Name: Stefan Schulz
Date: June 10, 2024
Course: Doctor of Spirituality (ACIM) of ULC Seminary
Lesson: VIII – The Power of Prayer
Hello Loretta, hello ULC-Seminary, this lesson was life-changing for me because it showed me for the first time fully the causes and destructive effects of the ego in all its facets and has given me a holistic understanding how to deal with it. Thank you very much! Your brother in Christ, Stefan
Prayer Exercise:
1. You've heard the expression before that we cannot serve two masters. Give your understanding of what the Course means when it says that we must choose to serve Truth or illusions. There are no other alternatives.
My understanding of what the Course means when it says that we cannot serve two masters is that the correctness of such a spiritual ordering scheme would mean that a state of "duality," "separation," or "split-mindness" in God's creation would be designed accordingly by Him.
God intended His creation to be exactly the opposite. His creation is designed for universal, eternal, unchangeable oneness in Him, expressed and extented through the reflection of His love, joy, forgiveness, freedom and abundance.
Moreover, God has given His creation both the freedom to choose as well as the ability/the gift of having total, pure communion with Him, this by prayer in the Spirit and in the name of Jesus Christ.
As I mentioned in lesson no. 6 (The Nature of Prayer), in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the act of initial "spiritual creation of life" can originally be traced back to and is vividly depicted in the biblical book of Genesis 2:7: "And the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul", as well as in the Gospel of John 1:1-4: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him nothing that was created was done. There was life in him; and life was the light of men."
Coming from this perspective, God can be understood in this context as all creating universal life force or universal life energy (= spiritually / biblically identified and labeled as "Holy Spirit"). Biblically speaking, God created humanity in His own "likeness" and "image" (see the biblical book of Genesis 1:26-27). This "likeness" implies that His creation is equipped with a particular medium or channel of communication with His Spirit, or for receiving His life energy respectively. This inherent, spiritual medium or channel can be referred to as the totality of the human "mind", "soul", or "consciousness", each with partial, different functions and characteristics (notice in this context the Gospel of Luke, 17:21, where Jesus spoke: "the kingdom of God is within you"; moreover, see the Epistle to Titus, 3:3-5, which states that the eternal life energy of God would be spiritually activated "by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost").
With this in mind, each person is free and has therefore the individual ability and responsibility to choose whether he/she is willing to live in a state of spiritual unity with God or in a state of spiritual duality, meaning the totality of his mind/ soul/ consciousness/ senses is primarily determined and controlled by the "ego".
This also means that any "spiritual hybrid" that contains even a small amount of "ego particles or ego energy" still represents a state of duality/separation/conflict since his/her energy is not yet (completely) connected to the only source of true life and is therefore misguided in its energetic properties in terms of resonance, vibration and frequency. This results into a state of being blocked from the full presence and life energy of God. Pure, unfiltered unity with God and all of His creation and with it, the universal reflection and extension of life-giving attributes such as love, joy, forgiveness and righteousness will then be diluted, distorted or simply be impossible.
In this status of self-imprisonment of duality, however, only fear, doubt, pain, guilt, shame, hatred, conflict, competition, greed, feelings of deserving reward and validation, deception, hiding, cover-up and self-destruction are both produced and projected onto God and His creation.
Therefore, it is spiritually impossible to serve both „antagonistic" masters/creators, namely God (=eternal, unchanging "truth", creating spiritual oneness and spiritual life), or the ego (= perpetual evolving, unreal, programmed "illusion", creating spiritual separation, spiritual conflict and spiritual death).
2. In your own words explain how perception and projection work to dilute the power of prayer.
As stated in lesson no. 6, prayer is in my understanding pure, unadulterated, total, and mutual communion of God with His creation. From a human perspective, prayer is both the celebration and thanksgiving of one's fully restored oneness with God, which means having both personally regained true spiritual life and being able to activate true spiritual life energy in others, through the radiance (= by conscious and unconscious communication) of the perfection of God's light, which is love, forgiveness, joy, abundance, wisdom, truth, and peace.
That power of a perpetual flow of receiving and giving/radiating/extending pure life energy in order to activate and multiply true life, which is the creative result of the process of prayer, can be diluted, distorted, or simply not active.
This is the case when "prayer" takes place in a state of "duality", i.e. in a state of separation from God. Then „oneness" with God is replaced or determined by the "ego" and the „ego" is able to block, to diminish or to misguide the flow of pure life energy for its own purposes, which is to protect itself, to survive, to expand and to dominate.
In the case that the ego negatively influences or makes prayer impossible, this natural flow of true life is replaced by the goals and desires of the ego, which itself continually generates and refines them through conscious, sub- and unconscious, i.e. self-directed, perceptual processes in the three dimensional space. These self-generated goals, desires and energies are then projected onto the ego's particular, interactive life world instead of true, divine life energy.
Therefore, the world of the ego, which is (pre)perceived and confirmed by the (sub)conscious and the human senses, appears more and more as wholly or partially "godless", i.e. primarily as "matter". This leads to a competitive mindset in order to satisfy material/worldly desires, to judgments of "success" and "failure" and to related thoughts/imaginations/activities, which also creates a perception and division of time into past, present and future needs, goals, "successes", and "failures". This then leads to a perception of transience, which also determines the "natural consequence" of "death".
Once this ultimately misguided perception is mentally accepted and projected into the world, fears arise about not achieving ego-driven goals within one's timeframes, feelings of shame and guilt in the event of failure or in the case of moral scruples, etc. Moreover, the responsibility for „success" and „failure" is transferred to other people and circumstances, i.e. through their reactions to one´s own projected behavior. In this way the ego protects and fuels itself because in this world of misperception the ego will never be the cause of failure or negative emotions. In case of success, however, the ego sees itself as the primary cause and uses this perception for its further growth and to confirm that it is on the right path.
With regard to this, ego-driven perception and its projection changes the nature of true prayer fundamentally. In this case, prayer then is not a state of total communion with God anymore. At best, if the existence of God is still recognized in some way, prayer mutates into an instrument of the ego for the fulfillment of wishes and goals as well as both for the reduction of self-created fears, pain and feelings of guilt and shame and for thanksgiving in the case of „success".
However, this deprives prayer of its true, divine power, since the ego does not expect a real answer from God in such a „prayer", but only expects the satisfaction of its needs for survival, protection and growth.
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