Prayer

The Art of Self Talk

What is the purpose of prayer in the spiritual journey and who are we addressing?

Not to be confused with meditation, prayer is supplication. It has taken on many meanings throughout the ages and continues to be a mixed bag of meanings and methods for communicating with God. In many religious circles, it is a way of subjecting one's self to the object or entity being appealed to.

For many others, it is a way to pay tribute or show devotion to one's most high object of worship. Many of these invocations are spontaneous while others are scripted and memorized so they are repeated with exacting detail.

What should our prayers be really?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to understand to whom are we praying and why. For most, we are addressing some outside entity who, in most cases, has been given absolute power over everything that affects us.

The problem with this form of supplication is that there is no one out there listening. The sole God of our experience in this life and throughout eternity dwells inside us.

In other words, we are God unto ourselves, and Jesus once identified that He and His Father are One, so are we one with our father or mother. His identity with His Father was unique because He understood that in so knowing, He too was God. Jesus' uniqueness, however, was that He discovered what all of us can know also, and He spent His ministry, as it is called, trying to convince the people of His time and throughout the ages that we, like him, are gods too.

Our entreaties need not be addressed to anyone other than that God who dwells within. That is where the creative power lives and so our supplications should be directed there.

We create everything in our existence.

Gods create and when they speak, the universe responds.

Even for those who have difficulty accepting they are the God of their own experience, their petitions are always answered. Not by the hand of some God in yonder heavens, but by the power of their own voice. In the book On Being God - Beyond Your Life's Purpose, we are told that Jesus was not instructing us to believe in Him, but rather to believe like Him. "Believe like me that you and your father are one, just as I and my Father are one."

When we pray, whether silently or out loud, it is God within who hears and listens and ultimately causes the heavens to open to us. For this reason, these invocations should be gentle and creative. They should not be directed from a position of wanting, but instead from a position of being.

Gods command the universe to bring into reality that which they direct. "Give us this day our daily bread."

In many ways, our prayers are a conversation with God and as we come ever closer to the knowing that we are the divine, then our conversations become more meaningful, directed and personal.

After all, who better to converse with than with God?

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