TL;DR
9/10. A Jesuit priest, drawing on Buddhism and psychology as freely as on Christianity, telling you that you are asleep and that you do not want to wake up. Assembled from recorded talks after his death, which is why it reads like being argued with instead of instructed.
De Mello was an Indian Jesuit, born in Bombay, who ran retreats and spiritual direction and did not write this book. It was put together from tapes of his talks after he died suddenly in 1987, and the transcription is the reason it works.
He interrupts himself. He repeats. He loses patience with the audience and tells them so. He tells a joke, lets it land, and then uses it against the people laughing. Occasionally he says something so blunt that you can hear the room go quiet on the page.
A written book would have smoothed all of that away, and the smoothing would have removed the argument, because the argument is partly conducted by tone.
What does Awareness mean by saying we are asleep?
That almost everyone is running on programming they never chose and have never examined.
The values you hold, the things you want, the standards you measure yourself against, the people whose approval matters. His position is that almost none of it was selected by you. It was installed by family, culture, and accident, and you have spent your life defending choices you did not make.
Waking up means seeing the programming as programming. Not replacing it with better programming, which is what most self-help offers, but noticing that it is there and is not you.
He is clear that almost nobody wants this. People come to him wanting to be happier inside the existing arrangement, and what he is offering dismantles the arrangement, so they leave. He tells that story repeatedly and with visible amusement.
What does Awareness mean by attachment?
Any belief that you need a particular thing or person before you can be all right.
This is where he becomes uncomfortable, because he does not exempt the attachments people are proudest of. Love, in his usage, is frequently attachment wearing better clothes: a need for a specific person to behave in a specific way so that you can feel a specific thing. He is explicit that this is not love, and he does not soften it.
The same goes for career, reputation, and the desire to be useful. Nothing gets a pass for being noble.
The line that stays with me is that you do not have to do anything to be happy, you have to drop something, and the dropping is harder because you have been told your whole life to acquire. Every other instruction you have received has been additive. This one is subtractive and there is no market for it.
Why is Awareness funny?
Because it would be unbearable otherwise, and because he was a retreat leader who knew his audience.
Half the book is stories told against people who came to him wanting to be fixed without being changed. The woman who wanted a technique. The priest who wanted a formula. The man who wanted to be told he was right.
The jokes are usually the same shape: somebody asks for something, and the request itself demonstrates the problem. That is a teaching device with a long history in several traditions, and de Mello uses it constantly.
It also protects the book from the tone that ruins most spiritual writing. Nobody is being solemn at you. He is not above the audience, he is amused at everybody including himself, and that makes the hard material go down.
What does Awareness refuse to give you?
A method, and this is deliberate and stated.
There are no exercises, no steps, and no program. He says explicitly that he cannot give you awareness, and that anybody selling a technique for it is selling you another attachment, meaning a new thing you believe you need before you can be all right.
That is why some readers finish it frustrated. There is nothing to do afterward, which is the argument. It also means the book resists summary, and a summary of it is worth nothing, because the value is in being argued with for two hundred pages by somebody who does not care whether you like him.
Anybody who has been handed a bullet-point version of this book has been handed nothing.
What happened to Awareness after his death?
Worth knowing, because it tells you these were not comfortable talks.
De Mello died of a heart attack in 1987 at fifty-five, and his work became enormously popular afterward. In 1998 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification warning that some of his positions were incompatible with Catholic teaching, particularly on the person of Christ and on the nature of revelation.
Whatever you make of that, it confirms that a Jesuit priest drawing this freely on Buddhist and Hindu material, and speaking about God in the terms he uses here, was doing something his own institution found difficult.
The books remain in print and remain widely read inside Catholic retreat circles, which is its own quiet answer.
Verdict
The most useful spiritual book I have read, and the one that gives you the least to hold onto afterward. Read it slowly, in short pieces, and expect to disagree in places where you will later suspect he had you.
His own church restricted some of his work after his death, which tells you what kind of talks these were.
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