Awareness
The unaware life is not worth living. When you change, everything changes.
“Awareness” by Anthony DE MELLO got me completely hooked. I read it, and reread it, again and again. There are few books that drew me in so completely. The first time I read it in one go. The ideas in it struck me as essential and yet radical, almost unnatural. And then I found myself savoring it slowly, chapter by chapter, appreciating, taaking notes.
When you read it for the first time, you may feel like its small chapters are somewhat random. But just as all roads lead to Rome, all the chapters lead to a better understanding of what awareness and love is: that you need to listen to the world and yourself without judgment, to drop your opinions, not to identify with any label, to be in the present moment and to nourish yourself on wholesome things. The unaware life is not worth living.
Here is what I am taking from this book.
Awareness = Spirituality = Waking up to reality. But it’s hard and we don’t want it.
Awareness starts with self-observation, which is not the same as self-absorption.
Awareness means dropping your opinions, judgments, and prejudices. It means simply observing the world, to study it without judgment.
Awareness means not identifying with labels.
Awareness is detachment, not depending on anyone or anything for your happiness. Awareness is the absence of fear or desire.
Awareness is not focusing on what you don’t have. Awareness is fully being in the present moment, listening to life.
Awareness is patience and compassion, starting from yourself.
Ultimately, there are only two things, love, and fear. Call it awareness, call it love, call it spirituality or freedom or awakening or whatever. It really is the same thing.
AWARENESS = SPIRITUALITY = UNLEARNING = WAKING UP TO REALITY. BUT WAKING UP IS HARD. IT FEELS UNNATURAL. WE DON'T WANT IT
The unaware life is not worth living.
Be aware of what you’re saying, be aware of what you’re doing, be aware of what you’re thinking, be aware of how you’re acting. Be aware of where you’re coming from, what your motives are. The unaware life is not worth living.
What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You’re always a slave to what you’re not aware of.
Awareness is wisdom.
Wisdom is not something acquired. Wisdom is not experience. Wisdom is not applying yesterday’s illusions to today’s problems. Wisdom is to be sensitive to this situation, to this person, uninfluenced by any carryover from the past, without residue from the experience of the past.
Spirituality means waking up.
Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.
Realize that you don’t want to wake up.
It’s pretty difficult to wake up when you have been hypnotized into thinking that scrap of old newspaper is a check for a million dollars.
In order to wake up, the one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
But we hate the new, we hate the change.
With this, I would partially disagree because we seek novelty, and yet at the same time crave familiarity. Think about it as the MAYA concept - "most advanced yet acceptable".
Are you listening, as most people do, in order to confirm what you already think? Or are you listening to discover something new? We hate the new. We hate it! And the sooner we face up to the fact, the better. We don’t want new things, particularly when they involve change. Most particularly if it involves saying, “I was wrong.”
I would add to that when it involves saying "I don't know"
We hate change out of fear. It's not the fear of the unknown. What you fear is the loss of the known.
The first reaction is one of fear. It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you don’t know/ Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.
The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. 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’re so precariously holding together.
And yet to wake up we need to give it a try. Listen and unlearn. Awareness is unlearning
Are you listening, as most people do, in order to confirm what you already think? Or are you listening to discover something new? We hate the new. We hate it! And the sooner we face up to the fact, the better. We don’t want new things, particularly when they involve change. Most particularly if it involves saying, “I was wrong.”
An openness to the truth, no matter what the consequences, 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 ready to listen.
Waking up is painful.
When you’re beginning to awaken, you experience a great deal of pain. it’s painful to see your illusions being shattered. Everything that you thought you had built up crumbles and that’s painful.
AWARENESS STARTS WITH SELF-OBSERVATION
Self-observation is not the same as self-absorption.
Self-absorption is self-preoccupation, where you’re concerned about yourself, worried about yourself.
Self-observation 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 don’t personalize what is happening to you. It means that you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever.
Awareness is not concentration.
Concentration is a spotlight, a floodlight. You’re open to anything that comes within the scope of your consciousness. You can be distracted from that, but when you’re practicing awareness, you’re never distracted. When awareness is turned on, there’s never any distraction, because you’re always aware of whatever happens to be. Say I’m looking at the trees and I’m worrying. Am I distracted? I am distracted only if I mean to concentrate on the trees. But if I am aware that I’m worried, too, that isn’t a distraction at all. Just be aware of where your attention goes.
Come home to yourself. Observe yourself. Self-observation is such a delightful and extraordinary thing.
Awareness is wisdom.
Wisdom is not something acquired. Wisdom is not experience. Wisdom is not applying yesterday’s illusions to today’s problems. Wisdom is to be sensitive to this situation, to this person, uninfluenced by any carryover from the past, without residue from the experience of the past.
Four steps to wisdom
The first thing you need to do is to get in touch with your negative feelings that you’re not even aware of.
The second step is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. As one man said,”I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it.” That’s what spirituality is all about: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you.
The third step: never identify with that feeling. It has nothing to do with the “I”. Feelings come and go. Don’t define your essential self in terms of that feeling. Don’t say “I’m depressed”
The fourth step: How do you change things? How do you change yourselves? The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if someone else changes. You keep insisting, “I feel good because the world is right.” Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. Understand that when you change, everything changes.
AWARENESS MEANS DROPPING YOUR OPINIONS, JUDGEMENTS, AND PREJUDICES. IT MEANS SIMPLY TO OBSERVE THE WORLD, TO STUDY IT WITHOUT JUDGEMENT.
This idea initially struck me as too radical. How can we drop our opinions, while we have been thought - from childhood into adulthood - that we need to have an opinion. On anything and everything. We have labels for anything and everything, including ourselves. It just helps us navigate the world, navigate reality, find where we belong. As the saying goes: we see people and things not as they are, but as we are. Dropping labels seems utterly unnatural. And yet it really IS a key for awareness. A key to peace and harmony.
Don't seek the truth. Just drop your opinions, your judgments, your prejudice.
Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels.
We spend so much of our lives reacting to the labels, our own and others. We identify the labels with “I”. All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me
The important thing is not to know who “I” is or what “I” is. You’ll never succeed. There are no words for it. The important thing is to drop the labels. As the Japanese Zen masters say, “Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions.”
Every concept that was meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up being a barrier to getting in touch with reality because sooner or later we forget that the words are not the thing.
One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, concepts, about judgments. Drop your concepts, your opinions, your prejudices, your judgments, and you will see that.
As soon as you look at the world through an ideology, you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. People are always searching for meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as a mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
No judgment, no commentary, no attitude: one simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is. Because if you desire to change what is into what you think should be, you no longer understand.
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 reference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.
AWARENESS MEANS NOT IDENTIFYING WITH LABELS
We spend so much of our lives reacting to the labels, our own and others. We identify the labels with “I”. All suffering is caused by my identifying myself with something, whether that something is within me or outside of me
The reason you suffer from your depression and your anxieties is that you identify with them. You are not your depression.
AWARENESS IS DETACHMENT, NOT DEPENDING ON ANYONE OR ANYTHING FOR YOUR HAPPINESS. AWARENESS IS THE ABSENCE OF FEAR OR DESIRE
No one owes us our happiness. Being happy WITH someone or something does not mean being happy BECAUSE of someone or something. It's another initially puzzling thought because we've been taught to place our happiness in other things, in other people.
What is success? It’s what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad. These are conventions, but we treat them like realities, don’t we? When we were young, we were programmed to unhappiness. They taught us that to be happy, we need money, a beautiful or handsome partner in life, a good job, friendship, spirituality, God - you name it. Unless you get these things, you’re not going to be happy, we were told. Now, that’s what I call an attachment. An attachment is a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.
If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you’re OK, you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you’re not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people’s expectations, you better watch out whether you live up to every damned expectation of theirs. Do you call that human? You’re not O.K. and you’re not not O.K., you’re you.
We all depend on one another for all kinds of things. But to depend on another psychologically - to depend on another emotionally means to depend on another human being for my happiness. If you do, the next thing you will be doing is demanding that other people contribute to your happiness. Then there will be the next step - fear.
Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency.
Can you imagine a life in which you refuse to enjoy or to take pleasure in a single word of appreciation or to rest your head on anyone’s shoulder for support? If you ever get to this state, you will at last know what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire. You will know what it means to love. But to come to the land of love, you must pass through the pains of death, for to love persons means to die to the need for persons, and to be utterly alone. How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, but the infinite patience and compassion. By developing a taste for good things in life to counter the craving for the drug.
How liberating it is not to depend emotionally on anything.
We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that new have never attempted to possess. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.
When I talk about not having expectations of others, or not making demands on them, I mean expectations and demands for my well-being. The expectations and demands are on people’s behavior - traffic laws, good organization, the smooth running of society. They are not intended to make the President or traffic policeman feel good.
How can you love people when you need people? You can only use them.
if we really dropped our illusions, we would be alert. If you wish to love, you must learn to see again. And if you wish to see, you must learn to give up your drug. Give up your dependency. Externally, everything will go on as before, but though you will continue in your world, you will no longer be of it. You don’t have to go to the desert; you’re right in the middle of people; you’re enjoying them immensely. But they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable. That’s what aloneness means. In this solitude, your dependence dies. The capacity of love is born. One no longer sees others as means of satisfying one’s addiction.
AWARENESS IS FULLY BEING IN THE PRESENT MOMENT, LISTENING TO LIFE
There is only one reason why you’re not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it’s because you’re thinking or focusing on what you don’t have. Otherwise, you would be experiencing bliss. You’re focusing on what you don’t have. But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss.
Many think: is there life after death? Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of: is there life before death? (…) it’s precisely the ones who do not know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.
Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?
Listening to life
You need awareness and you need nourishment. You need good, healthy nourishment. Learn to enjoy the solid food of life. Good food, good wine, good water. Taste them. Lose your mind and come to your senses. That’s good, healthy nourishment. The measures of the senses and the pleasures of the mind. Good reading. Or a really good discussion, or thinking. it’s marvelous.
Most of us have lost our capacity for enjoyment. We’ve got to have more and more expensive gadgets, but we cannot enjoy the simple things in life.
If you really enjoy life and the simple pleasures of the senses, you will be amazed. You’d develop that extraordinary discipline of the animal. An animal will never overeat. Left in its natural habitat, it will never be overweight.
When you have enjoyed something intensely, you need very little.
Slow down and taste and smell and hear, and let your senses come alive. Sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all. You’ll see the miracles that happen to you when your senses become unclogged. This is extremely important for the process of change.
The only way to change is by changing your understanding. I don’t need anybody’s love; I just need to get in touch with reality. Reality is lovely; it is an absolute delight. Eternal life is now. We’re surrounded by it, like the fish in the ocean, but we have no notion about it at all.
AWARENESS IS PATIENCE AND COMPASSION THAT START WITH YOURSELF.
The harder you try to change, the worse it can get. Does it mean that a certain degree of passivity is all right? Yes, the more you resist something, the greater power you give to it. You always empower the demons you fight.
The root of evil is within you. As you begin to understand this, you stop making demands on yourself, you stop having expectations of yourself, you stop pushing yourself and you understand. Nourish yourself on wholesome things: sunsets, nature, a good movie, a good book, enjoyable work, good company - and hopefully, you will break your addictions to those other feelings.