It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.
In other words, prayer -- as it was in the beginning and always should be -- is about how we begin to understand not just our own lives, but our relationship to the world around us as our lives are revealed to us through that relationship.
Prayer helps us relate to the world we see through another kind of eyes. It shouldn't be confusing. There's a very old expression in the Far East: Birds fly, fish swim, men and women pray. It alludes to the idea that we have a nature (like the bird is to fly through the sky and the fish to swim through the seas) that is meant to be in relationship with something sublime, supernal, divine. And that prayer is the path to awakening and maintaining that relationship with the most deep, profound parts of us that let us understand that the world is going to do what the world does. It's going to spin the way it spins. And whether it spins left or right, whether it goes the way we want it to or not, should have nothing whatsoever to do with who and what we are in the moment of those revelations. So that in the end, prayer brings us to a place inwardly where at last we can use and understand outwardly all that unfolds around us.
I'm the first to tell you that meditation, contemplation is invaluable. To be passive, sit quietly, open yourself up as best you can to all the influences (inward and outward) so that in the kind of unity that meditation and contemplation is intended to produce, we find a completely different kind of consolation within ourselves. We don't need anyone or anything outside of us to confirm who we are. Rather we are being sustained, really illuminated from the inside out, and in that kind of relationship find a peace that does pass all understanding. But what about everyday life? What about when we go to work, when our husband or our wife is negative? When our world seems to be falling apart (as the world will so often do)? What about then? The kind of prayer we're about to talk about is most likely different than what you've heard about prayer before.
Self-transformative prayer is not about being passive. It's not about asking for anything from the Divine. Rather it is how we can begin to be active in our moment-to-moment relationship with life, and use everything that takes place to us as a form of prayer... to use those problems, the pain, the suffering, whatever may cause it in the moment that we experience it, to align us in a completely different way with our former experience, which is usually to resist or otherwise deny that which brings up in us what we don't want.
So let's look at an example of this new active kind of prayer -- one that doesn't just transform ourselves, but everything about the way we see the world around us. I call it "Go Silent Before Your Enemies."
As we go through this prayer (that most of us may never actually have thought about as being a prayer), I trust you will begin to see that there is a completely different way in which we can take our wish to be a whole, even holy man or woman with us into the world, wherever we go, so that there is no moment life isn't bringing something to us that we can use to serve our new and higher wish.
Now, why is Go Silent Before Your Enemies a prayer? And what exactly does it mean to go silent before your enemies? What does not defending ourselves have to do with prayer?
You see, the way we are now (at least most of us anyway), when someone accuses us of doing something wrong, the first thing we want to do is find a way to either re-establish our now upset sense of well-being or put them in their place so we don't feel that pain anymore. This means that we defend what we take as ourselves from what we perceive in that moment as being our attacker. This action focuses our attention outside of us. Surely we can see that we feel attacked by something that comes at us, and because of that misplaced focus, our attention is taken away from the innermost parts of ourselves, removed from our consciousness where (as we'll see), the real weakness or the misunderstanding exists and begins.
Employing this new prayer-in-action, which is to Go Silent Before Your Enemies, means that we're going to refuse to defend ourselves when we're wrongly accused. It means that we consciously cut ourselves off from those rampant, running-wild thoughts and feelings that are telling us that if we don't straighten out this person, then we'll be their doormat for the rest of existence. Because if we can use this prayer in action, meaning in that split second to go silent before our enemies, we will see that what is really our enemy is those thoughts and feelings, that level of consciousness, that can't take any form of criticism (let alone should it be constructive).
So, never mind what you hear or see or go through as your mind and heart begin to ramp themselves up. Instead, work as best you can to be present to all those voices literally hammering at you, saying: "You know what? You've got to defend yourself here! If you don't do something right now, something bad is going to happen!" We all know those voices.
The all-important step in this new kind of prayer-in-action (that is, in essence, what will help us to transform ourselves and our relationship to the world around us), is we need to understand the importance of re-orienting our attention in that moment -- to come wide-awake instead of letting that ache born of feeling falsely accused drive us through the old pattern that it always has.
By becoming a conscious witness to everything -- thoughts and feelings passing through -- and our wish to be illuminated in that moment instead of dominated by those same thoughts and feelings, we bring ourselves into a completely different relationship with another order of our own consciousness that cannot be made a captive of anything, let alone someone standing before us and accusing us and disrespecting us in some way.
This kind of prayer literally begins to place you where you are the ruler of your own consciousness because you are in relationship with that which brings that consciousness into your awareness in the same moment.
