Waking up is the first act of salvation.
The person, in general, is a sleepwalker who moves, and acts, yet is asleep. He tends to go in one direction, but most of the time he does not know why. He dashes over here, shouts over there; now he runs, now he stops. He welcomes this one, rejects the other. He weeps, laughs, sings; one moment he is sad, the next, contented. For the most part these are reflex actions and not fully conscious acts. Sometimes man gives the impression of being a puppet moved by mysterious and invisible strings.
¡How often man fails to understand! And he suffers.!
Man suffers because he is asleep. To sleep means to be dissociated from objectivity or perceiving objects outside of their proper dimensions and exaggerating the negative aspects of events, persons and things.
We have to wake up. To wake up means to save yourself; it means to conomize on the high cost of suffering. It is the art of seeing the reality of things, in ourself and in others, objectively, and not through the prism of your fears and desires.to see whether or not a specific problem has a solution. If the problem has a solution, find it; if it has none, forget about it.
To wake up means to realize that what is done is done it. It is to know that everything will pass, that nothing will remain here, that everything is transitory, precarious, ephemeral. It is to know that sorrow follows joy just as joy follows sorrowóthat here on earth there is nothing absolute, everything is relative, and what is relative has no importance or is only relatively important.
¡Wake up! Much of the darkness of your mind will disappear, and large portions of suffering will vanish.
Extracted from the book Suffering to Peace by fr. Ignacio Larranaga
Imagen: © Depositphotos.com/[kavita]
