Anthony De Mello's Spirituality Means Waking Up - Part One, How To Wake Up

This course, taught by Anthony De Mello, is titled "Spirituality Means Waking Up." This is Part 1, called Awakening. The first part of each session is a lecture by Anthony De Mello. The second part, signaled by a chime, is a short practice that relates to the session. If you're familiar with Anthony De Mello, you already know his loving and compassionate heart. But you also know he goes straight to the point. He intends to wake us up, and at times, he shakes us like an alarm clock. He tells us something we may not want to hear, or may not yet be ready to hear: that we move through life asleep, never truly waking up. And because of this, we fail to recognize the loveliness and beauty of what it means to be human. This is not our fault. We were programmed to believe that happiness depends on external conditions. "I'll be happy provided I have this, and that, and the other thing." But that is not how happiness works. It is not earned or acquired through things. It is part of our natural state. We were born happy—filled with loving kindness, wonder, and a natural creativity. That is our essence. Yet as we grew up, much of it became obscured beneath fear-conditioning and the pressure to conform to what society expects of us. In classical terms, tragedy is when something powerful is brought from a high place to a low one. That is what happened to us. And that is what the course invites us to see for ourselves: that our essence is still here, alive, intact, and available, but it is being blocked. The essential step in waking up to this truth is awareness. Tragically, it rarely occurs to us that there might be a better way to live. Detachment is the better way, and this course offers a path to it.