Awareness — Anthony de Mello

Below are some pieces of wisdom from Anthony de Mello’s famous book, Awareness:

• What they want is relief; a cure is painful.
• “The nature of rain is the same, but it makes thorns grow in the marshes and flowers in the gardens.”
• Do you know one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?”
• When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. As long as you’re fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it. When you renounce something, you’re tied to it. The only way to get out of this is to see through it. Don’t renounce it, see through it.
• Believe me, it really doesn’t matter whether you agree with what I’m saying or you don’t. Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words.
• Your beliefs give you a lot of security, but faith is insecurity.
• “A saint is one until he or she knows it.”
• Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.
• The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away.
• Don’t interfere. Don’t “fix” anything. Watch! Observe! The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things, aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they’d change.
• 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 interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand.
• 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.
• Cut out all the judgments and simply observe, watch.
• “Is there a life after death?” Wrong! Nobody seems to be grappling with the problem of: Is there a life before death?
• Am I my thoughts, the thoughts that I am thinking? No. Thoughts come and go; I am not my thoughts. Am I my body? 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. Cells come and go. Cells arise and die. But “I” seems to persist. So am I my body? Evidently not!
• 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.
• Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.
• 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”? Or is it possible for the lamp to say, “I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people”? Or can a tree say, “I’ll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad”? These are images of what love is about.
• What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.
• “Don’t seek the truth; just drop your opinions.”
• Do you want to be happy? Uninterrupted happiness is uncaused. True happiness is uncaused.
• To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions.
• You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.
• Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!
• Negative feelings are in you, not in reality. So stop trying to change reality. That’s crazy! Stop trying to change the other person. We spend all our time and energy trying to change external circumstances, trying to change our spouses, our bosses, our friends, our enemies, and everybody else. We don’t have to change anything. Negative feelings are in you. No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy. There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you or hurt you. No event, condition, situation, or person.
• You’re free; you don’t care anymore about being accepted or rejected, that makes no difference.
• You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said very beautifully, “God is not attained by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.” You don’t do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.
• Can you imagine the relief when you don’t have to impress anybody anymore? Oh, what a relief. Happiness at last!
• You no longer feel the need or the compulsion to explain things anymore. It’s all right. What is there to be explained?
• “Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know.”
• God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God’s dance. It isn’t as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer. Oh no. You’re not a dancer at all. You are being danced!
• When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake.
• “The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.”
• No reality fits an ideology.
• Don’t ask the world to change—you change first.
• There’s the story of Paddy, who fell off the scaffolding and got a good bump. They asked, “Did the fall hurt you, Paddy?” And he said, “No, it was the stop that hurt, not the fall.”
• Wisdom occurs when you drop barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning. 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.
• … another reflection, from Plato: “One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in prison.”
• … another gospel sentence: “If a person makes you go one mile, go two.”
• If a person is trying to change external reality by being out of prison in order to be free, he is a prisoner indeed, Freedom lies not in external circumstances; freedom resides in the heart. When you have attained wisdom, who can enslave you?