Anthony de Mello was born in Bombay, joined the Jesuit order at sixteen, was trained in Spain and the United States, returned to India in his thirties, and from 1972 led the Sadhana Institute of Counselling and Spirituality at Lonavla in Maharashtra. From there he conducted retreats across the world for the next fifteen years that became, by the time of his sudden death in New York in 1987, one of the most widely heard Christian contemplative voices of the late twentieth century.
His teaching method was unique. He drew openly and freely on the Buddhist parables, on Sufi stories, on Vedanta, on the Indian guru tradition, weaving them into a Christian framework that was less about belief and more about waking up to what is already the case. His books, mostly transcribed from his retreat talks, include Sadhana: A Way to God, The Song of the Bird, Wellsprings, One Minute Wisdom, and the posthumously published Awareness, which is the most concentrated record of his late teaching.
His central call was simple and uncompromising. You are asleep. You do not see what is in front of you. You take yourself to be the labels, the stories, the conditioning, but you are not. The work is to wake up, which is not a process but a recognition. He died of a heart attack at fifty-five, hours before he was due to give a retreat in New York.
His writings are under copyright and held by the Society of Jesus. We do not host text bodies here. Awareness, The Way to Love, and One Minute Wisdom are the most accessible places to begin and are widely available from Image Books and Doubleday.
