What I've Been Reading

To know reality you have to know beyond knowing.

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One cannot do evil in awareness. But one can do evil in knowledge or information, when you know something is bad.

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How does one cope with evil? Not by fighting it but by understanding it. In understanding, it disappears. 

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello.

One of the best books I have ever read ! Anthony De Mello blunt truths bringing in religion, philosophy and psychology is a treasure for life.

• The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second including the excluded; third admitting that you are wrong.
• Do I do anything to change myself? I've got a big surprise for you, lots of good news! You don't have to do anything. The more you do, the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand.
• People react so quickly because they are not aware. You will come to understand that there are times when you will inevitably react, even in awareness. But as awareness grows, you react less and act more. It really doesn't matter.
• Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Pleasant experiences make life delightful, but they don't lead to growth in themselves. What leads to growth is painful experiences. Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.
• I remember that when my own mother got cancer, my sister said to me, "Tony, why did God allow this to happen to Mother?" I said to her, "My dear, last year a million people died of starvation in China because of drought, and you never raised a question."
• This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know what we do not know. Our great tragedy is that we know too much. We think we know, that is our tragedy; so we never disconnect. In fact, Thomas Aquinas says repeatedly, "All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly."
• Flags are in the heads of people. In any case, there are thousands of words in vocabulary that do not correspond to reality at all. But do they trigger emotions in us! So we begin to see things that are not there. We actually see Indian mountains when they don't exists, and we actually see Indian people who also don't exists. Your American conditioning exists. My Indian conditioning exists. But that's not a very happy thing.
• As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
• The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance; all evil comes from that. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefulness and unawareness.
• A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.
• You don't need conscience when you have consciousness; you don't need conscience when you have sensitivity.
• You lapsed into what the gospels call "the world" and you're going to lose your soul. The world, power, prestige, winning, success, honor etc., are nonexistent things. You gain the world but you lose your soul. Your whole life has been empty and soulless. There is nothing there. There's only one way out and this is to get deprogrammed! How do you do that? You become aware of the programming. You cannot change by an effort of the will; you cannot change through ideals; you cannot change through building up new habits. Your behavior may change, but you don't. You only change through awareness and understanding.