Prayer
The complement of meditation is prayer. Last week I talked about meditation, stressing that it is a passive state easily achieved by becoming still and listening. In this state we are better able to hear and understand our Divine instructions and ideas, which well up into conscious awareness from within. Listening also means that when unexpected or unwanted noises intrude, rather than break our focus, the noises themselves become part of the meditation practice.
Meditation is not visualizing or settling down to a guided meditation where you are listening to and following the instructions given by whoever recorded the “meditation.” These activities belong to the realm of prayer.
If meditation is a passive state, its counterpart, prayer, is an active state. Prayer is speaking, seeing and believing what is prayed for into being. To the practicing metaphysician, prayer is not about asking for something but rather it is preparing to receive it! Prayer is not about beseeching or supplicating some entity outside our selves to give us something we want, but about affirming the reality of the thing before we can see it in our 3 spatial dimensions plus time.
Most of us are not used to thinking of prayer as affirmation. We are more inclined to think that we have to leave our fate up to a God who may or may not be sympathetic to our aims and who may or may not grant us what we want. The reason that supplicative prayer is so often effective is not because it is up to God whether we get what we want but because we believe that our prayers will be answered. That means that the answer to the prayer is really up to us!
What is missing in the process of supplicative prayer is the understanding that God does not reside outside us. We are I AM THAT I AM! So to take the guess-work out of whether God hears and chooses to grant our prayers, we have to stop imploring a God outside ourselves and energetically bring to ourselves that which we desire. When we talk to God, Sisters and Brothers, we’d best be talking to ourselves!
This complete reversal in how we’ve been taught to pray and in our understanding of what prayer is is not an easy transition to make but will make all the difference in how your life goes. Recognizing that whatever you call God expresses itself in this world through you, as you, relieves you of any fear of blasphemy when you call yourself god. To pray rightly, you only have to call what you want into being by affirming and believing the truth of it. “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:24)
Prayer is affirmation, visualization, seeking after the feeling of the desire fulfilled. The combination of active prayer and passive meditation raise the vibratory rate of our consciousness as a whole and makes us more magnetic to our desires. If we are to sustain the work of building a Black Nation within a nation where our children and young people don’t have to look outside themselves for their worth and their power, learning the art of right prayer is essential.