Review: Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality (Anthony de Mello). This book was chosen for the next Music Hall book club. I am very disappointed with the choice and with the book. I do hope (and think) the discussion will be engaging, for there is plenty to latch onto in this series of short chapters which apparently were part of a spiritual retreat. Mind you, I am always interested in the messages of awareness. I truly love and have spent much time reading/listening to Eckhard Tolle (mentioned a couple of times in this book).... but his encouragement to live in awareness of the moment is one of gentleness. Here, I felt the reader/listener is often being bludgeoned for being "asleep" or "dead"..."wake up! wake up"... there is deep truth in the message of being awake in the sense he tries to convey, and in the later chapters many passages which felt more empathetic to the dilemmas we face trying to live as human beings. But too much here felt strident, dismissive, even snobbish in tone. One has to be fairly well educated to even follow the writing, so how could most humans adhere to his exhortations to basically treat every aspect of their lives as living an illusion? And for me, too much religiosity, even though this Catholic Jesuit in India says even religion is for most an illusion. So no, I don't think such a book is a great choice for a book club..... but I'll go anyway, to see how it plays out, even though I think I won't want to speak out and have my feelings turned against me...

on the bench near the entrances