The Evolution of Prayer

If only you could arrange your life so that everything you did was an act of gratitude to God, can you imagine the outcome?  Most likely, you'd never hurt anyone or be hurt.  LIFE AS PRAYER - PRAYER AS THANKS.  The recitation by rote of all those "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys" are just as ligitimate certainly as any prayer one could compose in the mind, from the heart.  But I've discovered that, for the most, people prefer to talk to their Creator in their own words.  A "learned" prayer is what we teach children, who don't yet possess the full vocabulary to show their parents that they can pray.  I think this is a kind of shame, in that who better than children know how to speak to God?  Nevertheless, as adults, after awhile and many years of praying for various people and things, wants and desires, you come to a place where the only satisfying method to reach God is through meditation, by clearing one's mind and making quiet the brain so nothing but His Light can come through.  That's the Light I seek when I pray, and I do that by simple thought on all that I believe God to be.  Then, before long, my thoughts become even less than that, there are no words in my mind, I am in communion with the Light of the Lord in my soul 

Prayer has evolved when words are no longer necessary, or even thoughts  You are in a state of pure gratitude.  This gratefulness is so intense, that a prayer for a sick child comes out as pure thanks to God, and nothing else, no name, no petition, nothing else is needed.  It's not an easy thing to attain, and I'll never truly achieve it - Buddhist monks are alot closer to the true act of praying, I'd say. It's hard to calm the heated mind, the chattering brain, so busy with the world's minutia.  

Evolved prayer never asks for anything.  What do you need in life that you think God isn't aware of?  We use words in prayer because we firmly believe that if we hear these words in the mind, so will God.  Truly, anything that brings us that much closer to our God, by whatever name or however praised, is a good and necessary thing.  No one can live fully without their soul, and I believe that soul is our "God-part" that one Light inside which God placed there somehow (not for me to know the methods) which makes me a reflection of the Lord in all I do and say.  The soul is eternal, but finite.  I believe only a certain number of souls were created and the fleshy containers we live in will circulate and revolve, incarnate and reincarnate, so as to animate that body into acts of goodness which, by their nature, can only reflect goodness and mercy, the reflection of God in our lives.  But we're not perfect and that's a good thing.  Life is a continual act of striving to reach that single, all-knowing Light, and when we reach it, we're already gazing upon the Face of God. 

I sit on the bed and get physically comfortable.  A sort of "lazy lotus" position.  Clearing my mind gradually, making quiet that noisy brain which is desperate to form words.  I rebuke the words, I enter the realm of thought.  In my thought, I form pictures.  In these pictures I note the beauty of nature, of the myriad life forms sharing this space with me, of water, air, light.  Then I am close - it is Light that I am seeking, for I am in a state of prayer.  When all thoughts have finally dissolved into pure feeling, I can then sense that one boundless Light, and I center all meditation on that Light.  To me, in every way that means anything at all, that Light is God.  It is the larger version of my soul. This is the time for gratitude, and I reform all thought in the pure feeling of being grateful, over and over.  "Thank You!" can be a feeling, it need not be words.  Just gratitude.  The state of being grateful.  No petitions, no begging, no deal-making, not even a word not even a thought.  Just being there and feeling thankful to God is the most evolved prayer I can imagine.