The Death of Me
by markhofreiter
The following is the 46th chapter in AWARENESS: A de Mellow Spirituality Conference in His Own Words
by Fr. Anthony de Mello, S.J. edited by J. Francis Stroud, S.J., Copyright © 1990 by the Center for Spiritual Exchange
“Can one be fully human without experiencing tragedy? 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. From them comes fear, and from fear comes everything else, but death is not a tragedy at all. Dying is wonderful; it’s only horrible to people who have never understood life. It’s only when you’re afraid of life that you fear death. It’s only dead people who fear death. But people who are alive have no fear of death. One of your American authors put it so well. He said awakening is the death of your belief in injustice and tragedy. The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly for the master. Death is resurrection. We’re talking not about some resurrection that will happen but about one that is happening right now. If you would die to the past, if you would die to every minute, you would be the person who is fully alive, because a fully alive person is one who is full of death. We’re always dying to things. We’re always shedding everything in order to be fully alive and to be resurrected at every moment. The mystics, saints, and others make great efforts to wake people up. If they don’t wake up, they’re always going to have these other minor ills like hunger, wars, and violence. The greatest evil is sleeping people, ignorant people.
A Jesuit once wrote a note to Father Arrupe, his superior general, asking him about the relative value of communism, socialism, and capitalism. Father Arrupe gave him a lovely reply. He said, ‘A system is about as good or as bad as the people who use it.’ People with golden hearts would make capitalism or communism or socialism work beautifully.
Don’t ask the world to change—you change first. Then you’ll get a good enough look at the world so that you’ll be able to change whatever you think ought to be changed. Take the obstruction out of your own eye. If you don’t, you have lost the right to change anyone or anything. Till you are aware of yourself, you have no right to interfere with anyone else or with the world. Now, the danger of attempting to change others or change things when you yourself are not aware is that you may be changing things for your own convenience, your pride, your dogmatic convictions and beliefs, or just to relieve your negative feelings. I have negative feelings, so you better change in such a way that I’ll feel good. First, cope with your negative feelings so that when you move out to change others, you’re not coming from hate or negativity but from love. It may seem strange, too, that people can be very hard on others and still be very loving. The surgeon can be hard on a patient and yet loving. Love can be very hard indeed.”
Awareness 
Hi, I am a big fan of this book Awareness. I am currently working through Sadhana, one of Father de Mello’s earlier books. I am very interested in the story telling approach to spirituality. I want to thank you for sharing these writings with the world. I think they are valuable. I am currently blogging on interfaith spirituality, reworking Desert Father stories and also trying to be a bit of a peace maker through my blog. I am looking for like minded bloggers to have a peek at my stuff and give their honest opinions. If that is something you are interested in please drop in. Awareness is a seriously good book but, you know what, its an even better concept. Words are just fingers pointing at the moon. In my Sadhana, I am still stuck on Silence, the first exercise. That’s a practice. My blogs is grantseraph11.wordpress.com.
Thanks for commenting! I will be stopping by grantseraph11 and hopefully we will talk more about this amazing journey of being human. Father de Mello has meant a lot to me and my family through the years. Through his books and tapes he has helped lead us to simple awareness of…what? ourselves, I suppose, and everyone else; all of our brothers and sisters whirling around through space on this big ball of dirt. He certainly had a way with a story, didn’t he? I had a tough time reading Sadhana, I’ll admit. He had a some meditations in there, though, that stuck with me and that I still use sometimes. His brother Bill just published a biography of Tony’s life that is informative. With my blog I am simply trying to carry on the efforts of Scott Reeves of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was leading a men’s recovery group largly with information from Father’s Awareness book. He had a website and through it offer to send any subscriber an email with a chapter every couple of weeks. I read and re-read Awareness9 or ten times thanks to Scott Reeves. Now, however, Scott is dead. And I thought now we have blogs why not take over where he left off.
Well, here we are grantseraph11, let’s see what we can find out about the nature of God.