“Meditating Is Simple, The Difficult Thing Is Wanting To Meditate”

Pablo D’Ors is a Catholic priest who talks to us about the need to learn to listen to ourselves, isolate ourselves from noise and dare to look at the shadows that surround us. He is the grandson of the thinker and essayist Eugenio D’Ors and the author of the book Biografía del silencio .

The silence turns us inwards

What happens to us that we are so anxious and sad?

The diseases of the human being today are, in my opinion, three: guilt in the past, fear in the future and attachment to the present. The reason or cause of all three is the same: we live too much outward and too little inward.

And it seems more difficult away from nature …

All of us who live in big cities, although to different degrees, are victims of this triple cancer. The only way out is, in my opinion, to foster a culture of interiority, which does not seem like a priority in our institutions. We have to learn to live in the present from being, overcoming those permanent temptations that are power, having and seeming. For this, the way of silence is clearly the way.

Do we need silence so much?

As much, at least, as the word, probably more. Breathing is a double biological rhythm: breathe in and breathe out. We live only exhaling, only pouring out; but we also need to inspire, welcome, silence to receive what is offered to us.

The Dalai Lama says that if all the children of the world meditated, we would eradicate violence in two generations …

I do not know if in two. Maybe three, which is a prettier number. I see it simple, yes. Meditating is simple, the difficult thing is wanting to meditate. In reality, everything is at your fingertips. It’s just that we don’t realize …

Are the ego and pride the evils of contemporary man?

Contemporary man… We know very little about him, we know very little about ourselves. We have to reconcile ourselves with our not knowing, live our ignorance serenely and happily ; that is what meditation leads to.

Why is it so difficult to be silent for more than half an hour?

Because we don’t like each other. Because we are not only truth, beauty and good, as we would like, but also greed, ambition and vanity. Silence returns us to our homeland and we are scared to realize that we have lived our entire lives as foreigners. On the other hand, it is not essential to be in silence for more than half an hour a day. With that time it is enough for the structure of our old personality to crack and a new one begins to be born.

Any advice to get it?

It is not about being an expert or a virtuoso, it is enough to be a fan of silence. We must eradicate the myth of the blank mind. The ideal is not the absolute control of the mind, but the absolute acceptance of what the mind is, what is something else. It is not about achieving formal perfection, but purity of heart. We do not love the perfect, but the authentic. Life is not perfect and neither is meditation, it is enough that we are alive and awake. The main “benefit” of meditation is that we can get closer to who we really are.

You say that an age of mysticism is coming …

I believe that the future world will be mystical, more turned inward, or it will not be. I train my confidence every day and, without closing myself to the horror of the world, I see much more good than bad, more beautiful than ugly, more good than bad people, many more reasons for hope than despair. I understand that many will consider this vision to be childish, but I really feel that the childish one is theirs.