Awareness by Anthony de Mello:
Notes:
People don’t always want cures; they want relief. A drug addict doesn’t want sobriety; they want their drug of choice.
Gurus don’t help. If you improve, you did it. If you are damaged, you did it. Own the improvement and the new identity.
The most important thing is self-observation. And no one can help you develop this skill. No one can give you a method or technique. There’s no protocol. As soon as there’s a protocol, you’re judging yourself against the protocol. Which is not awareness, not self-observation.
Repent means wake up. It does not mean weep for your sins.
A sign of lack of awareness is an obsession on another life, the next life. One sign of being awakened is you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life.
I —> me —> things. Observer —> observed self —> observed things. Humans have an “I” that can observe “me.” Other animals can’t do this. It takes a certain amount of intelligence to have an “I” that can observe a “me.” Therefore, the more intelligence, the more self-observation. (Tom’s gloss)
de Mello: grief is overrated. Your reaction to a friend’s death is one of personal loss. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.
Disagree. People feel grief for unknown victims (children, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, etc.). I think that’s a form of grief toward our idea of human goodness.
“So when you step out of yourself and observe “me,” you no longer identify with “me.” Suffering exists in “me,” so when you identify “I” with “me,” suffering begins.”
You are not the dancer; you are the dance.
Relationships are like orchestral performances. But the orchestra doesn’t depart when the other person departs. When you meet someone else, it plays a different melody, which is also very delightful. When you’re alone, it continues to play. “There’s a great repertoire and it never ceases to play.”
Hindi for bliss is anand. The reason we don’t experience bliss at all times is because we think and focus on what we don’t have.
Violence is just fear.
Say I’m looking at trees and I’m worried. Am I distracted? Only if I mean to concentrate on the trees. But if I’m aware that I’m worried, too, that’s not distraction at all. Just be aware of where your attention goes.
Awareness is not concentration. Many meditation techniques emphasize concentration. But concentration is a spotlight. “I’m leery of that.” Awareness is better.
Being human is not being “vulnerable,” which de Mello likens to being a puppet. If you let events or other people tell you how to feel, and you call that “vulnerability,” you’re a puppet.
Irish prisoner story. Prisoner dug a tunnel under prison wall. He comes out in the middle of a playground. Kids are playing. He can’t restrain himself, begins to jump up and down, crying, “I’m free, I’m free!” A little girl looks at him scornfully and says, “That’s nothing. I’m four.”
Program to stop sleepwalking with negative emotions: (1) identify the negative feelings in you; (2) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external or objective reality; (3) do not see them as part of “I”; these things come and go; (4) understand that when you change, everything changes. Do these steps 1,000 times and you will get it.
Silence of St. Thomas: St. Thomas stopped writing after a mystical experience and died months later in 1274. Left his Summa Theologica unfinished. He was previously a prolific writer. Lessons: mystery surpasses knowledge, reverence for the divine, ultimate truths are ineffable, beyond words, contemplation is also important.
People who claim to “know” God don’t really. “You’re surrounded by God but you don’t see God, because you ‘know’ God.” That’s what the gospels were saying, that religious people “knew,” so they got rid of Jesus. Too much God talk. Too little awareness.
Happiness should not turn on desires being fulfilled. But you can still enjoy certain things. These things would be preferences and not desires. You’re happiness does not depend on them.
Happiness is not the same as excitement or thrills. “You’re feeding yourself with thrills. This is like feeding a racehorse with delicacies.”
Closest description of how to actually “do” awareness: “Then look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything. The faces of people, the shapes of trees, a bird in flight, a pile of stones, watch the grass grow. Get in touch with things, look at them. Hopefully you will then break out of these rigid patterns we have all developed, out of what our thoughts and our words have imposed on us.”
Regain your childlike wonder. Don’t become a child. Become like a child. “Return to paradise.”
de Mello: flags are idols. Don’t salute a flag. Salute humanity.
You don’t “want” to experience more awareness. You do or you don’t. It’s not about effort.
Imagine giving a child a drug. The child becomes addicted. To die would be preferable to losing the drug. That’s what society does to us. “You were not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life—namely, work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind.”
Enjoy the simple pleasures of the senses and you develop “that extraordinary discipline of the animal.”
Unclog your senses through awareness and you’ll see miracles.
“The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave.” Look at your problems from that viewpoint.
You’re not living until “it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn to you” whether you live or die.
Reflect on the vastness of the universe. Good for awareness.
Develop a “ceaseless awareness.” Develop a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug. What good things? The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself; the love of laughter and intimacy. Take on activities you can do with your whole being. While you’re engaged in them, success, recognition, and approval drop away. It will also help to return to nature.
Quotes:
Every great idea starts out as a blasphemy. -Bertrand Russell
People are so distressed when I tell them to forget their past. They are so proud of their past. Or they are so ashamed of their past. They’re crazy! Just drop it!
Think of the loneliness that is yours. Would human company ever take it away? It will only serve as a distraction. There’s an emptiness inside, isn’t there? And when the emptiness surfaces, what do you do? You run away, turn on the television, turn on the radio, read a book, search for human company, seek entertainment, seek distraction. Everybody does that. It’s big business nowadays, an organized industry to distract and entertain us.
The person who is truly nonviolent, who is incapable of violence, is the person who is fearless.
We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.
Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don’t lead to growth in themselves. What leads to growth is painful experiences. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.
We die on the day when our live cease to be illumined by the steady radiance of wonder renewed daily, the source of which is beyond all reason. -Dag Hammarskjold
Mark Twain put it very nicely when he said, ‘It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have frozen to death.’ We do freeze to death on words. It’s not the cold outside that matters, but the thermometer. It’s not reality that matters, but what you’re saying to yourself about it.
As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology.
Loneliness is when you’re missing people. Aloneness is when you’re enjoying yourself.
What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. And to give it the response it deserves.
A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.
Hell is other people. -Jean Paul Sartre
Living doesn’t mean working in government, or being a big businessman, or performing great acts of charity. That isn’t living. Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness.
Do you know where wars come from? They come from projecting outside of us the conflict that is inside. Show me an individual in whom there is no inner self-conflict and I’ll show you an individual in whom there is no violence.