Anthony de Mello

This book was important at the very beginning of my spiritual journey. I was not sure what I was looking for. I knew something was missing, or wrong, or simply not quite right about the way I was moving through my life. De Mello had a way of naming that.

Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest from India — a remarkable combination of traditions. He drew from Zen, from Sufi stories, from the Christian contemplative tradition, from Buddhist psychology. He did not seem troubled by this mixing. He treated the various wisdom traditions as different paths describing the same terrain.

The central argument of Awareness is deceptively simple: most of us are asleep. We are dreaming our lives rather than living them. We have identified ourselves so completely with our thoughts, our roles, our opinions, our fears, that we have lost contact with the simple fact of being aware.

“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 important thing is to drop the labels.”

What de Mello called "waking up" is not a spiritual achievement requiring years of practice. It is something available in this moment. The obstacle is not lack of preparation — it is attachment. Attachment to our beliefs about ourselves, to our expectations of the world, to our need to be seen in particular ways.

He was controversial within the Catholic Church, eventually. The Vatican issued a notification after his death that some of his positions were "incompatible with the Catholic faith." He died in 1987. The notification came in 1998. He was not there to respond.

For me, the book's value was not doctrinal. It was the feeling of someone refusing to be careful, refusing to wrap things in comfortable language. He was blunt about the ways we construct our suffering and then mistake it for reality.