PRAYER AS A CHALLENGE

 

Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer for the living and the dead has reinforced the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. Prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living. Prayer follows the scientific view of things by focusing on two broad categories of prayer: petitionary and intercessory. In petitionary prayer, you ask for something for yourself; in intercessory prayer, you pray to a higher power for the good of others (living or dead).

When you pray for others and for yourself, you ask a higher power to bring about a certain outcome. This is what distinguishes prayer from positive thinking. Positive thinking includes nothing more than one's own mind, one's own desires, but petitionary and intercessory prayers are placed in the context of a higher power. For this reason, positive thinking does not fit into the category of prayer, although it is often confused with it.

Whether it be a petitionary or intercessory, prayer clearly challenges the mechanistic view of the world. According to this view, there is no way that thoughts that go on in your head, which create at best small electrochemical disturbances that are barely noticeable a few inches from your head even with a highly sensitive device, can possibly affect someone or something at a remote distance.

The answer to prayer depends on the power and will of God, not on the petitioners. God does not depend on the number of prayers or geographic distances, but answers at different times and in ways that are not always expected by those who pray. The answer to prayer may come in the form of increased ability to cope with sickness and tragedy, not necessarily in acts of miraculous intervention or healing.

If you were practicing positive thinking, or some of the more focused forms of petitionary prayer, you could use telepathic explanations, and if it were a prayer that affects physical objects, you could say it's psycho-kinesis. But such explanations only serve to replace one set of explanations, which lie outside the scope of modern mechanistic science, with another set. There is nothing in mechanistic science that could allow simple thoughts inside your mind, expressed in the form of prayer or positive thinking, to affect things at a distance. It just can't happen.

The key to understanding prayer as a scientific phenomenon requires abandoning the idea that the mind is somehow located inside the brain. If you believe that your mind is limited by your brain, then since what happens in your brain happens in the privacy and isolation of your own skull, no one else can be affected by it. By their very nature, however, minds are seen as fields, and mental fields are seen as the basis for habitual thought patterns. Mental fields go beyond the electromagnetic patterns of the brain and interact with them. Thus, mental fields can affect your body through your brain. However, they are much larger than your brain and, in some cases, extend for great distances.

Once you have the idea that the mind can spread through these mental fields and over great distances, you will have a means of communication through which the power of prayer can work. You are no longer dealing with a purely mechanical system in the brain, with no way to link the brain and the observed effect, for if this were the phenomenon of effective prayer, it would have to be dismissed as a fallacy or a coincidence. However, with the mental field, you have a medium for a range of connections between you and the people, animals, and places you know and care about with the rest of the world. When you pray, these expanded mental fields will be the context in which prayer could work non-locally.

If everything in nature is organized by fields, and if mental fields are a more subtle kind of fields, you don't have a sharp dichotomy - you have fields that operate through fields at all levels of reality. Thus, the problem of mind and body ceases to be a sharp dichotomy. The act of prayer has several benefits that have a positive effect on both the person who is praying and the recipient of the prayers. There is compelling scientific evidence that faith and prayer can help you become healthier physically, mentally, and psychologically.

Successful prayer depends to a large extent on the ability to concentrate - the ability to free the mind from distractions and direct it in one direction to what you want. Just as the scattered rays of the sun can be gathered with a magnifying glass to create an intense burning force, so the subtle yet powerful energy hidden in thoughts, feelings and spoken words may be gathered into a powerful prayer through a specific method of concentration. Vast reserves of mental power may be tapped through concentration, a power that can be used in any outward or inward endeavour to experience one's unchanging relationship with God.

People who pray benefit from a sense of emotional support. Imagine that you carry a backpack hour after hour. It will start to feel incredibly heavy. But if you can hand it to someone else to hold it for a while, it will feel lighter when you pick it up again. This allows you to mentally set aside your burdens for a while and rest. People who turn to God as a partner or collaborator in their lives have had better mental and physical health outcomes, and people who are angry with God feel punished or abandoned, or who shirk responsibility and rely on God to find solutions have worse results. It's like having a loving relationship with your partner.