Monkey brains

I've learned two new words and a description of what's wrong with me. It's been quite a day.
What's wrong with me is something that I believe Buddhists refer to as `monkey brains'. It's the inability
to focus and think on one thing to the exclusion of all else. I learned this from the author T.M Luhrmann whose excellent book `When God talks back' is what prompted me to start this blog in the first place in the hopes that it could be a path of focus. Monkey brains is me alright. I think I'm going to clear my head and concentrate on having a conversation with God but all this buzzy interference shoots through my mind like images you see if you constantly change the channels on your TV.I feel like I have mental case of Tourette's. And if I don consciously try and clear a space in my noodle, as soon as I do I fall asleep.And the words I learned were `apophatic' and `katophatic'. Apophatic is from the Greek apophasis which means denial.It's used for a technique or rather a number of techniques for shifting attention from internal sensations to external.You detach yourself from all thought -deny it.By rejecting what's human we hope to connect with the divine. Kataphatic is from the Greek kataphasis which means to affirm positively and it's used for a series of techniques to shift attention from what's going on externally to what's happening internally.It's a method for empowering our imagination.
The two techniques share the same objective to center our attention.And it's hard. They're both hard.
Me with my monkey brains. I used to think praying was easy.A quick our father and amen and it was done. But  what apophasis and kataphasis ask me to takes much more discipline.Prayer in the past was something I could do without engaging my brain.It was literally lip service. This is like some zen exercise of staring at a candle flame to clear everything away or imagining a new kind of reality.
It's hard hard hard. But this monkey is going to give it a try and see where it goes.