Lifeletter #172: Praying & Shopping

What now appears as the paradoxes of quantum theory will now seem just as common sense to our children’s children.
-Stephen Hawking, British theoretical physicist

“What does shopping have to do with praying?” you might ask. It’s a good question. My answer is that prayer is connected with everything. It’s not this esoteric, very holy practice that’s reserved for special, sacred occasions. Oh no. Prayer is for the dark and messy places, and for the mundane ones as well.

I’m coming out of the closet about prayer. I got discouraged a few years ago, after suggesting the possibility of prayer to some of my clients. They looked at me and winced, as if I was encouraging them to start bowing down to a patriarchal God who wasn’t very friendly. We have lots of strange, archaic associations tied up with the word ‘prayer.’ Let’s begin to untangle the word from the actual thing.

I was shopping the other day, in a mall, for some friends of mine in Nelson. I believe there is a shopping gene. If you have the gene, you are good at shopping and you like it. Sometimes the gene skips a generation–both my mother and daughter can shop. I, however, suck at shopping. Especially in malls. The sterility of a mall seems to shut down major centres in my brain. I wander around aimlessly, losing energy, getting lost, and feeling depressed, feeling sad, for all the salespeople who are stuck there all day, selling things to people who don’t really need them. I want to run out screaming from the mall, and make deep contact with another human being, immediately.

I discovered that prayer could help me when I shop about seven years ago. It took all the pain out of shopping for me. I begin by focusing on the person whose gift I need to find. I tune right into this person, with love. It feels like I am reaching out to them, with a long energetic hand. Then I stay focused on them; I keep repeating their name to myself. At the same time, I ask the field of greater intelligence to take me to their gift. I know it sounds very ‘woo-woo.’ The truth is, I am just not a woo-woo person. I tend to toward the cynical side, on the woo-woo scale. I pray like this because it works, every time. Sooner or later, usually sooner, I am led to where I find a great gift for them.

The essential question here is about the field. What is this field of greater intelligence? That’s a big question, and it’s one where science and mysticism are finally coming together. It seems clear to me that there is a vast intelligence moving through this universe. The quantum physicists sometimes describe it as an invisible field of infinite possibility. It also seems obvious that what I know through my mind and senses is extremely limited, in relation to this greater intelligence. I can’t see this field, or taste it, or touch it. Does that really mean it’s not there?

If you haven’t considered this possibility before, maybe now is the time. Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man. (Albert Einstein)

We can learn how to listen to this spirit, this intelligence–it doesn’t matter what you call it.  And we can learn how to follow the guidance we receive. It’s a practice, and it allows us to actually begin to trust in life, to relax into a much bigger sense of what is possible. At this point in our evolution, we might be growing in this direction, into a recognition the life is infinitely more complex, beautiful and mysterious than our minds have ever imagined it to be. I like to lean in the direction of this vision, even though I don’t know for sure if it’s true. I know that there are more and more people opening to the realities of what lies beyond their mind and senses. Thousands of amazing, inexplicable, and even supernatural events occur every day. And yet most are unreported by the media. The few that are cited are ridiculed. (Rob Brezsny)

Information is coming in, from all directions, to support this new way of understanding, of living, of relating to reality. Have a look around you. Things are changing very quickly. One of my teachers used to ask us, “If you have received all of this new information, why do you still believe in the world that your mother told you was real?”

That old world is based on the principle of separation, of fear, of competition, of scarcity. What have we got to lose by considering deeply that another reality might be much closer to the truth? And that we could align ourselves with that?

how fortunate are you and i,
whose home
is timelessness:
we who have wandered down
from fragrant mountains of eternal now
…
to frolic in such mysteries as birth
and death a day (or maybe even less)
ee cummings

with love,
Shayla

 

photo credit: Oleg Oprisco, http://www.oprisco.com