Distorted Image of Selfhood

In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer craves a particular commodity; anything less than all good is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. The fact that we are surrounded by miracles is not the result of luck or the worship of some exalted human that has been put on a pedestal of faith by humans who want to control and deceive. Prayer is sensing the stream of consciousness that exists in all life and realizing we all make our own reality.

Michelangelo and Da Vinci roamed the centuries and used the prayer of consciousness to connect to the genius within them. Their genius shows us what we are, yet we feel separated and tainted by religious convictions that are tainted with brush stokes of half truths. We live cut in half by the belief in one reality, yet we function in several simultaneously. We rub senses with the God we fear, and we crucify ourselves with the concept of sin. The potential within the prayer lies in our own creativity and if there are nightmares connected to that process we will waken from them as the awareness of the self expands.

We learn from the fear that exists within the prayer, and we begin to push into the self and find dimensions of being that exist, but we believe they are reserved for the God of challenges. From the fear we discover our own divinity, which gives our humanity meaning, and through our own innate compassion we learn to expand in awareness. We begin to understand that prayer gives humanity its meaning. Our soul within the cells continuously forms realities that are rooted in the divinity of our multiplicity.

Prayers exist as patterns in a stream of consciousness that mixes and merges and then separate in order for us to discover that we are a manifestation of our own souls. Just like a group of cells that form an organ in the body, the soul forms a group of selves that experience the miracle of one reality and the pleasure of functioning in other realities, which we choose not to focus on in this particular and distorted image of selfhood.