Here are some notes from Anthony de Mello’s program Awareness: Wake Up To Life, New York, 1986.

CD 1

On waking up

• All mystics agree: all is well. If you don’t see it, you are asleep.
• People don’t want to be cured, they want relief. Cure (waking up) is painful. Wise guru will never attempt to wake people up.

Will I be able to help you

• I don’t expect neither to help nor to damage you. You did it.
• You are never in love with anyone. You are in love with your prejudiced, hopeful idea of the person.
• You don’t trust anyone, you trust your judgements about the person -> blame on other: “how could you let me down?”
• Don’t try to make them happy. You only get into trouble. Banana in the ear parable.

On the proper kind of selfishness

• I’d rather be happy than have you.

On wanting happiness

• We don’t want to be unconditionally happy. We are ready to be happy provided…
• Love = freedom = peace = joy = happiness = spirituality (i.e. the most practical thing)

On psychology

• Psychology - relief
• People have to suffer enough emotionally before they are ready to wake up. It’s only when they are sick of their sickness.
• There must be a better way (than depending on …)
• Johny and cow dung parable.
• Sign of waking up: Q: “Am I crazy or are all of them?”
• Every new idea when it began was in the minority of one, or as blasphemy. E.g.: Jesus, Buddha.
• Step 1) realize you don’t want to wake up

Neither is renunciation the answer

• Renunciation is delusion. It ties you to the object of renunciation. You give it as much power as you use to fight it. Receive your daemons.

Listen and unlearn

• Agreement and disagreement don’t matter - have to do with words, not with Truth. Truth has to do with attitude (of openness), then it will be sighted.
• Truth can’t be described, only what is not - illusions. Neti Neti.
• All I can do is help you to unlearn.
• Are you listening to get confirmation for what you already think? Or to discover something new?
• belief - security vs. faith - insecurity. Faith: open, ready to listen, ready to follow, not knowing where it leads you, no matter what is the consequences.
• Faith doesn’t mean to be stupid - challenge what you hear. Buddha: monks and scholar must not accept my words out of respect but analyze them like a goldsmith does with gold.
• Step 2) readiness to listen, understand and challenge your belief system. Maybe you’ve got the wrong ideas.

The masquerade of charity

• even your most selfless acts are masquerading as altruism. self-centeredness #1 pleasing myself, #2 pleasure of pleasing others - more refined selfishness.
• A good is never so good as when you are not aware you are doing good. Sufis: a saint is one until he/she knows it.
• Less worthy motives - awful. Worthy ones - selfish.
• Acting based on pure feeling vs based on the idea of myself.
• The same process is used to produce a saint Francis Xavier and a terrorist. Brainwashing: full of flame, zero awareness.
• You are doing something for the love of anybody in your self interest - it does give you a good feeling.
• Self-centeredness #3: some people do things not to feel guilty and call it charity. It gives you a bad feeling if you don’t do it -> you have no guts to say “no! I want to be left alone”
• We love hurting people, we just don’t want to do it ourselves because we will be hurt in return.

What’s on your mind?

• Life is a banquet but most people don’t see it and are starving. We are surrounded in happiness, joy, love. Repent (wake up) and accept the good news. You’ve committed your sins because you were at sleep anyway. Put on a new mind!
• Brainwashing: introjecting (other peoples’) ideas. Funny: you’ll be ready to die for them. Do you react emotionally, feel stunned when they are attacked -> sign of brainwashing.
• Manure parable: “how old should be the horse?”
• Attach yourself to reality instead of ideas
• “I’m not Jack. So you’ve changed your name” parable.
• All your good deeds sprang from self interested. Maybe your neighbour has coarser taste - but it is the same thing.
• Most difficult people (for Jesus to deal with) were those who were convicted how good they were.

CD 2

Good, bad, or lucky?

• Stop feeling bad. We’re all the same. It’s wonderful.
• Jesus was so much at home with sinners because he understood that he’s not a bit better. The only difference is in what we do, not what we are.
• Pharisee is not evil, he’s just stupid.

Our illusion about others

• You choose not to see through people, to see them in bright colours, because you chose not to see through yourself.
• Enlightenment is when you are ready to exchange your dreams for facts.
• “There is nothing you can do about it but wake up”
• If you want it too badly, you are in big trouble.
• You are enlightened? What does it matter?
• What do you hope for? Isn’t it just another form of desire?

Self-observation

• The only thing someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.
• What you can do yourself is self-observation. Watch yourself, as if it were happening to someone else. There is no method, no technique.
• You suffer only because of identification.
• Don’t fix anything, but watch and understand.

Awareness without evaluating everything

• What you judge, you cannot understand
• When you don’t need to change anything, you don’t need to change yourself. Change will happen automatically. It requires a disciplined mind != effort, but aware life.
• Socrates: unaware life is not worth living. Majority lives mechanically.
• me/mine … got in there and I feel good/bad.
• Stop with I’m OK, you’re OK … Jesus Christ must have been pretty not OK. Final liberation: I’m an ass, you’re an ass. So what did you/I expect?
• “You’re charming” means “I’m in good mood”.
• Every time you are in love you are running away from your self.
• Pleasing addiction. Mechanical life, button pushing - when I give others the power to make me feel good/bad by their approval/disapproval - makes one a monkey, a slave. Puts you in a cage.
• Catch yourself whenever you are receiving flattery or criticism.
• psychology: exchanging one problem for another, until you’ve fixed the problem called “you”. Bomb on the lap -> “put it under the seat!” parable.

The illusion of rewards

• One sign that you are awakened - you don’t care what happens in next life.
• Eternal (= timeless, now) vs. everlasting (still in time).
• Forget your sins.

Finding yourself

• Are you listening? Maybe your daddy is. Who’s living in you? Maybe what you call “I” is a conglomeration of old experience, conditioning, programming - you’re a human computer.
• It’s painful to see your illusions shattered. That’s what repentance is all about
• remembering - memory, awareness - attention.
• I’m looking at me. “Who are you?”

Stripping down the I

• Search for the I (hint: eye - watch)
• We begin with awareness of things, then thoughts and then of the Thinker. Can the eye see itself? Can I know itself? … more practical: neti neti.
• Paddy in Belfast - gun at the back of head parable.
• Democrat/Republican - horse thief parable.
• Catholic dog mass parable.
• Labels belong to me - that constantly changes.
• Any time you identify with me, suffering begins. Now comes desire, fear. Suffering - there is something you crave for caused by identification with something.

Negative feelings towards others

• Any time you have a negative feeling towards anyone, you are living in an illusion. But generally we project (“he/she’s to blame …”).
• When negative feelings come in you go blind - “me” steps into picture.
• Be not affected emotionally but actually - act! When you swing into action it is important to act detachedly.
• Do we ever feel grief when we lose something we have allowed to be free? That we have never attempted to posses and never allowed ourselves to be attached to?
• To be attached - I made my happiness at least to some extend dependant on this thing / person.

CD 3

On dependence

• Live a life where you would be so totally alone that you depend on no one [for happiness i.e. emotionally/psychologically]
• Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations.
• My happiness does not lie in you.
• Unless you hate your father and your mother, unless you renounce everything you posses, you cannot be my disciple [Luke 24:16]
• Loneliness is not cured by human company. It is cured by contact with reality. Dropping one’s illusions.

How happiness happens

• Watch yourself. Understand. No one can show you how to do it. Because he would be programming you.
• I don’t know any other means of self-transformation than Awareness.
• “When the archer shoots for nothing, he’s got all his skill. When he shoots for a brass buckle, he’s already nervous. When he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind, sees two targets…” He thinks more of winning, than of shooting.
• Honour is a social convention.
• Success, failure means nothing to them.
• You can be happy in your anxiety, depression. It’s just you’ve got the wrong notion of happiness. You thought happiness was excitement, the thrills. That’s what causes the depression! (Q: How can I make it last?)
• To live alone. To have nowhere to rest your head. To leave everyone free. Be special to no one. To love everyone.
• Opposite of love: desire, fear, anxiety, manipulation.
• There is only one reason why you are not experiencing bliss right now, i.e. you are focusing on what you don’t have.

Fear - the root of violence

• There is only one evil in the world - fear. There is only one good - love.
• There is not a single evil you cannot trace to fear.
• It’s only when you are afraid that you become angry (Q: What were you afraid of losing).

Awareness and contact with reality

• When there is something happening to you see it as it would be happening to somebody else. No judgement. -> I’m not affected emotionally -> Disidentified. Died to the self.

Good religion - the antithesis of unawareness

• What you are aware of, you are in control of. What you are not aware of, is in control of you. When you are aware of it, you are free from it.
• What they trained us in the course [Rogerian Psychotherapy] to become participant observer.
• When I’m listening to you it is infinitely more important to be listening to me (myself).
• OBSERVE yourself the way you would be observing someone else.
• Awareness - you are open to anything that comes to the scope of your consciousness.
• Just be aware where the focus of your attention goes.
• I observing me. Children talk: “Tony has a problem”. Mystics feel like this.

Labels

• Important is not to know who/what I is. The important thing is to drop the labels.
• Don’t seek the truth, only drop your opinions. Drop the theories.
• If you are suffering, you’re asleep. Suffering is a sign that you are out of the touch with the Truth. Suffering points out that there is some falsehood out there. It occurs when your illusions clash with reality.

Obstacles to happiness

• The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick. They are loonies. Most of them. Success: You become the president of lunatic asylum.
• You are a success in life when you wake up. When you don’t have to apologize to anyone. When you don’t have to explain anything to anyone. You don’t give a damn what anybody thinks or says about you. You have no worry. You are happy.
• You are telling me “you are an ass.” I’ve known that for years. What did you expect?
• “Why are you happy?” Why not?
• Happiness is the natural state of little children to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidities of our societies and cultures.
• Life is easy, life is delightful. Life is only rough on your illusion.

CD 4

Four steps to wisdom

1. awareness of negative feelings.
2. understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality. No person on earth, no event has the power to make you unhappy, disturb or hurt you.
3. never identify with the feeling. -> depression is there. Not: I’m depressed. It is not an essential part of I. Same with horny, angry etc. your depression and your kicks have nothing to do with your happiness. Fight, do your duty but keep your heart at the lotus feet of the lord (unaffected).
4. understand, that when you change everything changes.

It’s all right with the world

• When you understand, when you see, the world becomes all-right. Don’t take it personally!
• Boy, rabbit, crocodile parable.

Sleepwalking

• Swing into action, but not to get rid of your negative feeling. It is not by your actions that you will be saved/enlightened, but by your Being, by what you are.
• We see people and things not as they are but as we are! The world is as we feel. The day you are different, you’ll see them different. She seems so rude -> I feel frightened.

Change as greed

• You don’t have to do anything. The more you do the worse it gets. All you have to do is understand.
• I have no right to make any demand on any person. I’ll protect myself from consequences of your actions, but you can be whatever you choose to be.
• Lunatic: You better do as I expect you to or else I shall have negative feelings.
• Do it enjoyable, not well. Village orchestra parable (competition).
• Part of waking up is to live your life as you see it fits you. The selfishness lies lies in demanding that someone else lives his life as it suits you.
• What will happen when we wake up? Why bother?! You’ll make it a goal and you’ll be determined to get there and you’ll say I refuse to be happy until I’m awakened. It’s OK the be the way you are.
• Parable: student writing letters to Guru about what he understands… Until he stops. After a long time he inquires and the students answers: “what does it matter?”.
• Be aware of your present condition. Stop being a dictator and trying to push yourself anywhere. Be aware.

A changed person

• As you identify less and less with “me” you are more at ease with everybody and everything. You are no longer afraid of being hurt, not liked, being left. You no longer desire to impress anyone. You don’t feel the need to explain yourself, apologize (after all, what are you expecting from an ass?).
• Nobody rejects/accepts you. They reject whatever they think you are. It’s your responsibility if you pick that up.

Arriving at silence

• What will happen, when I awake? I doesn’t matter. Those who know, do not say. Those who say, do not know.
• Guru can only point out your errors. He cannot give you the truth. Taste of mango parable.
• You are surrounded by God and you don’t see him because you know about him.
• All revelations are never more but a finger pointing at a moon. And when it happens all the idiot sees is the finger.
• Little fish in the ocean looking for the ocean parable.

CD 5

Losing the rat race

• Losing the self: ever tried to lose something? You lose, when you are not trying. You are never so centered on your self, as when you are depressed. You are never so ready as to forget yourself, when you are happy. Happiness releases you from the self.
• To die to the self is to understand its true nature.
• God: I am he who is. You are she/he who is not. God is the dancer, creation is the dance.
• To lose the self is to suddenly realise that you are not what you thought to be.
• Prepare the ground for the loss of the self: disassociate yourself with the transient things.

Permanent worth

• Worldly success - fragile, transitory. How we are reflected in the mirror of other peoples’ minds. One understands one’s worth when one no longer identifies in term of transient things.
• Blessed experiences make life delightful, painful experiences lead to growth. use negative feelings for understanding, watching it from outside, to disassociate from it - cut the connection with it. after some time it might not come at all, but it won’t matter.
• State of wakefulness - state where you drop desires, cravings (unless I get what I desire, I refuse to be happy), i.e. their fulfillment.

Desire not preference

• Suppress desires -> become lifeless, without energy. Desire = energy. Suppressing desire - being tied to it. Understand it, transform it into a preference.
• Happiness, dropping illusions - seeing things not as I (me) am but as they are.
• Every time you are unhappy, you have added something to the reality. Reality provides the stimulus, you provide the reaction. You’ve added something. Demand, expectation, craving.
• Changing the world won’t change you. Changing the pen won’t change your handwriting.
• Life is change, flow. If you want to live, you must have no permanent abode, no place to rest your head. The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change. The whole enjoyment of the symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass. Parable of Nasruding playing a guitar with one string.

Clinging to illusion

• When you cling, life gets destroyed. When you hold on to anything, you cease to live.
• A thrill comes from the fulfillment of a desire, craving. It brings anxiety. Sooner or later it brings its hangover. Feeding yourself with thrills - feeding a racehorse with cake and wine.
• Illusion: it is important, natural to be important, to belong, to love. Natural is to be free, to love.
• You become happy with contact with reality, not by being desired, important, loved.
• “You are a genius.” If you give reality to it, you will have to live up to it. Smash it.
• Life is what happens to us while we are busy making other plans.

Hugging memories

• An inner change always registers in your eyes, face, body.
• Looking at the people, world through the fixed picture of prejudice. You are more likely to respond accurately, when you see clearly. Do you really see someone you are attached to or you are afraid of? The emotion gets in the way.
• I’m conditioned, I’ve got a shopping list inside. So when I meet the person I fall in love (= desire). And you see her after you have married her. That’s when love might begin.
• Addiction is blind, love is clear-sighted.
• Every concept that was meant to help to get in touch with reality ends up becoming a barrier to reality. Unless you realise that the word is not the thing.

Getting concrete

• Concept - you have the same word for all the individuals. Example: leafs on tree. Great for finding similarities, communication, indication, science. It gives you an idea what it is not. Whatever IS is found concrete. Krishnamurthi: The day you teach the child the word for the bird he will cease to see the bird.
• Concept is always static/frozen. Reality flows (is movement, action, change). Watch! Look. Get in touch with things.
• Reality is whole, words and concepts fragment reality. Each language cuts reality differently (e.g. difficult translation of “home”).
• Concept, idea, word, thought (fragment) vs. vision, intuition (whole).
• Concept is abstract, reality is concrete. Concept is help to lead you to reality, but is not the thing -> idolatry. Concept - true and FALSE at the same time. Experience reality. God is a mystery: there is no words for reality (that is beyond words and concepts). The task of theologians is to explain everything through God and explain God as unexplainable.
• If words can’t really describe what is experienced how much more difficult is to use them to explain the experiencer (Vedanta).
• Thanks to concepts we develop intelligence, which in due time can see its own limitations. Become not children but LIKE children. We have to fall from the stage of innocence, to develop “me” thanks to concepts and then to be redeemed and to to paradise. Put off the old man and return to the state of the child without being children anymore. We start by looking at reality in wonder, but not the intelligent wonder of a mystic but the formless wonder of a child. Wonder -> boredom (along with language, concepts) -> wonder.

CD 6

At a loss of words

• Dag Hammarskjöld: God doesn’t die on the day we stop believing into a personal deity but we die on the day that our lives cease to be illumined by the radiance - renewed daily - of a wonder the source of which we can never described.
• One never quarrels about reality, we only quarrel about opinions, judgements. Don’t seek for truth, drop you prejudices, concepts, judgements.
• Ultimate knowledge of God: to know, that we do not know God. Neti-neti. Via negativa. Even our questions about God are absurd. C.S.Lewis: “Q: How many minutes are there in the colour yellow. A: 25 carrots.”
• Lose beliefs and come to faith. Sometimes the best thing for awakening is a tragedy to struck us.
• Our tragedy is that we think we know, so we never discover.

Cultural conditioning

• There are thousands of powerful words (concepts) that correspond to nothing (e.g. a country). Tree vs. India. Yet they have the power to trigger emotions in us.
• Part of our liberation is liberation from our country - cultural conditioning. They teach you to be proud of your country. Wear your culture like you wear your clothes. Don’t identify.
• Not being able (to not give alms, etc) - compulsion, mechanical. The beauty doesn’t come from a habit (programming, past experiences etc.) but from sensitivity, clarity of perception and accuracy of response.
• Passing through the eye of the needle - little baggage: Experience something fully, then drop it and experience new moment.
• Awareness -> understanding … imagine a human giving you always a fair deal, uninfluenced by words but only by reality.

Filtered reality

• We are constantly getting feedback from reality. But we filter it - by our conditioning, culture, past experience… So you see things that are not there or don’t see things that are there - paranoid person.
• Root of sorrow - craving, attachment. Fear and desires distort and destroy perception.
• Programmed to unhappiness: when we were young we were drugged to need people and are trading reality for acceptance, approval, appreciation, success… Script (for creating attachments): until you get this object, you cannot be happy. When you get it you have to work to keep it.
• You gain the world, but lose your soul to non-existent things: power, prestige, winning, popularity.
• There is only one way out. Deprogramming. How? Become aware of programming. You cannot change by an effort of the will, ideals, building new habits. Your behaviour might, but you won’t. You only change through awareness and understanding. When you see a stone as a stone and not as a diamond.

Detachment

• We are striving to reorganize the world (which is always changing) to keep our attachment.
• Prison of programming, fantasies. Happiness is a state of non-illusion. Freedom - drop the baggage.
• You are going anxious, angry? Your attachment has been threatened.
• Exercise: imagine something you are attached to and say to it: “I don’t need you to be happy. I’m only deluding myself into the belief that without you I won’t be happy”
• My favourite place is somewhere else. Be here and now. And when now goes, let it go.
• Where awareness comes in, programming goes. Programming (recipes) is opposite of awareness.
• We view people through our attachments. Only when you are able to tell your best friend I don’t need you - you’ll be able to enjoy his company thoroughly. Attachment destroys our capacity to love. Love - sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception.

Addictive love

• How can you love people when you (emotionally) need people? You can only use them.
• I can only love people when I die to to the people, when I’m in the desert. Loneliness -> Solitude. Desert begins to flower.
• Somebody is angry with me -> we think something is wrong with me, but actually there is something wrong with you. You’re having a tantrum? I don’t have any desire to rescue you.
• Aware person - e.g. Jesus - cannot do wrong / sin. His sensitivity will not allow it.

More words

• Cold? If the thermometer would be one inch longer we would have frozen to death.
• Finnish / Russian border parable. “I could not survive one more Russian winter at my age”.
• Guru: “sit down you son of a …” parable

Hidden agendas

• Increase awareness -> conditioning decreases (FIR).
• Every time someone is sinning they are sinning under the disguise, rationalization of good.
• You can be happy in your tension. Before enlightenment I was getting depressed, after I get depressed. Don’t make it a goal, e.g. people getting tense trying to relax.
• The harder you are trying to change yourself, the worse it will get. Come to reality, to senses.
• Plan (ego) -> resistance (reality). Goal: ego glorification / promotion.
• Spiritual greed for starters. There is nowhere to go because you are there already. The day you cease to travel you’ll arrive (Japanese saying). You’ll leave change to take care of itself.

CD 7

Giving in

• resist not evil - when someone strikes you on the left cheek offer the right as well. You always empower the demons you fight. Understand (incl. consequences), don’t renounce.
• Violence might change your behaviour, but never you. Understanding, insight provides easy change, there is no residue of violence.

Assorted landmines

• To doubt (to question) is infinitely more important than to adore (to believe) -> brainwashing. Doubt is a healing bar, thought it will burn at first it will heal you.
• As soon as you start thinking as a (communist, catholic, …) you cease to think.
• Life doesn’t have a meaning. Meaning is a formula, a set of sentences a mind can understand. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive as mystery.
• Are you enjoying yourself? Bernard Shaw: it’s the only thing I’m enjoying.
• Community is founded by free people, not by slaves emotionally dependant on other people. You enjoy yourself and reality and thus everybody.
• How many people spend their lives eating the menu not food.
• “Lose your mind and come to your senses”. Take it with a pint of salt: you’ll need an intelligent mind to understand.
• Awareness = life.

The death of me

• The only tragedy in the world is ignorance and all evil comes from there.
• Death is not a tragedy, death is wonderful. It’s only when you are afraid of life you are afraid of death.
• The person who is fully alive is full of death. Dies to every moment just to be resurrected again.
• The test of your awakening is the death of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
• Changing the system will put a different set of wolfs in place, unless they are woken up. A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it.
• Don’t change the world, first change yourself. First take the plank out of your own eye. So when you move out to change others so you come from Love (Love can be hard).

Insight and understanding

• Insight, not effort, not cultivating habits, not having an ideal (ideals do a lot of damage) - it makes you focus on what should be instead of what is (present reality).
• What happened? Was it always like this? Why did you want …? Find the skeleton in your closet - the emotions that tie you to a situation.

No pushing it

• It’s not a question of imitating Christ, but becoming what he was.
• Pushing a broken car - you are making a mess of your life. “But we did it.” Insight, not pushing, not effort.

Getting real

• Father, what you said was absolutely true but totally useless.
• Observe yourself, pick-up those negative feelings, you’ll find your own way of explaining that and you’ll change. Then you’ll have to deal with a big villain - self-condemnation.

Assorted images

• Image of insight: boat with sails. You don’t need to push it.
• There is nothing so cruel as the nature and there is no escape from it. Yet it is the heart that does the injury, the person’s own heart. When you cut water, it doesn’t get hurt. When you cut solid stuff - it breaks. You’ve got solid attitudes inside-> pain.
• If the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. If the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing… If the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom. Wisdom is not experience, not applying yesterday’s solution to today’s problem. It comes from not being experienced, not carrying over residue from past experiences but rather being sensitive to this situation/person. If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.

Saying nothing about love

• Plato: one cannot make a slave from a free person (i.e. a wise person). If someone forces you to walk one mile, go two. Need to change exterior situation? You need to be out of prison to be free? Freedom is in the heart.
• Prison - addictions, attachments, negative emotions, conditioning.
• You can only love when you are alone. Love - to see as it really is, not as you imagine it to be (labels, projections from the past). Seeing needs a disciplined, alert mind. Take the trouble the see each situation, person in present moment’s freshness.

Losing control

• Seeing means also dropping the control the society exercises over you. To remove it is like tearing yourself apart.
• Pleasing addiction: as a child you were given taste for the drug called approval, attention, appreciation, success, prestige, power. Instead of solid nutritious food of life: work, play, fun, laughter, company of life, pleasures of senses and the mind.
• A.S. Neil (Summerhill): a sign of a sick child is always interested in persons. Healthy child is interested in things (it is sure of mother’s love).
• Awaken person: no longer marches to the drum of the society. It dances to the tune of the music that springs from within.
• Dependant on people, feeling terror when making mistakes etc.
• Sartre: hell is other people. If you are dependent, living with people is tension. Being without them, brings the agony of loneliness.

Listening to life

• Enjoy things! Healthy food of life for mind and senses. Most of people have lost the capacity for enjoyment. They need more and more expensive gadgets. No time, guilty, overworked… [back to simplicity].
• In natural state, animals don’t overeat, exercise as necessary etc. We have an inner conflict. “Take that plate of sweets away as in front of them I loose my freedom”.
• When you enjoy immensely you need very little.
• Slow down, taste, hear, smell … + Awareness.

The end of analysis

• Knowledge != awareness. Information: poisonous snake on my arm (leads to effort, rationalizations, alienation from oneself). Awareness: it would get brushed off through me.
• Tasting and feeling the truth - awareness - you’ll change. When you just know it, you won’t.
• Forced change, being rigid on yourself: “You want to be a martyr, marry a saint.”

Dead ahead

• The passport for living is to die, to imagine you are in your grave.
• You don’t live, you’re just keeping the body alive. When you are protecting your life (vegetable state) you’re dead. Only when you don’t care, you live. Life is for the gambler.
• Information - cold facts. New feel, new perspective - Awareness.

CD 8

The land of love

• If you wish to love, you must learn to see again. If you wish to see, you must give the drug away - get rid of tentacles of society. Be in the world, but not of it - free and utterly alone in the heart.
• In solitude - in the desert - the dependence on your addiction will die. Aloneness means not depending emotionally on others - no longer seeing others as means of satisfying the addiction… Asking to die.
• Imagine a life where you refuse to enjoy a single word of approval and appreciation. Refuse to call anyone your “own”. Having nowhere to rest your head.
• See with a vision that is clear - unclouded by fear or by desire.
• To come to the land of love you must pass through the gate of death. Get there by ceaseless awareness, by infinite compassion you’ll have for a drug addict. To develop a taste for good things of life - to counter your cravings. Love of work, which you enjoy doing, love of laugher, intimacy with people of whom you do not cling. Activities that you so much love to do, that success / approval / recognition won’t mean a thing to you. Return to nature, send the crowds away, go to the nature and silently commune with clouds, see, birds, plants…
• Man with fire parable: He was not concerned about getting their recognition or their gratitude. He was concerned about their well-being… Got killed by priests of the system and made into an idol, but there was no fire. We overemphasize “Lord Lord” but where is the fire.
• Love is generated through awareness. No other way. Love is not something you generate, you have. It has you. You surrender.
• Analysis = paralysis. Insight! Aha experience -> change.
• Living means having dropped all impediments and live in the freshness of present moment.
• Anything you are aware of keeps changing! Don’t identify with the feeling. As you do you’ll get insight why they came into place. No need to dwell in the past anymore.
• You are free to do whatever you as long as you don’t interfere with the freedom of others.
• There is no violence in the kinds, because no one has practiced violence on them. Most of our evils arrive from violence to ourselves. A.S.Neil: Every child has god within. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.
• Progress. Are we more loving? Or have we created people of greater speed and precision?
• A.S.Neil: “The religion that makes people good also makes people bad. But the religion known as freedom makes all people good for it destroys that self-conflict that makes people bad.” Wars come from self-conflict, we project what is inside to outside.
• A.S.Neil: “The first thing I do when a child comes to Summerhill is to destroy its conscience.” You don’t need conscience when you have consciousness. Stop making demands on yourself, stop pushing yourself.
• Nourish yourself on good wholesome food: sunsets, nature, good movie, good book, music, enjoyable work, good company and hopefully you’ll break your addiction to those other feelings. Compare those feelings. Soul feelings vs. worldly feelings.