Praying with Mystical Love
Spiritual Transmission in Integral Prayer
Part One
Prayer may be one of the oldest and venerable traditions in all of humanity. Long before written history, humans were praying to the divine for help, guidance, and a change in the present circumstances in their lives.
But what does prayer look like for Christians today? As our views of God evolve, do we still feel comfortable asking for help and talking to God? Some are confused or maybe even embarrassed about what they find themselves uttering below their breath in prayer—or maybe they’ve given all that up as childish or mythical.
In this series on transmission, I’ll be looking at how our prayer transforms when it is infused with the mystical love and spiritual energy of the embodied presence of God within us, beside us, and beyond us. Especially in community!
It’s Still OK to Talk to God in Traditional Prayer
This is the transformative experience of prayer we might have when we integrate the best of the prayer forms that we have and bring them into integral prayer and beyond.
Interestingly, Jesus was for talking to God — and also against it. It just depended on how you went about it. Praying with words is based on the way Jesus often prayed and told us that we could pray that way, too. Traditional verbal praying today is often centered on making requests to God. It comes in all kinds of forms.
In a church, it can sound like the emotion-filled prayer of an African American pastor, the liturgy of a Greek Orthodox congregation, a priest officiating at the Roman Catholic Mass, or any other up-front, “performative” prayers. It may be someone praying the Rosary or a person in their devotions at home. Perhaps it is soldiers praying before they go on a dangerous mission. For many, it began in childhood at bedtime prayers.
Most people learn verbal praying by hearing church leaders in worship services or recited prayers from their traditions such as the Lord’s Prayer, or the prayers said in the Mass. Its various forms have been meaningful to many people down through the centuries. However, it has its limitations.
Talking to God Has Its Limitations
The lovely man I am honored to call my friend, Richard Rohr, has half of million people around the world who read and follow his Christ-centered teachings. Rather than me critiquing traditional prayer, I’m going to take the easy way out and let him do it in his insightful way. Here is his critique of traditional prayer:
“Jesus warns us about this verbal prayer when he says, “Why do you babble on like the pagans do? God already knows what you need” (Matthew 6:7).
“He also warns us against telling God what God already knows better than we do, (6:9), and I must say many times the formal prayers of the faithful at a Catholic Mass sound more like announcements than actual prayer, especially given the fact that they are done in the third person and not addressed actively as if God is in the room, which would lead us to pray in the second person. (You have to go to Pentecostal or black churches to hear that!)
And in that same Gospel, Jesus even warns us against too much public prayer since it has too many social payoffs. We must be honest and admit that we have not followed Jesus’s basic advice on prayer, and, in fact, often directly disobeyed it.”
Verbal prayer can focus on saying the right words rather than savoring God’s presence.
So many evolving Christians find themselves swinging to the other end of the spectrum—not talking at all. Often drawing upon forms from monasticism, Christian and otherwise, many have turned to meditation and mindfulness practices that serve as a sort of replacement or “better” form of prayer.
Meditation Is Not Talking to God
While we do not see Jesus directly practicing or offering the prayer of silence, we can easily assume that he did not spend a whole night in pray by talking to God, but also waited in sacred silence. Marcus Borg, one of my favorite Jesus scholars, believes Jesus learned the mystics’ way of prayer from the many travelers of many traditions from far-off places that made their way to the hub trade city of Sepphoris. Sepphoris was less than four miles from Nazareth and was undoubtedly where Jesus and his brothers went to ply their construction skills.
Father Keating, the spiritual giant who taught the Centering Prayer method of silent prayer, said, “The centering-prayer method is simple: Find a quiet place to pray alone. Sit in silence with the intention of being in God’s presence. When you become aware of any thoughts or feelings, turn away from them and focus on a “sacred word” of your choosing. Let go of every kind of thought during prayer, even the most devout thoughts.” He famously said, “If Mary appears to you, tell her you are busy.”
The popularity of Centering Prayer and other meditation practices can partly be seen as a reaction against the lack of spiritual depth of much traditional prayer. Centering Prayer has the potential to move people into deeper states of formless or causal consciousness where there is only enough of you to notice the formless emptiness. This usually occurs only after much practice for many years.
Not Talking to God Has Its Limitations
Another reason for the popularity of meditation techniques, beyond the embarrassment some feel when still praying to God, is the mental relief from all the noise and hyper-activity of the mind in this day and age.
However, many versions of meditation seek to use the mind to clear the mind. That can be like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop. It takes a pretty foxy person to pull it off.
Almost all forms of traditional meditation, Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian in their originating form, come from the deeply patriarchal culture of previous eras. Christian versions come from the even more patriarchal culture of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church. And in particular, from the predominately male-only monastery setting where Christian meditative prayer originated. So you have three layers of patriarchal, excessively masculine-oriented values which are unbalanced by more feminine emotional and relational values. Focusing on the mind is a more masculine approach. This outweighs other centers of spiritual knowing.
According to author and teacher, Robert Masters, spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality. Lopsided development, such as cognitive intelligence, is often far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence and is a form of spiritual bypassing in religion. It is detached from the body and can result in a spirituality that suppresses emotion, denying a vital aspect of humanity an integrated place in spiritual practice.
If we focus solely on meditative techniques that require strict adherence to silence, emptiness, and mind-centered techniques, we reject a Trinitarian second-person relational connection to God as Other while practicing it. We also dismisses noticing the presence of others physically present in the collective spiritual energy field. This results in a solitary practice that is individually focused.
At ICN we have included the beauty and strength of contemplative prayer in our Whole-Body Mystical Wakening group practice. However, we come to the still mind after engaging our heart, feet, and gut/spiritual womb as well as the presence of others both spiritual and physically present. From this grounded and embodied place, we find that many can effortlessly encounter a still mind. We are finding Centering Prayer groups now using WBMA first and then moving to Centering Prayer. This is an exquisite, collective, integral approach.
Integral Prayer integrates talking to God, not talking to God, and transmission
Jesus practiced the transmission of healing and awakening spiritual energy. He radiated healing energy to others. When a woman touched his cloak and was healed, he said, “I know that power has gone out from me” (Luke 8:46). We get the word “dynamite” from the Greek word dynamin for power here. And then we see the dramatic transmission of spirit-breath-awakening from Jesus to his friends as he “breathed” on them (John 20:22) and later at Pentecost. Paul and Peter continued this transmission of spiritual energy with new believers as recorded in Acts. At ICN we follow this model of transmission as a vital part of Integral Prayer.
What is Integral Prayer?
Perhaps the least familiar component of Integral Christian Network WeSpace groups is integral prayer and transmission. Near the end of our foundational Whole-Body Mystical Awakening practice in our WeSpace groups, we focus on each person, one at a time. We send them loving spiritual energy (dynamin) and share any images, words, sensations, impressions, or intuitions for them that emerge from within us while in deeper, non-ordinary consciousness. This is an integrated prayer practice that we learn over time, together with the others in our group, in a container of love and safety. It is a way we actively welcome the transmission element into our prayer lives in ways that many other prayer and meditative practices do not.
Ken Wilber writes, “This transmission process is not as far out as it sounds. Human beings, in general, are always transmitting their fundamental energetic state. If you are around somebody who is joyously happy, you tend to feel that happiness, too. If they are radiating a deep peace, you’ll tend to feel that. Likewise, if you are around somebody who is profoundly depressed, you will tend to feel sad as well. As you grow and develop in the path of Waking Up, and you attain higher and higher states of consciousness, you will to some degree transmit those states, and the people around you will notice them.”
You and Transmission
Beyond this common, unintentional transmission, there is a powerful way of becoming an intentional transmitter and a catalytic person. People tend to think of it taking years of practice to experience transmission in a subtle awakened or casual transcendent state of consciousness. But with transmission, depending on the circumstances, one can enter it in a few seconds. A person who is consciously immersed in and merged with God can prepare others so that they become vehicles, or conduits, for their own transmissions. Heart-based WeSpace groups are especially conducive to inviting the transmission of spiritually awakened higher consciousness.
Transmission occurs when the expanded mystical consciousness of one person intentionally acts as what appears to be a channel—via their heart, head, gut, and feet energy fields—to another person’s energy fields. This is facilitated by the recipient’s preparation and openness. From the outside, it looks like something from Point A was transmitted to Point B.
From the inside, it may be more accurately described as a person (or a group) serving as a catalyst for moving others from one state of consciousness to a more expanded one. I call this the “catalytic effect” of directed spirit-breath-consciousness. A spiritual catalyst is a person who speeds up the spiritual process in others without themselves losing anything of intrinsic value in the process. The act of transmitting can even increase the consciousness capacity of the transmitter as well!
We are always immersed in and merged with God as divine beings on a human journey, but our awareness and attention are so often on other things. We go through life without sensing and feeling the ocean we are swimming in, which is not only all around us but in us, too. The awakened spiritual catalytic presence of others can wake us up to that transforming reality!
Transmission will flow in your life when you decide to become an intentional channel for it. You can change your thinking from “what can this blog, book, teaching, teacher, and transmission do for me?” to “how can I become a channel for the transmission of spirit-breath-awakened consciousness?”
Mona Lisa Nyman, wheelchair-bound author with cerebral palsy, says, “You may not be able to change the entire world, but you can release your love, and watch its vibrant color paint the world around with kindness and patience, and watch your little part of it change for the better.”
We find that Integral Prayer is an elegant way to do this. The next three articles can help you learn to send love to yourself, your friends, and the whole world.