Stuff That I Have Noticed #50 – What Exactly is Prayer?

As those of you who have read the first volume of my memoirs, Three Stages, already know, I was raised in a Fundamentalist Southern Baptist environment. Practically everyone I knew was a fundamentalist Christian protestant of some stripe. The Presbyterians and Methodists believed basically the same myths, just with slight doctrinarian variations. (The few Lutherans and Episcopalians in our town were considered “soft” Catholics and, like them, were certainly going to hell.)

Prayer was a big deal and as a good boy, I prayed quite a lot. One of the shibboleths on the subject was that god always answered prayers. Sometimes the answer was “no”, sometimes “yes” and sometimes “wait”. This explained why praying did not automatically produce the desired result. But being true believers this “wait” answer held hope for a “yes” on some distant tomorrow.

Fundamentalist religion of any sort is a very mucilaginous milieu and extremely difficult to eradicate from one’s head. It took more than a few years to disinfect my mind and spirit of this hokum. So from around age twenty until I was in my early forties I was immune to any and all doctrines, deitific (my coinage) teachings and ideas.

When in the mid-1970s my friend David Fisher published a book entitled Tranquility Without Pills my mind began to show a slight opening. Dave had been hired to do a book “exposing” the “hoax” of Transcendental Meditation. As research he attended one of their seminars where he learned the technique, which he then practiced for a while, and submitted a manuscript – contrary to the original intent – fully endorsing the method. As soon as we finished reading the book Elizabeth and I signed up for the course and began daily practice.

This was the gateway to a total revamping of my (our) ideas about spirituality. Until then separating religion from spirituality was an alien concept.

By this time the so-called “Human Potential Movement” was arising; est, Actualizations, DMA and other such seminars burgeoned. Myself, Elizabeth and half the people we knew were in psycho-therapy and self improvement was all the rage.

In 1976 Elizabeth (a recovering Catholic) was curious about est so she went to one of their introductory seminars. Impressed by what she heard there she came home and announced that she had signed up and was doing the training on the next two weekends. My reaction to this news was bland and respectfully dismissive. Fine with me, do whatever you want or words to that effect.

In the following weeks I noticed some meaningful and positive changes in her behavior and attitudes. Long story short; a month after Elizabeth, I did est … and fought it every minute, argued regularly with the trainer, thought it was bullshit and yet: It changed my life forever.

(I have often said that Elizabeth dragged me, kicking and screaming, into enlightenment.)

Over the next few years we did several other “consciousness” programs, trainings and seminars. I didn’t realize it at the time but TM had launched both of us on our Spiritual Quest.

As my reading on spiritual and metaphysical subjects – not to mention quantum physics – increased I came to realize that most of the consciousness trainings and seminars were blends of truncated and simplified versions of ancient (mostly Eastern) teachings and said quantum physics.

A quotation from one of my blogs: Robert Monroe’s “Journeys Out of the Body” and Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life” had profound effects on me. Then came Monroe’s Far Journeys and my ideas about the nature of life, both physical and nonphysical began to coalesce.

The linchpin of all this came at The Monroe Institute, the “world’s leading education center for the study of human consciousness”. My six days with Bob Monroe in ‘85 put the icing on my Spiritual cake. One of the most important things I learned at Bob’s training was the first viable idea I’d yet heard as an alternative to the god/prayer concept.

The Monroe thesis is that there are non-physical entities who serve as “guides” or “helpers” in the nearest non-physical layer of our universe and all we need to do is communicate with them when we need help or inspiration.

This brings us back to my title: What Exactly is Prayer?

My experience is that asking one’s guides for assistance with a problem is what praying actually is. They don’t care if one thinks one is praying to a father-god or requesting aid from a guide; same difference.

Since that week at the Monroe Institute there have been more than a few times when I have been (as my Dad would say) between a rock and a hard place and I’ve asked my non-physical guides for help. Well over half of those times a solution has presented itself. Sometimes an idea came, sometimes a person showed up unexpectedly and sometimes the problem, conundrum or impasse simply seemed to resolve on its own. I have no way of knowing for sure how or why these events happened but I chose to opine that I got “a little help from my (invisible) friends”.

If you’re interested in exploring these ideas further Robert Monroe’s books will be an excellent starting point. (Read this one first.)