A PRAYER TO THE "ALL"
Adam Blatner

May 3, 2010

On the occasion of the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer—this year, 2010, it is on May 6—, it occurred to me to have a go at it. It’s a bit tricky, because I’m not affiliated with any religion that has its own traditional prayers, and I don’t find in their prayers what I really want to say. What is prayer, anyway? It seems to be an affirmation of thoughts, a willed turning of the mind towards our highest values and images, and channeling these through our left brain language system and from there through our mouth—or in this case, fingertips and keyboard. Well, why not try? So, here it is, posted on my website. I invite you to play with me and give me feedback. If I like what you write, may I have your permission to say, "On the other hand, (your name) suggested. . . " and  insert what you say?
 
So, an improvised prayer on the occasion of a National Day of Prayer, an essay to express my relationship with what I’ve called “the Greater Wholeness of Being”— and in the spirit of what Buber called an I-Thou “encounter,” I will address this as if I’m writing directly to the Cosmic Becoming of which we get to be a part, as if I could address that everything-ness as “Thou” or even “You.”   (In response, I imagine your saying, “Sure, have a go at it.”)

To begin with, I want to acknowledge that I recognize that this effort must of necessity be perhaps somewhat feeble, because our human minds are yet immature, our species having been evolving as a recognizable species for a mere hundred thousand years. I imagine there may be some sentient beings in the universe of billions of galaxies who have managed to develop over ten or a hundred times that length of time, and are correspondingly wiser and more sensitive. I realize my tiny human mind can hardly begin to relate to your greatness. I imagine your saying, “Okay, well, have a go anyway, because reflection is a deepening of sentience, and sentience is something I cultivate in my cosmos as much as multi-cellularity or diversity.”

So here goes: Ahem.  Oh, multi-dimensional becomingness of the trans-cosmic everything-ness!  (Is it okay if I forego the capital letters when I refer to you?) (“Sure, go ahead.”) Well, in the spirit of the Muslim idea of the ninety-nine attributes or names of Allah, I find myself attracted to focusing briefly my attention on attributes I can discern that are worthy of worship or prayer.

First, there’s the inclusiveness: You’re the all that we’re a part of.

Second, there’s the lure: You’re the future, and optimal potential and qualities we want to aspire towards.

Third, there’s the danger. We may survive our folly, but we won’t escape the consequences of our collective action. If we don’t watch out we may end up where we’re headed. Alas, the sheer momentum of lower consciousness may outweigh the feeble efforts to raise ourselves from our present average, and our present average level may not suffice.

Fourth, this prayer is an affirmation to do what I can to help, to serve the highest goals as I envision them to be.

I’m going to stop numbering, though—it interferes with the contemplation that is going on here, brought into expression. But I will affirm and remind myself that prayer is a kind of bringing that which is not clear in the mind and heart into sufficient clarity so that it can be expressed. In so doing, there’s also a willingness to affirm what is being said, and to have it heard.

The activity of praying for me invites a contemplation of the biggest picture or concept that I can imagine: At this point in human evolution, that is the idea of multi-dimensionality. I don’t just mean spatial dimensions, though I know some mathematicians and esoteric thinkers have been exploring that kind of mind-stretching. For me, though, these dimensions are sort of equivalent to facets of reality.

Music, for example, continues to invite our minds into greater experiences of complexity, dancing integration and differentiation, and other polarities of creativity: Novelty and same-ness, simplicity and complexity; and other dualities. The idea for me is that through our minds you and we (as part of you) are also exploring and playing, and to play on.

Play is another aspect of your multi-dimensionality. In the bruising violence of so much of the world and its desperate sufferings, the idea of play may to some seem frivolous. I envision your play, though, in the sense of exploration and room for experimentation, making mistakes, taking it over, probing, adventure, and as a necessary component of evolution. In this part of the prayer, I acknowledge the organic nature of your development, our development, in contrast to the popular notion that you see clearly just what needs to be done and you decide to do it by sheer will mixed with omniscence. My prayer to you is that you’re far more glorious than that idealized anthropomorphism. You don’t see where it’s going because it’s all too complex and full of potential. The recent scientific and mathematical discoveries of some of the facets of chaos and complexity theory open too many doors. It may be presumptuous and actually diminishing of your glory to imagine your creative process as being too simple.
    I wonder at the development of the embryo, a magnificent process that yet has no clear inner decision maker. The entelechy of the embryonic cells seem to operate according to rules that are only dimly appreciated by biologists, but the awe-inspiring complexity is such that it’s a wonder that in most cases organisms can form and survive! There’s just so many things that can theoretically go wrong and yet don’t! What’s that about!

I praise the luxury of those abilities to experience awe, wonder, curiosity, contemplations of beauty, and mixtures of these sentiments. I also praise the freedom and comfort to let go of efforts to understand and to surrender instead to just being, being comforted, held, trusting. I enjoy what for us is heroic efforts to expand and also the permission to relax when it gets a bit much for our tiny minds.

On this day of prayer, I count my blessings, personally and cosmically. Personally, so many fortunate elements have converged in my life, so that I have achieved a state of elderhood that still is infused with the best sparkly elements of child-likeness—or as I have come to prefer to call these qualities, “vitality.” I express thanks for my networks of family and friends, my opportunities to participate in wholesome recreations, for the wealth of secure and pleasant circumstances.

Hey, reading about the fine-tuning of the universe, and of the nature of the earth so that it sustains more complex forms of life, I’m thankful to be a product of all this fine-tuning and want to do my part to help move it towards what Teilhard called the Omega. (Only I don’t see it as a convergence but a continual blossoming of divergence, yet an integrated divergence! And I see consciousness and integration of consciousness as the flowering of life, the movement from biological existence into aesthetic potentiality, from matter into mind. Said another way, the biosphere evolves into the noosphere which in turn evolves into the theosphere.)

I’m thankful and confident that, however limited my mind’s abilities are, that I’m working in the generally right direction, helping to move the evolution of consciousness towards greater complexity, enhancing its vision, at times extending into poetry, working on the emotional infrastructure that will help people enjoy and trust and work together more effectively.

I’m thankful for the good fortune of finding my dharma, my life path and work, and feeling that it’s good. I’m especially thankful for the many supports your angels have given me in my life, beginning especially with my spiritual path traveling buddy, Allee.

Like a child at prayer, I ask you to bless them, or in some other linguistic format, affirm my desire for good fortune and Grace to flow towards them as it has towards me—and maybe for them to be able to recognize this flow of Grace, inspiration, solace, and other good stuff.

Now to name my blessings: Allee at the top, in a hundred ways. That’s already another prayer of thanks.

My good, wonderful kids and their blossoming into the world with their good, wonderful family, and my gratitude for their wholesome becoming and my good fortune that they love us, too.

My various clubs and the underlying affirmation of communion in play, in dancing, in singing, in making a joyful noise. Our philosophy and psychology clubs, our fitness clubs, and other endeavors all speak to the sheer multi-dimensionality of your being: There’s giving and receiving, rejoicing and contemplating, giving thanks and affirming loyalty. We plug into our national ideas in pledges of allegiance to our flag, and sing patriotic songs. Thanks and thanks and thanks again.

Gratitudinism as an act of prayer, alignment, a component of cheerful-ing, a component of wisdom, and glimpses again of the depth of this truth. It is so easy to drop away, to give in to brief temptations to complain, to be grumpy, to feel victimized, bewildered, “why me?” self-pity, to see the glass half empty, and to forget that such temptations are folly. At the moment they can seem so seductive and plausible. In this prayer, I call on the forces of Grace—i.e., you as the Source of angelic energy—to help me resist those temptations.

Oddly enough, I’ve come to appreciate even the temptations as residues of childhood, and in reflecting on my development I occasionally recognize something in need of further redemption: There are soft and sweet elements buried with qualities I’ve turned away from, relinquished.

I’ve given up being incontinent in my excretory functions—but glimpse a future in which I may have to come to terms again with limitations in self-control. I praise with thanks the opportunity to prepare myself for a more philosophical attitude towards my own decline.

This is a funny prayer, and I praise my taste and your taste for the funny, the ironic, the paradoxical, the mysterious, the many interacting perspectives that flip surprisingly. I can discern a kind of Grace that comes with the capacity to laugh at ourselves. (I’m reminded of the line, Humans are the only animals that get embarrassed, or perhaps should be; and a corollary, humans are the only animals that laugh at themselves, and need to.)

Oh, there are so many things to celebrate, so many things that I find interesting—and the ability to be interested is itself worthy of thanks! (I also glimpse the funny awareness that there are thousands of other things that I don’t find interesting but other people do, the limitations of my mind and body, and the surrender into this variety of ways of being human as being as marvelous as any set of sunsets.)

I’ll close this prayer, knowing that it won’t be that hard, now, to come up with another one. It’s an exercise to sharpen my contemplation and to channel my gratitude. There’s also the call to others, through outward expression, to join in the activities, the components of prayer.

It’s been a bit difficult, too, trying to work with the form of prayer, because there are so many encrustations of traditions, and most of the contents of previous prayers have contained elements that for many reasons that go beyond the work here I find repellent—if for nothing else their sheer irrelevance, their obsolescence, triviality, and at times implicit advocacy of values and perspectives that seem to particularized, ethnocentric, egocentric, and in other ways limited. Can we nevertheless use the form, as if it were a poetic form, to do the opposite? Can we dare create new ways to reach our minds and words towards what we feel to be most relevant, drawing on what is most current and even anticipated, advocating our highest values and recognizing that our values themselves evolve along with our consciousness. ?  Sure!  It’s just a bit of a challenge, daring to try to think past the weight of past traditions.

What occurs to me as a writer is that this is also a kind of communication, not just to God, but also to you to join me. And by joining me, I don’t ask that you agree or use the same words, but rather I invite you to play with me in this general direction. I’m interested in how you’d play this game: How can we optimally, creatively, express our highest aspirations, appreciations, and sense of relationship with the Greater Wholeness of Becoming? I don’t require that you imagine any particular kind of God or Allness, either with or beyond form. It’s more the general idea, like trying to fit images into some poetic format. It’s a game. The benefit for me is that you might give me some new ideas, “memes,” images, metaphors, perspectives, that I hadn’t previously considered.

In summary, I envision a turn of the cosmos increasingly towards having its sentient centers, human minds on this planet, maybe not-so-human but still sentient and perhaps intelligent, maybe more intelligent, and perhaps wiser, more loving, and more responsible minds on other plants—and then there’s you and me—all exchanging non-trivial affirmations of what we care about, what we aspire to. And I think this fits with another vision I have, that of part of God as a trans-dimensional, multi-cosmic Embryo, and that we are cells in its brain, groping to connect with other nerve cells and helping this Universe to Awaken, be Born more Consciously in our three-dimensional manifestation. I don’t know, it seems as if it would be very fine indeed.

Feedback?  Email to me at adam@blatner.com