The power of praying comes from daring to enter that mysterious place between the emerging God and us. But its not an empty spaceits our own selves on progressively larger size scales, where we are participating in multiple emerging phenomena and creating emergent identities. As the ancient Egyptian world blended outward into the spiritual world, so does ours. And the higher our consciousness goes along the Uroboros of Human Identity, the more it blends into the emerging phenomenon of God. In tuning our ordinary consciousness in to those higher levels that we may have scarcely ever visited before, we approach God.

This may seem bizarre. How can size scales alone control such great mysteries? How can whats essentially a number have the most profound of spiritual impacts? Well, size is not just a numbersize determines cosmic identity. The number that describes a size is not in itself important but is a powerful symbol of the complexity possible on that size scale. Size is a key to the universe. On the Cosmic Uroboros size distinguishes the physical from the spiritual. In fact, in this universe the size or complexity level of a thing or event determines not only its nature but which world its operating in and which physical laws control that world.

But all these worlds exist all the time. And our minds now know it. We cant simply ignore this when we think about God. God fits into this very pattern by emerging.

Prayer is a conversation among different faces of ourselves as we exist on different size scales. We send our ordinary consciousness out to connect to our roles on emergent size scales. Those roles speak back to us if were open to their existence. After all, thats us in there playing them. They expand our sense of self. Their messages sound like thoughts, but in some deep sense they actually are messages, because they come from outside our normal culture-stunted state of mind.

Its time to crack open the whole idea of talking to God. If we are in a universe now known to span more than sixty orders of magnitude, and God is emerging from the infinite interactions of human aspirations, we have to look at everything anew. Weve already begun to do this intellectually, but can we do it emotionally? How can we step outside images of God that are many centuries deep and realize that those are only images and not reality?

It turns out all humans have a tool that will let us do this. The perfect name for it was suggested by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In an interview filmed in the early 1950s Jung was asked bluntly, Do you believe God exists? Earlier Jung had written that all people need ideas and convictions that can give meaning to their lives and help them find their place in the universe (his phrase). He had written that we have the capacity to satisfy this need symbolically with a god image. He answered the interviewer by saying, What I know is that all humans have a god-capacity. Thats the tool. Our god-capacity.

Religions offer up symbols and images bounteously, but a capacity is something that belongs to us as humans, not as members of any religion. Our god-capacity is not tied to any specific tradition or symbol. It doesnt require any particular view of God. Its the ability to scratch the meaning-itch with a symbol. Shouldnt we want that symbol to represent the highest truth we know?

Public atheists like Richard Dawkins and others assume that unless a supernatural God is out there, ready and willing to answer prayers, there is no point in praying, and since such a God does not exist, praying is self-delusion. To them our god-capacity is not an ability but a liability, because it leads people to believe in the objective reality of their fantasies.

Many people do indeed believe in the objective reality of their fantasies, and doing so can be wildly dangerous in this world, but trashing our god-capacity because some people do this is like trashing love because sometimes it goes wrong.

At this moment in history, what is the highest and best use of our god-capacity?

Originally posted here:
Youre praying to the wrong God: What organized religion gets wrong about prayer