Just Sitting

“Master [your thoughts] by refusing to feed them despite their rage. By feeding them, I mean giving them all sorts of intricate speculations about the details of your being to gnaw on. Meditations like this certainly have their place and value, but in comparison to the blind awareness of your being and your gift of self to God, they amount to a rupture and dispersion of that wholeness so necessary to a deep encounter with God.”
—Privy Counsel, Ch. 3

Again, the point of contemplative prayer is not thought. But the author recognizes that the first and most common challenge of contemplation is the discursive mind. His counsel is pretty simple: don’t give your thoughts any weight, importance or encouragement. Notice that he does not condemn the thinking faculties of the mind. To do so would be pointless: human reason is a tremendous gift.

Thinking is not the problem. It’s our attachment to thinking that creates the barrier to understanding. Thoughts will arise and pass away. Sometimes, as the author points out, thoughts can be harnessed and used for important spiritual purposes. Prayer with words is a perfect example. But this is not contemplation, because thoughts have that tendency to reinforce our attachment to our “self,” our separateness, and therefore cause a “rupture and dispersion of that wholeness so necessary to a deep encounter with God.”

The fundamental practice of contemplation is just this: allowing the thoughts to arise without clinging to them or averting from them, and allowing them to pass away with the same equanimity. This is what the Zen masters call, “just sitting.” When we do this, our wholeness is reestablished, and we dwell in oneness.