without the drug is so unbearable a torment that it seems preferable to die. Now this is exactly what society did to you when you were a child … You were given a taste for the drug called Approval, Appreciation, Attention, the drug called Success, Prestige, Power. Having got a taste for these things you became addicted and began to dread their loss. You felt terror at the prospect of failure, of mistakes, of the criticism of others. So you became cravenly dependent on people and lost your freedom. Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable.”
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