The Paradox of Prayer

Ok, Ok. I know that this can all sound a bit religious when I start talking about things like prayer. But if you bear with me you'll come to see that prayer really has nothing to do with organised religion, or supplications  of unworthiness before a distant God who hands out favours at whim. Indeed, real prayer is the opposite of these things. So please indulge me for a moment and forget everything you may have learnt about praying from some sick idolatrous religion.

What is Prayer?

Prayer is communion with Grace, much the same as meditation, contemplation of the divine, self inqiry, sacred dance, intentional chanting and a dozen other forms of spiritual practice. Prayer can take a great many forms, but what tends to distuinguish it from other practices is that it usually takes the form of a 'conversation' with whatever the person recognises or conceptualises as the divine. Many people view prayer as asking for some sort of favour from God. A situation in which the little powerless human being begs the big powerful deity for some sort of intercession in their life. If this were true, you could imagine that the big G would be pretty busy attending to the needs of billions upon billions of lifeforms.

Such prayers seem to go unanswered, because the basic premise of them is flawed. For Grace to intercede in our creation of our lives would be a fundamental denial of who we are, an affirmation that what we are is something less than an expression of the divine creative life force. If such prayers were to be answered, it would give valididty to our concept of ourselves as small, powerless and dependent. Grace will never affirm such a misconception, will never support such an insanity. The purpose of grace is to bring us back to awareness of the truth of who we are, to help us beyond this injured identity and rediscover our divine self. A loving God would no more seek to make his/her children dependent and powerless than a loving human would.

True prayers never go unanswered, because they occur in recognition of our right relationship to Grace. This is the recognition that we are not separate to the divine in any way. A real prayer begins with the recognition that we are believing something that is causing us suffering. Perhaps we have projected our power onto something seemingly outside of ourselves, or become trapped in an illusion of separation, grievance and powerlessness. Whatever the reason, the form of a real prayer is deceptively simple. We are asking grace to restore us to right perception, to help us clear our minds of the illusions that are causing us to suffer.

There are many ways to ask this question. Some of my favourites are "please help me see with the eyes of God", or "What would love do in this situation" or "Show me the errors in my minds viewing of this situation" or "Help me to see what is for my highest good in this situation". Prayer doesn't always have to be in response to suffering either. As people develop their relationship with grace many simply make it a daily practice to pray. This can look like "show me how to live this day in peace" or "help me to find grace in each moment" or "show me how I might live my day closer to love". Answering these questions are the function, the very purpose of grace. Grace is the gift that helps us to find the truth and recover from the ilusions of sinfulness and powerlessness and prayer is one of the most powerful ways that we can connect with grace.

As much as a loving and responsible parent would not encourage dependence in their children, nor would they turn a deaf ear or fail to offer appropriate assistance. The paradox of prayer is that all prayers are answered by grace, it just may not look like we think it should. In the movie Evan Almighty, one of the main characters prays to God for a more loving, closer family life. After all hell breaks loose, threatening to disrupt their family life altogether, she unknowingly encounters God (as played by Morgan Freeman) in a roadside diner. He challenges her with the proposition that if you were to pray for a closer family do you think God would send you warm fuzzy feelings, or the opportunity to create closeness through offering love and support in difficult times. It's not often that I look to hollywood for spiritual wisdom, but this seems to me a perfect example of the way irresponsible prayers are answered.

When we pray we are engaging in a partnership with grace, not giving our power to it. Attempts to give away responsibility for our life usually result in situations that provide us with the opportunity to reclaim that responsibility. Grace partners us by giving us the opportunity to grow, heal and rediscover the reality of our divine self. If it were to do these things for us it would be a partner in our disempowerment. Graces ultimate answer will always be this, that you are whole, complete and powerful. That you have always been whole, it is only in your mind, and the illusory reality you create with your mind, that these dark dreams of brokenness can exist. They are but shadows that never affect the true reality, the reality of love. However, until we are ready to hear this answer, grace will always allow us the opportunity to experience our delusions, and offer us the opportunity to give them up. The choice, as always, is ours. Free will, it's a bitch.

Prayer isn't hard to do. It requires no rituals, no incense, no special words or scented oils or fancy buildings. In fact, Jesus instructed his disciples that "they would be better to pray in a closet than in a church". It requires nothing except a sincere willingness to let grace show us the truth. But don't take my word for it, give it a go.

together we rise

EGO is not a dirty word

I've made several references to the idea that our 'distorted ego mind' is what separates us from the awareness of grace. In many schools of thought the poor old ego is blamed for pretty much every moment of suffering we experience. I want to clarify that the ego is not actually at fault for the current human condition, it's as much a victim of the situation as anthing else. The problem is what happens to distort the ego when it emerges in a society that actively works to disconnect it from reality.

What is the Ego?

Sigmund Freud first gave us the modern conception of the ego. He divided human consciousness into three segments called the Id, The Ego and the Super Ego. The Id represents our instinctive and unconscious nature, our feelings, instincts, passions, and drives. He speculates that the id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking instant gratification for our various hungers, desires and impulses. He then posits that the Id is kept in check by the actions of the Ego, which operates on the 'reality principle', meaning that it adjusts our behaviours to the situation in order to avoid the problems that can occur if we were simply to act on every impulse. The Ego is partly in conscious awareness, and partly unconscious. Freud recognised that both the Id and the Ego were engaged in the same job, that of serving our interests and maximising our chance of getting our needs met. No problem so far.


Then we discover the Super ego. Freud allocated this the role of our conscience, that which constantly and critically examines our behaviours and thoughts against a 'moral' standard and try's to make us behave within the constraints of this ethos. This seems to be where the problem arises, the Ego ends up as the meat in the sandwhich, trying to serve two masters who seem eternally opposed to each other. The Id pushing for gratification and the Superego trying to constrain it with guilt and shame. It's unclear to me whether Freud believed that the superego was a natural and unavoidable development in consciousness, but I have come to believe that the presence of the super ego is a distorted emergence leading to what I'm calling the 'distorted ego mind'.


Freuds conception of the Id as being basically selfish and irresponsible, and therefore in need of constraint, seems to me to be essentially flawed. Certainly our passions drive us towards gratification, but our feelings also inform us of our limitations and our other needs. We come to organically understand that all of our actions have consequences and that those actions that are destructive also hurt us. It is through this that our Ego evolves in it's strategies for meeting our needs and naturally tempers the urgings of the Id with awareness and responsibility. One might say that they are are perfect team, with the Id supplying the destination and the Ego planning the journey.


The Super Ego on the other hand seems to be the result of imposed messages given to us by others, who wish to control our development and move us towards a destination of their choosing. Many modern cultures, particularly those who are being heavily influenced by religions, seem to be contructed to separate us from our natural relationship with the Id. they teach us that our instincts and our organic nature are not to be trusted. This leads to a situation where the Ego, in it's attempt to adapt to the prevailing environment, becomes dissociated from our innate faculties of feeling, desire and instinct. In doing so it becomes dissociated from grace, which is the source of these guiding and motivating forces. This leads to the emergence of a false 'self concept', an insane identity struggling to maintain itself in an insane world, and defend itself against the urgings of our true self (which it now believes to be the enemy).


This separation from our natural self leaves our ego floating rudderless in a sea of external messages. Without access to our feelings and instincts we are vulnerable to the manipulations and demands of others. We can no longer feel the right path for us and are constantly trying to make sense of a world map drawn by other hands. We are trying to navigate life without the benefit of our natural emotional compass. If we also accept ohter peoples conceptions of the divine, rather than trust our own innate relationship with it, we are sailing in a world where we cannot even see the stars for guidance.


The irony of course is that it is by complying with other peoples conceptions of 'The will of God' we become separated from our innate relationship with God's Will in us. Perhaps grace speaks to some through burning bushes, but for most of us it is through inner listening that we discover the truth. In fact, finding true grace requires of us that we reject these imposed mesages of sinfulness and shame to reconnect with our own being. We need to reconcile our Ego to our Id and remove the ever critical super ego from the throne of our consciousness. Jesus of Nazareth said that "to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must become as a small child", which is a lovely way of saying that we need to find the innocence that we once knew, before we were overcome by the impositions of others.


Ego really is not the problem. It is what happens to distort our ego that causes our suffering. Fortunately, through communion with grace this distortion is gently and irrevocably healed so that we can once more live in the flow of the true power and beauty of our being. This is a process that John Bradshaw calls 'recovering from toxic shame', which I'll be talking about in the next blog.


Grace be with you.

Who's the Boss?

Grace doesn't surprise me anymore. I see it all the time, in a thousand moments a day. What does surprise and fascinate me is how we as human being are able to make ourselves blind to it. Despite the riot of wonder and amazement that is everyday reality, so many of us manage to get from sunup to sleep without ever leaving our self created world of suffering and fear. It's exhausting, requiring a constant state of fixation on thoughts of problems and paucity.

From what I've observed, the mechanism of this fixation goes something like this. We imagine a big bad world full of struggles, enemies and difficulty which is set in opposition to poor little us with our limited powers and inadequate abilities (also an imagining). Then we go about trying to figure out how to overcome them and meet our needs, despite the fact that we've already decided we probably won't succeed. Holy shit, no wonder half the population is on Zoloft.

So, a little reality check can be helpful. I'm told that the conscious mind, which seems to be the part of us that is doing all this imagining, can process up to seven plus or minus two (7 +/- 2) pieces of information per second. Not bad really, faster than your average computer. However, they have recently built a computer that is capable of doing a pettiflop, which sounds like a bad experience from a high diving board, but is actually the ability to process one trillion pieces of information per second. Wow, this seems pretty impressive, until you realise that it is still an order of magnitude below what the human brain is doing. In other words, our noggins are doing ten trillion processes per second.

So, if our conscious mind is doing between five and nine processes per second, but our brains are doing ten trillion processes per second, what's going on in the unconscious? Well, heaps and heaps. In every second your brain is managing to keep you breathing, sweating, digesting, balancing, and assimilating gigabytes of visual, audial and sensory information. Just keeping you from falling flat on your face requires the monitoring of thousands of biofeedback signals and the movement of hundreds of muscles - a constant program of incredibly sophisticated adjustment. In every second you are literally doing thousands of actions, without having to pay attention to any of them.

It reminds me of the old joke about the Blonde (gender unspecified) who was always wearing earphones. Finally one of his/her coworkers got curious about what she/he was listening to and took them off his/her head. The blonde immediately dropped dead, and when the coworker put the earphones on they heard "breathe in, breathe out, breathe in.....". I'm allowed to tell this joke because I'm a blonde. Political correctness notwithstanding, its a good illustration of two things. One, it's a good thing we don't have to think about our basic body processes. Two, English really needs a gender neutral pronoun to deal with the modern age.

Jokes aside, if you think about what is really going on in your personal reality each second it becomes a little absurd when you conscious mind pops up and says "I'm in charge here". In the time it took you to read this your brain/body has performed millions of actions, and your conscious mind is still somewhere back there going "ooooooh ten trillion, that a really big number". The idea that we are in charge of anything at all is so ridiculous it's laughable. Yet this is the idea that most people go through their day with. "I have to take charge, to sort it all out, to solve this problem called life".

The bad new is that we really can't. We (our conscious mind/ego) can't even make ourselves breathe properly, let alone manage the untold trillions of actions we need to perform each day. If we can't even manage to keep ourselves running, how are we to handle the innumerable complexities of what's going on outside our skin. The truth is that life is simply beyond our control and our understanding. Seven plus or minus two just doesn't cut it.

The good new is that we don't have to. Life looks after itself the same way our body does. We exist within a field of infinite intelligence, and it's got it sorted. If we are smart we eventually learn to give up, to stop trying to take control of our life and let our life take control of us. Personal growth is not an action of becoming something greater that we currently are. It's an action of allowing our greatness to make itself known. If we are smart, we learn to stop fighting with ourselves and start cooperating with that which is trying to emerge. If we are smart, we learn that we aren't as smart as we may think we are.

The conscious mind has it's place, and is indeed intended to make choices and decisions, but if those choices are against the natural flow of our being it really doesn't work. It's useful to think of it like an iceberg, the visible emergence of a far greater weight of intelligence below the surface. The problems occurs when we think that our conscious mind is somehow separate and dominant, that it's in charge of things. The reality is that the iceberg will always go with the flow, following the deep currents of life. If we think that we should be going in another direction, then we simply create an experience of frustration and stress for ourselves. If we trust what is beneath the surface and concentrate on enjoying the journey, life becomes an adventure in curiosity and learning, not a pointless struggle for a control that is simply unachievable.

Well, that's how I see it these days. Grace doesn't surprise me anymore, but the things we do to fight it leave me amazed.

Peace be with you.