PRAYER

by Aeptha

Excerpt from Sunday Service

June 27, 2010

I would like to talk about prayer today. This past week I have received some beautiful thoughts from people who have been asking specifically about the ecological disaster from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, questions about how we can pray and what we can do, because many of us are experiencing a growing sense of impending doom combined with a profound sense of helplessness and possibly even despair.

One thing about this BP ecological disaster is that we notice the projection. From an esoteric understanding we all have to take responsibility for our own choices and our own reactions to those choices. That is part of the message.  Now with that comes empowerment because as many of us know, the way you empower yourself is to take responsibility. That is where the power comes from because if we simply say, “Why don’t they do something?” or “Why don’t they act right?” we go into a deeper sense of anger, resentment, hurt and despair.

I have received some beautiful prayers from you and this led me to talk today about prayer and meditation because we know that these are very powerful tools.  Prayer has been with us since prehistoric times and we see this in cave drawings from more than 5,000 years ago where there was a calling to something beyond the sense of the immediate. With prayer there is a sense of invocation.  The other thing about prayer is that it is not about dogma.  It is about openness, the possibilities of infiniteness. Generally speaking most of us may feel that prayer tends to come from emotional levels and meditation tends to come from mental levels.  There are cases where the two meet, in fact The Great Invocation is a vehicle that has both an emotional as well as a mental component.  It is a vehicle of consciousness.

Many of us were raised with the idea that with prayer we were calling to a Higher Being and I have told the story before – when I was little my prayer was to get a pony and I did not get one!  How many of us have felt disillusionment in our lifetime because we prayed for something that we did not get? How many of us felt resentment because somebody else prayed for something and got it?  Now is that fair?  No!  So how does that work? I love the pat answer: “If you only prayed better or to the right Deity you would have got your answer” or “Don’t blame it on Spirit because it is your fault.”  Well then you go back and you pray harder and you still don’t get that new job.  How does that work?

I have worked with many people over the years and this is part of what led me onto my spiritual path, because people would come into the counseling room with horrible resentments because somebody they loved or a pet they loved had died and people were praying for them and it didn’t help. The person died and they felt disillusioned or abandoned by God, by Jesus, by whatever the name of this higher Being was. They were told that there would be prayers for a miracle and when that miracle didn’t happen they were told that this was God’s will. Hello! That explains nothing, right? And yet prayer is a powerful vehicle of change of consciousness, so let’s talk about another possibility.

When we get prayer requests here at Light Haven the request may be for prayers for physical healing but we will pray for the infusion of the Wisdom of Love, for the balancing of Love, for harmonizing; we pray for the Light. Why?  Because I am not able to define your healing.  What I do know is that there is a power and potency of Light, of Love and the Will to Good. We attract to ourselves those situations that create disharmony in our consciousness. Let us look at a job situation. You may hate your job and if you cannot find a different one then you are stuck in it. Then perhaps what we can pray for is an infusion of Light so that you can stay in this job with a different level of consciousness. It’s the same job but your consciousness has changed in relationship to it. So there is power in being able to hold a different point of focus, to hold a higher level of consciousness.

If we want to effect change we have to be able to hold the bridge open to the Divine and let the Light flow in us and through us.  On the emotional level and on the mental level there is a whole lot of energy out there that we can get caught in and we don’t want to go into denial. It isn’t about lying to ourselves about the difficulty of our circumstances. We are here to experience this three-dimensional plane and so we take responsibility, but then what do we do with it? We make choices and as we know, energy follows thought and we are what we think.

What is constant prayer?  Constant prayer is the connecting over and over again with yourself as a Higher Being because then we attract to ourselves those higher energies and then when we pray for other people we are not praying for specifics such as “give her that pony that she wants so much.”  We can think about ourselves in relationship to the fact that we are Spiritual Beings and identify with the world of Spirit and then pull down the energies from that level. If I am my thoughts, then what am I identifying with?  What is my languaging? It is about where we focus and where we place our attention. If your focus is on life is hard then that is where your thoughts are and life will be hard.  For the year that I obsessed about getting a pony, life was hard because I didn’t get what I wanted.  Now that is one thing at the age of seven but now I have the capacity and the life experience to be responsible.  We are responsible and our attention does follow our thoughts and we are our thoughts and we have the capacity, through our emotional bodies, to pray and to connect over and over with the truth -- and it isn’t about denial.  We all have thoughts and feelings of victimization, we have resentments, hurts, pain, but how long do we sit in it and what do we do with it?  What is our responsibility around that?

That is where our meditation comes in because our meditation is where we use the focus of our attention to retrain our mental patterns and to build that bridge of light.  We have all of the tools but do we use them?

What can we pray for when we have a family member in Afghanistan? We pray for Light, for Love, for Will to Good.  We do not have the wisdom or the capacity to determine what that looks like for anyone, much less for ourselves.

The other aspect of prayer is Trust.  We have our own agendas but we don’t abdicate our responsibility. On the contrary, it is about being completely responsible for where we place our energies, but there also has to be an intrinsic level of trust that we do not know everything.

On the level of our personality we have to be in truth and recognize that just like with the BP oil spill, we have got toxicity within ourselves that blinds us.  To not recognize that is to be arrogant. 

When we meditate, when we pray, we are praying for Will to Good.  Some of the accounts that I have read say that we should not pray for ourselves at all.  Pray for others and in that act all of your prayers for them are prayers for yourself.  How could it be otherwise if we are indeed one? Another aspect of prayer is your desire. Remember, prayer has an emotional component and we all have desires. Where is the focus of our desire?

There is a lot of fear and it is not about denying the fear, but do we jump into it? We have a choice as to where we put our attention, our thoughts and our prayers. Ask yourself:  Am I holding to a point of Light here?  Am I holding to a point of Love?  Am I standing in the Truth of the Divine even though I do not like the way that it looks and I do not like the way that things are unfolding? And what do I do with that?  Does this mean that I become angry and fearful? Where are my thoughts?  Where are my feelings?  Where is my faith?  And faith is not about what it looks like.

There are many people who have suffered greatly and are suffering greatly and I am not in any way pretending that isn’t real, but it is only through identifying with the Divine that we will give our life meaning and give ourselves hope because unless we start to have a reverence for life, unless we start to think of something besides our own immediate needs, unless we start to truly sense our interconnection, I believe that this planet will be destroyed. We must start identifying with that which is beyond our personality because our experience of our personality is the experience of separation.  It is based on fear and neediness, the need to survive, or what we perceive we need to survive.

When we identify with the Divine we can see things beyond what our personality tells us and that is the way that change will occur -- from the inside out.  That is the way that we will have the wisdom, the inspiration and the guidance to move through these changes.  There will be people that will have insight into how to solve issues and we will also offer our energy because we may be one of those people who are informed, or we may be part of what is holding the space for that information to drop through.  It is all interconnected. I believe that, I know that is true.  We are so powerful and we have been told that over and over again by messengers in all traditions, but where do we sit with our power? How do we use our power?  What do we identify with?  What doorways do we open up?  Do we open up the doorways of inspiration and creativity and of will to good, of love and of interconnectedness of life?  Or do we stay in the doorway that just opens up the toxic waste of greed, blame and shame, resentment, hatred, separation, and disregard for life?  Where do we sit?  Where does our power go?

I also believe that in the turning of this Age, as we have been told, that we must have the courage to work together as a group and that is not easy because God knows, we get on each others’ nerves! But we are the power of One and we take our prayers, our intent, our meditations and as One we amplify them exponentially. We must have the courage to step beyond the limitations, to recognize change and to recognize that we are a force in that change for good -- or not.

There is nobody that is not a player on the stage.  We all are.  We are all able to affect the outcome.  Those of you who have studied The Great Invocation know that it came to Alice Bailey from Djwhal Khul, a master teacher, at a time when there was so much turmoil, so much uncertainty and the Great War was in motion and its outcome was uncertain.  There was a rallying and this Invocation was given as a vehicle for the emotional and the mental component.  It has been translated into multiple languages and used in multiple traditions and I invite you to use it as a prayer for the work that is happening in the Gulf of Mexico because it also holds the power on the astral plane of thousands of people who have spoken this over many, many decades.  This invocation was given back in the 1940’s and has been used in many different traditions so it has built up a powerful force on the astral plane and we can amplify that force of Light and of Will to Good. As we all know, there is a whole lot of energy on the astral plane which creates its own form of “oil spill”, of toxicity.

We are Divine beings but where is our focus?  Let us focus on ourselves as Divine and focus on that Divinity flowing through us and recognize the Divine in all life.

Pathworking

And so I would ask that we would now place our focus on our breath. And we open ourselves up to the truth of Divinity, both omniscient and omnipresent and we employ the use of our Will, our concentrated attention, to focus on the still point of the Divine, its width and its breadth, and in your mind and in your heart I invite you to follow these words:

I am the Light.  I am Love.  I am Will.  I am Fixed Design. I am a point of light, a part of the greater Light and I am one with that greater Light even as I am a point of light. And I am aligned with the Love of God and I am a source through which that Love flows. And mountains may be in uproar and the seas may foam and rage and yet I stand.  Let that which is above be so below and let me have the courage and fortitude to be the spiritual warrior to see beyond the perceptions, the illusions, the delusions and hear the Divine. And I respond to that call. And let my desire be one-pointed and let not my will waiver.  Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

And I would ask now that we would take our breath and that we would expand this consciousness and as we expand consciousness and as we expand this will to good, this love, expand this light, we expand this commitment to identify with the Divine, and we send this forth with our breath to all sentient life. 

And let the fires of inspiration as well as the fires of purification be fueled by our breath, by our will to good and let this love quicken and be enlivened as we are quickening and enlivening. And we send forth this quickening along the ley lines of life, the love of life, and as we quicken, as we breathe, we call to the Divine Feminine, to the Great Wisdom: Let it flow!  Let it move in the waters!  Let it move across the lands!  May it move under the earth and through the skies!  Let it touch life and let this Wisdom, this Understanding, this Compassion be strengthened!

And let us be the source of reconciliation for that which seems irreconcilable.