This article
was written by Theosophist Victor Endersby.
Mrs. Bailey
makes a huge thing of that nursery school "Invocation." It is evident
that "prayer" is a major heritage of her childhood conditioning.
Well, let us look at this. H.P. Blavatsky's Key
to Theosophy says:
«
IS IT NECESSARY TO PRAY?
Enq. Do you
believe in prayer, and do you ever pray?
Theo. We do
not. We act,
instead of talking.
Enq. You do not
offer prayers even to the Absolute Principle?
Theo. Why
should we? Being well-occupied people, we can hardly afford to lose time in
addressing verbal prayers to a pure abstraction. The Unknowable is capable of
relations only in its parts to each other, but is non-existent as regards any
finite relations. The visible universe depends for its existence and phenomena
on its mutually acting forms and their laws, not on prayer or prayers.
Enq. Do you not
believe at all in the efficacy of prayer?
Theo. Not in
prayer taught in so many words and repeated externally, if by prayer you mean
the outward petition to an unknown God as the addressee, which was inaugurated
by the Jews and popularised by the Pharisees.
Enq. Is there
any other kind of prayer?
Theo. Most
decidedly; we call it WILL-PRAYER, and it is rather an internal command than a
petition.
Enq. To whom,
then, do you pray
when you do so?
Theo. To
"our Father in heaven" — in its esoteric meaning.
Enq. Is that
different from the one given to it in theology?
Theo. Entirely
so. An Occultist or a Theosophist addresses his prayer to his Father which is in secret
(read, and try to understand, ch. vi. v. 6, Matthew), not to an extra-cosmic
and therefore finite God; and that "Father" is in man himself.
Enq. Then you
make of man a God?
Theo. Please
say "God" and not a
God. In our sense, the inner man is the only God we can have cognizance of. And
how can this be otherwise? Grant us our postulate that God is a universally
diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked
through by, and in, the Deity?
We call our
"Father in heaven" that deific essence of which we are cognizant
within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to
do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain
or its fancy: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the
spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?"
Yet, let no man
anthropomorphise that essence in us. Let no Theosophist, if he would hold to
divine, not human truth, say that this "God in secret" listens to, or
is distinct from, either finite man or the infinite essence — for all are one.
Nor, as just remarked, that a prayer is a petition. It is a mystery rather; an
occult process by which finite and conditioned thoughts and desires, unable to
be assimilated by the absolute spirit which is unconditioned, are translated
into spiritual wills and the will; such process being called "spiritual
transmutation."
The intensity
of our ardent aspirations changes prayer into the "philosopher's
stone," or that which transmutes lead into pure gold. The only homogeneous
essence, our "will-prayer" becomes the active or creative force,
producing effects according to our desire.
Enq. Do you
mean to say that prayer is an occult process bringing about physical results?
Theo. I do. Will-Power
becomes a living power. But woe unto those Occultists and Theosophists, who,
instead of crushing out the desires of the lower personal ego or physical man, and
saying, addressing their Higher
Spiritual EGO immersed in Atma-Buddhic light, "Thy will be done, not
mine," etc., send up waves of will-power for selfish or unholy purposes!
For this is black
magic, abomination, and spiritual sorcery. Unfortunately, all this is the
favourite occupation of our Christian statesmen and generals, especially when
the latter are sending two armies to murder each other. Both indulge before
action in a bit of such sorcery, by offering respectively prayers to the same
God of Hosts, each entreating his help to cut its enemies' throats. »
(Section V,
p.66-69)
Prayer in any other sense than the aspiration of the
personal self for union with its higher, inner self of necessity creates
separateness from that to which the prayer is addressed. It is something from
and to, and these words apply only to separate entities.
What the habit of prayer does, therefore is to set up
and continually reinforce the mental concept of something external and
imaginary, and to block off all possible integration of the personality with
its inner self. Since the personality as such is non-viable, perishable except
in such union, the tendency is toward ultimate oblivion.
Meantime the habit also produces a vitiating weakness
and dependency. People boast of "strength through prayer." Such
strength is no more the man's own strength than is the uplift of whiskey an
attribute of the drunkard's own will.
Should the prayerful man lose his faith he becomes a shattered wreck.
Where then was any power of his own?
Why should men be proud of being automata; empty
shells filled with an outside force, alien and unearned?
Islam forbids images of Deity and for good reason. The
great struggle of man is to escape the illusionary world of form, into the
arupa planes of reality and conscious union with universal spirit. Escape is
impossible for a mind clogged by the idea that the Ultimate itself has form,
body, parts, attributes and hence limitations. Graven images are no worse than
mental images, perhaps not as bad.
Moreover, the existence of such images in the mind
form focal points of attraction for certain forms of life, the "Star
Rishis","Rupa Devas", or "Mirror Devas" as they are
variously called.
The last term is due to their capacity to assume, in
the psychic field of perception, the mirrored subconscious images in the minds
of worshipers, and reflect back as from the exterior these images, whether
visual or verbal. Hence the visions of saints and angels and Christs - and
"Djwual Khuls".
Of all this the Mahatma said, in the "Prayag
Message":
« They [Messrs Sinnett and Hume] may have had influences
around them, bad magnetic emanations the result of drink, Society and
promiscuous physical associations (resulting even from shaking hands with
impure men) but all this is physical and material impediments which with a
little effort we could counteract or even clear away without much detriment to
ourselves.
Not so with the
magnetism and invisible results proceeding from erroneous and sincere beliefs.
Faith in the Gods and God, and other superstitions attracts millions of foreign
influences, living entities and powerful agents around them, with which we
would have to use more than ordinary exercise of power to drive them away.
We do not
choose to do so. We do not find it either necessary or profitable to lose our
time waging war to the unprogressed Planetaries
who delight in personating gods and sometimes well known characters who have lived
on earth. »
(ML 134, p.462)
Elsewhere H.P.B. said "Those who fall off from
our living human Mahatmas into the path of the Star Rishis are NO THEOSOPHISTS.
(Theosophical
Notes, September 1963, p.43-45)
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