Anthony DeMello: The Bob Ross of Spiritual Gurus?

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2021

⏱️ 126 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Well, the hosts have had a good long taste of the culture wars and friends, it is a bitter, bitter draught. As a palette cleanser, we return to a simpler time, a better(?) time... The 1980's! When Chris Kavanagh was young and innocent, running about in short pants with a twinkle in his eye and (I assume) lobbing bricks at RUC armoured vehicles for the craic. At nights he would curl up and listen to CASSETTE tapes of a fellow called Anthony De Mello, while the eyes of Pope Ratzinger would stare at him disapprovingly from the poster (I assume) that was on the wall of his room.

Yes, we're returning to the gurus our decoders were fans of during their young and impressionable years. And Chris rather liked Fr. Anthony De Mello. Who is he? A Jesuit priest who sounds more like a Buddhist monk with a message of peace, detachment, and the recipe for happiness. He says that society trains us to act like robots, encouraging us to go through life in a depressed haze. After you apply his recipe, you'll still be depressed, but you'll realise the depression is like the clouds, but you are the sky.

He's got the good vibes of Bob Ross, but does that conceal something darker? Was spiritual self-help better or worse in the 1980s compared today? Listen, and you shall know all!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's the podcast for an anthropologist and a psychologist
0:25.7	listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our best to understand what
0:30.0	they're talking about with me not with me I'm with you you're with me I'm
0:36.8	I'm professor about and who are you I'm Dr. Christopher
0:40.5	Kamno. Dr. Chris Cavinar,
0:43.3	thank you for being with me.
0:44.6	Chris Cavinar, famous anthropologist,
0:47.6	my camp still plays, the center of my winding gyre,
0:50.4	the Falconer, so glad you could be here. Thank you.
0:53.7	How many of those references that I get?
0:55.7	Maybe.
0:57.0	Maybe I'm 0.4.
1:00.0	I'm all right, Matt. I've noticed that I've got two mosquito bites from yesterday and that's very
1:08.8	upsetting to me. It's very distracting, upsetting, unfair.
1:13.0	I just want to complain about that.
1:17.0	Yeah, that would be disconcerting.
1:19.0	Not least, because I remember gloding yesterday
1:22.0	when I was out in the park with my wife and we were
1:25.4	visiting my son's nursery.
1:27.6	This was like a kind of sneakily observe your young child playing event in Japan. We had to like hide in bushes and stuff.
1:36.0	I'm glad it wasn't on my own. It looked worse, but I was wearing a shirt and you know it's hot in Japan and what not and then my wife was more
1:47.5	Appropriately summer adorned, but she was often having to scare away mosquitoes and I was saying,
	...

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