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SIXTH DAY
PRAYER
Spirit loq. You ask whether prayer for spiritual
strength and reinforcement is really and directly answered, and what prayer is?
Prayer is the uniform direction of the soul towards its source and origin; the
intense straining of the spiritual vision in the direction of the Light; the
soul’s cry of faith in that which lies beyond the eyes of sense, the witness to
the souls’ certitude of its own power to attain redemption from, and
even through, matter, and thus redemption from evil. For all evil lies in the negation of God,
arising from lack of consciousness of God’s Being, and therefore evil manifests
itself in the lack of conscious prayer. It is as much a truism to say that
prayer is answered as to say that a man arrives at the top of a mountain if he
climb
(p. 10)
long enough, or to say that a,
steamship arrives at her destination if she steer continuously enough towards
it. There is no mystery, nor miracle in prayer, nor in the answer to prayer. If
the eyes of the soul are set long enough and persistently enough in the
direction of spiritual Being, which is at once the most real and most consistent
Being that is; if, unbiased by considerations of sense or of earthly meaning, ye
focus the eyes of your innermost desire on the revelation of THAT WHICH IS, ye
shall surely see and know Truth, and “Truth shall make you free” – free from the
limitations by which comes evil.
But in the act of truest prayer is implied a deep and strenuous faith in that
which is prayed for. In so far as this faith is conscious, and by so much the
more powerful, does the soul mount more rapidly to God, its goal.
Prayer unaccompanied by conscious faith is as a ship without its rudder, turning
hither and hither as if uncertain what destination it seeks.
Your souls desire God, because, however deeply they may be embedded in matter,
they recognize that they are not of matter, and that the direction of matter towards change and decay is not
their direction.
The will of man, as a human active principle, may or may not stifle this cry of
the soul which finds its natural outcome in prayer for spiritual light and life;
but unless man resolutely suppress the soul within him,
prayer must
be.
Prayer is the ladder by which the soul steadily ascends through matter to its
end, which is God. We can trace its cry in the dumb efforts of material and
animal evolution to attain to a higher expression through the further and
further development of consciousness.
That which science calls “Natural Selection,” “Selection of Species,” “Descent
of Man,” is, no other than the mighty prayer or uprising of the universe towards
its source, its continuous expression of certitude that God Is,
(p. 11)
and that He is the Supreme
Consciousness from which it has issued forth, its mighty effort to ascend to
this Consciousness, individuated and purified by its contact with matter. Have
you never observed the common fact that man’s deep sorrow finds expression in
prayer, while his happiness and prosperity fail to do so? Have you never
reasoned why this is, nor yet seen in it evidence that man’s soul will re-assert its divine birth, will re-commence its up-climbing,
whenever it is set free from sense-suppression in sudden check of earth’s
desires?
Intense prayer bears the same relation to the spiritual universe as
does
pain to the animal kingdom. For is not physical pain the cry of the animal that
all is not well, the effort of nature to regain its equilibrium by a powerful
manifestation of feeling to animal consciousness? And is not prayer the soul’s
cry that all is not well, the effort of the spiritual nature to regain its
equilibrium in God by a powerful manifestation of feeling to the Universal
Consciousness?
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