28Nov

Prayer and Meditation: The most useful thing that a person can do to improve their life and even the lives of those around them is to pray and then meditate, in that order. To answer the question "Why is this so beneficial?", it boils down to "Ask, and you will be answered. Listen, and you will hear." The advice to pray is probably universal in religious paradigms.

I often half jokingly suggest to airline passengers looking for an aisle or window seat, that they should pray to the seat Gods for their request if their flight doesn’t have one for them. If these individuals took the suggestion seriously, they would be more apt than they realize to find their wish granted. The second step of meditation is a very important and often overlooked part of the prayer equation. In a case like this, if they would just pray for a moment and then sit back in meditation and listen for a response from within, where most good questions get answered, they might hear something intelligent. That would be a breath of fresh air, after hearing themselves talk.

Seat Gods are very powerful Gods, as anyone who has lost a seat that they thought was theirs will be quick to remind you (Parking space Gods are the non-flying equivalent). The passions aroused in some people when they lose their chosen seat would indicate that their seat was at the right hand of God himself and gave them special powers of comfort that no mere mortal’s seat could compensate for. Seat Gods only mess with people who want what they want when they want it, where they want it, and are too impressed with themselves to accept anything less than the best and most prestigious or comfortable that they can demand. If you have lost your seat and / or currently available seats aren’t good enough for you, then re-read the previous sentence ten more times. Instead of arguing their case to an airline agent who did not take their seat away and who can’t magically return it, they would spend their time much more productively if they were to take the nearest seat, sit in it, stop their cursing and start addressing the real power that controls their desired object.

The second step of meditation now becomes vital in their wish. The seat Gods may answer that a better seat awaits them if they change their flight to an earlier flight than they wanted. If they spend all this time talking to and convincing themselves that their old seat is theirs, they will get agita, high blood pressure, a coronary infarction, and many other possible diseases, including a really swelled head, a rarely fatal but very disfiguring condition.

Quakers, officially referred to as ‘The Religious Society of Friends,’ have no written dogma that they follow. They believe that quiet meditation is the way to experience the still, small voice within of God for personal guidance. They seem to have a point there, since highly intuitive people have the same belief that they are prompted by a thought or a feeling that comes from within them. It is often quoted that we are individually ‘The temple of the living God.’ If all religion is correct in the belief of an afterlife, and if physics is correct in its recent claims of multi-dimensional realities, then it would stand to be considered that the path to heaven would not be a linear one in time and space but through a personal connection that can be perceived as through our own spirit within us. Guidance from this other world would, if we move our ego’s out of the way, would move along this same path. We are our own stumbling blocks and we get in our own way when trying to hear the answers to our prayers. Restoring our conscious contact with God becomes less a matter of heading off to church and listening to a preacher or rabbi or imam or even listening to ourselves talk as it become a matter of putting all words aside and opening up a dialogue where we listen. 

Spirit is subtle. It is gentle in nature and in essence. Prayer and meditation, not prayer and interpretation.

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