Lessons from Awareness by Anthony De Mello

Part 1: All is Well, Observation and Happiness

This book has helped me work with the nature of suffering itself. The ideas within it aren’t new. In fact, I’ve heard them described in hundreds of different ways in other texts on spiritual enlightenment, yet it’s something about the way De Mello frames awakening that struck a chord within me.

I found myself sitting on the couch a few times and using the words like transmissions. Every time I read a powerful sentence I would just sit there and bask in the wisdom of what I just read. I suggest trying to drop into the awareness that he’s pointing to as well as you read this summary.

All is well

“They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know, all mystics, no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion—are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well.”

On the level of awareness, all is well. There is nothing wrong with this moment. You’re alive! You’re breathing! You’re conscious! Therefore, all is well. It’s impossible for something to be wrong with this moment. It’s impossible that your existence could be flawed.

“Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is a relief; a cure is painful. Waking up is unpleasant you know. You are nice and comfortable in bed. It’s irritating to be woken up.”

Are you still stuck in stories? Yes, you can change the stories you have to more positive and comforting ones, but nothing ever really changes. When we realize that all our mental stuff is the cause of our suffering, we understand that the only way to truly escape the reigns of suffering is to transcend all stories. To live in, as, and from Awareness.

We don’t want to be unconditionally happy

“I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. But this is really to say “You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.” … We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions.”

"Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand it's true value and you won’t need to renounce it; it will just drop from your hands. … But of course, if you don’t see that, if you’re hypnotized into thinking that you won’t be happy without this, that, or the other thing, you’re stuck. … If you understood, you’d simply drop the desire for it.”

You already have it all. You’re sitting on the biggest pile of gold the world has ever seen and yet you’re oblivious. You’re completely clueless.

We have everything that we need to be happy, truly happy, unconditionally happy. But this is a painful truth. We don’t really want to be happy. To be happy would mean that we wouldn’t get the pleasure of blaming others, of being a victim to the world, of getting caught in stories about what happened in our past and why we are the way that we are. We’d just be … happy.

But because we want and desire more, we’re stuck in our own suffering. If we could only realize that nothing we want will ever give us the happiness we week. Not another person, nor a better job, nor being smarter, stronger, better looking, or whatever our wildest fantasies are. It’s all bullshit. Don’t you get it! Wake up. Your desires are bullshit. All they’re really doing is keeping you stuck in your own suffering.

Just Observe

“Self-observation—watching yourself—is important. It is not the same as self-absorption. Self-absorption is self-preoccupation, where you’re concerned about yourself, worried about yourself. I’m talking about self-observation. What’s that? 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.”

“Don’t interfere. Don’t “fix” anything. Watch! Observe!”

“The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things, aren’t we? It never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really don’t.”

All we can do is observe. Observe what? Our stories, emotions, reactions, beliefs, thoughts, sights, sounds, feelings, mental images, narratives, etc.

The more that we can observe the content of our experience, the more that we can become aware of the fact that the content of our experience is not who we really are. It’s just content. We can become curious about who it is that is the witness of the content of our experience.

And the more that we’re able to tap into the witness of our experience instead of identifying with the content of our experience, the less we suffer. It’s as simple as that.

As I was reading De Mello’s book I was watching this happen in real-time. I started the book from a place of pain and suffering and as I read his words and attempted to experience what he was saying, I watched the amount of suffering I was experiencing drop within minutes. It blew my mind. That simple observation can have the tremendous power of relieving our suffering.

Openness is the opposite of delusion

“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.”

“The first reaction is one of fear. It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.”

Personally, I’ve experienced so much fear on the path. Fear is present more often than not when I meditate. Ohhhh and don’t even get me started on the fear of psychedelics. Where does this fear come from?

Well, in short. It comes from shattering your reality. “Fear is the loss of the known” is putting it pretty easy. The loss of the known is literally the loss of everything you think you know about yourself and about life. It’s the deconstruction of the idea that “I am a human being living in a universe on a planet called earth.” Even this has to go. All you’re left with is raw sense data, completely clueless about what it all means. This is the price of admission. Are you willing to pay?

You’re no better than anyone else

“Hey wake up! It’s liberating. It’s wonderful! Are you feeling depressed? Maybe you are. Isn’t it wonderful to realize you’re no better than anybody else in this world?”

"To me, selfishness seems to come out of an instinct for self-preservation, which is our deepest and first instinct. How can we opt for selflessness? It would be almost like opting for nonbeing. To me, it would seem to be the same thing as nonbeing. Whatever is is, I’m saying: Stop feeling bad about being selfish; we’re all the same. … The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.”

Everyone is stuck in the illusion of self. We’re all stirring in our own bullshit. And yet somehow we have the audacity to think that we’re better than all the other people who are also stuck in their illusions of self? I enjoyed De Mello’s reminder of our shared humanity — that we’re all human and nobody is better than anybody else — enlightened or not. Rich or not. Poor or not. Famous or not. Depressed or not. It’s all the same.

“A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot — you glorified her, didn’t you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They’re not! They’re not nice. They’re as bad as you are —bad, you understand? They’re asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference. Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop you false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.”

When we see the nature of self directly we begin seeing through other people’s bullshit. We begin to see that the entire identities that we’ve built up are false. That we’re not who we think we are. We’re so stuck in the play that we forgot we were actors. We totally became unconscious of the fact that we’re creating all of this. We’re creating the stories, the narratives, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s all us! Wake up! Right now! Not later. Now!

All hope is just imagination

“You want to hope for something better than what you have right now, don’t you? Otherwise you don’t be hoping. But then, you forget that you have it all right now awyway, and you don’t know it. … Isn’t the future just another trap?”

De Mello eloquently helps us realize that the past and the future are just illusions, they’re just stories made up in our minds. They don’t mean anything. When we attach to the stories of either past or future then we suffer. Don’t you realize that the future will never come? Don’t you realize that right now, in this very instant, you can wake up? You can realize that this is all there is. Right here, right now. There’s nothing else. And there will never be anything else.