The Sure Way to Happiness: Solve a Problem You Don't Know You Have

THE SURE WAY TO HAPPINESS: SOLVE A PROBLEM YOU DON'T KNOW YOU HAVE

What is the sure way to happiness? It is awareness. Awareness opens your eyes to beauty and your senses to pleasure. It opens your mind to truth and your heart to love. You may think you already have awareness. Most people think they do. If you do, you’re in for a surprise. Try this test.

Test Your Awareness

To test your awareness, look at the face of a clock. The minute and hour hands are moving. Odds are you can't see them move. Your eyes aren’t to blame here. Low awareness is. It takes very little awareness to see the fast movement of the second hand. Seeing the slower hands move takes deeper awareness, and this we lack. If full awareness is one hundred percent, we have as little as five percent on average.

Low awareness is a universal problem that keeps us from happiness. Fortunately there is a solution. Meditation restores awareness. Here’s how it works.

How Meditation Builds Awareness

Meditation has an active ingredient. It is attention. All forms of meditation attend to something (a mantra, the breath, a sounding gong, for instance). Attention leads straight to awareness.

One meditation method has an edge here. A feedback method delivers more of the active ingredient by letting you monitor attention. Let me explain the advantage of feedback.

How A Feedback Method Guarantees Success

Meditation demands attention, but attention is hard to hold on to. You set out to attend (to your breath for instance), but instead you daydream. You try again to attend, but again your mind wanders.

Why is attention so easily lost? It’s because it slips away unseen. You lose attention without knowing you are losing it. Traditional meditation doesn’t monitor attention. It lacks "feedback."

A new Feedback Method is the answer. In this method attention is focused on the bull's eye of a disc. (Focusing Discs are freely available at the Straight Line Meditation website.) Attention’s fixed gaze causes slight visual distortions, usually halos of light. The light is feedback.

As long as you pay attention you see the light. When the mind wanders however, your eyes wander and the light disappears. Seeing the light, you literally attend to your attention. In this way you easily sustain attention. Awareness follows, and with it, happiness comes free.

Awareness And Happiness

With this method you “see the light" in both senses of the word. Then happiness comes free. Your eyes open to beauty, your senses to pleasure, your mind to truth and your heart to love. Without awareness it is impossible to be happy. With it, it’s impossible not to be.

Meditation’s grand prize - the highest enlightenment, is nothing apart from full awareness. At this high level of awareness, happiness is unconditional.

We’ve been looking in the wrong places for happiness. It turns out that “having it all” doesn’t even include having what it takes. What does it take? All it takes is awareness.