YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

*People who feel as though they’re lacking a certain sense of stability in their lives, and who want to find ways of coping with the rapid pace of change and restoring their equanimity and peace.

*Seekers on any spiritual path who love learning about Eastern philosophy and what it has to say about not taking life so seriously, feeling “at home” in the universe, and witnessing the everyday miracles that are all around us.

*Readers who love discovering books that often deliver lightning bolts of inspiration and insight that will change the way they think forever.

*Anyone who wants to see further and deeper into the true nature of reality, with the help of one of the most humane, supportive, and surprising spiritual teachers the world has ever known.

What does it feel like to imagine oneself as intimately connected with Reality - with everything that exists - and to live with your eyes (and your heart) wide open?

Anthony de Mello points the way to an understanding - and awareness - of what such a fully realized life feels like, and just like life, this book is full of surprises.

Awareness began as a series of lectures that were later combined into a book, so it helps to imagine him speaking to an audience while you read it, and that you’re in that audience. I wish I was!

De Mello was a Jesuit priest and spiritual teacher, and he uses stories, parables, jokes, and striking insights - which he combines with his deep humanity, and his infinite care and affection - to wake people up to the life that's been sitting right in front of them the whole time they've been alive.

It's a favorite book of Tim Ferriss, who has mentioned it quite often on his extremely popular podcast. Awareness is also one of only two books on the recommended reading lists of both Eckhart Tolle and Naval Ravikant. The other book is the Tao Te Ching, which places Awareness in excellent company!

De Mello's whole "project" is to get you to see Reality in a completely different way - the way you would if the "doors of perception" were cleansed, so to speak. Traditional ways of approaching this same topic always seem to miss the mark. Mainstream psychology and what passes for religion these days don't really solve your problems; they just exchange your problems for other problems.

It's like the story of the man traveling with a brown package on his lap, who was asked by the train's conductor what was inside. The man explains that it’s an unexploded bomb he found in his garden and that he's taking it to the police station.

The conductor says, "Oh! You don't want to carry that around on your lap! Put it under your seat!"

Other “spiritual” approaches and "fixes" just transfer the bomb from our lap to underneath our seat. In contrast, the following graphic explains de Mello's approach:

Waking up to Reality and to Life itself isn't "supposed" to be comfortable. Nobody likes being woken up! But Reality is so much more miraculous and incredible than most of us ever glimpse on a daily basis, and when you think about it, waking up is very much like breaking out of prison.

We're imprisoned in our concepts, our ideas, our blind beliefs, and prejudices, but to break out of this prison and to actually experience life, the first step is to realize that you are in prison in the first place, and that there is a way out. Anthony de Mello shows us all the way out in this book.

Importantly, you have to wake up, not anyone else. It's you. It's always been you, and we can never shift the responsibility of waking up onto someone else.

We never go to the doctor and get a prescription for our neighbor! We go to the doctor to get a prescription for ourselves! All change begins with you, and when you change how you look at things, the things you look at change.

It's this relentlessly curious self-observation that de Mello was known for, and his gift was to inspire feelings of care, connection, and curiosity in all of his listeners and readers. He taught that awareness isn't something "extra" that you have to add to your to-do list. It's not a task, or an obligation, but a way of seeing, and a way of bringing yourself to life.

De Mello taught that you don't have to "add" anything to your life to make it (or yourself, for that matter) into everything it could be. Rather, it's a process of subtraction. It’s the dropping of your attachments, your labels, your concepts, and all the other obstructions to your happiness - which is, after all, your natural state.

#1: How Much Truth Can You Take Without Running Away?

Sleeping is synonymous with stagnation, with staying the same. Waking up implies a change of state, moving from one state of being into another that's closer to reality.

What's more, waking up doesn't usually happen without a significant amount of discomfort and questioning of previously held beliefs.

Waking up is also about seeing. Importantly, it's about looking at what you've always been looking at, but seeing it differently. Seeing it in its true form.

Because reality is always new, always changing, waking up means that you will constantly be evolving and growing over the course of your life, always ready to unlearn and discard what you've long believed to be true.

Of course, that doesn't mean you'll never feel strongly about certain things ever again, or that you'll never take a courageous stand for some deeply-felt cause. Rather, you're more likely to maintain a variety of "strong beliefs, loosely held."

Living in a state of wakefulness means believing in something completely and totally, but always being willing to shed that belief once you learn that it's actually false, or that it needs to be updated in some way. Sleeping people never update their beliefs.

And you really have to keep updating your beliefs, because there's virtually nothing you can say about reality that will be totally true in the next moment. Reality is constantly changing. Once you try to “fix” a belief inside time, it dies.

The only universal constant is change, and to be able to flow with that change and adapt to it and live with it means acquiring an openness and a flexibility that are prerequisites for true wakefulness. You can't run away from it, but you do have to move.

#2: Uninterrupted Happiness is Uncaused

Your happiness is like a clear blue sky, covered over with gray clouds of unhappiness. The blue sky is your natural state, and once you remove those obstructions, your fundamental peace, happiness, and perfection will be revealed.

You don't need to "acquire" anything that you don’t already have to become happy; you simply need to shed what makes you unhappy.

It's the same with money. The question of whether money can "buy" happiness is nonsensical; what money can do, however, is to remove the sources of unhappiness. It's the exact same thing.

Buying stuff is unlikely ever to create some state of “bliss” within you that was never there before. But removing the stress and anxiety of not having enough, or being unable to fulfill your obligations is likely to make you a whole hell of a lot happier! Money can absolutely eliminate unhappiness.

It's important to realize, though, that you can be happy for no reason at all. Indeed, it's one of the most transformational mental shifts you can ever make, because when you're happy for no reason, your happiness can never be taken away from you.

No longer will you be happy or sad "because" someone said this or that to you, or because something or other happened and you feel really good about it, or awful, or whatever the case may be. When you realize that it's possible to be happy for no reason - indeed, that it's your natural state and birthright - the entire sky opens up to you.

The key to your happiness is always within you - it always has been and always will be.

Again, that's not to say that you won't be happy or sad because of external events ever again. You should celebrate your wins! You may feel sad when something awful happens to you! Still…your fundamental, inalienable right to peace and happiness will never be at risk, no matter what.

The whole process is so easy but, at the same time, so incredibly difficult. You don't have to "do" anything, but how hard is it for people to do nothing?! It's so hard! The key, however, is not to add, but to remove. To drop the sources of unhappiness. As Anthony de Mello advises:

#3: Awareness is Not a Goal

If you were to say that you are trying to become happier, or more peaceful, or more serene, what you're actually doing is defining yourself as someone who is unhappy, violent, and restless. There's always going to be this unbridgeable gap between where you are and where you say you're going. You'll never get there.

Likewise, with awareness, when you say you want to become more aware, or you want to wake up, you're dead before you even started. Awareness - like freedom - comes at the beginning, never at the end. The only way to be more aware is to be aware! It's instantaneous! It's now!

You're either aware now, free now, or you never will be. Making it a goal just pushes it into the future, when actually, awareness is yours right now.

#4: Spirituality is the Most Practical Thing in the Whole Wide World

#5: The Highest Knowledge of God

Reality can never be defined as a concept. Reality just is, and there's nothing we can say about it that will come close to pinning it down - "God talk" included.

Essentially, you can write all the holy books you want - and shout at as many "unbelievers" as you want - but it will never change the fact that Reality (God, the Universe, etc.) is change itself.

But take a look around and what do you see?

So many people seem to be talking about "God" and "salvation" and all the rest of it, yet hardly anyone is extending unconditional love to everyone with whom we share this Reality. That's totally backward. "Religion" is everywhere, but love is not.

Spiritual teachers like de Mello can never tell you what God is; they can only give you hints, and pointers - in a word, awareness. They can never hand you the complete truth; they can simply make you aware that Reality can never be frozen into a concept, as de Mello explains in the quote below.

Trying to pin Reality down into a concept is like trying to stop a symphony because you think you've found the perfect note! In de Mello’s words:

#6: The Dancer and the Dance

Most people think they came "into" this world, but that's not true. They came out of it. Like one of my favorite philosophers, Alan Watts, puts it: “You” are something the total universe is "doing," in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing. How incredible!

Waves cannot exist without an ocean to create them, and people cannot exist without a universe from which they emerge.

This is our fundamental reality: complete and total identification with everything that exists. Everything.

Of course, there are different images and phrases that illustrate this reality - such as the dancer and the dance - but the fact is that neither can exist without the other. The dancer and the dance create each other, in the same way that you can't have "East" without "West," "Hardness" without "Softness," or "Light" without "Darkness."

Now, is it possible to translate this intellectual image into a visceral experience?

What does it feel like to know that you are intimately connected with everything that exists - that you are the total Universe and all the galaxies and everything - and that fundamentally, at the very basis of all reality, everything is actually okay?

In the awakened state, it feels like freedom. It feels like love. It feels like...awareness.

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