A Year with Anthony De Mello: Waking Up Week by Week

realized I was in the presence of life. It was right there. He was alive. By comparison, I was dead.

The root cause of your suffering is attachment. What is an attachment? An attachment is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some thing or some person or some result you cannot be happy. Look at this society we live in, rotten to the core, infected as it is with attachments.

What no attachment represents is a new attitude for engaging the world. It’s a willing attitude that says, “I want to be aware; I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen.” It is adjusting to the understanding that the moment you make a goal out of something and attempt to get it, you’re seeking ego glorification, ego pr

The second step is to understand that the feeling is in you, not in reality.

It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, and your past experiences that fed the operating instructions into your computer. These things depend on the criteria society establishes; they depend on your social conditioning that was stamped into you. You’ve been programmed with this. You’ve been conditioned this way. This is what

Your attachments: You will inevitably look for what fosters or threatens them and turn a blind eye to the rest. You won’t be interested in the rest any more than the avaricious businessperson is interested in anything that does not involve the making of money. Your beliefs: Just take a look at a fanatic who only notices what confirms his or her bel

The third step: Never identify with that feeling.

What decides what will finally make its way to your conscious mind from all the material that is pouring in from the world? Three decisive filters: First, your attachments. Second, your beliefs. Third, your fears.

Now, listening is not as easy as you might think. Why? Because we’re always listening from fixed concepts, fixed positions, fixed prejudices. The kind of listening I am referring to means being alert. So, as you read this book and reflect on it, be alert. Be watchful. Hold the intention to listen with a fresh mind, without prejudices, without judgi