Prayer Without Defining What You Pray To
Orar Sin Definir a Quién Le Rezas
A question about whether the habit of praying to an external God, rooted in Christian conditioning, reinforces separation or whether it holds something genuinely valuable.
Prayer Without Defining What You Pray To
A question about whether the habit of praying to an external God, rooted in Christian conditioning, reinforces separation or whether it holds something genuinely valuable.
I'm noticing a pattern, and I think it's obviously because of my Christian conditioning. It's like I'm talking to God, whether in supplication or giving thanks or adoration. I have this voice that's talking to an external God, and I feel like I get some sense of safety from that, especially when I'm asking for something. I'm just wondering how to approach that now, because it's becoming very apparent. I don't know if it's healthy or not, or if it's something that's keeping me in separation consciousness. I sense it might be.
I can speak to that. As I get to know you a bit more, I have a recurring sense of bringing up the expression: don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
There is something essentially powerful in religion, in all religions, in the essence of it. Something true. But it's gotten covered up with so much material that the essence is deeply diluted and hard to pick out. Yet because we grow up in a certain culture, if we try to deny that or fight it, it's just going to create more problems. If you try to remove the Christianity from you, it's going to be more chaotic. That is my sense.
Clarifying rather than discarding
So the approach is to understand it and clarify it more deeply. Keep praying. There is an energy and a calling in prayer. It is a beautiful thing, very deep and profound, and it can invoke a shift out of thought, because prayer is the dialogue with that which is beyond me.
The mystery of otherness
First, to move out of "me," I need to recognize that there truly is an other. A newborn or toddler, once there is a sense of "I," doesn't have much sense of another. And there are remnants of this in adulthood for most people: a lack of very deep recognition of otherness, the mystery of the other.
So first we need to get out of our own meanness, our own mind, which we project onto another. God is, in a sense, the ultimate otherness.
The problem of defining God
The problem arises if we know what God is. If in prayer we define that which we're praying to, that is where religion becomes orthodox and rigid.