Awareness was brought to my attention when I noticed it was one of only two books on reading recommendation lists from both Eckhart Tolle and Naval Ravikant. The other book? Tao Te Ching.
Personally, I’m a fan of tough loveâit says what needs to be said while maintaining respect. Anthony de Mello’s book Awareness (Amazon) was a much-needed dose of spiritual tough love.
In the foreword of the book, J. Francis Stroud, S.J. says Anthony de Mello’s work was all about “waking people up to the reality of their greatness.” He says Tony will be “a friend you will have for life.” So, let’s hang out with our friend Tony. In his own words, De Mello says he’s given us a “whole program for life” and promises he hasn’t “known a single person who gave time to being aware who didn’t see a difference in a matter of weeks.” That sounds promising. Why not get started now?
Quick Housekeeping:
- All quotes in quotation marks are from the author unless otherwise stated (I’ve added my own emphasis in bold).
- In several areas, I’ve paraphrased original quotes to make the main themes more succinct and actionable.
- This summary is organized by themes I’ve identified. Anthony de Mello liked to repeat themes over and over again to drive them home, so you’ll notice some overlap in the various themes below.
- De Mello includes a multitude of engaging short stories, analogies, and anecdotes throughout the book to illustrate his key points. Due to summary length, I had to leave most of them out. However, the book is on the shorter side, so itâs worth reading it in full if this summary sparks your interest.
Book Summary Contents:
- Some Big Questions to Begin
- A Few Watch-outs to Consider
- Starting the Waking Up / Awakening Process
- 10+ Ways to Tell if You’re Asleep vs Aware (+ Infographic)
- How to do Self-Observation (+ Infographic)
- 4 Steps to Wisdom (+ Infographic)
- The Transformative Shift & Your Call to Action
Tough Love Spirituality: “Awareness” by Anthony de Mello (Book Summary + Infographics)
Some Big Questions to Begin
These questions will help put us in the right mindset from the get-go.
- “Whoâs living in you? Itâs pretty horrifying when you come to know that. You think you are free, but there probably isnât a gesture, a thought, an emotion, an attitude, a belief in you that isnât coming from someone else.”
- “The trouble with people is that theyâre busy fixing things they donât even understand. Weâre always fixing things, arenât we? It never strikes us that things donât need to be fixed. They really donât. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, theyâd change.”
- “We are filtering things out constantly. Whoâs doing the filtering? Our conditioning? Our culture? Our programming? The way we were taught to see things and to experience them?”
- “Thereâs only one way out and that is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming.”
- “The one thing you need most of all 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. How much are you ready to take?“
A Few Watch-outs to Consider
Try to be conscious of these as we go through this process.
Arouse your curiosity but not your ego or spiritual greed (also known as spiritual narcissism):
- “Are you going to substitute one greedâa spiritual greedâfor the other greed? Before, you had a worldly ego and now youâve got a spiritual ego, but youâve got an ego all the same, a refined one and one more difficult to cope with. When you renounce something, youâre tied to it.”
- “The moment you make a goal out of it and attempt to get it, youâre seeking ego glorification, ego promotion.”
Truth cannot be put into words or a formula:
- “Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.”
- “I can speak to you, not of the truth, but of obstacles to the truth.”
- “The guru can only point out your errors. When you drop your errors, you will know the truth.”
While this post outlines steps or a loose process, always remember:
- “No one can give you a method. No one can show you a technique. The moment you pick up a technique, youâre programmed again.”
Starting the Waking Up / Awakening Process
Now that we are conscious of the questions and watch-outs above, let’s start waking up. After all:
- “Thereâs nothing so important in the world as awakening. Nothing!”
But, we must acknowledge that it’s not going to always be easy or pleasant. We may rather stay comfortably asleep:
- “The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you donât want to wake up. The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you donât like it.”
Next, assess your readiness:
- “The second step is a readiness to understand, to listen, to challenge your whole belief system.”
Your awareness is not selfish:
- Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish.
How will you know when you’re starting to wake up?
- “Do you know one sign that youâve woken up? Itâs when you are asking yourself, ‘Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?'”
10+ Ways to Tell if You’re Asleep vs Aware
Give yourself an honest assessment of your life right now.
Run through this list and think about if the description of asleep or aware better matches your current reality.
1. Overall
- Asleep: Marches to the drums of society. You are in your own prison/cage and rigid patterns: beliefs/convictions (religious, political, social, psychological), ideas (about love, freedom, happiness), identifications, labels, ideals, ideologies, social conventions, words, concepts, etc.
- Aware: Dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within. Torn away the “tentacles of society that have enveloped and suffocated your being.” Though you will continue to be in the world, you will no longer be of it.
2. Reality
- Asleep: The mind tries to make sense out of reality, but it bumps into something that destroys the sense you made.
- Aware: To know reality you have to know beyond knowing. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
3. Mind
- Asleep: Lost in our minds (brainwashed, hypnotized).
- Aware: Unobstructed mind (wisdom).
4. Ideologies
- Asleep: Look at the world through an ideology
- Aware: No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that.
5. Illusions
- Asleep: Living in illusion (negative feelings).
- Aware: The state of nondelusion (drop illusions, exchange illusions for reality). Living is to have dropped all the impediments and to live in the present moment with freshness.
6. Attachments
- Asleep: Enslaved by various attachments (a belief that without something you are not going to be happy.); striving to rearrange the world to keep these attachments. What you are not aware of is in control of you.
- Aware: What you are aware of you are in control of.
7. Suffering
- Asleep: Problems exist in the human mind.
- Aware: Nothing has the power to hurt you again. Mystics are unanimous that all is well, all is well. Reality is all right; not problematic.
8. Drugs vs Food
- Asleep: You were given a taste for drugs called approval, appreciation, attention.
- Aware: Enjoy the solid, nutritious food of lifeânamely, work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind.
9. Seeing
- Asleep: We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.
- Aware: See reality. See things not as you are but as they are, insofar as this is possible for a human being. You see things youâve never seen before. Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them.
10. Listening
- Asleep: Always listening from your programming (your conditioning, your hypnotic state). Listen from our positions.
- Aware: An openness to the truth, no matter what the consequences, no matter where it leads you and when you donât even know where itâs going to lead you…Youâre ready to follow and youâre open, youâre wide open! Youâre ready to listen.
11. Happiness
- Asleep: Trained to be dissatisfied with ourselves. Programmed to unhappiness. Taught that in order to be happy you need money, success, a beautiful or handsome partner in life, a good job, friendship, spirituality, Godâyou name it.
- Aware: Happiness is the natural state. A moment-by-moment contact with reality brings happiness. Go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them.
12. Goals
- Asleep: Trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere.
- Aware: Thereâs nowhere to go because youâre there already.
13. Change
- Asleep: Attempted change through effort of the will, ideals, building new habits. Behavior may change, but you don’t.
- Aware: Change through awareness and understanding.
How to do Self-Observation
A “how to,” but don’t forget: “No one can give you a method. No one can show you a technique. The moment you pick up a technique, youâre programmed again.”
Me
- Labels belong to ‘me.’ No matter what labels you think of (except perhaps human being) you should apply them to ‘me.’
- Suffering exists in ‘me’ and is a sign you’re out of touch with the truth (when you identify ‘I’ with ‘me’; there’s desire/identification under the suffering)
- What constantly changes is ‘me’:
- If you get yourself a new job or a new spouse or a new home or a new guru or a new spirituality, that does not change you. It’s like imagining that you change your handwriting by changing your pen. Or that you change your capacity to think by changing your hat.
- Thoughts, body, name, career/profession, beliefs, religion, spirituality, clothes, etc.
Self-Observation (Watching Yourself)
- 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 … you do not personalize what is happening to you.
- Take in what’s going on–in yourself and out in the world. Get in touch with things, look at them.
- “I observe ‘me,’ but I do not think about ‘me.’
- You are a passive, detached observer.
- “Look; observe; spend hours observing. Watching what? Anything.“
- One simply observes, one studies, one watches, without the desire to change what is.
- No interference, no attempt to change, no commentary, no attitude, no judgment (what you judge you cannot understand).
- Be aware of what you’re saying, be aware of what you’re doing, be aware of what you’re thinking, be aware of how you’re acting. Be aware of where you’re coming from, what your motives are.
- As you do this, you’ll begin to realize that increasingly you are disidentifying from ‘me.’
- To lose the self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were. You thought you were at the center; now you experience yourself as satellite. You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance.
I
- ‘I’ is none of the labels we attach to it
- “The important thing is not to know who ‘I’ is or what ‘I’ is. You’ll never succeed. There are no words for it.
- “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 (thatâs the ‘me’); and finally we get to awareness of the thinker. Things, thoughts, thinker. What weâre 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 eye see itself? Can the âIâ know itself?'”
4 Steps to Wisdom
I included this visual in the original book summary, but it’s worth revisiting since it’s actionable.
The Transformative Shift & Your Call to Action
Go from this:
Ignorance, Unwakefulness, Unawareness â Fear â Evil, Violence, War
(projecting outside of us the conflict that is inside)
To this:
Awareness â Healing, Truth, Salvation, Spirituality, Growth, Love, Awakening
———————–
Love = consciousness = sensitivity (sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons) = to see as it really is (not as you imagine it to be) = clarity of perception, objectivity = no demands, no expectations, no dependency
Your call to action now:
Not even the greatest guru in the world can take a single step for you. You’ve got to take it yourself … It is you who have to do it. No one else can help you. It is you who have to digest your food, it is you who have to understand. No one else can understand for you. It is you who have to seek. Nobody can seek for you. And if what you seek is truth, then you must do this.
â Anthony de Mello
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