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Monday, January 23, 2006

Power vs. Prayer


prayer
Originally uploaded by ALifeAllah.
Peace

Notice that the title isn't the 'power of prayer'. In actuality, it shouldn't be 'vs.' Prayer is asking, imploring, "entreating", an invisible astral being to change one's life's circumstances (whether they be physical, mental, or emotional). Power is the ability to make matter move. ALLAH stated that he manifests his Power through the Truth. One is dealing with illusion. The other is dealing with reality.

The word prayer is rooted in basically 'begging' also which can be inferred from the fact that many of the postures of prayer are of deference i.e. on the knees, head bowed, etc. Some state that prayer is just another word for meditation or that they pray to their self. Prayer and meditation are not synonymous. Meditation is stilling the random chatter in the brain to optimize focus, cognitive functions and physical functions. In terms of 'praying to oneself' that just sounds like schizophrenia to me.

I am aware that my family and I don’t live in a 'culture bubble'. We do not wrap ourselves in 'saran wrap' and 'hope' that our values won't become 'infected.' What happens is that we take hold of our Culture as a means to interact with the world at large and put those values on front street as a means of transforming the world. Thus we orient people to our way of life, customs and traditions. The teachers at the school know that it is the norm for my son to refer to me as God; they know that when he talks about the Earth he may be talking about his mother, and they know about our dietary law basically straight from I-Victory (" I don't eat pork and shrimp because they eat garbage and doo doo"). Yet when faced with unalike ideas that we do not want to 'infect' our Culture we have to address them and deal with them.

We've had to 'kill santa' because though that mystery god stuff doesn't fly in our home our son goes to public school, and is amongst the 85% of his family and friends. Once the concept of WHERE presents come from is understood then it's all pork-free gravy. This year the challenge was realizing that certain family members over the vacation taught him to 'pray' (needless to say myself and the Queen were both heated). In no limit of time though we injected him with that mental prescription.

We broke down the beginning of the 'lord's prayer': Our Father who art in heaven. Heaven is the sky to young I-Victory so we explored how heaven is also the most elevated part of his physical body, his brain. I then asked him who his father was and he pointed to me. I then asked him what was up in the sky. His answer to that statement was," the sun, moon and stars." That is keeping it simple.

We then asked him what he was praying for. Did he pray to clean up his room? Did he pray to turn out his lights? Did he pray for food? After he answered no to all of the above we introduced him to how prayer is just a place marker for one's own POWER i.e. to make matter move. It is also a place marker for Wisdom and Building.

Many religious peoples of the book (Jewish, Christians, Muslims) have prohibitions against worshiping idols. In my household we have a prohibition against being IDLE. Don’t ask another person for that which you can do yourself. If there is something that he cannot do then I teach him that God is here IN THE FLESH to assist him. Also he can ask the Earth to bring forth also as his mother is who he came through to manifest himself in the flesh in this world.


Peace

1 comment:

Unknown said...

there is a book by Jeremiah Camara called "Holy Lockdown" that talks about that...