The Lost Mode of Prayer (I)

I am sitting here in MidValley by the gardened boulevard with a delectable mocha and I am reading a book that is reviving my spirit.  I just have to share this pieces of this wisdom:

On this day, we found ourselves in some of the most remote, isolated, magnificent, and sacred places of knowledge remaining on Earth today: the monasteries of the Tibetan plateau....

I focused my attention directly into the eyes of the beautiful and timeless-looking man seated lotus-style in front of me: the abbot of the monastery. Through our translator, I'd just asked him the same question that I'd asked each monk and nun that I'd met throughout my pilgrimage: "When we see your prayers," I began, "what are you doing? When we see you tone and chant for 14 and 16 hours a day, when we see the bells, the bowls, the gongs ,the chimes, the mudras, and the mantras on the outside, what is happening to you on the inside?"

As the translator shared the abbot's reply, a powerful sensation rippled through my body, and I knew that this was the reason we'd come to this place.  "You have never seen our prayers," he answered, "because a prayer cannot be seen."  Adjusting the heavy wool robe beneath his feet, the abbot continued.  "What you have seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies.  Feeling is the prayer!"

The clarity of the abbot's answer sent me reeling.  His words echoed the ideas that had been recorded in ancient Gnostic and Christian traditions more than 2,000 years ago.  In early translations of the biblical book of John (chapter 16, verse 24, for example), we're invited to empower our prayers by being surrounded by [feeling] our desires fulfilled, just as the abbot suggested: "Ask without hidden motive and be surrounded by your answer."  For our prayers to be answered, we must transcend the doubt that often accompanies the positive nature of our desire.  Following a brief teaching on the power of overcoming such polarities, the words of Jesus recorded in the Nag Hammadi Library remind us that when we do this, and say to the mountain, "'Mountain move away,' it will move away."

 - Gregg Braden