Fourth Week: first day
Commence your prayers with the posture and mode that you find best. You can say a brief prayer: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your children”, or any other that you find good. Try to place all your being in the presence of God.
Topic: attachments–dependencies (III)
Mark 10,25
What do I have to do to obtain happiness? Nothing. The reason: because right now you are already happy. You have everything you need in order to be happy. How can you acquire what you already have? Then, why don’t I feel it, why don’t I live it?.. Because MY MIND WON’T STOP PRODUCING UNHAPPINESS. We need to get rid of the unhappiness in the mind.
How can I get rid of the unhappiness of mind? There is only one thing that originates unhappiness. Dependency.
What is dependency? In the past they talked about being alienated: without freedom. Dependency is an emotional state, a sentiment that is inside of you, that links you strongly to A THING or A PERSON. That is, you are fully convinced that without this thing or person you cannot be happy.
There are two elements: positive and negative:
POSITIVE: the spark, the passion: pleasure, emotion. It is like a shiver that is caused by whatever you are dependent on. (I know of the case of a child so dependent on his mother that, whenever the mother went out of the house, he began to run a temperature. That is, when the mother went out with the father, which means that the child may have the beginnings of a dependency produced by jealousy. Even children can be jealous.)
NEGATIVE: the fear of losing that thing or person. It you are happy, the fear of losing this happiness… ¡¡There is a mixture of feelings!!
How is it possible to come into the Kingdom of God like that? How is it possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle?
The tragedy of the dependency is that if I don’t get what I want, unhappiness grows. And if I do get it, I live in fear of losing it; living in anxiety. Then, can I not have not just one dependency? You can have any many as you want, but for each one of them you will have to pay a price. The price is the loss of happiness.
Be advised: such is the nature of dependency that, even though you manage to satisfy many of them in a day, if there is only ONE that you couldn’t satisfy, it would be enough to make you obsessed, to make you unhappy. There is no way of winning the battle with dependency: it always wins. The solution: don’t have them, because every dependency is a worry, a fear.
There is just one way to win the battle with dependencies: GIVE THEM UP. And it isn’t difficult. It is a case of OPENING your eyes to SEE.
To see three truths:
- 1st truth that you have to see: You are holding on to a false belief. The fundamental belief is that without this thing or person you cannot be happy.
In this moment you should examine the dependencies in you, if possible, one by one. It is a good idea to take note.
It is possible that your heart puts up resistance. The dependencies have a hold on us. They pull us to them, that is, we are tied to them. In the moment you become aware of this the dependency looses strength. There are some popular sayings that express this, this reality, this truth, but I cannot put them here. We are not talking about something special and rare: it happens to all of us and it is good to cure these wounds.
- 2nd truth: Enjoy things, people, but refuse to be tied, trapped by them. Convince yourself that you can be happy without them. You will save yourself a lot of emotional tension.
- 3rd truth that you need to see. Learn to enjoy the perfume of a thousand flowers, DON’T HANG ON TO ONE, don’t suffer because you cannot have it. Enjoy.
If you have a thousand favourite dishes, the loss of one of them will go unnoticed and your happiness will not be lessened: because a dependency can stop you enjoying the 999. It isn’t a door that is closing for you; it is thousands that are opening. Dependencies or attachments take away our freedom; they take away out happiness.
Conclusion: May God bless our ways, so that we are not trapped by any flower that appears on our road. In fact they do appear: when I say a flower, you can understand many other things. Free as the birds; we are made to fly, not to be chained.