The beatitudes deal with questions such as: What is happiness? Where is it to be found? Who is happy?

We see the unhappiness around us and in us that we might be tempted to discard the entire talk about happiness.

Jesus seems to give us some clues about happiness, but they are so unrealistic that we do not pay any attention to them. They sound good, but they simply are not applicable to our lives. We don’t argue or reject them; we simply ignore them, as 80% of Jesus’ teaching. We ignore Him as a teenager would ignore the advices of its family. “They are old folks: they need aggiornamento!”

Back to the basic question of happiness: do we know what causes this unhappiness?

We will probably say loneliness or oppression or war or hatred or poverty. And we will be wrong.

Religious person like Buddha has put at the very basis of his teaching the four noble truths: Everything is suffering. The cause of suffering is attachment. The cause of attachment is illusion and one can come out of it through “awareness”.  Psychologists agree with these simple statements.

Jesus in his Gospel goes a step ahead and says that there is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs we have in our heads. These beliefs are so widespread that it never occurs to us to question them. Because of these false beliefs we see the world and ourselves in a distorted way.

In modern terms: the computer that is our heart has got the wrong software. The computer needs software to operate, our hearts needs love. The problem is that we have the wrong software!

We have also been pro­grammed not to suspect, not to doubt, just to trust the assumptions that have been put into us by our culture, our society, and even our religion.

And if we are not happy, we have been trained to blame ourselves, not our programming, not our cultural conditioning.

Jesus says that the reason for his speaking in parables is that people “have eyes and to not see. They have a mind that doesn’t understand” in modern terms we would say that these people are in a state of trance.  We are like the man in a dream who has no idea he is dreaming.

What are these false beliefs that block us from happiness?

Jesus spells out for us these false beliefs:

First: we cannot be happy without the things that we are attached to and that we consider so precious. This is false because there is not a single moment in our life when we do not have everything that we need to be happy. The reason why you are unhappy is because we are focusing on what we do not have rather than on what we have right now. “Look at the birds of the sky, at the lilies of the fields”

Another belief: Happiness is in the future. It simply not true. Right here and now we are happy and we do not know it because  our distorted perceptions have got us caught up in fears, anxieties, attachments, conflicts, guilt etc. In one of His parables Jesus speaks of “the good seed being chocked” by the thorns ,symbolizing the worries of life.

Yet another belief: Happiness will come if wemanage to change the situation we are in and the people around us. Not true. We squan­der so much energy trying to rearrange the world. “ If somebody forces you to walk for a mile, go with him for two. Turn the other cheek” what a inner freedom!

So if it is true happiness that we seek, we must stop wasting our energy trying to cure our baldness or build up an attractive body or change our residence or job or commu­nity or lifestyle or even your personality. Changes will come, but they can not be forced by us. The sun does not pull up the flowers to make them grow, but embraces them with warmth and light: they will grow by themselves.

We could have the finest looks and the most charming personality and the most pleasant of surroundings and still be unhappy.

Another false belief: If all our desires are ful­filled we will be happy. Not true. In fact it is these very desires and attachments that make us tense, frustrated, nervous, insecure and fearful. “Give everything to the poor”

What then is happiness? Very few people know and no one can tell you, because happiness cannot be described. Jesus describes it as “living water, welling up to eternal life’. St. Ignatius describes it: “ I hear the living water in the depths of my heart, whispering: ’Come to the father’”

Can you describe reality to someone in a dream? Only if the person wakes up will be able to appreciate reality. Let us understand our false beliefs and they will drop; then we will know the taste of happiness. Joe is different from thrill!

If people want happiness so badly, why don't they attempt to understand their false beliefs?

First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed.

Second, because they are scared to lose the only world they know: the world of social pressures, tensions, ambitions, worries, guilt, with flashes of the pleasure and relief and excitement which these things bring. After all, that is the only world he knows.

In the words of Christ: If we wish to attain to lasting happiness we must be ready to “hate father, mother, even your own life and to take leave of all your possessions”. To die to the ego, so that the real self can be born.

Not by renouncing them or giving them up because what you give up violently you are forever bound to. But rather by seeing them for the night­mare they are; and then, whether we keep them or not, they will have lost their grip over us their power to hurt us, and we will be out of our darkness, our fear, and our unhappiness.

Every single thing we cling to and have convinced ourselves that we cannot be happy without is a nightmare.

Then, in the words of Christ, we will hate father and mother, wife and children, and even our own life.  It will be so easy to take leave of all our possessions, that is, we will stop clinging and thus we’d have destroyed their capacity to hurt you.

Then at last we will experience that mysterious state that cannot be described or ut­tered; the state of abiding happiness and peace. And we will understand how true it is that every­ one who stops clinging to “father, mother or children, land or houses… is repaid a hundred times over and gains eternal life”. We will the experience true happiness.

Is not strange that it takes a whole life to become what we are?

NB:

- The wrong software is called, in Christian terms, original sin. It comes with the computer!
- The right program is called by St. Paul: “To have the mind of Christ”.
- Baptism, with the opening of the third eye, the eye of the faith, is the installation of the new software.
- Saints are up-graded Christians