Seeds of Inspiration
10/28/09 Insights from Prayer The world is only as good or as bad as our perception of it. Therefore it’s different for everyone, which means perception can be changed.
Besides the differences in what our experiences are, we also interpret experiences differently, based on pre-learned attitudes. Therefore we sense that if we could bypass our own attitudes we could perceive more clearly.
If we can empty our faith of preconceived notions and go with only what we intensely and interiorly feel to be real, we can concentrate on that in certitude, because God places truths within our spirits. What God infuses is pure; far from our own ideas and free from the influence of lesser things. This purification of spirit involves active and voluntary examination of thoughts and the discarding of anything that doesn’t have God’s blessing.
In devotional prayer we put an idea before God and make ourselves willing to be receptive to whether or not God accepts it into our pure spirits – spirits from which we guard against ego and Earthly matters. Any sensory input can be placed before God for His inspiration. From a snippet of scripture to a contemplation of a beautiful stone – when we place it before God in wondrous prayer we can be sure He will grant us the knowledge and grace we are meant to glean from it, even if His answer lies below our consciousness.
Pure prayer is our personal affirmation that, independent of our own intellect and will, whatever is of the essence of God should ideally reside in us as well. The giving over of our free will actions to the divine default is the most perfect free will decision we can possible make. It cannot always come to pass perfectly in this imperfect world, but the desire alone is in harmony with the joy of the Creator.
The ability to wipe the spirit clean of ego influences is a gift of God, opened and used by our co-operation. As in everything good, it is granted by God but is only fully effective when we use our own free will to accept the gift.
