by Gregg Braden
A powerful sensation rippled through my body as the translator shared the abbot’s answer. “You’ve never seen our prayers,” he said, “because a prayer cannot be seen.” Adjusting the heavy wool robes beneath his feet, the abbot continued, “What you’ve seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies. Feeling is the prayer!”
How beautiful, I thought. And how simple! Just as the late-20th-century experiments had shown, it’s human feeling and emotion that affect the stuff our reality is made of—it’s our inner language that changes the atoms, electrons, and photons of the outer world. However, this is less about the actual words we utter and more about the feeling that they create within us. It’s the language of emotion that speaks to the quantum forces of the universe … feeling is what the Divine Matrix recognizes.
Key 9: Feeling is the language that “speaks” to the Divine Matrix. Feel as though your goal is accomplished and your prayer is already answered.
The abbot was telling us the same thing as the great scientists of the 20th century. Not only was he passing on the same ideas that the experimenters had documented, he was taking it one step further: He was sharing the instructions that describe how we can speak the language of quantum possibilities, and he was doing so through a technique that we know today as a form of prayer. No wonder prayers work miracles! They put us in touch with the pure space where the miracles of our minds become the reality of our world.
COMPASSLON: A FORCE OF
NATURE
AND A HUMAN EXPERLENCE
The clarity of the abbot’s answer sent me reeling. His words echoed the ideas that had been recorded in ancient Gnostic and Christian traditions 2,000 years ago. For our prayers to be answered, we must transcend the doubt that often accompanies the positive nature of our desire. Following a brief teaching on overcoming such polarities, the words of Jesus recorded in the Nag Hammadi library remind us of the power of our commands. In words that should be familiar to us by now, we’re reminded that when we say to the mountain, “‘Mountain move away,’ it will move away.”12
Through the clarity of his words, the abbot answered the mystery of what it is the monks and nuns were doing in their prayers: They were speaking the quantum language of feeling and emotion, one that has no words or outer expression.
In 2005, I had the chance to revisit the monasteries of Tibet for a total of 37 days. During the journey, our group learned that the abbot who’d shared the secret of feeling in 1998 had died. Although the circumstances were never made quite clear, we simply knew that he was no longer in this world. Even though we’d never met the man who took his place, when he heard of our return, he welcomed us back and allowed us to continue the conversation that began in 1998.
On another frosty Tibetan morning in a different chapel, we found ourselves face-to-face with the new abbot of the monastery. Only minutes before, we’d been led through the meandering stone-lined passageway that brought us to this tiny, cold, and dimly lit room—in absolute darkness, we’d carefully felt our way one step at a time along the slippery floor, which was dangerously smooth from centuries of spilled yak butter packed onto the surface. It was in the cool, thin air of the ancient room nestled in the heart of this monastery that I asked the new abbot my follow-up questions: “What connects us with one another, our world, and the universe? What’s the ‘stuff’ that carries our prayers beyond our bodies and holds the world together?” The abbot looked directly at me as our translator echoed my question in Tibetan.
Instinctively, I glanced to the guide, who was our go-between for the entire conversation. I wasn’t prepared for the translation that I heard coming back to me. “Compassion,” he said. “The geshe [great teacher] says that compassion is what connects us.”
“How can that be?” I asked, looking for clarity in what I was hearing. “Is he describing compassion as a force of nature or as an emotional experience?” Suddenly, an animated exchange broke out as the translator put my question to the abbot.
“Compassion is what connects all things” was his final answer. And that was it! Following nearly ten minutes of intensive dialogue involving the deepest elements of Tibetan Buddhism, all I got to hear was those six words!
A few days later, I found myself engaged in the same conversation once again, asking the identical question of a high-ranking monk in another monastery. Rather than the formality we experienced in the presence of the abbot, however, we were in the monk’s cell—the tiny room where he ate, slept, prayed, and studied when he wasn’t in the great chanting hall.
By now, our translator was becoming familiar with the form of my questions and what I was trying to understand. As we huddled around the yak-butter lamps in the dimly lit room, I looked up at the low ceiling. It was covered with black soot from countless years of the same lamps burning for heat and light in the very place where we found ourselves on that afternoon.
Just as I’d asked the abbot only days before, I posed the same question (through the translator) to the monk: “Is compassion a force of creation, or is it an experience?” His eyes turned to the place on the ceiling where I’d been looking only seconds before. Taking a deep sigh, he thought for a moment, collecting the wisdom of what he’d learned since entering the monasteries at the age of eight. (He appeared to be in his mid-20s now.) Suddenly, he lowered his eyes, looking at me as he responded. The answer was short, powerful, and made tremendous sense. “It is both,” were the words that came back to me from the monk. “Compassion is both a force in the universe as well as a human experience.”
On that day, in a monk’s cell halfway around the world, nearly 15,000 feet above sea level and hours from even the nearest town, I heard the words of a wisdom that’s so simple many Western traditions have overlooked it to this day. The monk had just shared the secret of what connects us to everything in the universe, as well as the quality that makes our feelings and emotions so powerful: They’re one and the same.
NOT JUST ANY FEELLNG WLLL DO
Recent translations of ancient prayers recorded in Aramaic, the language of the Essenes (the scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls) seem to support precisely what the monk was sharing as the secrets of reality making. These new interpretations also offer fresh clues as to why such instructions often appear to be so vague. By retranslating the original New Testament documents, it’s clear that tremendous liberties were taken over the centuries with the ancient authors’ words and intent. As the saying goes, a lot was “lost in the translation.” (I described this—and other examples that I share in these pages—in my last book, Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer, but they’re so relevant that I decided to include them here, too.)
Relating to our ability to participate in the events of life, health, and family, a comparison of the modern biblical version of “Ask and you shall receive,” for example, with its original text gives us an idea of just how much can be lost! The modern and condensed King James Version of the Bible reads:
“Whatsoever ye ask the Father in my name,
he will give it to you. Hitherto have ye asked
nothing in my name: Ask and ye shall
receive, that your joy may be full.” 13
When we compare this with the original text, we see the key that’s left out. In the following paragraph, I’ve emphasized the missing part by underlining it.
“All things that you ask straightly, directly …
from inside My name—
you will be given. So far you haven’t done this… .
So ask without hidden motive and
be surrounded by your answer—
Be enveloped by what you desire, that your gladness be full.”14
With these words, we’re reminded of the quantum principle telling us that feeling is a language to direct and focus our consciousness. It’s a state of being that we’re in, rather than something that we do at a certain time of day.
While it’s clear that emotion is the language that the Divine Matrix recognizes, it’s also apparent that not just
any feeling will do. If it did, then the world would be a very confusing place, with one person’s idea of what should be overlapping with someone else’s very different conception. The monk stated that compassion is both a force of creation and the experience that accesses it. The deepest elements of the teaching suggest that in order to achieve compassion, we must approach a circumstance without a strong expectation of the rightness or wrongness of that situation’s outcome. In other words, we must perceive it without judgment or ego. And it appears to be precisely this quality of emotion that’s the key to speaking to the Divine Matrix in a way that’s meaningful and effective.
As the physicist Amit Goswami suggests, it takes more than a regular state of consciousness to make a quantum possibility a present reality. In fact, to do so he indicates that we must be in what he describes as a “non-ordinary state of consciousness.”15
To get to this point, the Aramaic translation states that we must “ask without hidden motive.” Another way of clarifying this very important part of the instruction is to say in modern terms that we must make our decisions from a desire that’s not based in our ego. The great secret to bringing the focus of our imagination, beliefs, healing, and peace into a present reality is that we must do so without a strong attachment to the outcome of our choice. In other words, we’re invited to pray without our judgments of what should or shouldn’t be happening.
Key 10: Not just any feeling will do. The ones that create must be without ego and judgment.
Perhaps one of the best descriptions of how we experience this neutral place is found in the work of the great Sufi poet Rumi. With words that are simple and powerful, he states, “Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”16 How often can we truly say that we’re in Rumi’s field of nonjudgment at any time in our lives—especially when the fate of our loved ones is hanging in the balance? Yet this appears to be precisely the greatest lesson of our power, the biggest challenge of our lives, and the enormous irony of our ability to create in a participatory universe.
It seems that the stronger our desire is to change our world, the more elusive our power to do so becomes. This is because what we want is so often ego based. If it weren’t, the change wouldn’t hold such significance for us. As we mature into the state of consciousness where we know that we can alter our reality, however, it also seems that it becomes less important for us to do so.
Similar to the way our desire to drive a car, for example, wanes after we actually begin to do so, in having the ability to work miracles of healing and peace, the urgency to make them happen seems to disappear. This may be because along with knowing that we can change things comes an acceptance of the world just the way it is.
It’s this freedom of possessing power without attaching so much importance to it that allows us to be even more effective in our prayers. And herein may lie the answer to the question asked by those who meditated, chanted, omed, danced, and prayed for the recovery of their loved ones.
Although every act was undoubtedly well intentioned, it often involved a strong attachment to having or making the healing of our loved ones happen. It entailed a belief that a miraculous recovery was necessary. And if the healing still needed to occur, the implication was that it hadn’t taken place yet—if it had, we wouldn’t be asking for it in our prayers. It’s as if by wanting the outcome of healing, the efforts to create it actually reinforced the reality that the disease was present! This leads to the second part of the ancient instruction, something that’s often overlooked in our attempts to bring miracles into our lives.
The next part of the translation invites us to “be surrounded” by our answer and “be enveloped” by what we desire so that our joy may come to pass. This passage reminds us in words of precisely what the experiments and the ancient traditions suggest in their shared wisdom. We must first have the feeling of healing, abundance, peace, and the answers to our prayers of well-being in our hearts as if they’ve already happened before they become the reality of our lives.
In the passage, Jesus suggests that those he’s speaking with haven’t done that. Just like my friends with the powerful medicine of prayer and good intentions, while they may have believed that they asked for their prayers to be answered, if their request was simply the words Please let this healing happen, then he says that this isn’t a language that the universal field of the Divine Matrix recognizes. Jesus reminds his disciples that they must “speak” to the universe in a way that’s meaningful. When we feel as though we’re surrounded by healing in our loved ones and enveloped by peace in our world, that’s both the language and the code that opens the door to all possibilities.
In this feeling, we move from the viewpoint that suspects we’re simply experiencing whatever comes our way to the perspective that knows we’re part of all that is. Thus, we create a shift of energy that may be described as the classic “quantum leap.” In much the same way that an atom’s electron jumps from one energy level to another without moving through the space between, when we really know that we’re speaking the quantum language of choice and not simply thinking that we might be, we’re in another state of consciousness. It’s this state that becomes the pure space where dreams, prayers, and miracles begin.
WE’RE WLRED TO CREATE
During a conversation with the Indian poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore in 1930, Albert Einstein summarized the two viewpoints of the early 20th century regarding our role in the universe. “There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe,” he began. The first sees “the world as a unity dependent on humanity,” and the second perceives “the world as a reality independent of the human factor” [author’s italics].17 While the experiments described in Chapter 2 certainly show that our conscious observation of the stuff our world is made of, including atoms and electrons, directly affects the way that matter behaves, we’ll probably find that there’s a third possibility—one that falls somewhere between Einstein’s two extremes.
This possibility may show that our universe came into existence through a process that didn’t involve us initially. Although creation could have started without our presence, we’re here now as it continues to grow and evolve. From the stars so distant that their lives are over before their light ever reaches our eyes to energy that’s disappearing into the mysterious vortices we simply call “black holes,” change is the universal constant that we can count on. It’s happening as part of everything we see and even in the realms we don’t.
By now it should be clear that it’s impossible for us to be simply bystanders in our world. As conscious observers, we’re part of all that we see. Additionally, although scientists have yet to agree upon which theory explains the way we change our reality, they all suggest that the universe is altered in our presence. It’s as if being conscious is an act of creation unto itself. As physicist John Wheeler stated, we live in a “participatory” universe—not one where we manipulate or force our will or are able to completely control the world around us.
In our capacity as part of the universe today, we have the ability to modify and change little pieces of it through the way we live our lives. In the realm of quantum possibilities, we appear to be made to participate in our creation. We’re wired to create! Because we appear to be universally joined on the quantum level, ultimately our connectedness promises that the seemingly little shifts in our lives can have a huge influence on our world and even the universe beyond. Our quantum link with the cosmos runs so deep that scientists have created a new vocabulary to describe what such connections really mean. The “butterfly effect” mentioned in Chapter 1, for example, describes how small changes can have really big effects.
Formally known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the bottom line of this phenomenon suggests that a single small change in one part of the world can be the trigger for a huge alteration in another place and time. It’s most often stated as the analogy “If a butterfly flaps it wings in Tokyo
, then a month later it may cause a hurricane in Brazil.”18 An often-used example of this effect is the result of a turn down the wrong street by Archduke Ferdinand’s driver in 1914. This mistake brought the leader of Austria face-to-face with his assassin, and history shows that Ferdinand’s death was the catalyst that led to World War I. It all began with the chance occurrence of a simple error that we’ve all made at one time or another. That wrong turn, however, had global consequences.
In Chapter 2, we explored three experiments that told the story of our relationship to the world around us. They showed us that DNA changes the stuff our world is made of and that emotion alters the DNA itself. The military experiments and those conducted by Cleve Backster demonstrated that this effect isn’t limited by time or distance. The net result suggests that you and I direct a force within us that works in a realm that’s free from the limits of physics as we know them.
The studies imply that we aren’t bound by the scientific laws as we understand them today. This may be precisely the power that the mystic St. Francis alluded to more than 600 years ago when he said, “There are beautiful and wild forces within us.”
If there’s a power within us to alter the essence of the universe in ways that can heal and create peace, then it makes tremendous sense that there would be a language that allows us to do so consciously and at will. And there is—interestingly, it’s precisely the language of emotion, imagination, and prayer that was lost to the West through the Christian church’s biblical edits of the 4th century.
WHEN THE MLRACLE STOPS
WORKLNG
The effects of the mind-body connection and certain kinds of prayer are well documented in the open literature. From studies in major universities and field tests in war-torn countries, it’s clear that the way we feel within our bodies affects not only us, but the world beyond.19 This relationship between our inner and outer experiences appears to be the reason some forms of prayer empower us as they do. While the precise mechanism that explains why prayers work may not be fully understood, they do and the evidence is there. However, there’s also a lingering mystery. In the studies, the positive impact of the prayers seems to last only for the period of time that they’re occurring. When they stop, their effects also seem to end.