Blog

From time to time, it's good to ask basic questions: Where exactly am I going? Why? Is this conveyance really going to get me there? Had I rather be doing something else?

"In order to promote the kingdom," writes Paul Knitter—former Divine Word missionary and current professor of theology at an American Catholic university—"Christians must witness to Christ. All peoples, all religions, must know of him in order to grasp the full content of God's presence in history.…But in the new ecclesiology and in the new model for truth, one admits also that all peoples should know of Buddha, of Muhammad, of Krishna."

Harmony is a precondition for peace, and peace opens the door to joy. All of us know this from our own experience. In matters of health or study, work or worship, harmony is what we strive to achieve. When harmony is lost, the result is stress and anxiety, pain and sorrow.

Concentration can be practiced on any object. In fact, in our daily life we are concentrating on something or other most of the time. This kind of concentration is more or less unconscious and is done under the compulsion of desires. True meditation differs from it in being a conscious process involving the detachment of the will from lower desires and its focussing at a higher center of consciousness.

Before we begin the study of different types of meditation it is necessary to keep in mind two important points. One is that meditation is not just ordinary concentration but a special type of internal concentration.