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We’re working through the framework from my book “Getting Better When You Can’t” pictured below. Today we reflect on this internal structure through the lens of contemplative prayer, as we consider our mind/intellect.

AI explains the difference between contemplation and meditation: Think of meditation as building the path (using tools like breath/mantra), and contemplation as arriving at the destination (experiencing presence without effort). Meditation involves mental work (discursive prayer), whereas contemplation is a gift of quiet, loving infusion, a “gaze” or “repose”. 

Our goal of lasting transformation began with three vital questions which uncover our truth assumptions:

1. Who says I have a problem?
2. What do I believe is true about this problem?
3. Is this really true or all that is true?

Our reflection leads us to recognize two truth gaps:

1. Apprehension: We don’t possess all truth and therefore cannot live it out. We need further discovery.
2. Application: We willfully reject the truth which we possess , making us personally responsible for our unwanted behavior.

While our world thinks of our problems as external to us (drugs, porn, gambling, violence, debt…), I showed how Jesus located every sin, problem, or struggle as an internal condition of our heart (inner self). Mark 7:14-23

Let’s regain our comfortable, humble inner posture. As you inhale, breathe in and receive love, grace and peace, and exhale any resistance to inner surrender as you sit within the presence of God. Continue breathing out resistance, squirminess, and distraction, and inhale warm, calm, reception.

From this place of stillness and presence, we’ll contemplate our intellect or mind. This practice of “observing our thoughts” will train us to “see blips” on our screen of life which occur in our minds. This is where we “take thoughts captive” or are taken captive by them.

Consider this quote from the “father of quantum theory,” Max Planck:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”

This means our minds are NOT synonymous with our brains. Our intellect is the highest faculty of the human organism. Our “mind”, which employs and responds to biochemistry, also transcends and precedes the biology into which it is housed. While it isn’t coextensive with our biology, it’s also not other, or mutually exclusive to it. Each relates to each and require each for that relationship. Word and flesh, physical and non-physical reality coexist within our intellect. Our minds access places our bodies cannot.

The intellect is where our experience, training, and discovery of the Truth form our worldview. Our worldview is the lens through which our mind determines what truth (reality) is. It’s continually forming. No two people can possess exactly the same worldview, but they can move into conformity to each other. The mind is not static, it’s dynamic and that’s why changing it with determination fails, our minds don’t work that way.

As a novice pastor, I had minimal earnings. I lacked financial literacy and a budget. My worldview concluded I didn’t earn enough to save, and insisted I required debt to survive. Within four years, I was (inflation adjusted) $80,000 in debt.

We cannot live better than we think. We can’t change how we think until we access our truth assumptions.

My wife had skill with money. She cut up my credit cards and put me on scorched earth budget based on my earnings. She allotted me $20 a month for all non budgeted spending and that limit wasn’t lifted for seven years. I yearned to be free of debt, but my mind and thus my emotions (covered next week) warred against this effort. Why was that? I eventually learned how to think truthfully about money, then my debt came down as I became able to earn more.

One shift in my worldview was my framework for car payments. I believed I had money to be in debt, but not to save for a car. My debt problem was a truth problem and I could not live better than I could think.

Worldviews are the children of “the crowd” who press continually upon our minds. My school debt, burgeoning career, relationships, familial patterns, emotions, self-pity, political and economic assumptions, urgent expenses, surprises, available time, future plans, hobbies, weekends, religious beliefs, friends, etc… All these cause failure not despite our best efforts, but because of them…These were writing my truth scripts, no The Truth.

Our sin or problem is not doing bad things. It’s going after the good things badly. We’re OBLIVIOUS.

Sit with this. By identifying the good you are seeking (instead of focusing on the downstream bad you hope to change), you’ll be far enough “upstream” to rewrite the malware script that derails success. This is power of change within our intellect (the sanctity of our mind, the gift of contemplation). It trains us to notice the subtle blip on the screen. For example, what “blips” exist when you think you will be all alone? Can you catch that thought that thinks no one will ever know? All of this is a function of our intellect.

We transform within our minds, we don’t change our minds.

We can test this. If our struggle is caused by a rejecting the truth, then healing begins by humbly owning this rejection and giving ourselves to what we know is right.

Morality and fidelity are at the epicenter of transformation. It’s futile to pretend otherwise.

The great news is the Good News. Our infinite moral failures, sins, big and small, momentary or longstanding, personal or corporate, benign or toxic, all of which are seeds within our heart that germinate into our lives and the world, every last one of them, all past and all future, have been entirely placed upon Christ, who bore them for the entirety of the cosmos.

What this means, is that in our stillness and contemplation, we can immediately breathe these out in a desperate and apologetic sigh of soul scouring gratitude. We cast our cares upon Him. If we could carry these and overcome our struggles on your own, then we’d have done so. Fortunately, our internal silence reveals we aren’t alone. We aren’t left to ourselves. Our weakness becomes His strength. It’s the most counter-intuitive approach to REALITY that exists, but this is why it’s the only way to transformation. This isn’t religion, it’s the experience of God within the sanctity of our own minds. Our intellect (perception) is evidence of the Spirit of God abiding within.

Breathe in grace. Breathe out gratitude. This is your ground zero. Practicing how to live contemplatively ( from the intellect) literally changes everything in your life as the outside-in flow from life pressing in on you, now flows inside-out toward everything.