Distractions, Prayer and Brain Fog
The above reading is from the classic How to Pray by Reuben A. Torrey, published in 1900.
At one point, Christ said something like "The Father desires worshipers such as these who worship God in spirit and in truth." It is hard to pray when you are ill with a fever, for example. You are lost in delirium and cannot focus properly. Similarly, it is hard to pray when we are lost in our distractions.
Many times when I am at Starbucks or at the library to go online I see someone who comes in to study. He or she pulls out a textbook or notebook and begins to study, but after about 5 minutes, s/he inevitably reaches for the iPhone.
It is for this reason that I recommend beginning with the meditation available here. Most of us are lost in a semi stupor or trance state. We don't know that we are but the evidence of it is that everything pulls on your attention, you have difficulty focusing on things and even more importantly, you are lost in thinking. daydreaming, and the thought stream much of the time.
If you cannot study or focus properly, constantly reacting for your iPhone to check text messages or constantly lost in your music or video games, how are you going to pray properly?
Moreover, there is a residual effect that lingers after your texting, music, Internet or video game indulgence. It is called mental fog or brain fog.Understand this: texting, video games, excessive Internet use, music addiction, and so on are substitutes for the imagination. When you are not lost in your gadgets, then you are lost in daydreaming.
Thinking about what we just did, or what we plan to do, or about what someone said to us, even if only for less than a minute (though most of us daydream for much longer stretches) is daydreaming
where you are lost in thought and not totally there in reality.
When lost in thought, we are not fully there. You can drive right past your freeway exit.
But it is in reality, in the aware state, not lost in daydreaming, where you are closer to God.
All of this is to say that when the soul is immersed in the thought stream (or lost in emotional thinking) it is in a state where it cannot pray. But the person who learns to meditate properly is restored to objectivity.
So learning to pray is, as Mr. Torrey properly points out, a matter of asking, of sincerity, and of praying in truth.The person who is not immersed in thinking and feeling, and mentally stands back from the thought stream is subject to God. And it is in this state that the soul is free to pray and free to pray sincerely.
But if you can regain the objective state (which you had when you were a little child, before you were upset by the world), then you will be free to pray.
How proper meditation may help
When you begin to meditate properly, you will discover that you will be able to concentrate for the first time. Before you were merely caught up in one thing or another. When your attention was captured by one thing and another you were distracted. When you fixated on one thing for a long time, you thought you were concentrating, but your attention had been captured.
It basically frees you from having to do anything other than to meditate properly to come close to God. Going about your daily activities, you become more spontaneous, no longer feeling compelled or obligated to put on a show for God or anyone else. You have more time to enjoy the closeness to God and to ponder life and learn its meaning. Paul exhorts us to pray unceasingly, and I believe he is referring to the meditative life, where we become objective to thoughts and feelings, closer to the Light, and no longer immersed in daydreams, plans and schemes.
I also believe this is the prized state of mind that Christian mystics such as Madame Guyon, St. John of the Cross, Francois Fenelon, Miguel de Molinos, and Saint Francis de Sales had found. They tried to tell us about it and put it in the verbal coinage of the day. They used words like "prayer or contemplation," but I am sure they were referring to the objective state of awareness, mentally standing back from thought, and there finding communion with God.
Try the free meditation for mental clarity. It may be all you need!
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