TGU — Prayer and religion as magic

Friday, June 8, 2018

2:50 a.m. If I keep sleeping so much of the day, I’ll be entirely turned around and will be getting up at midnight. But in any case, I’m ready to go. Prayer and the vast impersonal forces?

3:30 p.m. (After an interval to finish the Sandford I was reading.) So –?

We realize that it is common in your society to think that religion is only a cynical con-game, or a business, or superstition. It can be any of these, but the same could be said of any human activity. Let us look at it in its purest and most useful form. The image of American and British churches being filled on D-Day entered your mind recently; let’s center on that.

We said we would present a view of prayer different from religious assumptions or secular ones. Let us look at prayer as ritual designed to align the individual with the group and the group with – well, with what can only be called personal / impersonal forces, but that will require explanation. It may not be easy, because we – even more than you – are well aware of your society’s prejudices in this matter. You are all still in reaction against your idea of what religion was or is. That strong bias makes it difficult to get a new slant across. At the same time, that pervasive bias creates by reaction a form of religion that is law- and group-think-bound, relatively impervious to argument.

Our effort will try to describe these forces, these relationships, without recourse to traditional words like God that are so loaded. In a situation such as your time is in – the culmination of social forces centuries in the making – the very words mislead because they are emotionally tied to streams of logic and of conviction and of emotional investment that have nothing to do with logic but are nonetheless (or perhaps we should say, therefore) unarguable.

Remember what we are doing: We are explaining the link between the individual and the external world, and that external world is in the All-D, not merely the 3D, no less than you as individuals. Nothing can be in the 3D alone, as we have pointed out. You must be in all dimensions if you are in any. Therefore, do not imagine that “the world” however you conceive it, can be merely material. It must, will, does extend into the non-3D if it exists at all. To us this is as obvious as height width and depth are to you as the 3D, but for some reason people keep losing sight of the fact: Everything is “spiritual” as well as “material.” You – and we – live in one world, not two. If you lose sight of this fact, any way you make sense of the world is going to be wrong.

There is no Heaven (nor Hell) elsewhere. There is no God, no Devil, elsewhere. There are no “spiritual” forces, no angels, demons, genii, elsewhere.

But – and here is the gist – the fact that there is no “elsewhere” is not to say there are no such beings or conditions. It is to say that in separating them in your mind, you distort relationships.

“God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world,” people say. even though all could scarcely be less right with the world.

Only, concentrating on how other people are wrong is not a good way to triangulate on what is right. Better to correct the concepts and look at the result.

Now, in the first place, nobody really knows what they mean when they say “God.” There are so many definitions, so many attributes, so many associated ideas, they really literally do not know what each other means by the word itself, let alone what the word is supposed to stand for. And, we say “they” but we might as well say “we,” and “you.” This is why we rarely use the word. How much good does it do to use a word when no two people have an idea what it means?

In practical terms, people do, or think they do. Those people in churches praying for Allied soldiers on D-Day couldn’t have defined God, maybe, but they knew who they were praying to.

That’s a matter of definition. If you mean, “They had a common emotion which they aimed at the deity as they were used to thinking of him” (scarcely as “it”), yes, but that doesn’t say much. Catholics, Protestants, Jews might have had a hard time agreeing on who they were praying to, only the emotion of the moment overcame such differences and focused them on their common awareness of their reliance upon a higher power.

But none of this gets to it.

No, I agree. The words don’t convey your sense of it.

If it were easy to convey the sense of it, it would have been done definitively long ago, even despite the difficulties of prejudice.

Let’s try this, sticking to the image of the filled churches on D-Day (and on VE-Day for that matter, though the nature of prayer then was of thanksgiving rather than supplication) – and on Dion Fortune’s group wielding magic to defend their island home.

I see your strategy, I think: By beginning with images rather than definitions we can perhaps escape the tyranny of sequential description even though we have only words to employ.

It may work, it may not. Let’s see.

The church image shows one way that people connect with the vast impersonal forces that shape their lives – forces that are experienced as personal forces when approached that way. Is this much clear?

I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but yes, clear. Without a sense of God, without an over-arching force that can be approached and perhaps influenced, there would only be an impersonal world of indifferent forces.

That’s right, and that is the world inhabited by those who have rejected organized religion but have been unable to see the reality the religion was created to deal with. This is the world of your “hard-headed realist,” your materialist who, as someone said, “believes in No God, and worships him.”

Contrast the image of the churches filled with congregations united in prayer to a personal God with the image of Dion Fortune’s group – physically separated by distance, but meditating by arrangement at the same hour of one day of the week. Those groups meditated on an image. They weren’t petitioning a divine force to come to their assistance; they were aligning themselves with an image of a desired result and seeking to pull the result into being.

Not sure that’s how they would have described it, and they certainly used vivid images such as someone – was it St. Michael? – patrolling England’s shores, guarding it from harm. I should re-read The Magical Battle of Britain, that describes the practice. Gareth Knight, if I remember rightly.

Here’s the thing. Both approaches were attempts to channel the currents of the times, to use human magical powers to effect external results. In both cases, prayer gave leverage.

I remember reading that Roosevelt prayed for our soldiers and sailors in a radio address, something that probably couldn’t be done today in our desacralized climate.

In effect, Roosevelt was acting as high priest, leading his people in united prayer, and on that Tuesday in 1944, probably few if any held themselves aloof from the emotion, regardless what they may have thought of him or of the idea of a God or of prayer as an activity. Those whose belief (or whose disbelief, perhaps we should say) rendered them unable to pray, hoped, and perhaps that wasn’t so different. [“Yearned, I think, would be a better word than hoped.]

What we are trying in all these many words to give a sense of is that praying is a magical ritual that does not depend upon one’s definition nor upon one’s moral character. Hitler, in effect, prayed. More than any politician of his time, he used magic to channel emotion and thus transform reality. If he had been able to use those same forces to channel good rather than evil, he would have gone down in history as a great man who did good things. Like Caesar, perhaps, or like certain aspects of Napoleon. But you must be careful what you pray for: If you invoke hatred and channel your resentments and seek to destroy your enemies –

The saying is, “If you go to take revenge, dig two graves.”

Precisely. Churchill, by contrast, though a man of many failings and blind spots, aligned himself with good and not evil. That did not prevent him from countenancing evil deeds, but it did preserve his alignment.

Our hour is up, but I get the sense that you haven’t really been able to say anything yet of what you want to say.

It’s the same old story: Little by little gets it done.

Well, we thank you for continuing to make the effort, and we’ll see you next time.

 

11 thoughts on “TGU — Prayer and religion as magic

  1. For me, it seems like a lot got accomplished in this session. I began it resistant–why do we have to go back to the language of the church? By the end, I was with it. “Let us look at prayer as ritual designed to align the individual with the group and the group with–well, with what can only be called personal/impersonal forces.” They are “the reality the religion was created to deal with.” I got the feeling they were going to call the vast impersonal forces God, as personalized by us.

    This reminded me that yesterday I was part of an “activation,” as Steve Rother at Lightworker gathered people in common support of the Earth as she deals with 22 active volcanoes. Prayer.

    I love the concept that we are not petitioning a divine force to come to our assistance, as if we were helpless ourselves. We are aligning ourselves to bring a common, desired result into being–using our “magical powers” to pull external results into being. That kind of coming together–in prayer–gives the necessary leverage, as TGU say. And its emotional–coming together around feelings for something, as with the churches on D-Day. Thanks for the session.

  2. Frank,
    I echo your thanks to TGU for ‘their’ effort in making this line of knowledge available, and repeat my thanks for your work to ‘make this information available.’ In writing I can see/feel a little of the long path that makes that ‘availability’ possible!?

    On occasion I’ve remarked about feeling ‘my’ guidance show delight and joy and (almost) excitement about some of your posts. It’s interesting (to me) that these last two have evoke a deep feeling of satisfaction (almost a sigh), as if saying (with a smile) “Well at last, we’re getting down to it.” Quite a ride, Frank!
    Jim

  3. I missed the Dion Fortune reference, so I Googled it. The book that describes the actions of Dion Fortune and her group during WW II to protect the British Islands from Hitler is called “The Magical Battle of Britain: The War Letters of Dion Fortune,” edited and presented by Gareth Knight. Haven’t read it yet — looks very interesting.

    A quote: “Let us meditate upon angelic Presences, red-robed and armed, patrolling the length and breadth of our land. Visualise a map of Great Britain, and picture these great Presences moving as a vast shadowy form along the coasts, and backwards and forwards from north to south and east to west, keeping watch and ward so that nothing alien can move unobserved.”

  4. Frank & All. Thanks – Yes, very good reminders about praying.
    Here in Norway the peoples long forgotten how to pray at all(besides the newcomers, the Muslims of course-smiles). There is an old saying about prayers: “As prayers go up blessings come down,” because to pray by heart- the importance of sincerity(and with others), the emotion/-or the intent of the movement releasing the electrical currents manifesting. A sort of making a shield into the ethers. And according to Seths` WE do have the own power – the more of us (among us), the better)….as it is the law of attraction (it is science).
    BTW: I have the book by Dion Fortune “The Magical Battle of Britain.”
    B&B, Inger Lise

  5. It is so strange that I happen to be reading for an exam on cognitive neuropsychology and the brain nuts and bolts department basically confirms this perspective. I could (and should and ought etc…) to write a book about how prayer is actually cognitive-behavioural therapy. And how the apparent world (3D as we see it) is just one of the many (theoretically) possible user-interfaces. Reprogramming the brain, whatever the method, is a big work requiring a lot of everything. Right kind of inner&outer pressure and desire and chemical balance (seems coffee helps) and then the non 3D requirements. On the boundary of impossible, and still it is happening.

    From the brain perspective the oldest way of doing this: a tribe celebration/ritual with rhythm/music, singing and dancing (and maybe psychoactive drugs) is most effective as this enables all major brain modalities to be flushed with the synchronized resonance wave (movement/motor system, music/hearing system, visual, tactile). But this maybe does not leave much room for individual choice. In this context the fledgeling demon may not have opportunity to grow into a full-fledged scourge. So that others would then have pressure to figure out a way to get rid of the scourge. The musical series by Vivaldi that four seasons is part of- its name is the war between harmony and invention. The human species has had long periods of harmony, but for us, here, now it looks like we are being squeezed for invention.

    Thank you all, Frank, TGU, commentors, for being such an inspiration!

    1. Perhaps you really should write a book, or at least an article, or at least a blog post, on the subject, because what is now plain to you will be terra incognita to those of us who have not studied what you are studying. if you have time to write such a post, I’ll be glad to put it up here.

      1. Thank you Frank- there’s always that time-excuse. And a peculiarity of my own brain: when I see something, it feels so self-evident that it becomes embarrassing to explain. It is so clear that of course everyone already knows it. But I’ll see if I manage to squeeze out something. Thursday is the last exam for this period, so after that. But I will also go back to work and the midsummer family gathering is looming so need to get the house in order. So the conclusion is typically that important things can wait while I keep the doomsday machine wheels rolling.

        1. “when I see something, it feels so self-evident that it becomes embarrassing to explain. It is so clear that of course everyone already knows it.”
          I have always done the same thing. S lowly I am learning to know, as well as believe, that we each have a unique viewpoint which gives us unique insights. Buckminster Fuller said it long ago….

  6. All of this reminds me of the Transcendental Meditations back in the mid-70s. In any city when meditators in large numbers gathered together with a single focus, things happened. I remember that Chicago’s violent crime dropped about 80% during the time and remained lower afterward from what it had been previous to the gathering.

    Then there were the events of Harmonic Convergence,, 11:11, etc. all of which I think are other examples of “ritualistic” activities with the intent of becoming more connected and using the personal power we all have access to. At least this is so in my own experience.

    1. Nancy, funny you to remember the highly popular Transcendental Meditations back then. We did the same in Europe – but never saw “a statistic” about any change sad to say. But in the mid-70s the Scandinavian Countries had a much lower rate in criminality than nowdays(indeed a VERY low rate of the criminality back in the 1970s, at least in Norway but the population only 4 millions). To tell the truth the escalation of “the criminals” in Norway never has been before as high as it is nowadays one way or the other.

      Another funny thing today in me picking a Seth Book out of my book-shelf. Book 2 of The Early sessions(The Seth Material)….And opening up session 44, April 15, 1964.

      Quote:(Jane began dictating in a rather normal voice and at her regular rate, but before long her delivery slowed down again): “Good Evening PLaymates(“good Evening Seth”)
      Seth: I was in fact going to speak about dream locations, in that you definitely experience these locations in your dreams, which take up no room in your space. On one level they could be said not to exist, and yet they do exist. While in your dream, you are able to see and touch and move about these locations. It is only when you awake that they escape you. This should be considered along with our material on the expanding universe, since dream locations represent, certainly, a reality, even a framework that has no existence in your space; and measured purely along the lines used to measure your space, you would receive no hint at all of their existence or reality. Measured purely in terms of your camouflage conceptions, many things which you know to exist would seem not to exist.
      – You cannot deny your own psychological reality, but sometimes it seems as if you would if you could. You cannot feel outwardly, or see or measure, an emotion, and an emotion takes up no space. Emotions still exist. Feelings intensify. In VALUE(underlined) they can be said to expand, yet this very real intensity or value expansion of a feeling takes up no more additional space than it did at its conception.

      Jumping a bit down page 11:
      The MIND(underlined) does NOT(underlined) take up space, and yet the mind is the value that gives power to the brain. The mind expands continually, both in individual terms and in terms of the species as a whole, and yet the mind takes up neither more nor less space, whether it be the mind of a flea or a man.
      – The mind simply does not exist in spatial terms. You have no way of measuring the mind`s expansion, any more than you can measure the expansion of the universe as long as you are thinking in terms of expansion in space. To deny the reality of what does not exist in space would be to deny much of mankind`s own heritage and abilities.

      – Again, the dreamworld exists in a very personal. vivid and valid manner, but the dream world does not take up so many inches or feet or yards or acres. NOW(underlined in the book)we get into something else. If the dream world exists, and it does, and if it does not exist in space, then in what, or where, does it have its existence, and what paths if any will lead us to it?
      Seth – You must understand here that your idea of space is something quite different from the reality of our fifth dimensional space. I want to make this plain again before we continue.”” And ending the quotes.

      Quite funny when to read this right now – because in my Mind, the memory (right now) of The Song from the old “Hippie” Musical “Hair” occured in my mind, the main song titled as “The Fifth Dimension(The Time of Aquarius”) Could not but laugh ! I`ll looking it up on YouTube for the fun of it. ….I was living in Bangok, among the U.S. Troops back in the early 1970s, when The Musical “Hair” became popular. The MUSIC and the songs are good.
      LOl, Inger Lise

  7. Thanks, Inger Lise. Nice to find someone else who was part of that special time.

    I enjoy your extensive knowledge of the Seth material and based on one of your comments sometime ago, I bought “Seth–Dreams and Projection of Consciousness”. I am in the beginning of the book and Seth mentions “mental enzymes”. I have to read more to find an explanation of that term. How do you interpret that in light of the TGU material?

    Nancy

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