Awareness

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I was NOT happy with myself and not comfortable in my own shoes back then and that would have manifested in the relationship. Along the line of “the only knowing is unknowing: the less identification with the world, the better.

If there was anyone who could be considered the perfect spiritual teacher, Anthony DeMello would be it. The example that comes to mind for this passage is anger and how when you are aware of your anger, you can catch yourself and choose a different way to respond (response = positive).

My experience is that people who suffer from chronic loneliness don’t need more or better relationships with other people so much as a better relationship with themselves—and with their emotions, in particular. It’s a spiritual classic with a relatively straightforward style and many counterintuitive insights into human nature.

You know, all mystics—Catholic, Christian, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion—are unanimous on one thing: De Mello includes a multitude of engaging short stories, analogies, and anecdotes throughout the book to illustrate his key points. In fact, Thomas Aquinas (he’s not only a theologian but also a great philosopher) says repeatedly, ‘All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly. But the moment you become attached in my sense of the word, then you’re blocking out many other things. Or to repeat that lovely Arab saying: ‘The nature of the rain is the same and yet it produces thorns in the marsh and flowers in the garden.

I first read Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello two years ago, after hearing it repeatedly brought up on The Tim Ferriss Show. 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.

As the Arabs say, ‘The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens. When you see a stone as a stone and a scrap of paper as a scrap of paper, you don’t think that the stone is a precious diamond anymore and you don’t think that that scrap of paper is a check for a billion dollars. Put this program in you a thousand times: a) identify the negative feelings in you; b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in an external reality; c) do not see them as an essential part of “I”; these things come and go; d) understand that when you change, everything changes.Perfect love casts out of fear where theres is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. Reality, God, divinity, truth, love are unknowable; that means they cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind. Believe it or not, every concept that was meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up by being a barrier to getting in touch with reality, because sooner or later we forget that the words are not the thing. I picked up this book at a monastery in Northern California about 10 years ago and have kept it close ever since.

To wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. They tell us that millions of cells in our body are changed or are renewed every minute so that by the end of seven years we don’t have a single living cell in our body that was there seven years before.

The “me” can be in pain, can be confused, can be divided, can be feeling elation, but each is transient and the forever “I” knows that all of it is the experience of being alive. 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 is safe to say that for the first 36 or so years of my life, I was sleep walking thinking I knew what it was all about, life, that is.