This last Sunday in April, I invite you to pray.
As you read my opening, what comes to your mind? I am not just inviting you to pray, but to consider your personal ideas and responses to prayer. Prayer is a vast spiritual field of meaning: longing, need, healing, faith, gratitude, strength, and surrender. Prayer is power, but not personal power. We can recite prayer, which binds us to collective support, layered with repetitive ideas, thoughts and passion across centuries. Or we can pray spontaneously--in the moment--as words and emotions flow. We can pray in a variety of places, postures, and times. Whatever our way, we are reaching beyond our separate, individual, human capacity to bring forth or express a desired condition. Prayer turns our awareness toward "something greater than ourselves" and our own thoughts, fears and pain.
I recently came across one of Emmet Fox's (New Thought, 1886-1951) teachings on prayer as the way to break a chain of repetitive, negative thoughts. Even though he taught and wrote before contemporary research on consciousness and well-being, he emphasized the power of prayer in the present moment as a way to dissolve negativity. Fox viewed thought as simply "vibration". This was an underlying assumption of 19th-century neuroscience, first described by Isaac Newton, whose work proposed that nerves included vibratory, elastic, and electric properties. Fox incorporated additional assumptions that arose out of early exploration of sound and vibration, including esoteric beliefs on higher and lower vibration, i.e., good thoughts have higher vibrations, and hence bring more good into our lives, and negative thoughts have lower and grosser ones, bringing more unpleasant experiences.
While modern research underscores the health and mental health benefits of positivity compared to a pessimistic view of life, "good vibes" and "lower vibes" are really metaphorical. The late 18th and early 19th centuries brought various theories that attempted to link musical and acoustic vibration to early neuroscience exploration of emotions and thoughts. Obviously music effects our emotional range, and vibration of different kinds impact the body, but the mechanism of thought is not in a symmetrical vibration system with sound--at least not one that has ever been proven. Human neuronal functioning is extremely complex. Thoughts arise from synapses, the connections between brain nerve cells. Those connections are stimulated via neurotransmitters, with a flow of chemical substances in and out of the cells, generating electrical impulses that pass signals from one cell to another.
All that said, Emmet Fox's technique is worth your own experiment. Consider his metaphor of a tuning fork. When a tuning fork is vibrating, you can stop it by simply touching it. The sound was a movement and the movement was stopped. Negative, fearful thoughts, self critical thoughts, paralyzing anxiety, however they are generated in our neurons, can be stopped. Thought substitution is one of the techniques cognitive therapy offers to move past the habit of negative self-thought, but Prayer is more than positive cognitive conditioning--it is indeed positive mental conditioning--but it is more than that. Prayer can be an expansion of consciousness that takes us beyond the boundaries of self, our limited frameworks, our mistaken assumptions. In some ways, it is like a koan that simply cuts through logic and mental rehearsals. We enter another realm. Prayer never leaves you where you started. Short, clear, frequent, from the Heart, today is a good day to Pray. (Susan Nettleton)
for poetry: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45323/the-higher-pantheism
https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/T/TheophantheR/Imageshoweve/index.html https://monadnock.net/gibran/prayer.html