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THE PRAYER ACCORDING TO ALICE BAILEY AND THEOSOPHY





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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