Tag Archives: Awareness

“Whatever period of life we are in is only good to the extent we make use of it, that we live it to the hilt, that we continue to develop and understand what it has to offer us and what we have to offer it. The rewards for each age are different in kind, but they are not necessarily different in value or in satisfaction.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

7 Jan

From Lara Setrakian’s 2018 New Year’s email.

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“The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life.” – John O’Donohue

7 Jan

From Lara Setrakian’s 2018 New Year’s email.

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“How would you ever get there? By a ceaseless awareness, by the infinite patience and compassion you would have for a drug addict. By developing a taste for the good things in life to counter the craving for your drug. What good things? 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. It will also help if you take on activities that you can do with your whole being, activities that you so love to do that while you’re engaged in them success, recognition, and approval simple do not mean a thing to you. It will help, too, if you return to nature. Send the crowds away, go up to the mountains, and silently commune with the tree and flowers and animals and birds, with sea and clouds and sky and stars.”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

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It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact, there’s no where to go because you’re there already. The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: ‘The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.” ‘

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

Continued from P. 146 “The moment you make a goal out of it and attempt to get it, you’re seeking ego glorification, ego promotion. You want the good feeling that you’ve made it.

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“You will never understand yourself if you seek to change yourself. The harder you try to change yourself, the worse it gets. You are called upon to be aware.”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

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“Spirituality is awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness, awareness.”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

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“Wakefulness, hapiness – call it what you wish – is the state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are, insofar as this is possible for human beings.”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

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“Four steps to wisdom. The first thing you need to do is get in touch with negative feelings that you’re not even arware of. – The second step is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. – The third step: Never identify with that feeling. It has nothing to do with the “I”. – The fourth step: How do you change things? How do you change yourselves?”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

On expanding the third step; never identify with negative feelings:

  • P. 80 “If you want to say depression is in there, that’s fine; if you want to say gloominess is in there, that’s fine.  But not: I am gloomy.”
  • P. 80 “Your depression and your thrills have nothing to do with your happiness.  Those are the swings of the pendulum.”
  • P. 81 “You don’t even need to be in love.  Who told you you do? What you need is to be free.  What you need is to love.  That’s it; that’s your nature.  But what you’re really telling me is that you want to be desired.  You want to be applauded, to be attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you. You’re wasting your life.  Wake up! You don’t need this.  You can be blissfully happy without it.”

The 4 Steps to Wisdom repeated again on P. 89: “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.

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“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.”

16 Nov

Anthony de Mello in “Awareness”

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“What is the most important thing of all? It’s called self-observation. – No one can show you a technique. The moment you pick up a technique, you’re programmed again. – What’s [self-observation]? It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and to watch it as if it were happening to someone else. – It means you do not personalize what is happening to you. It means you look at things as if you have no connection to them whatsoever.”

11 Nov

– Anthony de Mello in “Awareness” on Self-observation, P.35.

More on the process and understanding of self-observation, “I” vs “Me” and suffering below.

on P.46 “Be aware of your presence in this room. Say to yourself, “I am in this room.” It’s as if you were outside of yourself looking at yourself. Notice a slightly different feeling than if you were looking at things in the room. Later we’ll ask, “who is this person doing the looking?” I am looking at me. What’s an “I”? What’s “me”? … If you find yourself condemning yourself or approving yourself, don’t stop the condemnation and don’t stop the judgement or approval, just watch it. I’m condemning me; I’m disapproving of me; I’m approving of me. Just look at it, period. Don’t try to change it… Just observe what is going on.”

on P. 47 “Notice you have “I” observing “me.” This is an interesting phenomenon that has never ceased to cause wonder to philosophers, mystics, scientists, psychologists, that the “I” can observe “me”… The great mystics of the East are really referring to that “I”, not to the “me”. As a matter of fact, some of these mystics tell us that we begin first with things, with an awareness of things; then we move on to an awareness of thoughts (that’s the me); and finally we get to an awareness of the thinker. Things, thoughts, thinker. What we’re really searching for is the thinker. Can the thinker know himself? Can I know what “I” is? Some of these mystics reply, “Can the knife cut itself? Can the tooth bite itself?…Can the “I” know itself?”

P.47 “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 change or are renewed every minute, so that by the end of seven years we don’t have a single loving 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!”

P.48 “Is my name an essential part of me, of the “I”? Is my religion an essential part of the “I”?

P.49 – 50 “What constantly changes is “me”. Does “I” ever change? Does the observer ever change?… 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.”

P. 51 “Anytime you have a negative feeling towards anyone, you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You are not seeing reality. Something inside of you has to change… The one who has to change is you.”

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