Fresh Thinking, Inspiration, and Vision on the Process of Spiritual Transformation
The field of human conscious is transformed through prayer. Your life, your family, your world—your prayer changes it all. We have that power, each of us, if we will avail ourselves of it. Another way to make reference to that creative power is to speak of it as the Creative Word. We bring the current of transformation to focus through words; we bring the power of prayer to focus through words. In a spiritual context, the Word includes the speaking of words. But the power of the Word goes beyond just the speaking of words. The Word is the power of prayer we each have that transforms consciousness.
The prayer that transforms human consciousness is not a hope that God will do something about what we think is wrong. It is not a stale religious utterance. True prayer magnifies the awareness of what is whole; the wholeness of a person, the wholeness of all living things. It invokes the implicate order of being in consciousness.
Generally speaking, people think of their own conscious awareness as belonging to them personally and individually. But the fact is that the consciousness of humanity is not just six billion fragments. It is one creative field. The individual is a focalization of consciousness inside the larger body of humanity. So when we are praying over what is present in our consciousness, we can’t help but speak into the whole body of consciousness to which we are connected—ultimately all of humanity.
When the power of prayer is activated through you, there are people who are drawn at many levels. They may be drawn to be physically close to you. Their thoughts may be drawn in the direction of your thinking; their feelings may resonate with yours. Their spirit may join with yours, even though they have never met you or even heard of you. When the power of prayer is at work through you, you are attracting to you those people who want to join you in your prayer.
This world needs the power of prayer in human consciousness. And why? It is because there’s something in the nature of human beings that is a beast. We can see the beastliness at large in the world. There is a quality of human character that seems to be bent on destruction, both self-destruction and the destruction of others. And that same aspect of human nature is causing the destruction of life forms on Planet Earth. Bound in an unending cycle of reaction to what seems to be wrong in the world, the beast in people sows seeds of destruction. Then the results of that sowing bring even more fear and more reaction.
So we invoke the power of prayer to transform human consciousness, beginning with our own. It’s the power of the Word that is sourced in the fact that there is One whose consciousness this is. For us personally and individually, we could say, “This is my consciousness, for my use. These are my feelings, my thoughts. This is my life. I created it. I have power over it because it is mine. And this human nature that has been a beast, a beast that eats a person up inside, is mine, for my use. And the power that I have ascribed to this beastly nature is my power.”
If you experience a loss of inspiration, a loss of energy, a loss of personal power in your life, here is something to think about. There is plenty of power for all of us. But what is the power being used for? If we are giving our power to the beast in us, it eats us up alive. We are here to own the beast, to realize that any power the beast has is my power, for my accomplishment in the world, for my achievement, for my transformation. This is my transforming power I bring through myself to the people around me and to the world around me. That’s what this power is for. There is plenty of power, plenty of life. There is plenty of love. It’s all mine, for my use.
But this isn’t just an individual matter. We bring together one focalization of consciousness in the body of humanity and we are not alone. There is an Australian folk anthem we learned from Andrew and Lyell Horwood that says this so well: “We are one, but we are many.” Our American national motto is E pluribus unum—out of the many, one. Or perhaps it is the other way around: “Out of the one, many.” There is both plurality and unity in the body of humanity. All those who share these words are many—but we are also one.
In the individual human experience, it looks like “This is what I am experiencing all by myself and I’m all alone in it, and it’s really different from what everybody else is experiencing.” Anybody who has done some serious work in themselves and with other people finds out that this just isn’t so. The human experience runs in repetitive patterns, and even if people are feeling isolated they are feeling isolated together with many other people, wherever they may be around the globe.
When the beast rises up in a person, they tend to think that this is all about them and their own unique experience. Or if it rises up in somebody else, it’s all about that person—they are the beast!
The truth is there is one beast, even though it manifests through many human beings around the globe. And using the word angel to refer to the reality of the being that you are and that I am, there is one angel. If we speak about the one angel, we might put a prefix in front of it, arch—there is one archangel. There are many angels, but there is one angel.
We can speak for the angel that we are individually, but the game we are playing as human beings is not just individual. It often seems to be. It does come to focus in you and it comes to focus in me. So that’s true. It may seem as though you are all alone in confronting the beast in your life. But there is one beast. It is not just your beast, it is the beast. And it isn’t just you confronting it. The angel faces the beast. The one angel has already confronted the one beast. The angel created the human capacity that has taken on beastly attributes.
It serves the purposes of the beast for you to think it’s just your little individual beast or that it is just a beast in someone else; because when you really know that all around the world there is one beast and one angel, for you, the contest is over. Until that point, it may seem like there is a contest. It may seem like you are wrestling with whatever it is in yourself or in other people, and the contention may seem to go on and on. When you see that there’s one beast and one angel, it is over.
At that point, you can hear and speak the voice of the angel that says, “This body of humanity is mine, and everything about it is mine, for my expression, for the fulfillment of my purposes on the earth, to bring my spirit. This body is here to bring the vibration of cosmic love. This body is mine. And because it’s mine, I do not have to fight with it. I possess it.” Where there are people who see that and know it, the contest is over.
In Lloyd Arthur Meeker’s inspiring words: “If walls can stop you, you will be stopped.” And if the beast can stop you, you will be stopped. The usual belief about the beast is this: “The beast creates walls, I confront them, I battle with them, and I am stressed out over it.” That’s not the attitude of the angel. The angel sees right through the wall to the other side.
Can walls stop the vibration of love? I don’t care what wall a person puts up, it cannot. And the beast in you can erect no wall that would stop the vibration of love. The angel doesn’t contend with the wall. To the angel, the wall is as nothing.
You have the opportunity on this day to change the game that you are playing in your life, to change the rules by which you are playing and bring what is the ultimate game-changer: the knowledge that there is one beast and there is one angel, and what has seemed to be a beast is my capacity on earth for my expression, to bring my power, my authority, my love, my truth, my Word into the world.
A friend of ours says that the elders in the circle have to disbelieve. They have to disbelieve that the beast has any power other than that which we give it. This creative field we share is a field for transformation because there are elders here; elders who hold this field and create a context where other people can awaken to who they are, so that people around the world can find, consciously or unconsciously, that their thought and feeling are drawn to the creative field held by the one angel. They may not know about us but they will find themselves believing that there is hope in the world, that there is something that is true and there is something that is possible, because somehow they can feel it, they can touch it because there is the prayer that proceeds from the elders of this creative field; because they touch our living Word.