The Sure Way To Happiness - Solve A Problem You Don't Know You Have

How aware are you?

Find out with a simple test. Look at the face of a clock. The minute and hour hands are moving. Odds are you can't see them move. Very few people can. Our eyes are not to blame here. Low awareness is. It takes 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 little known but universal problem with major consequences. Low awareness means our eyes are not open to beauty. Our senses aren't open to pleasure. Our minds aren't open to truth, and our hearts aren't open to love. This problem we scarcely know we have keeps us from happiness.

Traditional meditation methods strive to increase awareness. They tend to fall short, however, due to a shared flaw: mental drifting and dreaming is impossible to control.

My training as a research psychologist allowed me to address this. Seeing meditation methods from a critical perspective, I found that they were missing something -- something that could still the wandering mind and assure success. Let me explain what I discovered.

Meditation has an "active ingredient." It is attention. Attention makes meditation effective, but attention is hard to hold on to. It slips away unseen. Meditation lacks a way to monitor attention -- a way to see what you are doing. In a word, meditation lacks "feedback." Seeing what was needed, I developed a new feedback method.

In the feedback method, attention is focused on the bull's eye of a disc. This holds the eyes still, creating slight distortions, usually halos of light. As long as you hold attention you see the light. When the mind wanders however, the eyes wander and the light disappears. The light is feedback. It lets you attend to your attention; mind your mind. It lets you hold on to attention the way you would grab a rope for a tow. And where does attention take you? Straight to awareness.

Meditation's grand prize is a breakthrough to full awareness. This is highest enlightenment where happiness comes without seeking it. Your way there might just be to "see the light" in more ways than one.

Carol E. McMahon, Ph.D. is the author (with Master Deac Cataldo) of a soon to appear book: STRAIGHT LINE MEDITATION: HOW TO RESTORE AWARENESS AND WHY YOU NEED TO. Learn more about the feedback method -- a straight line to enlightenment, at http://www.StraightLineMeditation.com

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