The Mind in the Heart: Standing Before God's Face

The text explains what it means to have the mind in the heart. It begins with a question: do you know where the heart is? The answer is to stand there with attention and remain constantly. The mind becomes inseparable from attention; where attention is, the mind is also.

The author notes that readers have written about feeling fire in the heart while reading the Akathist to Sweetest Jesus. That sensation marks the place. One should keep attention there and not go outward, not only during prayer but at all times. Standing there is not passive; it requires the awareness of standing before the face of the Lord or before His all-seeing eye, which sees the hidden chambers of the heart.

To stand this way, one must labor to kindle some feeling toward God, fear, love, trust, devotion, painful compunction, or similar. This state is described as the norm of inner order. Whenever one notices it disrupted in anything, one must hurry to re-establish it.