Anthony, I'll add something before Ashvin does.Anthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 11:53 am Ashvin,
Who or what are you advocating to prayer to? What form does this prayer take - petition, praise, thanksgiving?
I must admit that given my evangelical church background, the thought of prayer leaves me cold. A substantial part of my deconversion surrounded my increasing conviction that prayer was pointless. Little children who my church prayed for incessantly died of cancer. A needy man who was surrounded by prayer boiled alive in his bath. My pastor died young from cancer. God never seemed to turn up in times of need.
I can very well understand your evangelic dissatisfaction. I would feel the same at your place. But I won't go into that now.
The prayer we talk about is first and foremost a specific soul mood. I'll try to illustrate this.
It's been mentioned many times here that at any given time we experience only the tiniest tip of our being. At any time we experience a handful of thoughts that are in constant metamorphosis. Try to feel how infinitely small these thoughts at the focal point of our consciousness, are in comparison to everything that we know, that we can remember, that we feel, that we wish for and so on. Think how infinitely little of our whole life experiences are expressed in the few words at the center of our thinking at any time.
People live with the conviction that they are in control of the totality. To be sure, materialists are more objective here than most naive spiritual/religious people. The former at least imagine that the vast majority of the psyche is hidden away in the neural details. The latter imagine that they are already complete atomic beings. Some even imagine that they have outgrown the need for a brain!
So the first step is to make the effort and simply recognize how little we really experience of the hidden depths of the soul at a given time. The easiest way to appreciate this is by imagining how powerless we're when for example we can't remember something, when we can't solve a problem, when we can't get that song out of our head, when we dwell on emotions that logically we don't want to and so on.
This same thing was at the core of the Central Topic. Make an experiment. At some point of the day stop and notice what you're thinking about. Then see how you came to think about it? Did you choose it consciously our of a wide palette of possibilities or you were simply flowing within the invisible streams of soul life and the thoughts were only commentaries of wherever these streams took you? If it's the latter, then were these streams the result of fully conscious activity? These are simple but tremendously valuable observations.
Imagine that you're on an exam and you can't solve the problem. You know that you have studied, you know that you have the skills, the knowledge, yet you just can't find the answer. Once again the streams of deeper life have brought you into a hole where you simply can't see clearly. If you are in full control of the entire totality of the soul, you would just exercise that control, get out of the hole and find the solution.
And here's the crucial point. What should be the relation between our conscious thinking self and the deeper streams that lead us here and there? Please, think about this with all the needed seriousness. If we call these deeper streams "my soul" or "my subconscious", what do we imply? In the materialistic conception this implies completely mechanical processes happening in the brain and our conscious ego emerges on top of them. In other posts we spoke about the analogy with the archipelago, where our conscious self is the experiences of the islands (thoughts) protruding above the ocean surface. For today's man it's somewhat difficult to deny completely that there's something beneath the surface (the subconscious) but this is imagined as completely mechanical process of biological computation. Idealists don't go further than that. Especially when they embrace Schop's idea that what's beneath the surface is the dark abyss of the instinctive and unconscious will. Calling the abyss 'pure consciousness' doesn't lead anywhere either because it is still completely orthogonal to conscious thought and fully inexplicable. It just calls Schop's unconscious will - conscious. Yet it still has all the characteristics of completely instinctive and inexplicable will.
All of this makes the human ego to feel as a top authority. It doesn't deny that the abyss is beyond its conscious control but at the same time it feels itself to be higher than it.
Now I'll say something which will sound as the greatest blasphemy to the ego living in the above mood. Imagine that there are forces working in the subconscious which are fully coherent and in fact emanate from certain "I"-ness. Now the real question is how should we relate to that deeper "I"-ness?
I know that this is one of the most antipathetic topics for modern man who has come to extreme comfort of feeling as the absolute ceiling of consciousness. It's not that he denies there could be other more advances beings but they are placed outside. As far as the personal consciousness is concerned, the ego feels as the absolute apex. The idea that the forces within which our daily thoughts stream have coherent center, is disturbing to say the least.
And this is where the mood of prayer comes in. In secular Western culture, people live completely in one half-plane of reality. Their gaze is pointed entirely downwards, so to speak. Those who pray in the evangelic sense still feel as the ceiling of their atomic soul. They send their prayers out into space where they imagine some God will hear them. This is not the sense of prayer that is here used.
The mood of prayer here is about including the other half-plane of reality in our life. This means to have fully conscious relation to that which weaves below (or higher - it's relative) the surface of consciousness.
I'll leave it here. Everyone can decide for themselves where they are on this fence. Please note that we're not talking about some belief. This is completely practical matter. It's like seeking understanding of the best way to grow food or build a house. Similarly we need completely real and useful knowledge of how to relate with the forces which are beyond our conscious control at the tip of our waking self.
To make it even more explicit, all this relates to the question of the higher self. Do we think of it as some instinctive automaton? As the spiritual computation going on below the surface of consciousness? Or we're willing to seek the concentric relations of our "I"-ness with the higher "I"-ness within which our waking consciousness streams?