Spirituality Malaysia : Awareness – The Perils and Opportunities of Reality Awareness – The Perils and Opportunities of Reality ================================================================================ Darreck on 14 January, 2009 01:32:00 Darreck Comment: This is an excellent book to really make you think, “What’s my life purpose here?” With the mind stimulation & inspiration examples given in this book, you will probably start asking yourself and changing the view of how we see things, self and others. What will you discover and learn from this book:- · The illusion and reality of yourself & the world where we lived. · Fear & love · The truth of Charity · Self-Observation · Addictive love · Detachment · Cultural & religions from the soul perspective. Abstract of the book: The unaware life is a mechanical life. It’s not human, it’s programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood. In the country where I come from, you have hundreds of thousands people living in little hovels, in extreme poverty, who just manage to survive, working all day long, hard manual work, sleep and then wake up in the morning, eat something, and start all over again. And you sit back and think, “What a life”. “Is that all that life holds in store for them?”And then you’re suddenly jolted into the realization that 99.999% of people here are not much better. You can go the movies, drive around in a car, you can go for a cruise. Do you think you are much better off than they are? You are just as dead as they are. Just as much a machine as they are- a slightly bigger one, but a machine nevertheless. That’s sad. It’s sad to think that people go through life like this. People go through life with fixed ideas; they never change. They’re just not aware of what’s going on. They might as well be a block of wood, or a rock, a talking, walking, thinking machine. That’s not human. They are puppets, jerked around by all kinds of things. Press a button and you get a reaction. You can almost predict how this person is going to react. If I study a person, I can tell you just how he or she is going to react. About the Author: Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest known throughout the world for his writing and spiritual conferences. He died suddenly in 1987. Among his many books are Sadhana and The Song of the Bird. J.FRANCIS STROUD, the editor of Awareness, is a Jesuit priest who worked closely with Anthony de Mello.