Whether we realize it or not, we all suffer one primal addiction throughout the course of our lifetimes: an addiction to our own way of thinking. Not one of us is free from our particular set of lenses through which we view the world – the perspectives inherited from culture, country, ethnic group, religious tradition, family, and past experience. So too do we find ourselves bound by our particular ways of processing the world around us – according to our own preferences, biases, and needs survival, security, acceptance, and comfort. This one addiction to our own way of thinking, if not recognized and circumvented, will always prevent is from loving as God loves, mercifully, graciously, generously, accepting others wholly and entirely with a concern only for their wholeness and holiness. This is what God means in saying, “My ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts” (Is 55:9). Only Divine “thinking” (or Divine Love), is capable of seeing and loving all things as they are, with no other agenda. One way of understanding contemplative practice is as a conscious effort to allow God to break the addiction to our own thinking (something we cannot do on our own) so that we may embrace the “thoughts” of God, and thus truly love.