The ancients knew that our success or failure to live in ubiquitous love is directly manifest in reality. To me, it seems that the secret to ancient prayer was the spirited, unified, unshakable faith in the boundless power of Love and Goodness. For our age, it may be useful to understand the teaching that there is a judicious, all-knowing God as a mechanism for keeping this belief as potent and unfailing as possible.
For our modern times, this ancient Faith-mechanism appears to many as outmoded-that is to say, it is generally not successful unless you were born into the coded-rhetoric of metaphors that for millennia has been used to foster understanding. Even when born into and raised amongst the rhetoric, the paramount need for absolute, ubiquitous love in all our actions, thoughts, and feelings-the potent, certain, unshakable Faith that “this is how I, as a person of will, must live” may not be clearly cemented in our lives as unconditionally vital.
On the merit of 2,565 years of being treasured as written wisdom, I present the following words once spoken by a revered king to his God:
“When famine or plague comes to the land, or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers, or when an enemy besieges them in any of their cities, whenever disaster or disease may come, and when a prayer or plea is made by anyone… being aware of the afflictions of their own hearts…then hear…. Forgive and act.”
To paraphrase, the king has basically told his God: Hey, when there’s some kind of problem in the world and the people come to you and pray, then hear, forgive, and act. He says specifically, “affliction:” when anybody prays being aware of the afflictions in their own hearts…. Affliction is pain or the absence of love, so in this passage, on a mechanistic level, God is the connection of the spirit in people’s hearts to external things like plagues or war. This passage says that if people are aware of their own hearts (i.e. the depth to which love permeates their every thought and action), external reality is directly impacted.
How is external reality impacted? The king tells us. He says to his people: pray being aware of your affliction, and our God will hear, forgive, and act. In other words, a loving, nurturing reality is present on Earth when these steps happen:
1. we identify our suffering; the king calls this: pray and God hears
2. we change our ways to live in love; the king calls this God forgiving
3. things go from bad to good; the king calls this God acting
Here in this ancient wisdom, we see the concept of God being employed as a mechanism to reveal the potent connection between spirit-will-intention and manifest reality. In other words, we see the imperative need for love in all things because our Spirt and our Will creates the reality we have named Life on Earth.
For our modern world, many miss this wisdom because the metaphors used by ancients have become inadequate, as knowledge is typically revered only when conveyed through pragmatic, direct language.
For those persons in agreement with the need for ubiquitous love, but unsure of how to help actualize its manifestation on Earth, I can advise the following practical steps:
Find time to reflect upon your behavior throughout the day or week and ask yourself if you have done the most loving things possible. A moment in which you experience an unpleasant feeling is normally a good indicator that love was somehow amiss.
Grapple with understanding, and try to pinpoint the precise thing in your behavior that fell short of love. Avoid justifying your behavior. Instead, identify what you could have done that would have been more closely aligned with love.
Keep this insight with you, and watch out for repeat occurrences. Should a similar situation arise, check your behavior and instead of proceeding as you had in the past, apply the knowledge you gained from your reflections.
For many, this process is excruciatingly painful, as it forces us to abandon pride. Pride, I believe, is one of the ways we protect ourselves from the unbearable and wretched pain that is felt when we honestly recognize that there is or was an absence of love. For those who endeavor to struggle through this process, as I now am, there is a lot of literature and support in the world. Just seek it out, and it’ll be there.
I hope most of my friends-and even people I haven’t met-can agree to the central need for love on this Earth, which as evidenced by the physical state of our environment, our planet, and the suffering amongst animals and people alike, is potently manifest. I hope the practical steps I have offered, despite the pain they promise, are employed in an honest quest for the attainment of ubiquitous, omnipresent love as a guiding force in all.
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Thank you for listening.