What is it that makes a prayer more than a mere string of words? Active imagination, not fantasy or imagery but imagination of the heart.
The source word for imagination is mago, magic. When it resides in the heart, imagination is aspiration, lifting, reaching up, joyous, subtle intimacy. Breathing in.
When first exploring prayer, I thought it was repetition and attention on the words. It has taken years to connect the use of just a very few words with imagination of the heart.
Imagination of the heart lifts me into a realm above the earth, where words are primarily sounds rippling an ocean of sensation and feeling, where prayer is the state of its own fulfillment, a state-shifting, unbounded by time and space.
The prayer itself contains the response we seek.
It can be simple, the act of a heart broken by life, humbled by failure, no longer ambitious, alive to the infinite sufferings of the material world, the indignities of ageing, the contemplation of things lost.
The heart knows this prayer and one day when you are not seeking it, perhaps when you have lapsed into gratitude for the simple act of breathing, it will rise up in you as an inexplicable burst of joy.
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April 17, 2026
Tags: heart, imagination, prayer
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March 7, 2026
When something happens we can’t understand, when a child dies or an accident suddenly takes someone from us, we say “we cannot know God’s plan’. To make sense of it, we think there must be a plan, an explanation, just not one we can understand.
Plan is a very human idea. It’s a construct within sequential time where things have causes and occur one after another according to intention. Sequential time powerfully shapes the human dimension but there are other dimensions of time where non physical realities such as truth do not change yet nonetheless evolve.
I do not think sequential time is the way God sees His creation. From His point of view, perhaps everything is in motion and yet at rest, eternal and passing everything influencing everything else more or less, therefore making anything possible? His creation happens within Himself, in the ocean of light, being and love which is his nature, a surprise and a delight in its wholeness and what each part reveals of Himself to Himself.
We do not perceive that our thoughts also move among the stars, that our words reach the depths of His Heart, that we are connected to all and everything that is and was and shall ever be. We see in linear time, bounded by the limits of our attachments, held in place by personal significance. The mystery of existence must be so much greater than a plan.Tags: God's plan, His creation, linear time, plan
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October 14, 2025
What is your inner work? You may know in advance. You may not. Your work may relate to what is happening in this world, your personal experience of it or a larger perspective, including protection of friends, your community or the resolution of a war.
How to begin? Enter the attention space previously described. If you are followed by wishes or concerns that do not mire you in thinking or personal reactions, this may be the subject of your work at that time. Or you may enter free of content and feel your way to the work you are asked to do.
Each of us has particular proclivities or resonances. In a state suitable for inner work, the correct orientation is likely to arise.
I can always begin with an apology for having forgotten to do this work, for which I have accepted an obligation. I acknowledge my obligation. I submit to it. My heart responds. A pressure enters me, pushing me to surrender and accept what comes. I may have an idea of what the work is for but it has its own intending. Often I do not know what that is. Sometimes my wish for some action is allowed, even encouraged.
Inner work proceeds in love. It’s love that takes me outside myself and into this engagement, perhaps with the sorrow and suffering of sentient beings, their strivings, fears and aspirations. Or perhaps love expresses itself as glorification of the Absolute. There is no room for self-concern. Love is the center of a constellation of feelings which further inner work. There is compassion, intimacy, gratitude, praise and humility. Inner work will move you among these and more.
For every crisis, every tragedy, every possible joy, there is a good which has the possibility of entering and completing it.
Suppose that I feel the wish to pray for the end of a war. The resolution exists. I do not need to create it or know what it is. My task is to give the resolution room to enter. Holding a connection to the war in my attention, in my heart, without judgment, without expectation, with love, this is the nature of this work. God has an answer for every problem. Can I faithfully submit to this understanding, that He is the answer and I can assist Him to enter this world through loving attention.
Submission. Faith. The power of Intending. What am I intending? His will. I do not need to do. I only need to allow.Tags: inner work, intending, what work
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September 4, 2025
On reactions, and on a personal note, I recently met a woman who within the last year had experienced a sudden awakening. All her life she had suffered from anxiety, and then one day she didn’t, ever again. Some time after her awakening, her 12 year old daughter commented, “Mom, what happened. You’re so chill.” I take that comment to imply that Mom no longer reacted to the 12 year old daughter’s shenanigans. I asked Mom about meditation. Before her awakening, she didn’t know what meditation was, and still doesn’t meditate now. Rather, she pointed to a wasp and said, “I could watch that for hours.”
Tags: inner work, non-reacting, reactions
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September 3, 2025
The personal self is a bundle of habitual reactions. To react is to be expelled from the attention space.
It is the work of a lifetime to live without reactions. Non reaction enables direct reading of, and engagement with, sensing and feeling. A whole universe opens to one who is free of habitual reactions. This is what it means to be realized. Not some super-duper higher state of bliss and omniscience.
How to be free of reactions? First you have to see them in your behavior, your gestures and postures. Then sense them in the body. Then see the judgments and justifications which prolong them. Then cease to react to the judgments and justifications. Then, silence. Is this work ever finished? I don’t know. But an island of equanimity can arise where you can be reliable enough to work inwardly.
A bonus: Equanimity accesses more attention. Reaction loses it.
If you wish to be useful as one who works inwardly for the benefit of the world, you must begin the journey as soon as you can. Perhaps you will then be able to work before you die. Life is short. The way is long.Tags: inner work, not reacting, reactions
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August 5, 2025
You can’t work inwardly without help. The biggest recurring trap is that you enter this work actively, with the intention to ‘do’ it. As soon as you reverse this impulse, things become possible.
You will need to find for yourself what this means. There are inner gestures of submission, apology, contrition that enable you to receive help. When I try to do this work on my own, by my own light, I feel the dryness of it. When I ask for help and acknowledge my poverty, I feel that my state becomes ‘juicy’.
As one of my teachers once said of this work, when you volunteer for service, you are given what you need to proceed. A janitor is not expected to work without a broom. You do not need to know what is needed. The work knows.Tags: help, inner gestures, inner work
