The article argues that sixteenth-century Iberian contemplative prayer, oración mental, as described by García Jiménez de Cisneros and St. Teresa of Avila, deliberately bypasses mental or cognitive faculties, advocating instead a practice closer to a 'prayer of the heart.' It juxtaposes this with the Buddhist concept of sati, popularized in the West as mindfulness, and contends that oración mental may be more accurately translated as 'mindfulness' rather than the conventional 'mental prayer.'
Consciousness is intrinsically and nontransitively self-aware—a nondual self-presence that is the simple awareness underlying all experience. This view is shared by the Tibetan Mahāmudrā tradition of the Kagyü school and by Daniel Helminiak’s Christian-adjacent psychology. Both traditions describe contemplative training as a process of deepening awareness of this nondual self-presence, moving from awareness of the superficial nondual presence that makes ordinary intentional contents available to a more profound sense of a limitless, primordial ground. Helminiak’s account provides a basic understanding of consciousness and a contemplative psychology that can mediate Christian theological reception of Mahāmudrā and other traditions centered on nondual awareness.