INTROSPECTION

Modern man is terrified of two things - of God and himself.

To escape from God he professes atheism, if not, a fragmented faith in any of the religiosities and, to escape from himself, invents noises and occupations of all kinds.

If there is no reason to flee, at least logic says that - those who flee from God must also flee from the Self ... because the Self without God is infernal - and who can live in hell?

To return to the Self - you must return to God, O modern man!

You try to escape from yourself, filling the void of a super busy life with people, filling with encounters full of noises and expendable tasks, your inner solitude, and intending to fill the vacuum of yourself with thousands of emptiness.

Don't you know that voids are not filled with emptiness - but with plenitude?

Why do you avoid knowing what's going on inside your Self - and you are only interested in what happens outside, in the peripheries of your tyrannical ego? ...

Why are you friendly with all of your peripheries - and an enemy of your inner centre?

You love the noise of the streets ...

Delight yourself with the coming and going of the avenues and plazas ... you are enchanted by the profane sound coming from beaches and clubs, of elegant salons, of electronic paraphernalia that today looks more like an extension of your body!

Carnival madness and profane games fill you with delusions ...

And when you live distant from the beloved noise, you don't know what to do with yourself ... you end up lost in everything - and with that, frustrated and neurotic.

A vacuum facing another vacuum ...

May the newspaper, the romance, electronic paraphernalia help the poor castaway of himself, channelling the profane noise to the unbearable inner loneliness!

The castaway clings to anything - and believes that he can escape drowning in the ocean of inner emptiness.

O, poor man! ... What will become of you after the carnival of this life? ...

When does Ash Wednesday dawn? ...

The day you tear all fantasies off your face - and even your skin? ...

The day when the matter returns to the matter - and the spirit will return to the Spirit? ...

Build your inner life, O man - architect your eternal world!

Fill soul empty spaces with eternal values! ...

After the hallucinated carnival, comes the silent lent, Holy Week and joyous Easter follow ...

Make your life a Holy Week of work, study and meditation - and you will see an Easter Sunday appear.

It follows today's miserere - tomorrow's hallelujah ...

Your inner world is eternal ...

Immortal ...

It's you ...

___________________

The above text, revised and supplemented, was written by Huberto Rohden in the early 1940s, showing today, early 2021, the same existential problem of mankind from time immemorial - amid a pandemic caused by an invisible enemy, which forces, through governments and other entities, social isolation to combat this evil.

And in isolation, man cannot find himself, frustrating all possibilities of opening a channel towards the Cosmic Source and letting the living waters of self-knowledge flow. In other words, far from his comfort zone, interacting with all externalities, shows how fragile the human mind is and how much it submits to the demands of profane activities and with that, increasing the statistics of frustrations, depressions and other psychological diseases, accelerated number of suicides, domestic violence and all other evils reserved for those who cannot control a multi polarized mind.

According to Rohden, it is: “wasted time wanting to get around the central problem of happiness through all kinds of escapisms and camouflages. It is better to bravely face the painful reality of this inevitable encounter with itself, even if it is to undergo a surgical operation without anaesthesia, a tremendous bleeding of the ego, but the result of which is convalescence and life.”

In this sense, Paul Brunton wrote: “We spend so much of our leisure time doing nothing which matters, that there is little of it left to do the one thing that emphatically does matter”, and Socrates states that we need “to be careful with the emptiness of a too-busy life!”