Awareness: Conversations with the Masters

Father Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest. This book is based on a retreat he led on the subject of awareness. Other reviewers have described the content very well, so I will only discuss what the book means to me. It’s easy to read, but hard to understand. It’s hard to understand because understanding requires “deprogramming.” The reader needs to be able to set aside all the nonsense they learned growing up in a self-centered, consumer culture. The reader needs to unlearn all the nonsense they learned from their parents, their education and even from their religion. If there’s such a thing as a freethinking Catholic priest it’s Anthony de Mello. Some of his teachings remind me of Buddhism, Daoism, the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and even Roman Stoicism. Anthony de Mello is a priest who even quotes the British philosopher and skeptic Bertrand Russell. And he manages to sneak in a little Jesus-talk here and there. According to a Wikipedia article, the Roman Catholic Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that Anthony de Mello’s later teaching is incompatible with the Catholic faith and could be gravely harmful. That was enough to convince me to buy the book. This great book is a keeper that deserves multiple readings.

Opened my eyes on attachments. I did not understand the difference between I and me. Something we should all explore.

I thank God for this book. It changed my life. At 21 years of age I was so lost in the world and confused. It brought everything together into an integrated whole, a "oneness". It told me things I already knew to be true but had forgotten. It challenged me, and yet at the same time encouraged and helped me. I feel very deeply thankful for Anthony de Mello and his writings. I feel very connected to him, like he is here helping me in life. His writing is so honest and true that every word and every sentence is full of purpose and meaning. It speaks about even silence has great purpose and meaning. I remember reading it for the first time and not being able to put the book down. I had an inner smile and a hunger for this kind of refreshing insight into life. It speaks directly to your heart, bypassing your mind. It speaks with living words, not just pointing a direction but taking you down that road, almost carrying you. I must have read it 3 times to begin with and then only pulling it out when I needed some encouragement and to remember how to live. I reached a point where as it said at the end of the book that you will come to a point where you don't need it anymore, and I felt I didn't. I have lost my way many times since, but I can keep coming back because it planted and nourished a seed of awareness within me. I started listening to Allan Watts and Eckhart Tolle after words. I appreciate all of their teachings, but there is something about this book that is like my first true love in life, that it will always be special to me, innocent. I have matured much since my first true love but I will always remember and be thankful for that experience. I am currently ordering this book for a friend who I think will find a treasure trove in "Awareness" here. Whatever you are doing in life, do it well. If you are sweeping the street, be the best street sweeper in the world. If you are walking down the hall of your house walk it as the best hall walker in the world, when you breath, breath as the best breather in the world. Stay connected to your source. (recent Julia Roberts movie) - "Smile with your mouth, smile with your whole body, even smile with your liver." Love your self first. Then when Love given to you by the Universe overflows your cup, let it flow out to others and it will be unconditional as you are not in "need" of anything at all. It's when we give all that we have to others first that we become depleted and unfulfilled, and thus have to be conditional with our giving as we try to allocate our limited energies and Love to give to those around us, as we are in a state of "need" ourselves. Love yourself and let yourself become filled with Love first, only then can the Love that flows from you be with out selfish need, unconditional and true.

This book was a fundamental tool on my journey to self-awareness! I'd recommend to anyone wanting to learn more about awareness.

It would be easy for someone reading, “Awareness: By Anthothy DeMellow”, for the first time to not know that this book is actually a transcript from multiple seminars that Tony gave on the topic of, “waking up.” I find that fitting because that is the nature of reality itself. A stream of wonderfully random events that come together to form a complex symphony. I was first introduced to the works of DeMellow through a friend when we where out to coffee one morning and she left her copy of, “The Way To Love”, on the table before going to retrieve our order from the counter. I am not dramatizing it when I tell you that I opened the small pocket book to some random page and read two sentences that caused soft tears to form in the corners of my eyes. Up to that point in my life I had not read anyone who articulated a perspective of reality that resonated so deeply with my own. He was the mentor I had been waiting for. Seeing that I was moved, my friend and I spent the rest of that mornings conversation talking about Tony's other work, “Awareness”. She said she had been reading it once a year since it found her and everytime she did something new jumped from the page deeper into her heart, where it would later grow into fruitful mentality. After our date I download the audiobook on my phone and began to give it a listen. I highly recommend you give it a listen. Getting to hear Anthony speak his truth adds so much depth to the knowledge he has to share. He was a witty man, full of life, and sensitivity coming through every statement. After I had finished the audiobook I went online and order my first paperback copy. I would proceed to spend the next year vandalizing each page with blue and orange highlighter strokes, and fill half a spiral notebook with my own thoughts, in an effort to mine as much knowledge as I could from its reserve. When I tell you this work will change your life I mean it. Though not in the way you may think. Most of the time when I read a book I seek to understand how it can add to my existing network of knowledge to help aid in this crazy beautiful thing called life. However with Awareness I found less of a compounding effect in its words and more of a stripping. A clarifying of what I thought I knew about myself and the nature of reality. An opportunity that should be considered with extreme caution. For once you wake there is no go back to sleep. The idea of “waking up,” is not as simple as saying, “Awareness is…”. For the truths laid out in these pages do not come from one man, but from the very breathe of our Creator. Whispering that can only be heard by those willing to still the noise of the ego. Anthony DeMellow is but one in a long line of spiritual guides who has found the key to living well and invites the reader to walk through that door. He offers himself as a teacher to inspire action over apathy, consciousness over conditioning, participation over programming. If you are ready to live a bulletproof exist as a human-BEing than I recommend giving “Awareness: by Anthony DeMellow”, your complete attention.

After having read all of the positive reviews before buying this book, I was looking forward to an advanced book that would give me another step up in my lifelong spritual and psychological journey. Nearly all of the reviewers reported that this was a 'life changing' book or that it would be read on an annual basis in order to learn its enclosed teachings. And, admittedly, such would have been the case for myself if I had initially read this book a number of decades ago. These teachings are no longer that; teachings. They became simply a way of life nearly thirty years ago. To me this has been how I have lived for most of my adult years and, being so, I can state that if you do put these ideals into practice, yes, you will lead a life of awareness and an ever closer feeling of being in tune with life itself. Yes, you will become quite different from those around you and the things you have in common with others will become less and less. Aloneness will be something that is treasured and no longer feared. Tasks and activities will be done for the joy of doing them and not as a means of receiving accolades from others. Life, regardless of your social standing, will have joy contained in it. You will no longer base your sense of worth on the opinions of others but, rather, rely solely on your inner spirit for the value and worth you have about yourself. And, when in doubt about what to do in any given situation, always do the 'hard thing'. It is only by doing this do we grow as a person and come to understand ourselves more. The 'easy way' is what you have done in the past and if you wish to grow, you must do the thing that is different, the thing that is hard. The author clearly states that one must get out of one own's personal prejudices, one own's cultural brain-washed ideas and one own's family taught traditions and shortcomings. Each one of us has all of the answers of life locked up inside of us and it only takes the energy necessary to unlearn all the useless trivia that we have been burdened with and to simply start all over again. It really is that simple! God never meant it to be hard. We are the ones who have made it so.

It's a book that's nice to read: 1. easy language, 2. practical conversation and connections, 3. he speaks with no authority of any kind, 4. the author comes across as "extra ordinary" (mind you, not special :), 5. clears a lot of stuff from the point of inputs (from your parents ie. from one's childhood to getting conditioned as we speak, 6. makes distinctions between tradition that tells us eg. "We must be children" to we must be able to "wonder as a child" do - so critical, 7.takes whatever comes (his mother's death) in his stride and ask his sister did she get upset with god (for taking away her mother) and not for taking aways 10's of thousands of Chinese people during the famine????? ..... explosive connections. It takes a extra ordinary human being to be born once into religion and then again into humanity. On that happy note .... stay well.

Full of stories, analogies, metaphors. Beautiful, simple and elegant words to talk about Real Love Reality A life worth living The origin of unhappiness (and how simple is to be happy) I recommended it to friends and loved ones already. Thank you Anthony 🙏🏽

This book is filled with awesome reminders of daily life, on consciousness, perception, behaviourism, mindfulness. I really love this book. Many AHA! moments as I read through, and the humour and some sarcasm is always appreciated, especially in spiritual books :) light-hearted and awakening.

Excelente libro, se convirtió en mi favorito.