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Q: What prayers are useful?
A: Ask to be the servant of the Lord, a vehicle of Divine Love, a channel of God’s Will. Ask for direction and divine assistance and surrender all personal will through devotion. Dedicate one’s life to the service of God. Choose love and peace above all other options. Commit to the goal of unconditional love and compassion for all life in all its expressions and surrender all judgment to God.
Although the personal self likes to think that the thoughts going through the mind are ‘my thoughts’, they are actually only ‘the thoughts’ that prevail at a given level of consciousness. It’s like different depths in the sea attract different types of fish. Thus, if one’s calibrated level of consciousness is primarily in the field of pride, then the field itself impersonally attracts similar supportive thoughts that are quite different from the ones that prevail with an overall attitude of neutrality or acceptance.
Spiritual intention subserves, reinforces, and focuses on witnessing and observing rather than on doingness or specifics. Spiritual processing is like positioning oneself in the wind or in a water current.
Spiritual motivation, intention, and alignment could be likened to changing the magnetic or gravitational field of influence by which context is shifted, revealing a different understanding. For example, a presumed loss becomes recontextualized as a hidden gain (greater freedom, opening of opportunities and choices, etc.). By comparison, from the level of Pride, the options are few and limited, but from Willingness, Surrender, and Acceptance, the options are multitudinous.
The Will
The Spiritual Will is not like the ego’s understanding of will as ‘willpower’, which means emotional force with clenched teeth of exertion and increased emotionality. The ego-driven will takes energy and is taxing. It could actually be understood as a form of aggression. In contrast, invoking the Spiritual Will is like opening floodgates and then standing back. The ego/will contextualizes events in terms of cause and effect in which the personal self-will claims credit or blame because it sees itself as a causal agent. In contrast, the Spiritual Will is not personal but is a quality of consciousness that changes context by surrender to an invitation to the power of the Self. The Spiritual Will calibrates at 850, and the personal will calibrates at only the person’s current level of consciousness.
The Spiritual Will, invited by complete surrender, is thus capable of performing the seeming ‘miraculous’, whereas the personal will, paradoxically, often automatically triggers resistances, as anyone knows who has tried personal ‘willpower’ to overcome even minor habits.
Surrender of the personal will to the Will (Wisdom) of God (or Providence, Higher Power) signifies relinquishment of control. One can expect the ego to resist doing so, and it invents excuses, counterarguments, and multiple fears in order to maintain illusory control. The ego’s positions are reinforced by pride as well as desire for specific results. Thus, to the ego, to step back and invite the intervention of Divinity seems like a loss, whereas, to the Spirit, it is definitely a win.
Another limitation of the personal will is that it has no knowledge of karmic propensities or propitious timing, nor does it have the wisdom (omnipotence) to comprehend beneficial sequence. The Self orchestrates with an inner knowingness of capacity. For instance, to try to face a certain conflict prematurely may be unsuccessful, whereas it would have been successful after a few other layers of the conflict had been resolved.
From: “Discovery of the Presence of God: Devotional Nonduality” (2006), Chapter 3: Orientation, pp. 64–66
Choosing the Positive
One surprising effect of the willingness to let go of our inner negativity is the discovery that the polar opposite of the negative feelings exists. There is an inner reality that we can term our “inner greatness” or “Higher Self.” It has much more power than the inner negativity. In return for letting go of the payoffs that we were getting from the negative position, we are now surprised by the positive payoffs that stem from the power of our positive feelings. For example, when we let go of blame, we experience forgiveness.
Our Higher Self, which we might say is the composite of our higher feelings, has almost unlimited capabilities. It can create employment opportunities. It can create situations for the healing of relationships. It has the power to create the opportunity for loving relationships, financial opportunities, and physical healing. As we stop giving authority and energy to all of the negative programs that stem from our own thinking, we stop giving away our power to others and begin to own it back again. This results in a rise of self-esteem, the return of creativity, and the opening of a positive vision of the future that replaces fearfulness.
Serious inner spiritual work may sound tedious and demanding (to the ego), but it is exciting to the spirit, which is eager to return home. Consciousness innately seeks its source. In so doing, it encounters obstacles from which it may periodically retreat, and this may result in periods of reflection and reorientation. Periods of resistance or even dismay are normal and to be expected. Their resolution is often the consequence of recontextualization.
Although the personal will and motivation, plus the mind and intellect, are strong tools, in and of themselves they do not have the strength to disassemble the ego because they are part and parcel of it. However, once a seeker becomes devoted, the strength of the spiritual Will via the Presence of the Self supplies the necessary power.
