Meditation and Prayer: The Soul's Door to the Infinite

What is your purpose in life? Have you ever really thought about this in relation to the big picture? Because so much emphasis is placed on the development of intellectual and physical skills in our society, you may have defined your purpose, as most people have, according to how adept you are in these areas. After all, authority and expertise are often determined by the number and kinds of degrees a person has listed after his or her name. And from the standpoint of physical development, our professional athletes command some of the grandest salaries in America.

Do you think your purpose is to be an architect, a writer, a schoolteacher, a plumber, a computer programmer, a good mother, father, son, or daughter? While all these are important roles you may play, areas of service to others in which you may make a marvelous contribution to our society or even the world at large, they are secondary to your true purpose in life. If you consider your purpose to be centered in any of these areas, the time will come when you will have no sense of purpose at all. You may retire, the kids grow up, parents pass on; any number of things can happen to remove the supposed object of your purpose, and with this removal comes the removal of a reason to live a creatively happy life.

Your purpose has to be based on a factor that will always be relevant, and the only thing you have that you will always have is your spirituality. You have intelligence and you are clothed with a body, but you are primarily a spiritual being. As a spiritual being you have a purpose, and when that purpose begins to dawn on you, you will carry it into your chosen fields of expression, whatever they may be, bringing a depth of meaning that will make your life worth living, whatever you are doing.

Understanding what this purpose is will clarify all foggy areas in your life. It will especially clarify the subjects we are dealing with in this book, meditation and prayer. The reason meditation sometimes seems difficult and even unproductive is that it is often practiced only to relax the mind and body rather than to also tap the inner spiritual resources. Prayer, too, is often misdirected because, more often than not, it is practiced solely in response to some mental, emotional, or physical desire or need. When your true purpose is understood, the reasons you meditate and pray will change dramatically.

How can we best define your purpose as a spiritual being? In simple terms we can state it thus: As a spiritual being, your purpose is to express the attributes of God in everything you do.

This statement may require some thoughtful consideration, for on the surface it may sound like an oversimplification. But you are happy and fulfilled to the degree you are involved in expressing the attributes of God. Why? Because some of the attributes of God are love, life, peace, joy, success, harmony, freedom, prosperity, wholeness, fulfillment, intelligence, enthusiasm, security, and power. Do these not comprise the essence of what you are looking for in everything you do? Do you know why you spend so much time looking for these qualities in people, places, and things? Because they are the very elements that compose your true identity, and your desire to experience their external counterparts is really the bubbling forth of God's desire to express them through you.

It would be impossible to desire to express any of these qualities as deeply and as universally as we do without our already being connected to them in some intimate way. While the feeling that we lack any of these qualities usually sparks an all-out search in the outer world of things, this sense of lack is only a signal to us that it is time to express a broader and deeper range of God's attributes in our lives. As Meister Eckhart wrote: "One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be." Herein lies the key to finding true fulfillment and satisfaction.

The first place these attributes of God must be expressed is within our consciousness. Emerson wrote: "A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to clothe his thought in images." The building of an internal foundation of consciousness always precedes the demonstration of its external equivalent. You will never see anyone sustain a lifestyle, whether it be one of poverty or prosperity, sickness or health, struggle or harmony, that is not an extension of his or her consciousness.

To get in touch with your sense of purpose, you may find it helpful to speak the following words: As an expression of God, I now let God's infinite qualities shine through me in all I do. I am blessed with a sense of wholeness and harmony. Thank You, God.

What exactly is meditation? The answer you get will depend on whom you ask. Ask the Eastern yogi and you may be told that it is a discipline to put you in touch with the essence of all life. Ask a Western holistic doctor and he or she may tell you it is deep physical and mental relaxation. Ask a fundamentalist Christian and you may be told that it is a heathen practice to be avoided at all costs. Ask certain others and they may describe meditation as a dreamy state that usually precedes sleep and is often experienced in church.

The word meditation is a general term that can be and is used to describe a variety of mental and spiritual exercises. Of the several definitions found in the dictionary for the word meditate, the two that best suit our purposes here are "to focus one's thoughts" and "to engage in contemplation or reflection." And yet the results we seek in meditation transcend both focalization of thought and contemplation, for we seek to penetrate a realm beyond these usual functions of mind.

In the writings of Unity School of Christianity, the state of consciousness required to enter this realm is usually identified as "the silence." Charles Fillmore called the silence "a state of consciousness entered into for the purpose of putting man in touch with Divine Mind so that the soul may listen to the 'still small voice.' Through the superconscious level of mind, you experience the deeper part of yourself that is directly connected with the Infinite. From this vantage point you become less a thinker and more a beholder. The continual chatter of the thinking mind is silenced, giving way to the rejuvenating spring of pure, unadulterated life.

In biblical terms, this experience could be referred to as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, though it may not be as dramatic as the baptism received by the disciples on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). This phrase is certainly appropriate when we consider the meaning of these familiar words. Baptism indicates an immersion or a cleansing. The word holy is derived from the old English word halig which is akin to the old English word hal meaning whole. The baptism of the Holy Spirit, then, can be called the immersion or the merging of individual mind with universal Mind and the realization of the wholeness and omnipresence of Spirit. Initially, the individual experiences an inner transcendence of which, prior to the experience, he or she was totally unaware. Where before there may have been a sense of separation from God and other expressions of life, now all is seen as one. As the experience deepens through further exploration, the individual centers more of his or her patterns of thought in this transcendent realm and the consciousness is raised.

The story of Jacob fleeing the wrath of his brother Esau dramatically depicts his baptism of the Holy Spirit in a dream. When he awakens from sleep he says, "Surely the Lord is in this place-and I did not know it!... How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28:16-17). How true this is! It is no wonder that this baptism has such a dramatic impact on a person who has spent a lifetime thinking of God as up in the sky somewhere. Jacob named the spot where he had this awakening Bethel, which means "house of God." So it is with everyone who is baptized by the Holy Spirit. We realize that we have lived in the house of God all our lives and we knew it not.

One of the turning points in my spiritual career came during a time of deep frustration. I remember waking up one morning feeling spiritually empty (as I had for some time), so I picked up a book by Charles Fillmore and began to read. Beautiful as the words on those pages were, their effect was mocking and antagonizing instead of uplifting. I wanted to be what those words described, but it seemed the harder I tried the emptier I felt inside. In a moment of anger, I threw the book down and said to God, "If You want me to learn all this stuff, then You're going to have to show me, because I'm tired of trying to do it all myself!"

There was no reply. All day I felt mad at God for giving me a vision that seemed impossible to reach. That night I was getting ready for bed and a strange thing happened. I was sitting on the edge of the bed when something in my mind suddenly opened and I could perceive a grand scheme. Everything was beautiful and in its proper place. Deep waves of love and the feeling of total acceptance rushed through me. I felt a level of contentment with myself and my surroundings that I had never felt. I could see the infinite nature of all things, animate and inanimate, and it was wondrous. A knowing came to me that said, "Do not be concerned about your life, for there is a plan for you." I felt this message was not to me alone, but to all who could receive it. In tears and total release 1 whispered, "Let it be that others can see what I am seeing now."

I believe this experience empowered me to eventually make the decision to enter the ministry. There I could see that what 1 had read about and suspected was real, yet so different than I had imagined! How could it be put into words on paper? How could it be grasped by the intellectual mind? I felt deep appreciation, gratitude, and respect for those who had tried.

The Christian fundamentalist typically sees the baptism of the Holy Spirit as a onetime event in which the initiate makes "a decision for Christ." How much of this decision is emotionalism and how much is actually a cosmic awareness is difficult to say. No doubt it varies from case to case. Obviously, the individual experiences a transcendence of some sort. Those whom I have had the opportunity to counsel on the subject tend to report it in retrospect as an emotional experience brought on by their own desire and the expectations of their peers. This is what I experienced in the church in which I grew up. I had been baptized and "saved," yet still felt Sunday after Sunday that the minister was making the altar call for me. Confused by my feelings, I asked the pastor one Sunday afternoon if I should come up again. He said I had already been saved so it would not be necessary. I still did not feel very saved because I continued to believe that he was offering the invitation to me and that Jesus was speaking to my heart. I feel that Jesus was.

The metaphysical Christian's perspective of the baptism of the Holy Spirit is that it is not a onetime event, but rather a process. We are not just "horn again," as the experience might well be referred to, but again and again. Some persons pattern their expectations according to the account in Acts that baptism is always accompanied by speaking messages of Truth in strange tongues: 'All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability" (Acts 2:4). I have always felt that true spiritual baptism enables an individual to speak the Truth in plain English, or whatever language he or she is familiar with. Unity minister and author Bill Fischer called spiritual baptism "a prayer experience with Spirit, an intimate dialogue between an individual and God." In any event, I am calling the process of reaching this state, the process of meditation.

Having established that your purpose in life is to express all the attributes of God in everything you do, it is important for you to know what God's attributes are. I have already listed a few, but as far as you are concerned, these may appear as just words on paper. You may want to silence your preconceptions of these words and have a firsthand experience with God. So the purpose of meditation is simply this: Meditation is the process that brings you into direct contact with attributes of God.

You can never understand your spiritual purpose unless you see for yourself what lies beyond the veil of surface level thoughts. As you penetrate this veil, you will know your purpose, not because you read about it and believed it, but because you have seen for yourself. English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill said: "There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home." This is certainly true of the "truths" revealed in quiet meditation. People often get into the study of Truth and the practice of meditation as a means of solving temporal problems. Nothing less than a direct experience with the qualities of pure Being will provide you with the incentive and enthusiasm necessary to continuously expand your spiritual horizons. To know God for the sake of knowing God, you have to know why you seek what you seek.

Meditation tunes you in to what we might call a life ' signal being sent to you from the Infinite. This is an important concept to consider because it frees you from the thought that you have to get God's attention before He will respond. The communication lines are already open. You already have God's attention and, in fact, are the manifestation of God-Mind concentrated in the place where you are. All you have to do is learn to become sensitive to the broadcast, to "tune in" to an impulse that has been within you all along. This is especially important if you have believed your relationship with God has been damaged or severed as the result of sin. Whi1e sin, in whatever way you define it, can cause a sense of separation, nothing can separate you from God. God cannot behold you as a sinner nor have any sense of condemnation for you whatsoever; however, because there is a difference in your concept of the world and God's reality, you may believe you are condemned. Your practice of meditation will gradually lift you out of this world of misconceptions and into God's Truth. In God's Truth, you are without sin.
Perhaps these words can help you begin to break any bonds your concept of sin may have you in: I am now free from all sin and punishment. In God's perfect love I am free to begin an

In the first part of this book we discussed the difference between your world and God's world. God's world, if you remember, is the underlying reality of Absolute Good that you seek to enter in your time of meditation. Your world is a product of your consciousness, which means that your experience in life is greatly influenced by what you believe. While the practice of meditation infuses you with new life, your experiences will still be colored by many of the limited .,. beliefs you have held, which are not easily displaced by your new realizations of Truth. As Emerson wrote: "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." A concerted effort must be made to accomplish "the independence of solitude" in the midst of a busy day and to build a consciousness suitable for sustaining a higher experience. Prayer is the tool that will enable you to do this.

For example, in meditation you may receive the realization that as a spiritual being you are totally unlimited. Yet, when you go shopping for a new dress or suit you may not look at what you like but at what you can afford. In meditation you had a realization of limitlessness, but in practice you are still operating from limitation. Why? Because you have programmed yourself to think within a certain budgeted image of yourself. You are responding to a subconscious idea of limitation that you have accepted and lived out of for so long you do not even realize you are acting out of it.

This is not to say, of course, that you are to spend more money than you have or to think you can tap into God's unlimited abundance with a credit card. This is a mistake that is made all too often by many on the spiritual path. Being a good steward by engaging in sound financial practices is an important aspect of prosperity. Spending beyond your means to give the appearance of prosperity and then struggling to pay for it later is not a demonstration of God's abundance.

In this vein, a young man explained to me that he had a well-paying job but he did not like it and wanted to quit. Though he had no other job to go to, he felt he had sufficient faith to let the "Holy Spirit" provide for him. Any suggestion of finding another job before he quit his present one was met with, "Wouldn't that be a lack of faith?" He quit the job. After a short period of time he came back to the church asking for a loan to pay his light bill. I had to refuse him because I, too, knew that the Holy Spirit would provide for him. It may not have provided him with what he wanted immediately, but it would provide him with something of much greater value in the long run-a lesson in good common sense!

The only reason we experience limitation is that we have habitually accepted self-imposed limitations to the point that they have become so much of our identity that we do not even know we are making decisions out of them. We must start building a consciousness of abundance through study, meditation, and prayer, and by changing the way we think when we do little things like entering a store. Do we run first to the sale rack? Why not look at the things we think we really want and begin to get used to the idea that these things are not necessarily good for us? We do not have to actually buy everything we want in order to expand our consciousness. Every time we become aware of a pattern of limitation and we interrupt that pattern of consciousness, we advance toward a more suitable overall demonstration of the abundant life.

My father shares an amusing incident that illustrates how ingrained patterns of consciousness can go undetected even though we think we are changing them. Early in his married life he was a traveling sales representative for a feed and grain company in northern Missouri. Along with a suit, the attire of a businessman in those days usually included a dress hat. My father wore one. One day, as always, he removed it from his head when he walked into a small-town cafe for lunch. When the waitress came to take his order, he noticed she was having to try very hard to keep from laughing. When she brought his order to him she was still having the same problem. In the meantime, he noticed others in the restaurant staring and snickering. He did not know what their problem was but assumed it had something to do with the fact that he was not from their town. Finishing his lunch, he paid the check and, hat in hand, went out to his car. When he glanced in the mirror of his car he noticed, much to his dismay, that although he had removed his hat, his hatband had come loose and stayed on his head! He was so used to the feel of the hat that he could not feel the band still on his head, even though he had removed the hat.

We become so comfortable with our limited perceptions of life that even though we think we are changing, something of those perceptions-like the loose hatband-remains. These perceptions are brought to the surface of our minds throughout our day, prompting us to act in ways that keep us bound within their limits. If we are to fully demonstrate the limitlessness of the new vision we receive in moments of inspiration, we have to become aware of these habitual perceptions and do things that will push us beyond them. The tool with which to begin changing these ingrained patterns of consciousness is prayer.

The Purpose of Prayer
We have now covered two important points: (1) as a spiritual being, your purpose is to express the attributes of God in everything you do; and (2) the purpose of meditation is to bring you into direct contact with the attributes of God. Now a third point is this: the purpose of prayer is to integrate the attributes of God into your consciousness which, in turn, will manifest as corresponding conditions.
We are to look at prayer as a consciousness-raising tool, not as a method of begging favors from God or even as a problem-solving device. This attitude could he a departure from many of the preconceptions you have about prayer; but then such preconceptions often limit the effectiveness of this important tool.

The Aramaic word for prayer, slotha, means "to set a trap or to make an adjustment. The meaning to set a trap" carries with it the idea that prayer is an activity which prepares the mind to capture insights into the characteristics of God. While this carries some connotations worth considering, the definition "to make an adjustment" is the most fitting for our purposes here.

Prayer is the activity of adjusting your mind, in every situation, to the higher spiritual standard unfolding in you as the result of your spiritual development. It is a conscious effort to harmonize your mind with the Mind of God, making divine attributes a part of your conscious awareness. It is practiced in special times of quiet solitude as well as in day-to-day circumstances, in situations such as the shopping excursion mentioned above, the healing of an illness, or the attracting of the perfect companion. In Part Four, we will deal specifically with the practical application of prayer in various conditions in life. For now, we will discuss the nuts and bolts of the prayer process.

If God's world is perfect and yours is not, and your world is a projection of your consciousness, then the raising of your consciousness will naturally lift you above the level of the problems you are experiencing. When we ask God to straighten out situations, our focus is usually on getting God to change the conditions, not to change us. In our eyes, we are not the problem. The problem is out there somewhere. We want change as long as we do not have to change. But problem areas in our experience have a direct correlation to the level on which our consciousness operates. When the cause in consciousness is removed, the outer condition responds accordingly. Our problems are solved from the inside out, not from the outside in. Is this easy to put into practice? No, it is not. It is not easy to understand that the only place we can deal effectively with life and the challenges it offers is within the realm of our consciousness. Nevertheless, when this understanding begins to dawn on us, the world becomes our footstool rather than our taskmaster.

I counseled a woman who had felt since childhood that she had been a victim of the insanities of the world. Indeed she had been, but she began to grasp the truth that all the power those people in her life had had over her had been given to them by herself alone. She began to withdraw that power from them, rendering them powerless to make the choices of what she would feel and how she would experience her life. Difficult as it was for her to make this transition, it was beautiful to watch and rewarding to know that if someone coming out of such a negative condition in life could make that kind of progress by solving problems from the inside out, it could be done by anyone. This is the only way we can permanently rise above our problems.

Practical and Powerful
This is a beautifully written book. The concepts are presented in a clear and compelling way. The author's authenticity comes through in his writing. The book lives up to its name...PRACTICAL. I recommend this book for anyone in search of purpose and a deeper relationship with themselves and God. I also recommend his other book...A Practical Guide to Prosperous Living.

"Without a doubt, the most practical, concise, and to the point book I have ever read about meditation and prayer. This is a must for someone who wants a well written and clear book on these subjects. No jibberish and 'roud the mountain lingo here. A definite keeper for my library."

"In A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer, J Douglas Bottorff gives us an easy to read beginner's guide on meditation, what to expect at first and not to expect, and the purpose of meditation being that it is the process that brings you into direct contact with the attributes of God. Regarding the subject of meditation, this book has helped me immensely in how to begin meditation and how best to do so.
Regarding the subject of prayer, Bottorff is so right on! We use prayer to raise our higher consciousness and conform our thought system with our purpose. He uses denials (releasing negative thoughts) and affirmations (a conscious effort to bring the Truth of God into your awareness and then ACT from that truth) to teach us how to pray and live with more peace of mind, better clarity of our Oneness with God and in praying for others. I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to work on their spiritual growth, as it is a fantastic tool to be read over and over because it is just so very inspiring!"

Practical means it makes sense!
This is a great book and I would highly recommend this or any of Rev. Bottorff's works to anyone seeking to gain a greater perspective of their spiritual growth - read it - apply the teachings - reap the rewards!

simple and elegant
I read this then bought copies for people I care about. In my opinion a very inspired book for those with the courage to determine for themselves what is meaningful. The author is a Christian Unity minister I believe but his frame of reference is universal. I love spiritual literature but am sometimes daunted by the esoteric redundancy. This book is everything its title claims.

Other Comments
"This book changed my life! It is truly the most wonderful book on prayer and meditation. It was given as a class at my church."

Rochester, MI
"I continue to receive strong spiritual sustenance from your two books: A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer & A Practical Guide to Prosperous Living. I have been a tither for several years and the knowledge in your books is just what I need to hear at this time. Equally wonderful is the way that the universe works."

San Diego, CA
"I want to express to you my heartfelt thanks for your having written A Practical Guide to Meditation and Prayer. The book has proven to be both educational and practical. I am in the process now of several re-readings of the book, along with thoughtful reflection. It has impacted my life significantly and I expect even greater impact in the future. I know that God will continue to richly bless you as you bless others through such books."