A discipline more than a technique

For the secular mind today, we approach meditation not so much as a journey, a path, a way that opens up into the boundless, into infinity, into the divine dimension. But we approach meditation more as a technique. And a technique is a way in which we control circumstances and we want to get certain results as quickly as possible, according to a timetable. So it’s one of the first challenges for anyone. We are all secular in our training and in our conditioning today, psychologically we’re conditioned in this way because of our culture and society, a materialistic society, technological society, so we approach many things, most things in terms of technique and control. One of the first things of course we have to learn as we begin the journey of meditation and as we persevere in it is that this is a discipline more than a technique. The great gift really that John Main has given to the world and to the church is the remembering of the method present within our own Christian tradition. He found it of course in the teachings of the Desert Fathers, in John Cassian, and then was able to recognise this was a continuous tradition in the Western Church. 

( Breakthrough by Laurence Freeman )