Evolving Prayer
Part 2-The first prayers were merely verbalized wishs, the expression of sincere desires.Prayer became a technique of achieving spirit co-operation.And then it attained to the higher function of assisting religon in the conservation of all worth while values.
Both prayer and magic arose out of man's adjustive reactions to the Urantian enviroment. But aside from this generalized relationship, they have little in common.Prayer has always indicated positive action by the praying ego; it has always been Psychic and sometimes Spiritual. Magic has usually signified an attempt to manipulate reality without affecting the ego of the manipulator, the practioner of magic.Despite their independent origins, magic and prayer often are interrelated in their later stages of development.Magic has sometimes ascended by goal elavation from formulas through rituals and incantations to the threshold of True Prayer.Prayer has sometimes become so materialistic that it has degenerated into a pseudomagical technique of avoiding the expenditure of that effort which is a requisite for the solution of Urantian Problems.
When a man learned that prayer could not coerce the gods, then it became more of a petition, favor seeking.But the truest prayer is in Reality a Communion between Man and his Maker.
The apperance of the sacrifice idea in any religon unfailingly detracts from the higher efficacy of true prayer in that men seek to substitute the offerings of material possesions for the offering of their own consecrated wills to the doing of the will of God.
When religon is divested of a personal God, it's prayers translate to the levels of theology and philosophy.When the highest God concept of a religon is a impersonal Deity, such panthestic idealism, although affording a basis for certain forms of mystic communion, it proves fatal to the potency of true prayer, which always stands for man's communion with a personal and superior being.
During the earlier times of racial evolution and even in the present time, in the day-by-day experience of the average mortal, Prayer is very much a phenomenon of man's intercourse with his own subconscious.But there is also a domain of prayer wherein the intellectually alert and spiritually progressing individual attains more or less contact with the superconscious level of the human mind, the domain of the indwelling Thought Adjuster.In addition, there is a definite spiritual phase of True Prayer which concerns its reception and reconition by the Spiritual Forces of the Universe, and which is entirely distinct from all human and intellectual association.
Prayer contributes greatly to the development of the religous sentiment of an evolving human mind.It is a mighty influence working to prevent isolation of the personality.
Prayer represents one technique associated with the natural religons of racial evolution which also forms a part of the experiental values of the higher religons of ethical excellence, the Religon of Revelation.
Bruiex's note-I know this is big worded and the Thought Adjuster is a unknown concept,so I will reach that phase soon enough.Any questions can be answered by www.urantia.org.Urantia is the name of Planet Earth, as the Superuniverse calls it. You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or
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