Perpetual living prayer within Being

Cosmological Ruminations, part 4: an organ of prayer

Photo: Garden of the Humble Administrator, Suzhou

"The idea of the possibility of broadening man's consciousness and increasing his capacities for knowledge stands in direct relation to the teaching on cosmoses. In his ordinary state a man is conscious of himself in one cosmos, and all the other cosmoses he looks at from the point of view of one cosmos. The broadening of his consciousness and the intensifying of his psychic functions lead him into the sphere of activity and life of two other cosmoses simultaneously, the one above and the one below, that is, one larger and one smaller.

G.I. Gurdjieff, as quoted in In Search of the Miraculous, P. 207

I began this series intending to write about the call to organic prayer, yet— perhaps inevitably—I distracted myself with the matter of sensation.

So, back to that particular subject of organic prayer.

As I explained earlier the word "organic," while overused and corrupted, is still useful in the sense that it’s meant to refer to something that arises from a new organ of Being.

Something that is so deeply rooted in Being that it’s like a physical part.

A part, for example, like the lungs. They bring the action of breathing naturally to the creature they exist in.

So when I refer to organic prayer, I refer to a kind of prayer that is so integrated into being that it takes place as naturally as a breathing does. This means kind of prayer which becomes a sustained activity that goes on at almost all times and provides more direct nourishment for Being.

Perhaps this seems a bit odd. Maybe you’ve not thought, until now, of prayer as a food for Being. Yet it is absolutely one, in the same sense that all impressions are; and it is furthermore a much finer food for Being than, for example, yelling at the referee while watching a football game.

Once put in those terms, I presume there’s less argument about it. So now perhaps we have— at least provisionally—agreed that prayer is a special kind of food that feeds Being in a different way. Both the action of yelling at the referee, and the action of ordering prayer changed the molecular activity in the body; but one is presumably less profitable in the end than the other.

How does prayer feed being? Good question. I’ll offer a few spontaneous observations.