Let’s take a moment to reflect on four inner steps that can provide us with a glimpse of true happiness. These four practical directives are as follows:
- From distraction to focus.
We need to understand that our distracted and scattered minds make us unwell. As modern science has demonstrated, this leads to profound unhappiness and makes us vulnerable to countless dark thoughts and debilitating desires. However, focusing the mind is something we must practice regularly and effectively.
- From defensive-aggressive automatisms to awareness.
When the mind is focused, we can become more aware of our own automatisms. We can more easily recognise those wounds that still hurt inside and generate automated, thus destructive, reactions. Therefore, with a focused and more aware mind, we can select our own thoughts, desires, and aspirations, thereby freeing ourselves from the continuous and paranoid strains that this world bombards us with through advertisements and propaganda. However, such work requires adequate practice as well as the application of knowledge from the psychological insights of the last century.
- From excessive projections of time—whether towards the future or the past—to the state of presence.
A good meditation practice allows us to experience, with increasing intensity, the happiness that comes from being present, free from all those thoughts and desires that project us far away from the “here and now” and from the infinite possibilities that the present moment can offer us. Saint Augustine of Hippo commented in his Tractates on the Gospel of John (38, 10): “Examine the changes of things, and you will find ‘has been’ and ‘will be’. If you would truly be, transcend time.” Only through this repeated experience of the present moment can we grant breathing space to time and set it free from that vertiginous acceleration that transforms our lives into an extremely painful hurdle race.
- From suffering constrained by time to joyful, eternal breathing.
Meditation liberates us deep within from all our inflexible mental shackles, through focus, awareness, and the experience of the state of presence. It opens for us the door to the mystery of life’s eternal condition, allowing us to experience a time breathed by the Eternal Being; hence, it reveals the profound mysteries of the relationship between Time and Eternity, Man and God. In other words, meditation reopens fundamental spiritual matters through our direct and personal experimentation. At that point, we can also encounter the Revelation of Christ in a new light and appreciate its originality and promise for a fullness of life and happiness.
THE MASTERS’ THOUGHT
“We need to go back to meditation with renewed will. Becoming quiet and present doesn’t mean being dozy. On the contrary, it implies a silent, profound, and limpid vigilance. Here life is in its own presence. It is the present act that owns itself. In this calm and openness, I can welcome inside me the holy truth, which is the object of the meditation itself, so that I can intimately become aware of it.”
Romano Guardini