Soul
Needs
“Prayer
is the soul’s sincere desire. Your desire is your prayer. It comes out of your
deepest needs and reveals the things you want in life.”
Joseph
Murphy (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, c.1963)
Joseph
Murphy started out as a Jesuit priest in Ireland and ended up a Religious
Science scholar in California. He taught about the power of the mind to heal,
believed strongly in affirmative thinking, and in keeping the conscious mind “busy
with expectation of the best.” Holding positive thoughts and the heart’s
deepest desires always in one’s mind, he believed was the path to health and
wholeness and constituted the purest form of prayer.
That,
of course, assumes that one knows what one’s deepest desires are. I wonder if
you could state in unequivocal terms your heart’s deepest desire. I have
trouble doing that. I can come up with cosmic notions of world peace and ending
climate change, but those are left brain desires—meaning they are one step
removed from my personal life and my heart. So…what does my heart desire?
I
can come up with a whole list—love, creativity, usefulness, strength of body
and mind—but when I say them, I begin to think of exceptions and
qualifications. “I want love in my life, but not so much that it distracts from
creativity.” “I want the freedom to be creative, but not so much so that it becomes
an obsession that blots out the rest of my life.” See what I mean? I can see my
guardian angel filing her nails, yawning, waiting for me to have an unencumbered
desire.
Maybe you are better at this than I am. Some
of the prayer experts agree with Murphy. Marianne Williamson, for instance, says
that when we can clearly articulate our desires and prayers, the universe accommodates.
All the powers and principalities line up behind us to make our prayers come
true. I don’t know about that, though. I think that maybe some of our true desires
are not so good for us or for anyone else—I have a few destructive ones, and I’ll
bet you do too. And I always wonder what it does to our psyche when we
earnestly pray for something that does not happen. Some people can turn on a
dime when that happens, and say, “It just wasn’t God’s will,” to which I
respond, “Well then, what’s the point? If it’s all up to God, why pray at all?”
Why not just say, “Here you go, Lord; this is on you!”
But we do pray, don’t
we? All the time. Because our soul needs to communicate with the world’s soul,
with the collective soul. In other words, prayer is the way our personal soul
communicates with its “mother ship,” so to speak. Maybe if we listened to it,
we would have a better understanding of ourselves, the true purpose of this
lifetime, and exactly where we are headed. It’s probably a good idea to be
aware of what your soul is asking for. Just saying…
In the
Spirit,
Jane
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