"Prayer is a very big deal, but it is not the old prayer. The God you don't believe in doesn’t exist and the prayer you thought was prayer is not prayer.
Prayer is not a dogma. It is a First Principle. It is a realization. It is the realization of the Infinity of Personhood that knows your name. It is actually something you can access in your first person. You actually know it. It lives inside of you.
Prayer is not a cosmic vending machine where you put in a formula and reality gives you a car. That is not what prayer is. Prayer means that I am never alone, that I am always held and that it always matters.
Prayer means there is an Infinity of Intimacy, who is an Infinity of Power, who holds reality, who partners with us in reality, who moves reality towards ever-deeper levels of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, who acts in our lives in a thousand ways but doesn't always step in and save us in the way we think we should be saved.
We stand always at the edge of mystery. We stand always dancing in the certainty of what we know in our interiors and on the edge of uncertainty, but we know that we can pray.
The First Principle is, in the language of the interior sciences, there are three primordial perspectives, and those perspectives are First Principles of reality. They are first-person, second-person, and third-person.
In the original interior sciences of the Hebrew, it is ani: I, first-person, hu: him or her, they or them, third-person, and then ata: you, thou, second-person. That is a First Principle that lives in the interior sciences.
The second-person perspective is the personhood of reality. Reality has personhood. Reality has personhood all the way up and all the way down.
We are creating a new word for that here in First Principles: pan-interiority, meaning all of reality has interiors. Pan-interiority, that is what prayer is based on. All of reality has interiors.
Materialism, that says that all of reality is just an exterior, is not true.
On the other hand, dualism, which says material has no interiors and then there is this spirit that is different, there is spirit and there is material, spirit and matter, those are two separate forces, that is not true either.
Materialism and dualism, which is what philosophy talks about, are both actually limiting.
The best possibility is a third possibility which matches reality, which fits in terms of evolutionary science gorgeously, which the interior scientists like Kashmir Shaivism, Abhinavagupta picked up on, but so did Alfred North Whitehead, and I am giving it a new name: pan-interiority, meaning all of reality has interiors, all of reality has personhood.
That does not mean all of reality is a person, obviously, but it means there is a feeling quality.
Actually, there is a way in which I direct my intention, I speak into the field, I focus my attention on the field, and attention blooms reality.
Love is attention, so prayer is an act of love. I am placing my attention, my intimate attention. I am offering up my deepest self in prayer. That is what prayer does. Prayer is an act of love. It is an act of attention. It is radical attention."
This blogpost is a direct quotation from Dr. Marc Gafni from our weekly Live Global Communion Service on Sunday at 10 am PT.
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