Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Oct 26, 2021 1:21 pm
Sorry I didn't structure my post well. There are two distinct and broadly unrelated questions. Given what you have said about "God", how do we understand prayer? I think Cleric has mentioned prayer a few times and it doesn't make much sense without the personal God with a distinct conscious center from our own.
As with any polarity in Nature, we also have two polar attitudes of consciousness. Think of an hourglass. With our "I" we're in the middle, at the point point of inversion. What is below is what we can grasp concretely in consciousness, everything that we are 'larger' than. In certain respect this is the past. We can only grasp that which we have outgrown and which is already in the past. This is true also for our thoughts - we can perceive our thoughts only when they are already our past thoughts.
Things become very different when we turn our gaze towards the future. When we look towards the future we can only know our willful becoming. We never perceive what we are becoming into. We're only dimly willing our way towards something and as we become that something it passes into memory - into the past - and becomes perceptible. That is, we have outgrown it and now we're larger than it, we contain it as part of our being.
We don't have full control of our becoming. Everyone knows this when we're on an exam and we can't solve the problem. We're pushing with our will towards the solution but we can't find it. We don't have control over this. If we had control we would simply exercise that control and get the solution effortlessly. But instead, we must grope in the dark. What if we never find the solution? We can do nothing about it. We know that as potential the solution exists. Actually what exists is our own potential future state of being in which we are thinking the solution. Our blind groping is the search for this state of being.
Prayer is the healthy attitude towards the future. When we look towards the past we're as old man who looks on his past life and understands what he's gone through. When we look towards the future we're as a small child that is becoming something which can't yet fit into its conceptions. One of the major disbalances in our epoch is that humans live primarily in the former state. Even at very early age, we already become old. We look from the pedestal of the ego only towards what is smaller than us, which we can grasp. We don't have the humility to look above, towards what we have not yet become and which is greater than us and which we can't even understand at this time.
As long as we pretend that we're in control and everything is in our own power, we're blinded by pride. There's no guarantee that we'll become the state of being that we grope for. Why not? Because we don't know in what part of the invisible landscape we are. We may as well be in some local minimum and try in vain to find the desired state of being in our immediate vicinity. What we need is something analogous to
quantum annealing. In real terms this is what the mood of prayer is. It is the humble realization that there's no guarantee that we can reach the state of being that we hope for if we pretend that we're in control and we know very well where we're going. The fact that the gradient rises in certain direction doesn't yet mean that we'll find the sought state there. It might be only a local maximum, while the true peak that we seek might be in a very different direction.
In prayer we open up in humility for something to flow in us. We acknowledge that by brute-force groping in the dark we can reach only the more trivial states. To pray means to focus on the idea of the future state of being that we want to become. We don't possess this state, it is outside us, spread everywhere. Yet we can seek resonance with this state and allow our current state to be attracted towards it. This can give direction of becoming which we might never stumble upon otherwise.
We shouldn't expect that things will happen in real time. Actually any expectation that something will happen any moment, only paralyzes us and closes us. In some cases it may really happen in real time but we should not expect it. We simply don't know how far we're separated from the sought state. There might be the need for many other intermediate states before we reach the goal. This is also and the reason that prayer doesn't equal passivity. We must indeed surrender in receptivity in the act but then it is still our "I" that will have to walk every step. Prayer attunes us. The things that lead us towards the desired state begin to shine in special light and we know where to walk.
We reach the idea of God when we don't desire only some things for our personal benefit but search for the state that makes perfect sense of the Whole, where everything will find its rightful place in the great Cosmic puzzle. We realize that there's such a future state of being which far surpasses our current human consciousness. This state encompasses the whole evolutionary arcs as something whole. If we imagine that we are already in that future state, the whole Time structure of the living Cosmos will lie before us as something that has become part of us, just like our thoughts are now part of us. We'll see the spirals of time as living ideas and we'll see our incarnations as pulses within these spirals, embedded into larger pulses of the evolutionary epochs and so on. This is not exactly the same as our current ability to remember as pictures our childhood. These Time structures will be then our structure, similarly to how we can now feel our heart and lungs to be our structure.
So this potential state of being exists even in this moment. All potential exists in the eternal now. Time is only a Divine technique to experience this infinite potential in differentiated streams of experience, which integrate as memory. This future Divine state is something living and we can interact with it, speak with it, and pray that we move towards it, to be attracted towards this state.
The mood of prayer is the rightful conscious attitude for that which is greater than us, in respect to which we're not even children yet. As long as humans pretend to be old, to have everything below them, they walk with their back towards the future. They try to fix the future by rearranging the past. This is only because, blinded by pride, they don't dare to turn with their face towards the future and conceive in awe and humility the long path in front of us, which leads to states of existence which simply don't fit in the conceptual shards of the intellect.
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What can I not say about it? All is Spirit. I think what is most important for our purposes here is to recognize the function of the Spirit in our immanent experience. For that, I will quote Steiner.