Prayer Without Beliefs
On Playing with the Infinite
Carl Jung said that a single question is “the most telling of one’s life”. It is this:
Are you related to something infinite, or not?
If we are, we know about it, as life begins to melt and transform into something unimaginable, something beyond belief.
If not, how are we to get there? How to enter into conscious relationship with the infinite?
The answer provided by so many traditions worldwide is to pray.
Prayer is a coming into relation with the infinite, the unknown, the ungraspable and impossible. It is a state of communion with the miracle of life. You do not need to believe in God, or in anything mystical outside this life, to pray. In fact it is probably helpful not to. Beliefs lead us astray. Beliefs are mind-chatter, whereas prayer works in silence. Through silence we learn to listen to the heart, to hear its messages and to witness its transformation.
A friend said to me “prayer is a softening of the heart”. We need this, more than anything else, since our hearts have grown hard and cold, each encased from the sadness and violence of the world by a protective shell. Prayer is time in which we allow ourselves to feel again, to allow the eggshell around the heart to be cracked open, allowing the Bird of Love to breathe, to move, and one day, to fly and sing and commune with the other birds, at home again in the living breathing forest.
Prayer cannot be understood or explained. There is no rationale or reason for it. That is why it is so essential: it allows us to express a dedication and devotion to the irrational, the unreasonable, the infinite. To the dimensions of life that are beyond reason, beyond the mind which is constantly contracted in a painful state of confusion and questioning.
Prayer is an activity of the imagination, expressed through the symbology of posture. The human body in prayer posture, whether with hands together facing upwards, or with head bowed, touching the ground, is an image of union with the cosmos, with the divine mystery. It is like becoming a mirror to receive the light of the infinite, and learning to see it shining everywhere without exception. It is a mythical joining with an ancient and vast tradition of souls enraptured by life and devoted to love.
Prayer allows an embodied expression of that dimension of our being that, despite everything, despite all the pain of the world and the torments of modernity, is overflowing with love and gratitude and appreciation. That dimension is inexhaustible, ever-present, luminous and shining and always perfectly awake. It sees the mystery in everything and knows nothing but joy. It receives that mystery as a gift from the beyond.
Spending time in the postures of prayer and meditation, in asana, this light is allowed to shine, and thought and worry begin to calm and disappear. There is nothing else to do except assume a posture and rest there. A helpful metaphor is that of a glass filled with water and sediment. When the glass is stirred up, the sediment particles are moving and the liquid is opaque. We cannot see through it. But when the glass is left to rest, the sediment falls and settles and the liquid grows transparent and perfectly clear. The light flows freely. There is no effort involved. All that is required is patience.
There will likely be resistance at first, perhaps significant and extremely uncomfortable. We carry huge traumas around religion and divinity and all of these may be provoked by the activity of prayer. Good. This is all valuable shadow material to confront and understand. We have been fed so many false beliefs about God / the divine that we are largely allergic to it all. This is a result of trying to understand and navigate life solely at the level of the intellect, of the rational mind, causing us to reject religion due to its grounding in the irrational, inconceivable and ungraspable mystery. All of these well-reasoned arguments will fall away and dissolve in the light of that mystery, given time and patience in prayer and meditation. The self, filled with fear at believing itself to be finite, realises its belonging to something vast, infinite and eternal, and as a result, glimpses a peace that was hitherto unimaginable. We gain our own (non-)understanding of divinity. Our own intimate relationship with the infinite.
Experimenting, or rather, playing with prayer allowed me to drop a host of distasteful, confusing and limiting beliefs about God being some all-powerful male Creator. This has helped me conceive of prayer as a time to drop all our projections, rationalisations and intellectualisations about the nature of life, God, reality, existence. These concepts cause us so much suffering and confusion — this is why Meister Eckhart speaks of “leaving God for God”.
What a relief to drop all stories and simply return to myself, which I do not know or understand, and to let the mystery unfold in silence, effortlessly and endlessly, to let love blossom in the soul, to let a vision of something infinite and inconceivable to dawn… too beautiful and majestic to ever capture, conceive or communicate… what else is there to do but put one’s hands together in thanks, or one’s head to the ground in rapturous communion with it all?
As Jung said, “I do not believe in God, I know”. Prayer without beliefs can take us away from the false abstract God (which is nothing more than a concept, image, or idea) and back to that innate knowledge of the mystery, to the inconceivable love that encompasses and makes possible everything, every fibre of our being. We can call that God, and fall back into the prison-loop of concepts, or we can just proceed to live and serve, in awe and gratitude, basking in the silent smile of the heart.
It can be helpful and even beautiful to use the G-word to communicate what we are trying to talk about, but it has so many associations and connotations, and triggers people so strongly, that is often best not to, unless we are willing to engage in an unravelling of the word and what it means to us personally. That is a major strength of Buddhism, in my view: it is a practical path that will take you to total unshakeable freedom without ever using the concept of God (which may only distract you and hinder progress towards ultimate inconceivable liberation!). A limitless freedom is on offer, if only we are courageous enough to seek and give up everything for it.
Jung wrote “I had to wrench myself free of God, so to speak, in order to find that unity in myself which God seeks through man. It is rather like that vision of Symeon the Theologian, who sought God in vain everywhere in the world, until God rose like a little sun in his own heart”.
God is Love, some say. And it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. You don’t have to believe a thing to look upon the miracle of life, the miracle that is being, that is embodied existence in this vast starlit cosmos… and respond with a prayer of love and gratitude.
Meister Eckhart said that “if the only prayer you ever uttered was “Thank You”, that would be enough”.
Beliefs are distractions. Come home to yourself. Your body is waiting. Let it sit and rest and pray. The mind will soon catch up, and bow in awe and wonder. The only worthwhile measures of prayer and meditation practice are joy and wonder, love and laughter.
I see it like this: basically, all creation is in love with the uncreated. (The Muslims call this Allah, which translates to “the Nothing”, and Buddhists call Nirvana, the Unconditioned. But getting hung up on names is only going to cause more mind-level confusion!)
The uncreated is the boundless unfathomable emptiness, or love, from which creation flows. Creation is infinite, and so is the uncreated. Through meditation and prayer we come to see that we are the artists of this eternal dance, this love-play between form and formlessness, fullness and voidness.
To enter into this play is to enter into the infinite freedom of the imagination — and to realise that this is where we already are, and always have been. It is to die and be reborn at will countless times, for the sake of beauty and the soul’s desire to create and explore. It is to taste the divine mind of the buddhas, beyond all conception, description or limitation.
Welcome home.
