Awareness

Rating:
Summary: A NEW DIMENSION
Review: These pages will take you to a new dimension of being.
You will feel free, liberated from the daily frustrations of your life because you will acquire a superior vision of values.
These pages have the unbelievable burning power to take you to places of your spirituality and of your personality where you have never been by yourself.
After you went through this transformation you will realize that you discover a new ability to understand, to be happy, to love and to live...and this will be just the beginning.......

Rating:
Summary: A Grand Summary
Review: You'll love the way Anthony gets right to the point in a way that sticks. Using vivid and entertaining language, this book is a spectacular summary of what it means to be AWAKE. Readers who enjoy Anthony's presentations will likely enjoy reading Vernon Howard as well. Two of the very best authors on these subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book, and then read it again.
Review: Upon finishing this book for the first time, I turned right to the front and started reading it again. Buy three copies - that way you may get to retain one long enough to read it over a few times. Wake up.

Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking, stunning, life changing
Review: De Mello's "Awareness" is one of the most profound books on spirituality that I have ever read. Breathtaking, stunning, life changing - these are some of the adjectives that come to mind. Sell your house, your car, and your television set, whatever it takes to own a copy of this book. You will feel like Oedipus when he discovered the horrible truth about his own life, except that the discovery will not be one of tragedy but exhilaration. What makes "Awareness" unique is that although it is a short book that is easy to read, it provokes a revolution in outlook and attitude that can only be pondered over a lifetime.

Rating:
Summary: Liberation
Review: i find this book most liberating and rewarding. It is my bible for living. i have given the book as a gift, many people say it is depressing, these happen to be the same people who seem to me to be caught up in drama and ego. The concepts are like home to me, and yes i do read to confirm what i already think, fair criticism to by the author about humans. However there is one difference, these thoughts have been out of the concensus reality since my childhood. I have wondered why i thought differently, and it re assuring to hear someone say the things i have already thought. I would enjoy recommendations of any people via E mail for books in the same vein. I am a philosophical ignoramus and hope for guidance. i recommend it highly thank you Anthony De Mello

Rating:
Summary: Awarenss IS the ANSWER
Review: Having read approximately 60 gazillion spiritual books I was amazed that one could still blow me away. So succint, clear, to the point, hardhitting, Truth by the ton. Eloquent, enlightening and easy to understand. Numerous quotes and stories that I have not read anywhere else. What a treasure!

Rating:
Summary: A Wake-Up Call
Review: This book deserves more than a passing glance. It is a wake-up call to all who care enough to not want to slumber their lives away. Read it more than once. Better yet, read it as as many times as you can stand. DeMello offers practical advise on how to become more conscious/aware. But be forewarned; if you take his advise seriously you will find yourself jolted as from a dream.

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Summary: Read this not like a book, but like life
Review: This book has within it the power to free you from thinking of the word 'burden' and life in the same thought.

Time and time again I come back to this book so that I may continue to challange myself to think beyond everything I have learnt spiritually and practically. Strange how this one book has changed so much about how I approach life.:-)

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Summary: Heretical Priest Discovers His Navel
Review: The Indian Jesuit priest's works, which almost always take the form of brief stories, contain some valid elements of oriental wisdom. These can be helpful in achieving self-mastery, in breaking the bonds and feelings that keep us from being free, and in approaching with serenity the various vicissitudes of life. Especially in his early writings, Father de Mello, while revealing the influence of Buddhist and Taoist spiritual currents, remained within the lines of Christian spirituality.

But already in certain passages in these early works and to a greater degree in his later publications such as this one, one notices a progressive distancing from the essential contents of the Christian faith. In place of the revelation which has come in the person of Jesus Christ, he substitutes an intuition of God without form or image, to the point of speaking of God as a pure void. To see God it is enough to look directly at the world. Nothing can be said about God; the only knowing is unknowing. To pose the question of his existence is already nonsense. This radical apophaticism leads even to a denial that the Bible contains valid statements about God. The words of Scripture are indications which serve only to lead a person to silence. In other passages, the judgment on sacred religious texts, not excluding the Bible, becomes even more severe: they are said to prevent people from following their own common sense and cause them to become obtuse and cruel. Religions, including Christianity, are one of the major obstacles to the discovery of truth. This truth, however, is never defined by the author in its precise contents. For him, to think that the God of one's own religion is the only one is simply fanaticism. "God" is considered as a cosmic reality, vague and omnipresent; the personal nature of God is ignored and in practice denied.

Father de Mello sees Jesus differing from other men only in the sense that Jesus is "awake" and fully free, while others are not. Jesus is not recognized as the Son of God, but simply as the one who teaches us that all people are children of God. In addition, the author's statements on the final destiny of man give rise to perplexity. At one point, he speaks of a "dissolving" into the impersonal God, as salt dissolves in water. On various occasions, the question of destiny after death is declared to be irrelevant; only the present life should be of interest. With respect to this life, since evil is simply ignorance, there are no objective rules of morality. Good and evil are simply mental evaluations imposed upon reality.

Rating:
Summary: delightful
Review: This is a beautiful beautiful book. Going way past identifying with any religious or spiritual "techniques", de Mello tells us that in order to be happy we need to be fully human and in order to be human we need to be aware of ourselves. Yes, we hear this kind of a thing all the time, yet he Mello does this in such a highly personal, direct and warmingly engaging style that you take him in. He somehow synthesizes the best of Jesuit, Buddhist and Sufi teachings as well as modern psychological theory without any name-dropping or theorizing. Like a true master he is he goes straight for the personal experience. His jokes did more for me than the abhidamma texts i've been reading lately. Really, this is such a wonderful book that half-way reading through it I was already happy envisioning the happiness of my friends I will present the book with.