Awareness

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Awareness, Anthony de Mello's most popular book, is a beautiful bridge between Western and Eastern spiritual thought. Before, you had a worldly ego and now you’ve got a spiritual ego, but you’ve got an ego all the same, a refined one and one more difficult to cope with. Unfortunately, when sleeping people swing into action, they simply substitute one cruelty for another, one injustice for another. And once we have the "awareness" he asks, "Can you imagine the relief when you don't have to impress anybody anymore? Though he died suddenly in 1987, he leaves a rich legacy of spiritual teaching through his written and recorded words.

And when I talk to Moslems, I say, ‘Your Ayatollah and your mullahs are not going to be happy to hear this, but God is going to be much more pleased by your being transformed into a loving person than by saying, ‘Lord, Lord. As a matter of fact, I haven’t quite finished it, but it’s due at the library and I’m taking it back.Here, then, is a masterful book of the spirit, challenging us to wake up in every aspect of our lives. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. When the average American says he or she is making a living, it isn’t a living they’re making, oh no!

But if Teillard’s prose had the rich intricacy of, say, Handel’s water music, then the writing of de Mello is the lone, sweet melody of a Pied Piper. Then there will be a next step—fear, fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, mutual control.I’ve often thought that terms like faith and belief seem incompatible with certainty… If you’re certain, why do you need to believe or have faith? The third point, admitting that you are wrong is something that many humans, myself included, struggle with.

For instance when we grief over losing a loved one when we’re fired from our job when we get very ill. de Mello was a Roman Catholic priest who grew up in India, and his intimate familiarity with both traditions combined with a deep understanding of world mysticism provide seekers of a Western background (i.From every pore or living cell of our bodies and from all our senses we are getting feedback from reality. I can imagine for some readers though, this book will seem like an exploration of Mars for solutions to problems on Earth. We should all be on our path to clarity, we should all stare within, need less and make less castles in the sky. Once you get convinced of that—and it gets into our subconscious, it gets stamped into the roots of our being—you are finished. That gives the hope to people who still believe that there is much more to life than the wretched mechanical life they are clinging on to.