Paradox

It might sound like a contradiction that John Main recommends the mantra. This is the part of the essential teaching that we follow, that he invites us to learn, but at the same time he says don’t create this as a model of reality in the left hemisphere of your brain so that every other kind of approach to prayer is inferior or inadequate. So there’s a paradox here or tension between the commitment to the way of the mantra in this teaching of the Christian tradition with the fact that prayer cannot be reduced to some-thing we get by a particular technique 

Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB