Breaking through in prayer
- This page is part of an ERW course: Internal Guidance - Prayer.
- By John Eagles, October 19, 2009.
Prayer is not easy, most of the time. Through prayer we wish to connect to the Creator in a direct relationship. The reality of our lives is such that we usually need to overcome hindrances before we can reach a level of deeper prayer.
When we pray we don't want it to be a one-way communication. We strive to get answers from God. It is easy enough to pray and to not expect an answer from God. If, however, we seriously are awaiting God's response, our prayers very often become a kind of struggle and fight. What are some of the difficulties that can affect our prayers?
First of all, we all live in a spiritual environment. Because the world around us isn't heaven in most cases, our spiritual environment also is not the most ideal. There can be many reasons why not-so-heavenly spirits are around us and make it difficult to break through in prayer. One reason can be the place where we are praying. If that place isn't claimed by God and heavenly spirits, it is more difficult to pray. Even if we pray on a sacred place, a dedicated prayer room, it is possible that we encounter difficulties for example because someone was there before us and offered impure prayers.
Another reason can be that because of our spiritual inheritance from ancestors or friends we are surrounded by lower spirits. Also mistakes we have made in our own lives can cause this. Another description for these causes of a difficult spiritual environment is 'original, ancestral, collective and personal sins.'
Almost always when we pray, we need to break through less than favorable spiritual circumstances. We may get strange feelings against God or against prayer itself. Such feelings can come to us from the spiritual world. In order to break through these, we need to discover what is wrong with such feelings. That makes our prayer to a process that frequently can resemble a spiritual fight.
A second barrier may be formed by our own thoughts and feelings and our own mental condition. We cannot see this separated from the spiritual reality because our desires, thoughts and feelings are influenced by the spiritual world. Yet, I treat our mental state, and even deeper our condition of heart, as a separate factor. When we have done something that isn't pleasing to God, our heart and mind will make us want to run away from God. We may have feelings of shame, fear and guilt when we enter into deeper prayer. It is essential that we overcome such feelings, on the one hand by trusting in God's love and goodness and on the other hand by determining ourselves to repent for what has been wrong and to do what is right from now on.
When we prayed in the past and God gave us a clear answer telling us to do something, and we haven't done that, our future prayers will get more difficult. We cannot expect answers from God that God already has given us before but to that we haven't responded in the right way. Prayer and action go together. If we pray and don't act from what God tells us, our prayer life will suffer very much or even dy out entirely.
A fourth problem that can occur in our prayer life is when we don't realize that it is up to God when and how to answer. We cannot expect that God will answer our prayers whenever we desire for this or in the way that we expect it. Prayer is an offering of faith and therefore needs fulfillment of our good investment over a certain time period. Depending on what questions we are asking to God, it may take longer time before we can get an answer. Answers can come in many ways. God can speak to us directly, through dreams, through inspiration and revelations, through nature, and of course through what other people say and do to us.
What I described above is not meant to be a complete overview of all difficulties that can toughen our prayer lives. The truth is that we can pray to God and we shall get answers from God if we are serious in our love for God and in our effort to live a life under God. It's our faith in God's love that makes us desire to pray in a close relationship to God.
Comments
- Question: Can you expand a little on what 'impure prayers' are?
Impure = to be impure of heart, to be self-centered in motivation. Impurity of heart is always the result of having sinned. The sins we may have inherited from ancestors and culture are like bad habits clinging on to us and tempting us to repeat those sins. Mostly we are entirely unaware of these habits being tendencies to sin and therefore we repeat those sins. In that sense, all our sins affect us as personal sins, these are desires, thoughts, feelings and actions that are not centered on God.
Sins make our heart impure, that means not centered on God. Most sins are elicited by the influence of people around us and by spirits. The more that we have a common base with certain types of sin, the easier we commit those sins. The eventual result of sin is impurity of heart. It means that false love came into us and selfish motivation. That impurity of heart can make us sin again and those sins make us yet more impure.
As we sin, because of our own self-centered desires and/or stimulated and tempted by spirits who are in the same kind of mood, there is always multiplication of that sin. We emit selfish feelings and thoughts and other people around us can fall under this.
So, impure prayers are those that we pray from an egoistic heart and most often in unison with impure and selfish spirits.
Impure prayers can take many different forms. One most common form is the 'hypocrite' prayer. That kind of prayer necessarily always is a monologue as God cannot answer us when we are impure. It is the kind of prayer in that somebody prays as being expected by him/herself and the environment. A Christian would call upon Jesus and speak loudly of his love for Jesus. A Roman Catholic would confess of love for Mary. A Unificationist (member of the Unification Church) could cry tears of pain for God and Rev. Moon without actually understanding the deeper heart of God. Such prayers can become a kind of emotional theater. The person praying brings him/herself in tears and feels emotional but because the prayer is a monologue the tears are not real and the heart is impure. The praying person often is not aware of this and believes the prayer to be highly divine and may leave the prayer room with a satisfied feeling, yet others attending such a prayer may feel disturbed and not entirely realize why.
All love, all emotions, all tears and all joy can be either pure or impure. The determining factor is the heart, that has either impure motivation and desire, or pure intentions.
It is by really believing that God can answer our prayers and doing what is needed to receive those answers that we can become more aware of our own impurity and overcome it. Sincere prayer followed by earnest actions is the way to overcome impurity of heart and prayers. The exemplary lives of God's saints and sages can make us aware of our own lacking and therefore show us the way to find God in a deeper relationship.
- Question: Could you comment on the Christian notion that prayer is a time to get alone with your God?
The Christian concept of being alone with God in prayer is often more fantasy than reality. I believe that this kind of limited concept is mainly due to the fact that Christians believe that Jesus is God. Most, but not all, Christians pray to Jesus. Jesus as a single individual cannot answer all the millions or even billions of daily Christian prayers. So people got used to the idea that God doesn't answer their prayers and they make up God in their mind, sometimes, or pray to a fake god, in other cases.
What is a fake god? Usually a fake god is a spirit that answers the prayers as if he were God or Jesus. Such people praying think to be 'alone with their God' but actually are with a spirit doing as if Jesus or God. There are angels who play such tricks on people. There are many spirits as well who do this.
In other cases Christians pray to God without expecting any answer. They pray formula prayers, sometimes written out like in monastery traditions, sometimes only in a certain accepted style as in many protestant churches. This is of course not only a problem of Christians. We can find this kind of tradition in all established religions including the Unification movement.
We are never alone in a spiritual sense. The number of angels and human spirits existing is staggering beyond our conception. While we live on earth in a world of established cultures and traditions, it is even more so the case in spirit world. Here are residing all those who went before us. The earth is the place on that most spirit beings focus their attention because it is on earth that the most significant spiritual changes are brought about by what physical people do.
- Question: Of course there are all kinds of prayers, but at least some people are trying their sincere best. Even for half-hearted efforts inadvertently distorted by misconceptions, are they not some condition through which God can work?
If people are 'trying their sincere best' there is no problem. But how many people are there who sincerely are convinced of trying their utmost and yet if we deeply investigate their motivation, there's something wrong. Now God surely will try make them aware of the impurity of their prayers and motivation, yet will they listen?
How many people have I seen who believe to be religious and who believe to invest all for their religion and yet.... sometimes they are entirely deceived.
We all go our road to discover God in a true sense. What is seen by many people as 'trying their sincere best' is often only a complicated self-deception. People sacrifice for a religion and expect to get rewarded by God because they did their sincere best. Yet they may have been deceived in some cases. Must God honor their perceived good intentions, which are not really unselfish in God's eyes?
Can God honor selfishness only because a person isn't aware of being selfish and therefore thinks to have good intentions?
I think God will honor it if they really have desire for God but sometimes the true desire for God is controlled by self-justification and self-righteousness. How can that be solved in any easy way other than that such people will bump with their head into a wall and feel some pain from that? Anyone who sides with what doesn't come from God will eventually find out that something was wrong. It isn't God's punishment, it is a logical consequence of their own involvement with evil. This is how we learn. That is how some Israelites during slavery in Egypt have learned about evils of Egypt.
Think also of this: In the first stage of sinning the sinner is still aware of having done wrong. In a further stage the sinner loses awareness of the sin being a sin. Should that deeper stage of sin be rewarded because the person doesn't realize anymore he or she is sinning?
- Question: Is it possible to visualize around myself the presence of a saintly person either on earth or on in spirit world? Is this actually possible and how effective is that to protect myself?
There is no easy way to solve this kind of problem. You are Adam and you cannot rely on anybody else for your protection, except from having your own relationship to God. You have to learn to detect evil spirits and their deceitful ways of attacks and temptation and you do this by your own relationship to God. You can learn from those who went the way before you, but you cannot use them as a way for your protection.
Remember also this: It is the task of archangels to protect Adam, not Adam's task to protect the archangels. It is the task of man to protect God against evil accusations by Satan, not God's task to protect us against evil.
- Question: What accusations are evil spirits & angels throwing to God at this point? How can I prevent them from doing so? How meaningful is it to pray for protection?
Satan is accusing God that God wouldn't love him enough. This is how Satan justifies his asking love from Adam and Eve. Satan says that because God doesn't love him enough, therefore Satan has the right to take that love by himself.
Adam and Eve take a crucial position in this scheme. They are standing in-between God and the angels. They can defend God and tell Satan to back off with his false love and accusations, or they let Satan influence them and they come under Satan and then the position is reversed. Satan then relates directly to God and accuses God of all kind of things.
It is only by man's fulfilling his or her responsibility that we can protect God against the evil angels' attacks.
If we expect God to protect us against Satan, we expect God to deal with Satan directly. But man's position is in-between God and the angels, is to dominate the angels with love and to make that evil angels cannot come directly to God with accusations.
So we can pray for God's protection. I see nothing wrong with that when it means that we ask God's help to make clear how to fulfill our responsibility. If we expect God or for example True Parents to do the work for us, while we don't focus on our own responsibility, then it means that we cannot fulfill our own course and we give extra burden to God.
- Question: Could you tell us more about the spiritual struggle that may have to be fought for a good prayer?
No prayer is the same. If you for example pray for the well-being of certain less-central people, you may not be attacked much. But if you want to solve a serious problem in yourself or a problem that is related to history, then you must expect that all that spiritually has caused such a problem will come to stand in your way.
Also your own mindset will come to block you if you want to solve a problem in yourself. The evil side will never let anybody leave their territory without a fight. The moment that a person makes real effort to leave 'Satan,' evil spirits will try to keep what they perceive as theirs. They will put up a fight against you, not when you pray weak and meaningless and ceremonial prayers, but whenever you determined yourself to make a step forward in coming closer to God. Alarm bells go off in spirit world at that moment and you absolutely will be attacked.
The spiritual fight that follows is seldom one in that you see the spirits attacking you. It is a struggle of feelings and thoughts and if you lose that fight your desires will turn away from God, but if you win the fight God will immerse your being and give you good desires and feelings and thoughts. Revelations and heavenly realizations come as the result of such a prayer.
- Question: Looking at the picture for this article, it shows the traditional folded hands. Do you always pray with folded hands like that?
I don't always pray with folded hands. It is also not just a peripheral thing because folding our hands makes the energies that flow out and in from our hands circle in ourselves. So folding our hands makes us more isolated from the world around us, similar to closing our eyes.
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