Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer

THE HIDDEN POWER OF BEAUTY, BLESSING, WISDOM, AND HURT

By Gregg Braden

excerpted from Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer

For 14 days we’d acclimated our bodies to altitudes of more than 16,000 feet above sea level. We’d crossed an icy river in hand-hewn wooden barges, and driven for hours peering at one another over our surgical masks, which doubled as filters for the dust that floated through the floorboards of our vintage Chinese bus. Although the bus seemed as old as the temples themselves, our translator assured me that it wasn’t! Holding on to the seats around us, and even on to one another, we had braced ourselves over washed-away bridges and roadless desert, as we were jarred from the inside out, just to be in this very place in this precise moment. I thought, Today is not about being warm. Today is a day of answers.


I focused my attention directly into the eyes of the beautiful and timeless-looking man seated lotus-style in front of me: the abbot of the monastery. Through our translator, I’d just asked him the same question that I’d asked each monk and nun that we’d met throughout our pilgrimage: “When we see your prayers,” I began, “what are you doing? When we see you tone and chant for 14 and 16 hours a day, when we see the bells, the bowls, the gongs, the chimes, the mudras, and the mantras on the outside, what is happening to you on the inside?”


As the translator shared the abbot’s reply, a powerful sensation rippled through my body, and I knew that this was the reason we’d come to this place. “You have never seen our prayers,” he answered, “because a prayer cannot be seen.” Adjusting the heavy wool robes beneath his feet, the abbot continued. “What you have seen is what we do to create the feeling in our bodies. Feeling is the prayer!”


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 more than 2,000 years ago. In early translations of the biblical book of John (chapter. 16, verse 24, for example), we’re invited to empower our prayers by being surrounded [feeling] by our desires fulfilled, just as the abbot suggested: “Ask without hidden motive and be surrounded by your answer.” 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 the power of overcoming such polarities, the words of Jesus recorded in the Nag Hammadi Library remind us that when we do this, and say to the mountain, “‘Mountain move away,’ it will move away.”


If the wisdom was that consistent over such vast periods of time, then it must be useful to us, even today! Using nearly identical language, both the abbot and the scrolls were describing a form of prayer that has been largely forgotten in the West.