Awareness

AWARENESS
A de Mello Spirituality Conference in His Own Words

ANTHONY DE MELLO, S.J.
Edited by J. Francis Stroud, S .J.

IMAGE BOOKS DOUBLEDAY

[OCR Scanned in March 2005 by ShareTruth. Original pagination not preserved. Table of Contents updated to reflect new page numbers.]

AN IMAGE BOOK PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. 1540Broadway, New York, New York 10036 IMAGE, DOUBLEDAY, and the portrayal of a deer drinking from a stream are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. This Image Books edition published May 1992 by special arrangement with Doubleday. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data De Mello, Anthony, 1931–1987 Awareness : a de Mello spirituality conference in hisown words / Anthony de Mello : edited by J. Francis Stroud. p. cm. 1. Spiritual life—Catholic authors. I. Stroud, J. Francis. II. Title. [BX2350.2.D446 1992] 248.4’82—dc20 91-37433 CIP ISBN 0-385-24937-3 Copyright © 1990 by the Center for Spiritual Exchange All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6

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CONTENTS
Foreword 5 On Waking Up 6 Will I Be of Help to Youin This Retreat? 6 On the Proper Kind of Selfishness 8 On Wanting Happiness 8 Are We Talking About Psychology in This Spirituality Course? 9 Neither Is Renunciation the Solution 10 Listen and Unlearn 11 The Masquerade of Charity 12 What’s on Your Mind? 15 Good, Bad, or Lucky 17 Our Illusion About Others 17 Self-observation 19 Awareness Without Evaluating Everything 20 The Illusion of Rewards 22Finding Yourself 23 Stripping Down to the “I” 24 Negative Feelings Toward Others 26 On Dependence 27 How Happiness Happens 28 Fear—The Root of Violence 31 Awareness and Contact with Reality 31 Good Religion—The Antithesis of Unawareness 32 Labels 36 Obstacles to Happiness 36 Four Steps to Wisdom 38 All’s Right with the World 40 Sleepwalking 41 Change as Greed 43 A Changed Person 45 Arriving atSilence 47 Losing the Rat Race 49 Permanent Worth 50 Desire, Not Preference 51 Clinging to Illusion 52 Hugging Memories 53 Getting Concrete 56 At a Loss for Words 59 Cultural Conditioning 60 Filtered Reality 61 Detachment 63 Addictive Love 65 More Words 66
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Hidden Agendas 66 Giving In 67 Assorted Landmines 68 The Death of Me 69 Insight and Understanding 70 Not Pushing It 71 Getting Real 72Assorted Images 73 Saying Nothing About Love 73 Losing Control 74 Listening to Life 75 The End of Analysis 76 Dead Ahead 77 The Land of Love 78

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FOREWORD
Tony de Mello on an occasion among friends was asked to say a few words about the nature of his work. He stood up, told a story which he repeated later in conferences, and which you will recognize from his book Song of the Bird. To myastonishment, he said this story applied to me.
A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked. “That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’rechickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

Astonished? At first I felt downright insulted! Was he publicly likening me to a barnyard chicken? In a sense, yes, and also, no. Insulting? Never. That wasn’t Tony’s way. But he was telling me and these people that in his eyes I was a “golden eagle,” unaware of the heights to which I could soar. This story made me...