Book Review: Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality By Anthony de Mello
This book is outside the regular reading list. It's a bestselling set of spiritual lectures that I saw Tim Ferris recommend online. He starts with the premise is that we are asleep and we need to wake up and become aware. It's provocative and unusual but if you want to keep calm beyond the offerings of the venture-backed phone apps, you've got to push yourself. That is the point.
Quotes:
“Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep”
“Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is a relief; a cure is painful.”
“If we want to love, if we want freedom, if we want joy and peace and spiritually. In that sense, spirituality is the most practical thing in the whole wide world.”
“Some of us get woken up by the harsh realities of life. We suffer so much that we wake up. But people keep bumping again and again into life. If you haven’t suffered enough, then there is another way: to listen.”
“Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude. So you could be disagreeing with me and still sight the truth. But there has to be an attitude of openness, of wiliness to discover something new. So I can speak to you, not of the truth, but for obstacles to the truth.”
“Are you listening, as most people do, in order to confirm what you already think? Observe your reactions as I talk. Frequently you’ll be startled or shocked or scandalized or irritated or annoyed or frustrated. Or you’ll be saying, “great!”. But are you listening for what will confirm what you already think? Or are you listening in order to discover something new? It is difficult for sleeping people. “
“An openness to the truth, no matter what the consequence, no matter where it leads you and when you don’t even know where it’s going to lead you. That’s faith. Not belief, but faith. Your beliefs give you a lot of security, but faith is insecurity. You don’t know. You’re ready to follow and you’re open, you’re wide open! You’re ready to listen. And, mind you, being open does not mean being gullible, it doesn’t mean swallowing whatever the speaker is saying. Oh no. You’ve got to challenge everything I’m saying. But challenge it from an attitude of openness, not from an attitude of stubbornness. And challenge it all. When you do that, you’re listening.”
“The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in a communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. 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 youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. “
“We want to lean on anybody we think has arrived. We love to hear that people have arrived. It gives us hope, doesn’t it? What do you want to hope for? Isn’t that another form of desire?”
“The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you are ready to listen and if you’re ready to be challenged, others one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It’s called self-observation. What’s that? It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. It means that you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever. “
“The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. If you understood the, they’d change.”
“Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.”
“Change will happen, you will not have to bring it about. As the life of awareness settles on your darkness, whatever is evil will disappear.”
“But this calls for a disciplined mind. When there’s something within you that moves in the right direction, it creates its own discipline. The moment you get bitten by the bug of awareness. Oh, it’s so delightful! It’s the most delightful thing in the world; the most important, the most delightful. There’s nothing so important in the world as awakening. Nothing! And, of course, it is also discipline in its own way.”
“Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. That’s why I said earlier that self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing. After a while, you don’t have to make any effort, because, as illusions begin to crumble, you begin to know things that cannot be described. It’s called happiness. Everything changes and you become addicted to awareness.”
“You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. They see it; they’re different. They react differently. In fact, they react less and act more. You see things you’ve never seen before.”
“God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction” you don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.”
“The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes. You’re suffering because you are asleep, but you’re thinking, “how wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed.”
“Unfortunately, all the emphasis is concentrated on changing the world and very little emphasis is given to waking up. When you wake up, you will know what to do or what not to do.”
“When you finally awake, you don’t try to make good things happen; they just happen. You understand suddenly that everything that happens to you is good. Think of some people you’re living with who you want to change. You find them moody, inconsiderate, unreliable, treacherous, or whatever. But when you are different, they’ll be different. The day you are different, they will become different. And you will see them differently, too. Someone who seemed terrifying will now seem frightened. Someone who seemed rude will seem frightened. All of a sudden, no one has the power to hurt you anymore. No one has the power to put pressure on you.”
1.) identify the negative feelings in you
2.) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality
3.) do not see them as an essential part of “I”, these things come and go
4.) understand that when you change, everything changes
“It’s not selfish to live your life as you see fit. The selfishness lies in demanding that someone else live their life to suit your tastes, or your pride, or your profit, or your pleasure.”
“The’s a story of a disciple who told his guru that he was going to a far place to meditate and hopefully attain enlightenment. So he sent the guru a note everything six months. So he sent the guru a note every six months to report the progress he was making. The first report said, “Now I understand what it means to lose the self” The guru tore up the note and threw it in the waste paper basket. After six months he got another report, which said, “Now I have attained sensitivity to all being” He tore it up. Then a third report said, “Now I understand the secret of the one and the many.” It too was worn up. And so it went on for years, until finally, no reports came in. After a time the guru became curious and one day there was a traveler going to that far place. The guru said, “why don’t you find out what happened to that fellow” Finally he got a note from his disciple. It said, ‘What does it matter?” And when the guru read that, he said “He made! He Made it! He finally got it! He got it!”
“Negative feelings, every negative feeling is useful for awareness, for understanding. They give you the opportunity to feel it, to watch it from the outside.”
“When you go through life with preference but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness. Wakefulness, happiness - call it what you wish - is the state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are insofar as this is possible for a human being.”
“As the great Confucius said “the one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change” flow. But we keep looking back, don’t we? We cling t things in the past and cling to things in the present’. Do you want to enjoy a melody? Do you want to enjoy a symphony? Don’t hold on to a few bars of the music. Don’t hold on to a couple of notes. Let them pass, let them flow. The whole enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass.”
“I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you’re lying in your coffin. Any posture you like. So imagine you’re lying flat and you’re dead. Now, look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it?”