Prayer: Becoming Real in the One

Prayer means addressing God. That is the fundamental feature common to all prayer. We turn our attention toward God and pray. Whether we are asking for something material, for help, for purity, for the grace of God's presence, or praising God, it is all prayer and all about the relationship between ourselves and the Sacred.

Yet prayer also serves God, and in so doing serves all humanity, for God is in us all. There are several primary ways that prayer serves.

One usually overlooked way that prayer serves is through spiritual energy transformations. We humans are transformers of energy. At the level of food and air, this is obvious: we extract energy from our food and use it to do all the things we do, from walking to seeing to thinking and everything in between. The energy transformations of prayer occur at a deeper level than ordinary food. The raw materials of prayer are the sensitive energies of our senses, emotions and thoughts, plus the energy of consciousness. In prayer, we effectively open to higher energies, such as the great life energy and the unifying energy of love. In prayer, the various interactions and combinations of all these energies generate more energy, for example, by raising some of the sensitive energies to a higher level of energy. Those higher energies enable deeper, more refined experience and attitudes, not only in the person praying, but in others touched by the energies produced.

The action of prayer creates a purified foundation within us, which makes more room for God, further enabling the Sacred to enter this world, further enabling love among us, among all life. This is the process of spiritualization: we elevate the material by inviting and hosting the spiritual. The higher energies create the necessary context within us, while the core that lives in that context is our will. Making room for God means purifying and opening our will to the higher, universal, unifying will, so that we become more able to be the bearers of love, while strengthening our unique individuality and agency. We become more ourselves while recognizing our inherent unity with others and with the Sacred. This is the essential and sublime effect that prayer has on us.

Prayer also serves by its content. If we pray for peace, for example, then some of the energies produced go toward the force of peace in the world. If we pray for healing, the some of the energies produced promote healing.

Consider the following spiritual exercise as a kind of prayer.

The Ocean of Love

Imagine a vast and boundless ocean of love. Here and now, that ocean of love abides within us, within everything, everywhere. With the whole of your presence, come into your inner stillness and then drop beneath that. Rest in that ocean of love that is the unity behind all that is, erasing all boundaries. Feel that love.

Now with the whole of your presence, picture to yourself one of the world's current war zones, plagued with violence. And beneath that war zone, the ocean of love. Imagine all the anger, hatred, and violence of that war zone sinking into the ocean of love and dissolving therein.

Repeat that with other war zones across our globe. And with all the instances of violence anywhere.

Picture peace reigning everywhere, supported by the ocean of love.

There are levels of unity. Consciousness is everywhere and we all share the one field of consciousness. Yet we would not say that a rock is conscious, so the unity of consciousness is limited. The deeper unity is the unity of and in the Divine Will, which is everywhere in everything. Even a rock has the, albeit rudimentary, will to be a rock. In living things and in people, will is more concentrated and free. Yet our own will is intimately connected with the One Will, behind everything. The ocean of love is the ocean of will that penetrates all, that joins us all. That is our unity, the unity. Will is the Real. And love, as the deeper will, makes us real. The act of opening to the ocean of love is the fundamental act of prayer. Love is the perception and reality of unity.

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