Is Prayer A Waste Of Time And Energy?

The question is: Is prayer a waste of time and energy??

GC: Oh dear. I wish you wouldn’t ask this question. This may not be a popular inquiry because we have been so well taught that prayer has some deep and sacred energy; that it’s associated with the spiritual world or reserved only to the Gods. So before we inquire, we must for a few moments put aside all of our pre-defined definitions of it. If we don’t untangled the meanings of that word with that activity itself, we will stumble. We will be blocked. We will resist it, or it will in actuality resist us. So can we put aside for a few moments, all the correlations about prayer in your own mind, and ask this question openly, and neutrally just to see if something interesting comes up but without expectations - it may or it may not. Can we do it?

Audience: Okay / We can try!

GC: So we are questioning what is prayer, and why does one pray? Is it not just some kind of wish? Wish to be free of suffering. Or a wish to be healed. Or a wish for someone else to be healed. Or a wish for a hope for something better. Is this not a want? What is want? Or prayer could be related to giving thanks - being grateful. It serves as a reminder. You remember a ritual, some words and that helps to be grateful. I wonder why we need reminding to be grateful or why we remind ourselves to be grateful only around meal time.

Audience: Sometimes it’s about energy and sending positive vibes.

GC: Energy yes we could talk about that, positive - let’s not get into that now because it introduces negative. But I do wonder if energy is something you “send”. Is prayer the “button” to send that energy, or am I vibrating at an energy that is vibrant and alive right now and that is already impacting others around me? Interesting isn’t it. We might head in a different direction with that topic but I think we should ask, why does one pray at all? Please, we are not judging that prayer is not a good thing and that we should or shouldn’t do it, because I can feel people’s energy rising about this.

What is it you are seeking when you decide to pray? Is it some insight? New knowledge? The end of war? It is you that wants the comfort of another person? Is it you that asks for relief from suffering? Then isn’t a want based on something you current do not have - something you are deficient of. You are “this” and you need to be “that”. I am stressed, so I pray that I won’t be stressed by tomorrow or I pray I will be calm tomorrow. I fear loneliness when my partner dies so I want the other person to be well. I don’t want the other person to suffer, so I pray they will be free of that. Or I don’t have enough money this month so I pray that business gets better next month so I can thrive, financially. Has prayer been invented to fill or prevent a “gap” of some sort.

Audience: There is proof of prayer working from a scientific perspective.

GC: Research can be made to see all kinds of things, but we are not relying on the outer to tell us whether it works or not. Their form of prayer could be related to something else such as energy. Please let’s not get into proving whether this is working or not working, right or wrong. This is what was meant in the beginning when we start to resist. The moment we start to resist, we can no longer question. So, can we stay with this question a little longer without the noise interfering?

We were questioning whether prayer has been invented to fill or prevent a gap. And we can see that we are trying to achieve or make something happen in prayer. So let’s continue and ask who or what is it that you pray to? A God? A Deity? A Saint?

Audience: I think we really want things to change for the better so we ask a greater force for help.

GC: Yes that’s part of it isn’t it. We believe there is a greater force or energy and we use verbalization, words, thought to put a message “out there” for the greater force to latch on to. And from that we hope change occurs. Can you see how thought, or I should say can you see the movement of thought in all of this? We have been so well trained to change the future, change the outer, hope for something better - it’s always about what now is not. We miss the whole point of what we have in the now and continue to seek all the things we want instead.

Audience: Is prayer a form of compassion? Maybe we pray for people to heal or the world to get better out of compassion?

GC: Ah now you are introducing another area and one would need to question what is compassion - is it something based on sorrow or something else. It’s a slightly different topic - let’s stick to prayer for now if that’s okay. So all the movement of thought that we spoke about, are they acts of thought? Is it thought that is projecting the “future state”? If so, it is based on the concept of time, and as we spoke about last week, time interferes with the energy of the now because it’s based and acting on the past.

You see, whether you pray to a higher-being, or a so-called higher self, these are all creations of thought, and therefore are made-up ideals. Can there be any truth in ideals? You might repeat some mantra or have remembered some grand words that someone said a few thousand years ago. Maybe by repeating them you might reinforce them or believe they will keep you safe. These kinds of prayer are invented by thought based on some purpose or need or a feeling of security. At this moment, you may be resisting quite profusely at the speaker’s expression of prayer but are we seeing this together? If you can be open to the resistance, in other words, if you are not afraid, you will ask another most important question.

Audience: I was just thinking that sometimes we pray selflessly, that is we pray to God for something he wants for us rather than the other way around.

GC: Well that is questionable because who has defined what God wants from us? We need to go into the question of who or what is God. If we defined what God wants from us then we are back at square one. It becomes a thought-born idea…

Audience: The bible tells us!

GC: Again please you are going back to the outside for information. I understand this is a difficult topic but once we introduce the outer, we again block the inquiry. Let’s try to look at this with a mind that is clear for a bit longer because I am about to ask a very important question:

Who is it that is praying?

Prayer, which is a construction of thought, is created by a thinker, an entity that is doing or thinking (or praying). We seem to have divided the thinker and then the thought in our minds. And, the mind convinces you that the the one doing the thinking is the all-important permanent me. This is how we create our reality - based on the illusion of a separate “me” that is doing the thinking; the experiencing; the deciding; etc.

So prayer, born out of desire to fill a gap, is nothing but a manifestation of the ego - the “me”. It is better to thrive in life right now so that your energy naturally impacts the energy of everyone around you and that of the earth than to try and manifest something artificial in the future. If you allow thought to use the brain’s energy for worrying, projecting, thinking about tomorrow, thinking about all the things you don’t currently have, then you miss all the beauty life has right now. You miss the chance to vibrate at a frequency that impacts everything and everyone around you. Perhaps that is the real essence of prayer.

I think we have run-out of time. Let’s continue the discussion tomorrow morning.

Love and light,

GC