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Develop the
Indomitable Self in You
by Guy Finley |
Prayer is not what you think it is. The truth is that we
have all been given a tremendous amount of information,
most of it misinformation - indirectly and directly -
from individuals who, without any real interior
experience of their own, having either assumed positions
of authority or had it granted to them, instruct others
about the Way to God. This brings to mind an old Sufi
saying, "May God kill he whom himself does not know
the Way to Heaven, and yet presumes to show
others."
Having such insufficient inner
instruction for too many years has predisposed our
thinking toward having a very limited, often childish
knowledge of what prayer is; of what it’s about; of
what it’s intended to do. Even worse is the thought
that this "knowledge of prayer" – along with
its potential power and implied relationship – is
somehow our possession alone and that the weight of it
somehow makes us the center of the universe around which
all others should orbit. Such spiritual immaturity is
the secret seed of religious fanaticism, a form of
sickness that thrives within any unconscious aggressive
conviction that others must see life as you do and that
pushes you into the life of someone else who has not
invited you in. To demand that anyone blindly
conform to anything is harmful to all involved
and for all involved.
Why is our spiritual life something we
practice only in certain places or at appointed times?
How come it’s almost an inconvenience to have to go
someplace for spiritual reasons, such as meetings or
services to worship or to study Truth? What makes it so
difficult for us to perform our inner practices each
morning before we launch into the day, or quietly read a
spiritual work before we slip off to sleep? Yet, whenever
we find ourselves having been just knocked down by life,
we can’t stop crying out, as though there’s
no way to understand it, "God, where are you?
Allah! Why have you let me down?" or "Christ,
come into my life and save me, a sinner." What I’m
asking you to consider here is why is life divided up
into these times where a person fairly burns for a
relationship with something Higher, and then, for what
is the greater part of his or her life, this same person
gives virtually no thought whatsoever to the Celestial?
We must admit that this condition is an
accurate description of our present lives. We must be
honest. Self-honesty is one of the main-sails that, when
opened and allowed to be filled, helps to deliver a
person to the safety of Truth’s shore. As difficult as
it may be, we must be willing to see that the bulk of
our present energies and efforts are consumed with
pursuing money or authority; with struggling to get
people’s approval; in fearing how "this" or
"that" will impact our carefully laid plans;
and all of the rest of figuring out what to do when it
appears we’re not going to get our way. And oh, how in
these moments, do we turn our tear-streaked faces
towards the Heavens as though we’ve never thought to
look any other place!
The following may shock you, and I hope
it comes as just that.
Everyone practices prayer twenty-four
hours a day. . .only they do not know they’re praying,
nor do they know (and this is the real problem) what it
is they’re praying for! And this fact of life includes
those people who say, "But I don’t believe in
prayer. I don’t have a spiritual practice." A
moment’s consideration of the following insight proves
the truth of this claim.
Expectation is a form of prayer.
Let’s look at a few simple examples to
prove the point. Don’t you walk around hoping that
what you’ve hoped for will happen? Whatever that hope
may be for you? "Of course," you would have to
reply. "But what’s that to do with prayer?"
Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that
your hope that money’s going to come is a kind of
prayer to the god of money? Certainly no one
deliberately, consciously, sits there and says,
"Oh please, lord of dollar bill signs, pour
yourself down on me." Then again, most likely, some
do. Hopefully you don’t say to yourself, "Oh god
of Mars, strike down this person who said that evil
thing about me." But you may be hoping for some
harm to befall someone who hurt you. It’s possible the
wish for revenge may be the momentary point of your
life, as it becomes for many when they feel betrayed. So
in case this isn’t yet clear to you, realized or not,
these hopes and wishes, and all such similar underground
expectations are prayers.
What you are really praying for,
the still-secret purpose for your prayers that you don’t
yet understand, is to be able to possess yourself.
Think about it! When you were a small child (it happens
to us even as adults!) you went to the beach and a wave
rolled in and knocked you off your feet. Then, just as
you struggled to your feet, along came another wave to
knock you off your feet again! It’s a good metaphor
for some days in life, don’t you agree?
Here comes this condition, this anger
towards someone, and it knocks us off our feet; then all
of a sudden here comes this other condition rolling in
from a seemingly different direction, perhaps remorse
for some unthinking cruelty on our part, and it bowls us
over just as we’re getting up!
What I’m hoping to convey is that
there are ways of asking for things that you don’t
presently understand. And until you do understand how to
ask for what you want, what you really want, you
will continue to ask in the ways that you think are
appropriate. You will continue to ask from a nature that
doesn’t know the difference between what is genuinely
good for you and what is not. This is a huge question
for all of us. Presently, the way we’re constituted,
our lives are nothing but a series of requests, whether
they’re done in a "spiritual-religious"
sense or from out-and-out greed or ambition. We are
always asking, and then not understanding, why it is,
despite all the things we’ve asked for, our lives
still seem to be this proverbial leaf in the wind.
What you don’t realize is that the
punishing mental or emotional condition dominating your
spirit has no real authority whatsoever to take you over
– NONE! No dark state has authority over you!
No self-compromising state is entitled to command who
you really are! Now, is this higher understanding at
work in your life? Most likely not. The odds are that
you’ll have to admit that virtually every state that
comes visiting expresses its life through yours, whether
welcome or not. Fear surfaces, you’re afraid; cruelty
appears, you’re cruel; hostility comes, you’re
hostile; anxiety jumps up, you’re uptight. Every
response of yours that either embraces or denies the
visitation of these self-compromising states is a secret
prayer on your part to never possess yourself. Now, in
the light of these new and true facts about ourselves,
let me ask you: What is it that we’re praying for?
We’re praying – if we’re praying
– because we know that we’re not meant to be human
beings who can be blown this way or blown that way;
bowled over and turned into something dark or hateful.
We know that we’re not supposed to be psychologically
fearful, so that we take advantage of other people to
free ourselves from our fear. We know, or at least
deeply sense, these truths about ourselves. Yet every
visiting state that comes, every despairing condition
that washes over us, transforms our life into its
own. When that state turns us into what it is, we
are unable to respond to life from anything other than
the content and "quality" of that state. Our
inability to respond from anything but the quality of
that state is the same as requesting all the conditions
that are in line with and similar to that negative
condition. Are you following me? Because this new
finding reveals two very important discoveries.
First, we have an inherent God-given
understanding within us that we’re not intended to
spend our lives being dominated by anything. This cannot
be stated strongly enough. Nothing is supposed to
dominate us – nothing! But presently our lives
are nothing but a series of explanations to ourselves
about why we have been dominated and how we will never
be dominated again. Incidentally, this includes being
dominated by what we call excitement, because it always
just flips in this world of opposites into the boredom
or the depression that follows its receding high. So,
here we are day in and day out dominated by one mental
or emotional state after another, washed over so
thoroughly that there’s no difference between us and
what has washed over us.
The second part of this self-discovery
is even more fascinating. Each and every state that
washes over us is replaced with another state that
washes over us in the form of a reaction or resistance
to the initial state. Thus, we are never truly in
possession of ourselves; our lives are secretly spent
running through a series of being possessed by these
mechanically alternating states.
Will you agree – continuing with our
metaphor – that these negative states that wash over
you also roll around you even as they roll you around?
Yes, they do. It is as if you’ve been caught in a
rip-tide; you can feel one set of currents pulling you
in one direction even as you’re aware of other
currents waiting to pull you in yet another. Like being
in the grip of an anxiety while fear waits its turn to
get you even more turned upside down. This essential
insight into our inner world raises an important
question for us to ponder; If you know these runaway
inner states wash "you" back and forth like a
bubble rides the tide – that their action rolls you
around and around – what’s the hub? Go slow
here. Your careful consideration of what’s being
revealed here will be rewarded in ways beyond words.
Consider the ground upon which those
waves roll back and forth. You know the waves. You’re
pushed around by them or punished by them. Yet for now,
at least, you don’t know the ground. The point is that
you couldn’t know these states as waves unless
there was ground underneath. You could not have the
awareness of these negative states going around and
around unless something within you wasn’t going
around and around. This is the nature of the hub of any
wheel. This is what I mean by intrinsic nature. That’s
what I mean by something already being inside of you
that is the Unchanging Being you seek.
At our current level of consciousness,
we experience ourselves as beings who have a certain
emotional state of energy come into us, which defines
and shapes our individuality. But the fact of the matter
is that there is no separate self. Not really. There are
just these states of energy and the fleeting sense of
self that their undetected possession produces. We then
fight and resist the state – or if it’s pleasing we
embrace it – while believing that we’re doing
something for ourselves, from ourselves, and that we’re
special for our experience. Then in a heartbeat, because
that state isn’t really ours and only washes through,
the minute its nature has moved on, so does the sense of
self that we had derived from it. Now a whole new and
unwanted feeling floods in, leaving you asking yourself,
"Hey, I’m missing something here. Where did my
life – my sense of self – just go?"
So we spend our lives in a continual
kind of unconscious struggle, attempting to overcome our
own persistent and painful sense of loss. We search for
a way to contact some power to empower us; to make us
superior to those states that punish us, or to allow us
to hold onto these pleasing states that lend us a sense
of ourselves as being powerful or loving. Now the truth
is that you are meant to be more than any of these
states. Can you imagine?
Think about what it would be like for
you to begin asking to live from God’s ground. To
stand upon something unshakable. How do you ask to live
from that ground that knows itself as part of the whole,
yet isn’t washed away by it?
Can you see how down to earth such a
question really is, even though it deals with heaven? If
not, then you can begin seeing its value by asking
yourself if you’ve ever given yourself away; sold
yourself for a crumb; been the fool again? Then
ask: wouldn’t it be nice to never again be washed away
by any state that compromises your real life? This is
what I’m talking about. But you have to ask for it.
You have to learn to ask in the "right" way
for this kind of Help – and the "right" way is
the spirit you ask from.
The beauty of this new request is that
as you begin to do this special internal work, you find
that there are actually ways that you can work at being
more than the state. But the way that you work at being
more than the state is by becoming aware of its presence
within you and, while remaining aware of it, working
consciously to neither express nor repress it. When you
refuse to give yourself over to any state that
ordinarily dominates you, for the first time you are
conscious of the state and the ground it is rolling
over. Do you see this? Here’s a spiritual fact that
will help you to develop this necessary new and higher
self-discernment.
All of your emotional states are
visitors. They are not you. They are not
selves. They are part of your self only to the degree
you identify with them, which then turns you into that
expressed self.
So, when this psychic visitor comes,
your ability to recognize it as a visitor does what? All
of a sudden there’s you and the state. There’s
you and the condition that before has dominated you
because you didn’t recognize it as being a visitor.
You thought it was something you had to go along with
because you thought it was "you". And by
keeping your attention where it belongs (on the ground
and not on the waves), you don’t give yourself away to
something that doesn’t belong to you. Instead, you
find your new sense of "I" in the quiet
revealing quality within you instead of in those
wave-like qualities that are being revealed to you. A
brief review will serve us well.
In every moment there seems to be a
"you" and the appearance of these visiting
states, whatever their qualities, rushing over and
through you. Ordinarily, as each mental and emotional
state moves into you, its nature defines you. You’re
unaware in these moments that you have within you a
Being that is changeless, that is indeed timeless. But
you can’t ask for this wonderful, truly empowering
internal Life to be yours as long as you continue to
identify with every single emotional state that wanders
through you. So it’s necessary to work at
self-detachment. And this effort of conscious detachment
is a special form of prayer in two ways.
First, as you can begin waking up to the
presence of these visiting states and work to
deliberately detach yourself from their inner
influences, you won’t lose yourself to them. This is
an elementary but powerful form of self-command.
Second, as you become newly aware of
yourself in this way, you’ll also contain the
visiting state. This conscious sense – of being
both containment and its contents – is the
proof there is something "higher" than that
visiting state. Not only does the higher contain the
lower, but it also reveals the presence of another Self
whose lofty nature may be in one world, but that is not
of that world at the same time. Please ponder this
deeply. You can understand all that it implies because
the truth of it lives within you. Find it there.
Start asking for a relationship with
what can’t be washed away by doing this specialized
work upon and within yourself. Learn to ask for
something that is Permanent. Ask for something that
doesn’t shake. Ask for something that doesn’t turn
into its painful opposite by learning to recognize and
detach yourself from what you’ve always mistakenly
assumed was yourself. This is the kind of powerful
prayer that proves itself even as it provides proof that
within you dwells the Indomitable. Work at it every
moment.
Find that immovable ground that is
inside of you. Learn to live there by working to not let
your life be lived out by visiting states.
Copyright © 2001 Life of
Learning. All rights reserved. This excerpt taken
from The Lost Secrets of Prayer, a Llewellyn
Publication, all rights reserved. Permission granted to
reprint with author credit only.
Guy Finley is today's brightest
voice in the field of self-development, showing men and
women how to find a life of freedom, enduring
fulfillment, and true purpose. Nightingale-Conant, the
world's largest producer of motivational books on tape,
calls Guy Finley "one of the leading experts at the
forefront of human potential." Guy's
career reached this point through a circuitous path.
Born into a successful show business family, he is the
son of late-night talk show pioneer and radio celebrity,
Larry Finley. His childhood friends were the sons and
daughters of major celebrities. As a young man Guy
enjoyed success in a number of areas, including
composing award-winning music for many popular recording
artists, motion pictures, and episodic television. From
1970-1979 he wrote and recorded his own albums for the
prestigious Motown and RCA record labels. Throughout
his youth, Guy suspected there was more to life than the
type of worldly success that led to the emptiness and
frustration he saw among his own friends and colleagues.
In 1979, after travels to India and parts of the Far
East in search of truth and Higher Wisdom, Guy
voluntarily retired from his flourishing career in order
to simplify his life and continue his inner studies.
Today Guy is the best-selling author of over a dozen
books and tape albums on self-liberation, including,
among others, The Secret of Letting Go, Design Your
Destiny, The Intimate Enemy, and Lost Secrets of Prayer.
His works have sold over a million copies and have been
translated into 9 languages. Guy has been featured on
over 300 radio and TV talk shows including Sally Jesse
Raphael, CNN, PBS, Entertainment Tonight, Coast to Coast
Live with Art Bell, NPR, David Essel Alive, and the
Wisdom Channel. His writings have been featured as
"Today's Pick" in USA Today. Guy presents more
than 150 seminars each year on self-liberation.
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