A Spiritual Mystery: Does God Listen to Prayers? (Part 3)

By Deepak Chopra, MD.

Credit: wealthpreservationsociety.com

It may sound odd at first, but there are ways to improve the chances that God will answer your prayer. In the first two posts we saw that the whole subject of prayer is filled with assumptions and preconceptions. Once they are cleared away, a prayer turns out to be a special kind of intention. Therefore, the rules that apply to intentions, which are rules about consciousness, apply. Your prayer will be answered, or not, depending on events happening out of sight – but not out of mind. The mind furnishes the mechanics of making any intention come true.

This quick summary will raise eyebrows if someone denies that the inner and outer worlds are connected. (See the two previous posts for the reasoning behind the union of these two domains of reality.) The world’s wisdom traditions don’t run into this obstacle, which is peculiar to modern materialism. Yet in a way it’s good to start with a blank slate. What makes any intention come true? Three vital elements are at work, as mentioned in the first post of this series:

1. How deep into the mind is the intention coming from?
2. How steady is your focus?
3. How fluid is your intention? (more…)

A SPIRITUAL MYSTERY: DOES GOD LISTEN TO PRAYERS? – PART 2

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To say that prayers are answered isn’t the same as saying that God answers prayers. In the first case, a thought manifests as reality. You wish, intend, or ask for an outcome, and the outcome appears. In the second case, a supernatural being in the sky listens to millions of requests every day and kindly responds to a few while turning his back on the vast majority. The first post in this series was devoted to a consciousness-based explanation for prayers as opposed to a religious explanation.

The question automatically arises: If answered and unanswered prayers have a basis in our own awareness, what creates the difference? Here, I think, the religious explanation leads to serious difficulties. If you pray to be healed, for example, and the healing doesn’t come, religious thinking puts the blame on you. God has not granted your prayer, the reasoning goes, because you don’t have enough faith. Or you didn’t surrender to his will. Or you have secret sins in your heart that you haven’t repented of. These are time-honored explanations, and the problem with them – as with the existence of God – is that they can’t be proved one way or another. Does God hate you? Is God simply unfair? These are questions that have no basis for a valid answer. (more…)

Can Brain Science Explain Experience? Part 2


By Deepak Chopra MD, Menas Kafatos, PhD, Subhash Kak, PhD, 
Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, and Neil Theise, MD

For at least two thousand years thinkers have tried to explain the human mind and disagreed heatedly, but a consensus has formed around one thing. When you try to figure out where the mind comes from, you find yourself in a strange domain filled with mirrors, illusions, and a shaky grasp on reality. The mind is harder to hunt down than the mythical unicorn, because the hunter and the hunted are the same.  This frustrating obstacle has led to speculation that swings between two extremes – at one extreme consciousness is pure illusion created by brain chemistry. At the other extreme consciousness is a given that defies exploration, much as water is a given to a fish. We can’t jump out of our minds to land on a place where objective observations could be made, just as a fish cannot land on dry land as a way to peer under the sea. Both are physically impossible.

Must the riddle of the mind remain a riddle? In the first post we looked at the currently dominant field of mind research, neuroscience, that provides one explanation of consciousness, as a manifestation of the brain. (You may want to read Part 1 first to get the basics of what brain science is trying to achieve.)  Our position is radically different from the vast majority of brain researchers, who attempt to unravel the intricacies of the mind by dissecting the intricacies of the human nervous system. We hold that mind doesn’t need the brain in order to exist. It precedes all living things by being fundamental to the universe. In other words, human beings inhabit a conscious universe. (more…)