Awareness by Anthony de Mello

Rating: 10/10

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Hands down the most impactful book I have read in the last two years. Recommended highly by Tim Ferriss, this book dives into a skill that is fundamental to living a satisfying life: awareness of our emotional state and inner voice. De Mello explores what it means to be truly aware, how we can become more aware, and how life changes once you are fostering perpetual awareness. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Five-Sentence Summary

We go through life unaware that our negative emotions happen only because of preconditioned filters, concepts, and labels that were programmed into us from a young age. We fail to recognize that instead of trying to clean what we view through this filter, we simply need to change the filter. You clean this filter through reflection on experience, gaining insight into the illusions you are overlaying on reality that are causing these negative emotions. Once the filter is cleaned, you are able to objectively observe what is happening through "me" from the point of view of the detached observer "I." This detachment disarms any external event, action, word, label and illusion from affecting your state of mind.

One Page Summary

As the title suggests, this book is about developing Awareness of our emotions, thoughts, actions, circumstances, predispositions, and biases.
The everyday person is perpetually unaware, living life on autopilot. They would rather live this reactionary lifestyle than go through the foundation-shaking discovery of waking up. And understandably so! Waking up involves challenging your entire conditioned belief system, which is inherently uncomfortable.
Self-observation, the separation of "I" (the observing self) from "me" (the medium of experience), is the key to awareness. "I" must observe "me" objectively and unjudgingly. "I" am not my thoughts, my feelings, my body, etc., as these are fluid. Suffering exists through "me", so when you identify "I" with the labels of "me", suffering begins.
Too often, people identify with labels and preconceived notions that rub up against reality. This friction causes unhappiness, which they then identify with. The root of the problem is you are viewing reality through your fixed viewpoint. We are slaves to what we are not aware of. When you become aware of it, you are still affected by it, but you are free from it.
Four Steps to Wisdom
1. Take note of the negative emotions happening through you.
2. Understand that this feeling is inside you and is not a part of reality.
3. Never identify with that feeling. Your illusion is defining yourself in terms of the feeling.
4. How do you change things? You change yourself, your perception, your illusions.
The first benefit of waking up is the ability to live life as you see fit, unselfishly. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else life their life as you see fit. When dealing with others, they are never accepting or rejecting you, they are accepting or rejecting the image they have fashioned in their heads of what they think you are.
Negative emotions = reality + illusion. The illusion can be a demand, an expectation, or a craving. Pain comes from grasping tightly to this illusion instead of stepping back, observing it, and changing your perception.
Our illusions are developed through filtering reality. The filter on reality we currently use is conditioned into us at a young age — we are programmed to perceive through a certain lens. We develop labels and identify with them based on this filtering. We have to simply change the filter. Wisdom occurs when you drop barriers you have erected through your labels and conditioning.
Awareness = Understanding + Insight. The difference between knowledge and insight is that we constantly do things that we know are wrong, but once we gain insight into the actual results, we change. We never do things we are aware are bad, but we do things we know are bad all the time. That is insight and understanding.
The freedom of awareness comes in being able to enjoy the simplest pleasures in life. The pleasures of the senses and the even better pleasures of the inner-mind.

Pithy Quotes

Before trying to change what's outside your window, make sure the window is clean.
Take careful note to be aware of when your demands and expectations of others are demands and expectations for your own well-being.
To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were.
One never quarrels about reality; we only quarrel about opinions, concepts, and judgements. Drop your concepts, opinions, and illusions, and you will see just that.
"It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have froze to death" — Mark Twain
"Has it ever occured to you that you can only love when you are alone? What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be."

Will I be of help to you on this retreat?

People don’t want to change, and people don’t want to wake up, and people don’t really want to be happy

On the proper kind of selfishness

The first step of waking up is understanding that you don’t want to wake up. We’ve been brainwashed that it is selfish to want happiness for ourselves over others

Are we talking about psychology in this spirituality course?

Only when you are sick of your sickness will you get out of it
Every great idea starts out as blasphemy

Listen and unlearn

The first step is understand you don’t want to wake up. The second step is a readiness to understand, to list, to challenge your whole belief system. That’s what this book is all about

The Masquerade of Charity

Two types of selfishness
1. I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself (self-centeredness)
2. I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others — volunteering to feel good
3. I do something good so that you won’t get a bad feeling
Enlightened self-interest — ordinarily everything we do is in our self-interest
We love when people hurt, but we don’t want to be the ones doing the hurting, because then WE will hurt

What’s on your mind?

We are surrounded with joy, happiness, love, but no one realizes it
“Oh you’ve changed your name too!” — hilarious anecdote
Need the readiness to upend the belief system, which is painful. How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered

Our illusion about others

You want happiness? You want freedom? Drop your false ideas. If you see through people, you won’t spend your entire time grappling with your wrong notions of them

Self-Observation

It means you do not personalize what is happening to you, you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever
We are deluded into thinking we /are/ depressed. These may be present in you right now, but they do not define you

Awareness without evaluating everything

Observing yourself without the desire to change, and not even just yourself but the actions of others brings clarity
“As long as you live to fulfill other people’s expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair … "
Moving the bomb from your lap to under your seat — you are just switching where the problem is and not solving it

The Illusion of Rewards

One sign that you’re awakened is you don’t give a damn about what’s going to happen in the next life

Find Yourself

Disconnecting “I” from “me” is a crucial step in waking up
Perhaps this thing called “I” is simply a conglomeration of your past experiences, of your conditioning and programming
“Observing whatever is going on in you and around you as if it were happening to someone else"

Stripping down to the “I”

“I” is not your thinking, because your thoughts go and change
“I” is not your body, because cells come and go
“I” is not your career, your name, etc — all of those things are “me.” Labels belong to “me”
When you step out of yourself and observe “me”, you cease suffering, as suffering is associated with "me"

Negative feelings towards others

Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion
The “me” is being threatened, but since we are identifying with the “me”, we feel threatened

On Dependence

To depend on another psychology is to depend on another human being for my happiness
Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality
What do we do when we feel that loneliness? We run from it — turn on the television, the radio, etc. There are huge businesses profiting from the fear on loneliness in people

How Happiness Happens

Watch yourself — when you are angry, are you aware that you are angry or are you simply identifying with your anger
When you’re living for nothing, you’ve got all your skills, you’ve got all your energy, you’re relaxed, you don’t care, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose.
“The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong.”
The common thread is disconnection. Before enlightenment, I was depressed. After enlightenment, I continue to be depressed. But I don’t identify with it anymore. I watch as it comes and goes, detached from its effects.

Fear — The Root of Violence

Love and Fear are the only two things in the world
Think of the last time you were angry — identify the fear behind it. What were you afraid of losing? What could have been taken from you?

Awareness and contact with reality

If you have an examination to take, I am not all that affected. It is easy for me to say “the more you worry about it, the worse it’ll get” → but why don’t we do that to ourselves?
Because we identify with “me”

Good Religion — The Antithesis of Unawareness

“What a life” you think as you look at someone just managing to survive, working all day, etc. But you are the same as them. A bigger machine, maybe, but a machine nonetheless.
You are a slave to what you are not aware of

Labels

Dropping your labels — “when your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering”

Obstacles to Happiness

Who determines what it means to be a success? This society. The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick!
These labels depend on the criteria established by society. They depend on your conditioning

Four Steps to Wisdom

Be aware of your negative feelings
Understand that the feeling is inside you, and not reality.
- There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you
Never identify with that feeling. “There is X right now, but it will pass.” → do not create labels for yourself regarding your negative feelings
How do you change things? How do you change yourselves?
- “The doctor says “very well, I understand your symptoms. I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor to solve them!” — how absurd? Yet that is what we often seek. We believe everything will be good in the world if other changes
- Step 4 is really understand that your perception must change about the feeling. When you change, everything changes

Sleepwalking

Emphasis is concentrated on changing the world. Very little emphasis is given to waking up.
“Make sure your window is clean before trying to change what you are looking through it”
Think of someone you live with that causes you trouble. You believe, the day they are different, you’ll be better. But not true.

Change as Greed

When faced with negative feelings toward someone, first understand that the negative feeling is inside you
Then say to yourself “I have no right to make any demands of you”
Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: that is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as YOU see fit.

A Changed Person

All people fashion a subjective image of something in their heads and then either accept or reject it. People do it to us, and we identify with their image. But that image is not us. Similarly we believe our own images are totally correct when we fashion them. But that is not true either.

Arriving at Silence

God, divinity, love, are unknowable. We are always living under the illusion that we know. We don't know.
"The fanaticism of one sincer believer who thinks he knows causes more evil than the united efforts of two hundred rogues"
When we look at a person, we really don't see that person — we're seeing something that we fixed in our mind, we keep holding on to that impression,looking at a person through that impression

Losing the Rat Race

"To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were"

Permanent Worth

Where do you get self worth from? One understands one's personal worth when one no longer identifies or defines one's self in terms of these transient things.
Negative feelings — every one of them is useful for awareness. They give you the opportunity to feel it, to watch it from the outside.

Desire, Not Preference

Desire in the healthy sense of the world is energy, and the more energy we have, the better.
Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to reality. Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction — if you examine what you have added, there is always an illusion there — a demand, en expectation, a craving

Clinging to Illusion

Happiness is not the same as excitement.
No one can do this for you, no teacher or guru.
We do not have a natural urge to be loved, only to be free and to love.
External events do not have the power to hurt you. It's you who give this power to them.
You are none of the labels you have put on yourself or others put on you.

Clinging Illusions

Perception has devastating consequences in the matter of love and human relationships
Recognizing your own biases, conditioning, and predispositions mend many of your fears
We hate most what we fear.

Getting Concrete

A concept applies to a number of individuals — concepts are universal.
If you cease looking at things only through your predisposed labels, you will never be bored.
Concepts are frozen while reality flows. Concepts fragment reality but reality is whole.
Essential it is to the human being to watch all of reality. Are you imprisoned by your concepts? Are you looking at things through the same lens at all times and not what whole they truly are?

At a Loss for Words

Do not quarrel over words, words are not reality
Like describing color to a blind person, Neti Neti, not that not that
We really only know that we cannot know God

Cultural Conditioning

Words are limiting, labeling, and not reality
Carrying over past experiences, both good and bad, is limiting. The ability to experience something fully then drop it is powerful.
Imagine being the first human being to not be influenced by labels, words, fake ideas, etc.

Filtered Reality

We have thousands of gigabytes of sensory information coming at us at all times — who is doing the filtering? Our programming? Our conditioning? Yes.
We’ve been programmed to crave — the root of all sorrow.
Attachment and craving are the staple of the American way of life and the engine that churns consumption and addiction.
You must become aware of the programming. This goes back to processing my negative emotions. What underlying belief that is not actually reality is causing me to feel this way? Acknowledge that and you cannot be affected.

Detachment

Eternal life is right now, but we have no notion of it.
Say to things “I really do not need you to be happy. I am only deluding myself in the belief that without you I will be unhappy” — anything you find yourself very attached to.
Most people are attached to appreciation and praise — you can exploit that in your dealings with other people.
When youre attached, you have blinders on to everything else.

Addictive Love

Dying to the need of people is the premise of being able to love. By being comfortable in solitude is when you know you can love someone
Only a very aware person can refuse to pick up guilt and anger from someone else

More Words

"It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have froze to death" — Mark Twain. To most people it is not the cold that matters, but the thermometer
Words words words → they are just words! Living on the Finnish/Russian border. No way I would have survived another Russian winter

Hidden Agendas

There is a difference between knowledge and awareness — you cannot do evil in awareness, but you can do evil when you know something is bad
"Everytime someone sins, they're sinning under the guise of good" — St. Thomas
Careful of spiritual greed. "I want to be aware" → do not make a goal out of it, that is spiritual greed.

Giving In

Given a billion-dollar check. Spiritual greed would say "I know I Must renounce this check, as the gospel says."
Awareness would say that is a scrap of paper, nothing to fight and nothing to renounce. When you renounce something, you give it power over you.

Assorted Landmines

Loneliness is when you're missing people. Aloneness is when you're enjoying yourself.
Awareness is realizing that you're wearing glasses that have been dyed a certain color, and taking the glasses off.
You don't "want" to be aware. You do or you don't.

The death of me

The fully alive person is the one who is full of death — dying to the past, dying to the future, living in the present moments.
Don't ask the world to change — you change first. Then you'll get a good enough look at the world so that you'll be able to change whatever you think ought to be changed.

Insight and understanding

The concrete steps to awareness is gaining insight into your negative emotions, finding the root cause, and then understanding why that root cause has not been dealt with and why it might not matter.

Not Pushing it

Don't push the car all the way to your destination. You need an expert to handle that. That expert is understanding, insight, and awareness.

Assorted images

The sailboat — when change comes through awareness, little needs to be done.
Pain comes when your rigid attitude bumps up against reality. Your misconceptions and illusions disagree with reality.
Wisdom occurs when you drop barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning → wisdom via subtraction, not addition.

Saying Nothing About Love

What does it mean to love? It means to see a person, a situation, a thing, as it really is, not as you imagine it to be.

Losing Control

Imagine a child given drugs at a young age. To be without the drug is so unbearable a torment that it seems preferable to die. This is exactly what your society did to you when you were born. You were given a taste for a drug caled approval, appreciation, attention.
There is never a minute when consciously or unconsciously you are not aware of the reactions of others
When you ditch this drug, your dealings with people improve. You no longer think "Will I get what I want from them?

Listening to Life

Pleasures of the senses of the mind — the simple pleasures. An animal left alone will never become addicted, never overeat or remain lazy
Sit down and soak in all of the sounds around you without filtering.

The end of analysis

Information and awareness are different. We touched on this earlier.
Recognizing that change doesn't happen through "me." It happens to "I" through "me." Your body is the medium for change
Knowing it will kill you versus being aware it will kill you. Knowing that your procrastination and distraction will kill you versus being aware that it will kill you. Being aware that the things you repeatedly do are killing you.

Dead ahead

Imagine you're lying flat, and you're dead. Look at your problems from that viewpoint. You're dead!
Lying there → skeleton → dust. You're literally going to die. We live in a flash of light and yet we waste it with our anxiety, worries, concerns, and burdens

The Land of Love

Aloneness means enjoying othe rpeople immensely but they no longer have the power to make you happy or miserable. Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally
To see at last with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire.
Developing a taste for the good things life. The love of work which you enjoy doing for the love of itself, the love of laughter and intimacy with people to whom you do not cling and on whom you do not depend emotionally but whose company you enjoy. Experience things with your whole being, go up to the mountains and silently commune with trees and flowers and animals and birds.
Think of someone teaching an entire village how to make fire. But the local priests kill off the teacher as he threatens their jobs. But the preachers know this might start a rebellion, so they place a sculpture of the teacher at the front of the church and lay before him the instruments of fire. And people worship for thousands of years. But they don't get to make fire!
Insight → the aha experience that has to do with awareness. Awareness = Understanding + Insight. Understand what you are addicted to, then come to the insight of how it is slowly killing you.
Don't identify. Emotion happens through me, not to "I". Here comes some anger through me. I am not angry, anger is happening through me. Then, admit the feeling is in me and no one else. Third, again don't identify. It is not in me, I am not lonely → loneliness is there, but it is not happening to me.
Summerhill book → every child is born with god within them. Attempts to shape them turns it into a devil.
Show me an individual in whom there is no inner self-conflict and I'll show you an individual in whom there is no violence.
I've given you a whole program for life, haven't I?