Karma

I don’t know why I take so much notice of these church billboard signs. I don’t go to church. I’m not Christian, and I don’t percieve God in the same manner they do. I am, in fact, of a Bhuddist-Hindu philosophy. But I’m very contemplative, despite context, and am always on a subconscious lookout for concepts to mull over. Things like “Big bang theory? Yeah right! –God” catch my eye now and again.
So this morning on the way to work, after dropping off some of my mum’s heavenly vegetable soup for my best friend (it’s her favourite), I drove by a sign that jumped out at me.
It said, more or less, that prayer was not to give commands to God, but to report for duty.
This challenged my personal perspective.
I have prayed to “God” before, once. I guess I just wanted to see what it was like. It was a warm fuzzy feeling, though uncertain, and of course tinged with that silly feeling that one is talking to oneself about things one already knows. It was the latter that stuck with me, not because I felt stupid for having done it, but because it was true - I was talking to myself. Churches have the strange dichotomy of all at once telling you that God is in everyone, but that “He” is also the master. He is a separate entity. When you speak to him in prayer, you are broadcasting your prayer in a heavenly direction. But what I found, that one night, is that it is simply a further internalization. We pray before we sleep, with what is most important to us weighing on our mind. The comfort of the idea of a God then sends you to sleep with reassurance that someone is giving thought to your problems, your dilemmas. And sometimes it happens, miraculously, that you wake up in the morning and you come to some kind of conclusion, though you can’t explain why. You dreamt something? Or maybe you don’t even remember your dream.
I talk to myself all the time. Driving in my car, falling asleep at night, both silently and out loud. The same thing has happened to me, some strange resolution, realization, or epiphany has come to me, though I have no heavenly agent to which I can attribute its coming. It is of the same nature.
“Prayer” is not for giving commands to God, no. But it is not for recieving them, either. It is for putting those thoughts of yours out in the open. Telling yourself and whatever is floating in the air around you what you are worried about, what you are thankful for, or what you hope will happen, works the same way as it does when you sometimes write something down to remember it and the act of writing it causes you to memorize it. It is now manifest as one assumes God to be. And there it remains, in your subconscious, which processes these thoughts in the background more than you may realize at the time. Is this “God?”
All I had intended to say, initially, was that no one can tell you how to “pray”. But the more I bounced it off of myself in the car on the way here, the more I thought of. All this in a ten-minute drive to work? I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me! This ought to be fun.