When we sit in silence with the Prayer of the Lamb we are offering this prayer in a meditational style. We are not concerned about holding any mental intention of intercession for others throughout the time of sitting, although we may have begun with offering specific intentions. At my first morning meditation I offer the Prayer of the Lamb for each name or situation on my prayer lists and each prayer request that has come to me. Then I set that all aside and give my attention only to the meditation practice and the silent, mental recitation of the Prayer of the Lamb or the Name of Yeshua alone or a simple “Yeshua, have mercy,” offered gently, slowly and rhythmically into the time of silence.
After a short while inevitably what comes up are thoughts emerging out of the background of awareness making flash appearances in that ocean of silence. Many are the times when the Prayer or the Name drop into the background and the emerging thought has grabbed attention.
One of the issues that comes up again and again with meditators is a perceived problem with thoughts. “Clear your mind of thoughts.” “I try but I can’t,” I hear. “Thoughts keep distracting me.” “I have ‘monkey mind’ every time I try to meditate.” “At first it seemed so easy and so peaceful, but now every time I sit down the mind is filled with one thought after another.” These expressions reflect the idea that one is the victim of one’s own thoughts.
In some traditions of meditation the emphasis is on controlling and subduing the mind and the thoughts, holding them in check. There can be heroic effort put into directing attention away from thoughts. I can’t say that I have seen this work for many people, and with those for whom their efforts bring some measure of success, I harbor the suspicion that they have reinforced their own ego strength, so that in place of an expansion of awareness and ease of practice, there is a constriction of awareness into a tight band of control. However, it may also be very good to try as hard as one can to check thoughts, control the mind, and set aside all distractions, and to keep trying until one has utterly failed and comes to the realization that this is beyond capability. Then we can come to a place of grace and compassion for ourselves. Certainly telling people to control the mind serves to bring attention to the way the mind dominates and brings present awareness to what currently is foremost in the mind. It shows us our condition and engages us in some intentionality about our spiritual condition so influenced by the mind.
Some have likened the mind being distracted by thought to a puppy dog following whatever is set in front of it. When training a dog, I was told, you have about four seconds of dog attention in which to reinforce a desired action or to discourage an unwanted behavior before the window of opportunity closes. Response time has to be pretty close to the event. So likewise in meditation we might do well to practice the “four second rule” or remind ourselves quickly that we need not follow this thought that just emerged before us, but to let it go, let it drift off untouched or only slightly considered. Once there is the awareness that I am thinking a particular thought, that particular thought is over. To go back to that thought now becomes a matter of willful choice rather than the spontaneous arising of the stream of thoughts that the mind, or the mechanism of the brain, continually spews out.
I hope you can see the subtle difference between a spontaneously arising thought and a planned, premeditated or developed thought. It is the difference between the thought that I need to figure out what to fix for dinner and the actual planning of the dinner menu. It is the difference between a flash of memory from childhood of the gathering eggs in the hen house on Cousin Jack’s ranch in Montana and the expansion of that memory into a reminiscence about the time my sister picked up an egg so freshly laid that its shell had not yet hardened and how it broke in her hand, and the beauty of the sun appearing over the tops of the mountains in the morning there in the Flathead Valley and walking back to the farm house where Cousin Grace had breakfast preparing for us, and stopping to check our shoes before coming in the door and pumping water for washing our hands. It is the difference between a sudden remembrance emerging in consciousness of a comment with a barb to it that a colleague had made earlier, and working out what I wish I had said at the time and what I would say to that person next time we met.
Thoughts will arise, and we need not pounce on each one as it does. We can let them go. And we can also know that many times, much of the time, we don’t let them go until farther on down the road when we finally recognize that for the last several minutes attention had been totally engrossed in the development of some thought. Lord, have mercy.
So when thoughts arise and the puppy dog of attention starts following it, one way then to work with the situation is neither to berate ourselves nor to reject what has happened. Instead one could look at the thought as a piece of information reflecting one’s current condition. At that moment we could check what we are feeling right then. Is there any tension, concentration of energy, or reactivity occurring within our awareness? There is no need to do anything about our condition except observe it and accept the truth of our condition and honor our master by letting Yeshua do the work within us through the Holy Spirit.
So the mind is like a puppy dog in terms of stability of attention, having an attention span of less than four seconds. There is an advantage to this: dog awareness. Take your dog out for a walk and what does the dog do? It seems to want to examine everything, sniff everything. It doesn’t have the same agenda that you do. It doesn’t naturally walk along at a steady pace, keeping to the sidewalk, crossing streets only at corners, not being distracted by neighborhood cats or squirrels scrambling up tree trunks. The dog does not have the human’s agenda of going from point A to point B. To the dog everything is new right then. Even from one day to the next what was there when you went out for your walk yesterday is today as though it is brand new. With an attention span of four seconds everything is new. This is a way to stay present to the moment, to live in the now.
Meditation is “non-doing.” In meditation the idea on our part is to approach that state of non-doing by our subsequent refinement of still body, closed eyes, quiet environment and non-development of thoughts. Non-doing includes letting go of desire, hopes, struggle, and both clinging and rejection. But the silence is a gift; it is what is given. So the best advice of all, one could say, is to give up all hope of getting anywhere. We will not accomplish the quiet mind by our own efforts. Meditation is a faith practice.
