MENTAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Listening to my friend John today, I couldn't help but notice his convoluted way of thinking. Everything he was saying was making some sort of sense and certainly, to himself he was making sense and yet, it seemed as if he was keeping himself, somehow detached from the actual reality of the moment…

…During that same conversation, our friend Peter came up and it was obvious to me that his way of thinking, which again, must seem perfectly logical and inescapable to himself, kept him in a kind of prison that no one but he, himself had the key to.

And then I realized that I must certainly be just as bad off! All of my thinking, everything that I talk about and write about that seems so profound and unquestionably True to me, was nothing more than my own mental construction that, to most people, probably sounds like the gobbledygook that it actually is!

Then I realized that prayer and the spiritual life was probably designed to trick our mind into ‘letting go’ for at least a moment so that we might, however briefly, have an experience of reality and not the false creation we are familiar with that keeps us always one step away from reality. And that, it is that brief experience of reality that has the power to change our life forever for the better…

This is why in many of the lives of the Saints it describes them as being proficient in ‘Doing’. Because no amount of reading about prayer and the spiritual life, or thinking about it, or writing about it can compare or have any of the real benefit involved with it, as that of actually ‘DOING' it.

A word to the wise and also to myself, the one who ‘thinks’ that he is wise!