A Brief Reflection on The Existential Meaning-Effect of Prayer
I have been living among modern generation to whom prayer was alien, a psychological pacifier, an “opium for masses”, the delusional “soul of a soulless [and cruel] world”. If I heard or saw someone was praying, I wondered to whom and for what? I was the fish swimming in the fetishism of science and worshipping human reason and consciousness. I didn’t know, as fish don’t know about the whence of water, this alienation from the sublime and prayer was a state of turning away from seemingly the invisible and essential connection to the source of Being, and consequently falling into materialism and despair---camouflaged with temporary worldly success in sciences and industry. This “turning away” was partially caused by undoing faith in God through excesses of faith. Religious excess, intolerance, and fundamentalism is a kind of greed and can turn the good into its opposite: religious bigotry and hypocrisy. Thus, this strange little motto was hacked somewhere in my mind--and we hear it even now: “I have faith in science”!
It took years of studying philosophy and catching up with sciences that I woke up from my slumber and came to the realization that we need balance: we can’t exorcise scientific inquiry from the world in the name of God, nor should or can we expel religion and God and de-deify the world into our lifeless scientific dissection. This transformation requires seeing and doing sciences and religions in a new light: a world in which seeking scientific proximate causes and quantification occurs within a holistic and qualitative understanding of Being, where we understand why we pray and to whom.
I was disconnected from the gift of “prayer” for so long. When I came back to it, it felt like walking in a cloudy world in which I couldn’t find the right footings to overcome my doubts. God guided me. I have no doubt now that without God’s grace, I couldn’t see these seemingly clouds as the most real in life. I didn’t want to deceive myself and to accept prayer as the most essential and God as the most real; respecting my existential yearning, I sought God with eyes wide open. I reflected on different possible analysis of our existence for years and in my yearning indeed I was praying to God to guide me. What a bliss! And faith grows like a seed, especially if one understands the wisdom behind it. Then one sees the world in a different light: seeing the presence of God’s grace, in attending to each idea and object, in reflecting on one’s thoughts, words, and actions. I experienced the invisible background horizon of all events, though the most neglected and forgotten, as the most real. Thus, I moved away from a materialist, physicalist, and narrow scientific-secular mode of comportment to the world to literally experiencing divine presence in my family and civic duties, intellectual activities, and scientific endeavors. I can tell exactly how these two different worlds feel like and how the former ends up to hedonism and nihilism and at best humanism, and the latter brings about attunement and connection to the source, and, strangely enough, makes one capable in seeing the dark side of one’s soul and shortcomings better with courage, hope, and determination to clean the mirror. I know now that faith in God is not a self-hypnotizing pacifying idea, but the true answer to our inner void. The unseen ubiquitous God is the Source, not coextensive with life, but as that which holds life together and sustains it in each moment of existence. God did not pre-set the clock of the universe and withdrew. God is not absent or dead—as 19th c. and 20th c. the West believed and believes. God is the most present and those who see themselves in absolute delusional autonomy had brought about death of species, including human species on this planet by consumerism, casino-predatory-usury capitalism, wars, hedonism and greed.
Now it makes so much sense to me why we shouldn’t set any “partner” with God. What does “partner” or “substitute” mean? All the Quran is permeated with the unity of God. I had a difficult time to digest this point in the past. For example, surah The Cave tells the story of the Companions of the Cave who rebelled against the false gods of their time and God says: “We gave strength to their hearts when they stood up and said, ‘Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and earth. We shall never call upon any god other than God, for that would be an outrageous thing to do. These people of ours have taken gods other than Him. Why do they not produce clear evidence about them? Who could be more unjust than someone who makes up lies about God?” (18:14-15)
Nothing is the same as God. God is transcendental and ineffable—in terms of the fact that we know only 99 names of God in the Quran but we can’t fathom God’s existence, we are not equipped to understand the eternal. Our understanding of God’s unity is a hidden treasure in us that constitutes the foundation of our existence-essence in one constellation, i.e., our essence is not separate from our existence. But when in our self-understanding, we separate them and deny our “connection” to the Source, we commit injustice to ourselves and violate our divine nature and consequently fall into despair and nihilism. Our belonging to God is the essence of our very inquisitive mind and engulfing waves of love and devotion in our heart. Whenever we try to reduce this existential fact to mere biological notions, amygdala or genes, we take part of truth as the whole truth. Faith in reductionism is fallacious, whether in sciences or in our existential self-understanding. In each case, it is a version of worshipping anything but God and it is dangerous. Why? The idea of unity of God has immediate moral-practical ramifications. Whenever we ground our existence in “gods and goddesses”, we go astray as they have no guiding scriptural evidence; they are the invention of our whims of power and pleasure. Or whenever we reduce our existence to “nature” or “cells” or “atoms and particles”—while they are partly constitutive of our existence—we fall astray. We lose the perspective and intuition of the whole picture—the Being that gives rise to beings. We take what is expedient and practical for the fact. And consequently, we are prone to fall into hedonism and will-to-power or at best humanism.
In the nineteenth century self-perception, it was impossible for Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx to see the future of their views. Everything is on an open plane for us now. Scriptures were waiting to be read with a new conscience and historical experience. And it is the time to see the truth: spiritually Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx are dead. The worshipping of Trump’s art of dealing in predatory-casino-usury-white-supremacist-nationalist-misogynist-demagoguery is dead; it is a tragic repetition of a historical comedy.
After years of reflection, I awakened shivering and shocked to the reality of what we have done to ourselves and other species. The narcissism of worshipping our nationalism, wealth, fame, or honor is killing us. The worshiping our own consciousness and reason as self-subsistence and self-sufficient—this was the dream of modernity—is killing us. Postmodernity is the antithesis to this dream—pushing us to the limit of complete relativism and melting all values into “whatever goes”—overshadowing reason altogether. We can reason in sciences, philosophies, and religions and see now with clear evidence that all gods and goddesses, and all our scientism (as a religion) and atheistic philosophies couldn’t stand the evidence of our scriptures and the Quran: denial of our connection to God is an existential-spiritual suicide. Look at the clown of scientism, Trump-crown-capitalism, and the horror of global warming and the present 6th mass extinction—an evidence for all to see.
But what ought we to learn? Prayer. Now with a deeper understanding and in the light of reason. Praying is a mode of connection, which both increases and is the effect of faith. Facing, heeding, conversing with, asking God, in the test of existence in this world, is for our growth, because God knows the outcome of all things and events. The test of a limited time to live on this planet is to know ourselves. We can purify ourselves by praying-stepping-in-unity of our thoughts, words, actions in God. It guides our reason how to seek sciences, which can save us, not distract or destroy us. It rectifies the delusion of our metaphysical autonomy and highlights the sense of our “sameness” to God, as belonging, not identity. From the time we fell into the delusion of “identity” with God, we have fallen astray. Praying-connection-heeding God gives us moral strength; it will repel evil and help us not to get lost in the worshipping of pleasure and power. Prayer-connection to God brings us back to the straight path of spiritual release from despair and nihilism. Connection to God liberates and guides us into the true channel of existence, which transcends us to God, rather than reducing us to the beast. All addictions and fetishisms—and complete identification with worldly success—is a cry of despair and thirst for the source of our existence. As a post says, it is grammatically, and I add spiritually, correct to say: “Many people embrace their fetish, rather than attempting treatment to get rid of it.”
“Tell them the parable of two men: for one of them We made two gardens of grape vines, surrounded them with date palms, and put corn fields in between; both gardens yielded fruit and did not fail in any way; We made a stream flow through them, and so he had abundant fruit. One day, while talking to his friend, he said, ‘I have more wealth and a larger following than you.’ He went into his garden and wronged himself by saying, ‘I do not think this will ever perish, or that the Last Hour will ever come– even if I were to be taken back to my Lord, I would certainly find something even better there.’ His companion retorted, ‘Have you no faith in Him who created you from dust, from a small drop of fluid, then shaped you into a man? But, for me, He is God, my Lord, and I will never set up any partner with Him. If only, when you entered your garden, you had said, “This is God’s will. There is no power not [given] by God.” Although you see I have less wealth and offspring than you, my Lord may well give me something better than your garden, and send thunderbolts on your garden from the sky, so that it becomes a heap of barren dust; or its water may sink so deep into the ground that you will never be able to reach it again.’ And so it was: his fruit was completely destroyed, and there he was, wringing his hands over what he had invested in it, as it drooped on its trellises, and saying, ‘I wish I had not set up any partner to my Lord.’ He had no forces to help him other than God– he could not even help himself. In that situation, the only protection is that of God, the True God: He gives the best rewards and the best outcome.” (18:32-44)
It took years of studying philosophy and catching up with sciences that I woke up from my slumber and came to the realization that we need balance: we can’t exorcise scientific inquiry from the world in the name of God, nor should or can we expel religion and God and de-deify the world into our lifeless scientific dissection. This transformation requires seeing and doing sciences and religions in a new light: a world in which seeking scientific proximate causes and quantification occurs within a holistic and qualitative understanding of Being, where we understand why we pray and to whom.
I was disconnected from the gift of “prayer” for so long. When I came back to it, it felt like walking in a cloudy world in which I couldn’t find the right footings to overcome my doubts. God guided me. I have no doubt now that without God’s grace, I couldn’t see these seemingly clouds as the most real in life. I didn’t want to deceive myself and to accept prayer as the most essential and God as the most real; respecting my existential yearning, I sought God with eyes wide open. I reflected on different possible analysis of our existence for years and in my yearning indeed I was praying to God to guide me. What a bliss! And faith grows like a seed, especially if one understands the wisdom behind it. Then one sees the world in a different light: seeing the presence of God’s grace, in attending to each idea and object, in reflecting on one’s thoughts, words, and actions. I experienced the invisible background horizon of all events, though the most neglected and forgotten, as the most real. Thus, I moved away from a materialist, physicalist, and narrow scientific-secular mode of comportment to the world to literally experiencing divine presence in my family and civic duties, intellectual activities, and scientific endeavors. I can tell exactly how these two different worlds feel like and how the former ends up to hedonism and nihilism and at best humanism, and the latter brings about attunement and connection to the source, and, strangely enough, makes one capable in seeing the dark side of one’s soul and shortcomings better with courage, hope, and determination to clean the mirror. I know now that faith in God is not a self-hypnotizing pacifying idea, but the true answer to our inner void. The unseen ubiquitous God is the Source, not coextensive with life, but as that which holds life together and sustains it in each moment of existence. God did not pre-set the clock of the universe and withdrew. God is not absent or dead—as 19th c. and 20th c. the West believed and believes. God is the most present and those who see themselves in absolute delusional autonomy had brought about death of species, including human species on this planet by consumerism, casino-predatory-usury capitalism, wars, hedonism and greed.
Now it makes so much sense to me why we shouldn’t set any “partner” with God. What does “partner” or “substitute” mean? All the Quran is permeated with the unity of God. I had a difficult time to digest this point in the past. For example, surah The Cave tells the story of the Companions of the Cave who rebelled against the false gods of their time and God says: “We gave strength to their hearts when they stood up and said, ‘Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and earth. We shall never call upon any god other than God, for that would be an outrageous thing to do. These people of ours have taken gods other than Him. Why do they not produce clear evidence about them? Who could be more unjust than someone who makes up lies about God?” (18:14-15)
Nothing is the same as God. God is transcendental and ineffable—in terms of the fact that we know only 99 names of God in the Quran but we can’t fathom God’s existence, we are not equipped to understand the eternal. Our understanding of God’s unity is a hidden treasure in us that constitutes the foundation of our existence-essence in one constellation, i.e., our essence is not separate from our existence. But when in our self-understanding, we separate them and deny our “connection” to the Source, we commit injustice to ourselves and violate our divine nature and consequently fall into despair and nihilism. Our belonging to God is the essence of our very inquisitive mind and engulfing waves of love and devotion in our heart. Whenever we try to reduce this existential fact to mere biological notions, amygdala or genes, we take part of truth as the whole truth. Faith in reductionism is fallacious, whether in sciences or in our existential self-understanding. In each case, it is a version of worshipping anything but God and it is dangerous. Why? The idea of unity of God has immediate moral-practical ramifications. Whenever we ground our existence in “gods and goddesses”, we go astray as they have no guiding scriptural evidence; they are the invention of our whims of power and pleasure. Or whenever we reduce our existence to “nature” or “cells” or “atoms and particles”—while they are partly constitutive of our existence—we fall astray. We lose the perspective and intuition of the whole picture—the Being that gives rise to beings. We take what is expedient and practical for the fact. And consequently, we are prone to fall into hedonism and will-to-power or at best humanism.
In the nineteenth century self-perception, it was impossible for Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx to see the future of their views. Everything is on an open plane for us now. Scriptures were waiting to be read with a new conscience and historical experience. And it is the time to see the truth: spiritually Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx are dead. The worshipping of Trump’s art of dealing in predatory-casino-usury-white-supremacist-nationalist-misogynist-demagoguery is dead; it is a tragic repetition of a historical comedy.
After years of reflection, I awakened shivering and shocked to the reality of what we have done to ourselves and other species. The narcissism of worshipping our nationalism, wealth, fame, or honor is killing us. The worshiping our own consciousness and reason as self-subsistence and self-sufficient—this was the dream of modernity—is killing us. Postmodernity is the antithesis to this dream—pushing us to the limit of complete relativism and melting all values into “whatever goes”—overshadowing reason altogether. We can reason in sciences, philosophies, and religions and see now with clear evidence that all gods and goddesses, and all our scientism (as a religion) and atheistic philosophies couldn’t stand the evidence of our scriptures and the Quran: denial of our connection to God is an existential-spiritual suicide. Look at the clown of scientism, Trump-crown-capitalism, and the horror of global warming and the present 6th mass extinction—an evidence for all to see.
But what ought we to learn? Prayer. Now with a deeper understanding and in the light of reason. Praying is a mode of connection, which both increases and is the effect of faith. Facing, heeding, conversing with, asking God, in the test of existence in this world, is for our growth, because God knows the outcome of all things and events. The test of a limited time to live on this planet is to know ourselves. We can purify ourselves by praying-stepping-in-unity of our thoughts, words, actions in God. It guides our reason how to seek sciences, which can save us, not distract or destroy us. It rectifies the delusion of our metaphysical autonomy and highlights the sense of our “sameness” to God, as belonging, not identity. From the time we fell into the delusion of “identity” with God, we have fallen astray. Praying-connection-heeding God gives us moral strength; it will repel evil and help us not to get lost in the worshipping of pleasure and power. Prayer-connection to God brings us back to the straight path of spiritual release from despair and nihilism. Connection to God liberates and guides us into the true channel of existence, which transcends us to God, rather than reducing us to the beast. All addictions and fetishisms—and complete identification with worldly success—is a cry of despair and thirst for the source of our existence. As a post says, it is grammatically, and I add spiritually, correct to say: “Many people embrace their fetish, rather than attempting treatment to get rid of it.”
“Tell them the parable of two men: for one of them We made two gardens of grape vines, surrounded them with date palms, and put corn fields in between; both gardens yielded fruit and did not fail in any way; We made a stream flow through them, and so he had abundant fruit. One day, while talking to his friend, he said, ‘I have more wealth and a larger following than you.’ He went into his garden and wronged himself by saying, ‘I do not think this will ever perish, or that the Last Hour will ever come– even if I were to be taken back to my Lord, I would certainly find something even better there.’ His companion retorted, ‘Have you no faith in Him who created you from dust, from a small drop of fluid, then shaped you into a man? But, for me, He is God, my Lord, and I will never set up any partner with Him. If only, when you entered your garden, you had said, “This is God’s will. There is no power not [given] by God.” Although you see I have less wealth and offspring than you, my Lord may well give me something better than your garden, and send thunderbolts on your garden from the sky, so that it becomes a heap of barren dust; or its water may sink so deep into the ground that you will never be able to reach it again.’ And so it was: his fruit was completely destroyed, and there he was, wringing his hands over what he had invested in it, as it drooped on its trellises, and saying, ‘I wish I had not set up any partner to my Lord.’ He had no forces to help him other than God– he could not even help himself. In that situation, the only protection is that of God, the True God: He gives the best rewards and the best outcome.” (18:32-44)
