Tag: Meditation

The goal of mindfulness practice is to increase the conditions which lead to our happiness and our freedom. However, the major world wisdom traditions seem to have come to an awareness that  full happiness may not be possible in this world and propose different perspectives based on that. The Buddhist tradition’s fundamental teaching is that life has ultimately an unsatisfactory quality to it and that our suffering comes from not recognizing that. The Old Testament believes that we are on this world with a timeless longing deep inside us, which means that we can never fully find a complete contentment here. As the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes puts it He has also set eternity in their heart. From this perspective therefore, there will always be an restless quality to our life here, because there are (eternal) desires in our hearts which cannot be satisfied by the (finite) experiences which we have. This goes against a lot of what advertising and modern society like to tell us, as they place in front of us a succession of created needs. Although both the Buddhist and the Judeo-Christian traditions differ in the way they resolve the problem, they agree in telling us that no person or no thing can ultimately satisfy our deepest longings and that we will not be fully happy unless we realize that. There is an unfulfilled quality which can manifest itself in our relationships, in disappointments in our families, in a job which does not live up to our dreams, in the place where we live seeming poor in comparison to other places and other lives. To be unfulfilled in this way is to be human. Realizing that it has to be so is the first step to genuine peace.

In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we finally learn that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished.

Karl Rahner