From Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, Meditation and Worship", Living Prayer, at page 26:
1. The main distinction between meditation and our usual haphazard thinking is coherence; it should be an ascetical exercise of intellectual sobriety. Theophane the Recluse, speaking of the way in which people usually think, says that thoughts buzz around in our heads like a swarm of mosquitoes, in all directions, monotonously, without order and without particular result.
2. The first thing to learn, . . . is to pursue a line . . . .having chosen one the subject of our thinking, renounce all, except the chosen one. 3. It is better to begin with something which is alive for us, either with those sayings which we find attractive . . . or else, on the contrary, with those against which we rebel, which we cannot accept; we find both in the gospel. 4. There are words which we can understand adequately only if we ignore the particular or technical meaning they have acquired (e.g. spirit ). . . .We should never start with the deeper meaning before we have got the simple concrete one, which everyone could understand at the time Christ spoke with the people around him. 5. So, after a preliminary understanding in our own contemporary language, we must turn to what the Church means by the words. . . . 6. As the aim of meditation, of understanding scripture is to fulfil the will of God, we must draw practical conclusions and act upon them. 7. Often we consider one or two points and jump to the next, which is wrong since we have just seen that it takes a long time to become recollected, what the Fathers call an attentive person, someone capable of paying attention to an idea so long and so well that nothing of it is lost. The spiritual writers of the past and of the present day will tell us: take a text, ponder on it hour after hour, day after day, until you have exhausted all your possibilities, intellectual and emotional, and thanks to attentive reading and re-reading this text, you have to come to a new attitude. 8. In the beginning, extraneous thoughts will intrude, but if we push them away constantly, time after time, in the end they will leave us in peace. It is only when by training, by exercise, by habit, we have become able to concentrate profoundly and quickly, that we can continue through life in a state of collectedness in spite of what we are doing. However, to become aware of having extraneous thoughts, we must already have achieved some sort of collectedness. 9. Parallel with mental discipline, we must learn to acquire a peaceful body. . . Theophane the Recluse: Be like a violin string, tuned to a precise note, without slackness or supertension, the body erect, shoulders back, carriage of the head easy, the tension of all muscles oriented to the heart. 10. Meditation is an activity of thought, while prayer is the rejection of every thought. According to the teaching of the eastern Fathers even pious thoughts and the deepest and loftiest theological considerations, if they occur during prayer must be considered as a temptation and suppressed; because, as the Fathers say, it is foolish to think about God and forget that you are in his presence. 11. Prayer is essentially standing face to face with God, consciously striving to remain collected and absolutely still and attentive in his presence, which means standing with an undivided mind, an undivided heart and an undivided will in the presence of the Lord; and that is not easy. 12. St. John Climacus gives us a simple way of learning to concentrate. He says: choose a prayer, be it the Lord s Prayer or any other, take your stand before God, become aware of where you are and what you are doing, and pronounce the words of the prayer attentively. After a certain time you will discover that your thoughts have wandered; then restart the prayer on the words or the sentence which was the last you pronounced attentively. You may have to do that ten times, twenty times or fifty times, you may, in the time appointed for your prayer, be able to pronounce only three sentences, three petitions and go no farther; but in this struggle you will have been able to concentrate on the words, so that you bring to God, seriously, soberly, respectfully, words of prayer which you are conscious of, and not an offering that is not yours, because you were not aware of it. 13. In this way of training a given amount of time is set apart for prayer, and if prayer is attentive, it does not matter what this length of time is . . . . therefore, the best way is to have a definite time and keep it. You know the time fixed and you have the prayer material to make use of; if you struggle earnestly, quite soon you will discover that your attention becomes docile, because the attention is much more subject to the will than we imagine, and when one is absolutely sure that however one tries to escape, it must be twenty minutes and not a quarter of an hour, one just perseveres. St. John Climacus trained dozens of monks by this simple device – a time limit, then merciless attention, and that is all. RefMgr field[22]: 1″