You are not a Chicken

The book opens with a story you have probably heard in some form. An eagle's egg ends up in a henhouse. The eaglet hatches with the chicks and grows up as one of them. It scratches for worms, clucks, and never flies more than a few feet off the ground. When it is old it sees a great bird gliding far overhead and asks what it is. That is the eagle, a neighbour tells it. He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth. So the eagle lives and dies a chicken, because that is what it believes it is.

Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist from India, told that story to describe his work. The rest of the book tries to convince you that you are the eagle, and that the only thing keeping you on the ground is that you haven't noticed.

What kind of book this is

Awareness isn't a book de Mello sat down and wrote. It is a set of talks from his retreats, edited and published after his death in 1987. You can tell. It reads like someone talking to a room: he repeats himself, jumps between topics, tells a joke, and then says something that stops you.

The chapters are short and don't really build on each other. Some are a page or two long. That makes it a good book to read slowly, a chapter a night, and a bad book to rush.

The central claim: you are asleep

De Mello's main idea is simple and a bit insulting. Most of us are asleep. We live mechanically: we think other people's thoughts, feel secondhand emotions, and react instead of act. We say we want to wake up, but what we really want is for someone to fix our broken toys. We want the job back, the relationship back, the reputation back. In his words, people want relief, not a cure, because a cure hurts.

Most people tell you they want to get out of kindergarten, but don’t believe them. Don’t believe them! All they want you to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my wife. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” This is what they want; they want their toys replaced. That’s all. Even the best psychologist will tell you that, that people don’t really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.

This is where the book is at its best. It doesn't tell you to become a better person. It tells you to see the person you already are, clearly and without judgment. Real change comes from seeing, not from trying.

Three ideas I keep coming back to

1. Observe like a scientist watching ants

De Mello asks you to watch yourself the way a scientist studies ants: with curiosity and no agenda. The scientist isn't trying to train the ants or get anything out of them. He just wants to understand them. De Mello promises that if you can watch your own mind like that, change comes by itself, without effort.

A scientist observes the behavior of ants with no further end in view than to study ants, to learn as much as possible about them. He has no other aim. He’s not attempting to train them or get anything out of them. He’s interested in ants, he wants to learn as much as possible about them. That’s his attitude. The day you attain a posture like that, you will experience a miracle. You will change—effortlessly, correctly.

The obstacle is labelling. When you call someone a communist, or lazy, or difficult, you stop understanding them at that moment. He borrows a line from Krishnamurti to make the point: once a child learns the name of a bird, the child stops actually seeing it. The word replaces the thing.

2. You are not what you identify with

The book's most radical chapter, "Stripping Down to the 'I'", asks what is left when you remove everything you aren't. You aren't your thoughts, because they come and go. You aren't your body, because its cells are always being replaced. You aren't your job, your nationality, or your reputation.

He has a funny, self-mocking example. Visitors to his centre in India praise the trees and the climate, and he catches himself feeling proud, even though he didn't plant the trees or choose the weather. The same "me" that swells when someone praises his country shrinks when someone criticises it, and he had nothing to do with either.

His conclusion is blunt: all suffering comes from identifying with something. He also has a striking test for when you've done it. Grief, he says, shows that you had made your happiness depend on the thing you lost.

Whatever you're aware of, you control. And, in de Mello's words, "what you are not aware of is in control of you."

That line is probably the book's thesis in one sentence. De Mello illustrates it with a story against himself. During his counselling training he was sure he hadn't asked a client a single question, because his method forbade it. When the tape was played back, there it was: a huge question he had heard three times without noticing.

3. Preferences, not desires

This is the most practical idea in the book. De Mello doesn't ask you to give up wanting things. He says suppressing desire leaves you lifeless. He also warns that fighting something ties you to it, because you give it as much power as you spend fighting it. His advice is to turn desires into preferences. Prefer things all you like, but don't let your happiness depend on any of them.

He uses an old parable from the Chinese sage Zhuangzi aka "Tranxu".

An archer shooting for nothing has all his skill. Shooting for a brass buckle, he gets nervous. Shooting for gold, he sees two targets. His skill hasn't changed. The prize has split him in two. If you've ever choked in an interview or a big game, you'll recognise this.

The jokes are part of the teaching

It's easy to forget how funny this book is. There's the man in Belfast with a gun to his head who's asked whether he's Catholic or Protestant. There's the voter who backs a party because his father and grandfather did, until his friend's argument backfires. There's the advice never to teach a pig to sing, because it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

The jokes aren't decoration. Nearly every one shows something the chapter around it is trying to say: tribal identity, inherited beliefs, the pointlessness of trying to fix other people. De Mello seems to know you'll remember the punchline long after you've forgotten the argument.

Where I push back

The book deliberately overstates things, and sometimes that goes too far.

• The absolutes. De Mello says that any negative feeling toward anyone means you are living in an illusion and something in you must change. As a way to examine yourself, that's useful. As a universal rule, it's hard to apply to someone facing real injustice. It works better as a question than as a verdict.
• Charity as selfishness. He argues that most generosity is self-interest dressed up as altruism, including the refined pleasure of pleasing others. It's a useful provocation, but it can harden into a cynicism the book doesn't really want.
• Small inaccuracies. He attributes to Socrates the line "the unaware life is not worth living," but Socrates said the unexamined life. It's close enough for a retreat talk but worth knowing.
• Some dated riffs. Parts of his commentary on American consumerism and competition feel like they belong to the 1980s.
• The theological controversy. In 1998 the Vatican issued a notification warning that some of de Mello's positions were incompatible with Catholic faith. The book does push hard against religion as a system. De Mello worries about worship becoming more important than love, and the Church more important than life. Some readers will find that freeing and others will find it a problem. Either way, you should know about it going in.

None of these ruined the book for me. A teacher who shakes you awake won't be perfectly fair at every moment.

Who should read it

Read it if you've ever felt that self-help keeps handing you techniques while nothing actually changes. De Mello offers no techniques. He argues that any technique would just be more programming. What he gives you is a way of paying attention, plus a promise that people who practise it notice a difference within weeks.

Skip it if you want a structured, step-by-step program, or if repetition bothers you. The book keeps circling back to the same idea, which is either its weakness or its method, depending on how you look at it.

The takeaway

The book ends up somewhere surprisingly physical. After all the talk of illusion and identity, de Mello tells his listeners to go and taste good food, good wine, good water. His advice: "Lose your mind and come to your senses."

That sums up the book. You don't wake up by adding more ideas.

You wake up by dropping the ones you've been carrying around without noticing, then looking up.