Anthony De Mello: Awareness

Sometimes people have to suffer enough in a relationship to get disillusioned about all relationships. It takes that rock bottom to reach the insight of: there must be another way of living than depending on another human being. 

This is a crazy idea

When you renounce something, you are stuck to it forever. In opposites you are holding on, not letting go. 

The prostitute comes to the guru talking about God. The priest about sex. 

When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. 

Don’t renounce it, see through it. 

Understand it’s true value. And drop it from your hands. 

If you understood, you’d drop your desire for it. 

Fascinating type or person - you do something good so you won’t have a bad feeling. Doing something good doesn’t give you a good feeling to do it; it gives you a bad feeling to do it. You hate it, you make loving sacrifices but you’re grumbling.

If I had a dollar for every time I did things that gave me a bad feeling, I’d be a millionaire. You know how it goes. "Could I meet you tonight, Father?" "Yes, come on in? I don't want to meet him and I hate meeting him. I want to watch that TV show tonight, but how do I say no to him? I don't have the guts to say no. "Come on in, and I'm thinking, "Oh God, I've got to put up with this pain." It doesn't give me a good feeling to meet with him and it doesn't give me a good feeling to say no to him, so I choose the lesser of the two evils and I say, "OK. come on in."

Wow. This is crazy. 

Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is most people are starving to death. 

We don’t want to look. Because if we look, you lose control over the life that you are so precariously holding together. 

The one thing you need most to wake up is the readiness to learn something new. 

The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. 

Interesting:

You cannot fear the unknown. You cannot fear something you do not know. What you really fear is loss of the known. 

The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with the sinners because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were. 

Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disappointed again ? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. You want to wake up? Want happiness? Here it is: drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. 

On selfishness, and every act motivated by selfishness. Our own search for pleasure or run from pain. 

Self-observation—watching yourself—is important. 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. What does that last sentence mean? It means you do not personalize what is happening to you. Look at things as if you have no connection to them whatsoever. 

Understand this - I don’t yet

You would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer. That’s shocking, particularly to someone in the Western Culture. You’re not interfering. Don’t interfere. Don’t “fix”. Watch! Feel, experience and let go. 

Be like a dog trainer, who attempts to understand a dog to train him to perform certain tricks. Like a scientist, who observes the behavior of ants with no further end than to view ants - he wants to learn as much as possible from them. He wants to learn about ants. 

Ha! Many think the most important question is: is there life after death. What about, is there life before death?!

Sit in the chair and see yourself. This is the I observing Me.  

Interesting:

On a friend dying - We never feel grief when we lose something we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess. 

Can you be said to love me if you cling to me and do not let me go? If you will not let me be? Can you be said to love me if you need my psychologically or emotionally for your happiness?

Hm…

Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality. 

They were living in another world, the world of the awakened. They had the attitude: “I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?”

Because love does that. It shines on the good and bad alike; if makes rain fall on the saints and sinners alike. 

Is it possible for the rose to say, “I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad”?

There’s not a single evil in this world that you cannot trace to fear. 

Anger comes from fear. When you are angry in a car, you identify with your body and the car, and you are suddenly aware of how vulnerable you are to losing - the car, and therefore the body, and you get angry. Road rage. 

What you are aware of you are in control of, what you are not aware of is in control of you. 

Become a participant observer. Talking to you, I’m watching myself and you.  

This is a big idea. Absorb it. Wow 

Say I’m looking at those trees and worrying. Am I distracted? I am distracted only if I mean of concentrating on the trees. But if I’m aware that I’m worried right now, then I’m not distracted at all. Just be aware of where your attention goes.  

The quiet of the tree where there was slight rustling. The 3-4 conversations through the screen window behind my head. Hannah as she turns the page. The sound of drinking and the glass put on the table. The flitting up and down against the page against my wrist by the wind. The tickle of the bug on my knee and it’s miniature black form. The errant zigzag the bug makes as it flies away, as the wind rustles the tree. The sounds of the game from the switch and the competitive noises from the players. Emily. Hanser. The vast beauty of the green mountain and the trees out of the corner of my eye. The bright sheen of the wooden tabletop, the intricate rug, chilling under me, and the balcony, unmoving. 

Disidentifying yourself with yourself. This is why a two year old uses third person: “Tommy had his breakfast this morning,” he doesn’t say “I”. 

Do you want to be a puppet? Press a button and you’re down; you like that?

Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality. Stop trying to change the other person. 

Hm:

The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes. You’re suffering because 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. 

Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in 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.

You are responsible for the negative feeling, not the other person. Someone in your place would be perfectly calm and ease in the presence of this person, they wouldn’t be affected. You are. 

How much you’re going to discover about your “me.” Let the dictator in you come out. But I’m a tyrant and you’re a tyrant. A little variation on I’m an ass, you’re an ass”

Interesting. Notice everything, so you can notice the things you like. / so you can notice the things you were looking for. 

And there is the story about a soldier on the battlefield who would simply drop his rife to the ground, pick up a scrap of paper lying there, and look at it. Then he would let it flutter from his hands to the ground. And then he'd move somewhere else and do the same thing. So others said, "This man is exposing himself to death. He needs help." So they put him in the hospital and got the best psychiatrist to work on him. But it seemed to have no effect. He wandered around the wards picking up scraps of paper, looking at them idly, and letting them futter to the ground. In the end they said, “We've got to discharge this man from the army." So they call him in and give him a discharge certificate and he idly picks it up, looks at it, and shouts, This is it? This is it. He finally got it. So begin to be aware of your present condition whatever that condition is. Stop being a dictator. Stop trying to push yourself somewhere.

Nobody ever rejects you, they’re only rejecting what they think you are. But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either. 

How easy it is to love people once you understand this. How easy it is to love everyone when you don’t identify with what they imagine you are or they are. It becomes easy to love them, to love everybody. 

Interesting: parenting advice. Making rules is the way to parent. That’s the way things are run around here. You’re free, but you must take the consequences. 

Am I implying, for example, that we shouldn't make demands on our children? What I said was: “You don't have a right to make any demands." Sooner or later that child is going to have to get rid of you, in keeping with the injunction of the Lord. And you're going to have no rights over him at all. In fact, he really isn't your child and he never was. He belongs to life, not to you. No one belongs to you. What you're talking about is a child's education. If you want lunch, you better come in between twelve and one or you don't get lunch. Period. That's the way things are run here. You don't

come on time, you don't get your lunch. You're free, that true, but you must take the consequences.

It cannot be said, only the opposite can be said. Truth cannot be put into words. 

Neither of them knows what they're talking about, because if they did, they'd shut up. It's as bad as that. It's even worse, because one day, say, you give sight to this blind man, and he's sitting there in the garden and he's looking all around him, and you say to him, "Well, now you know what the color green is. And he answers, "That's true. I heard some of it this morning!" The fact is that you're surrounded by God and you don't see God, because you "know" about God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know.

Like a fish looking for the ocean. 

It’s all there. All around. Everything. 

Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. 

Suffering points up an area where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. 

When you go through your life with preferences but don’t depend on any one of them, you’re awake. Turn desires into preferences. 

The nature of the rain is the same, yet it produces flowers in the garden and thorns in the marsh. 

That’s what brings happiness, moment-to-moment contact with reality. 

Neti, neti - not that, not that. You can only know what God is not. 

Drop attachment to peace. 

You are called upon to be aware. Get the feel of that jangling telephone; get the feel of the jarred nerves; get the sensation of the steering wheel in the car. Come to reality, and let the peacefulness or the tension take care of itself. 

It helped you. That’s wonderful,  congratulations to you. No credit to me. 

“Thank you, you have a golden heart.”

This is crazy parenting advice:

Neill says that the sign of a sick child is that he is always hovering around his parents; he is interested in persons. The healthy child has no interest in persons, he is interested in things. When a child is sure of his mother's love, he forgets his mother; he goes out to explore the world; he is curious. He looks for a frog

If you want a royal road to mysticism, 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.