Power of the Not Quite There Yet? (© 2008 Eileen Baker)

Can we ever really understand The Lord's Prayer? The truth is that we do not know what truth is so how can we know what foregiveness is? The Way forward is what then?

Perhaps the Power of the Not Quite There Yet (towards Eckhart Toll's "The Power of Now" that is).

Sometimes we feel and know that we are behaving in a way that is not true. Then we feel guilty so perhaps our conscience is telling us this and that is at least a power in itself. Not perfect and not in "the now", but a start maybe.

We cannot seem to overcome our behavioural ‘norms’ because it is too embarrassing to do something completely spontaneous, without prejudice and yet with a feeling of knowing it is the right thing. That is why we feel guilty.

Throughout a lifetime of going and being part of ‘our’ groups we become institutionalised or programmed and why not? It helps. It helps us to ‘function’ but it doesn’t help us to grow.

What if someone comes over to us (a stranger) and offers a welcome, or wants a welcome? That is nice. What if they are someone not like us, what if they are different to our ‘norms’ and they are the type of person to whom we feel a dislike, a prejudice? Do we discreetly snub or just ignore them? Or what if a stranger is not acknowledged and we feel that they are not our type of person so we won’t bother. Well, they are not like me, so it’s ok. But there is the guilt.

Over the years this gets compounded and, despite our inner knowing of disharmony – for no other reason than being confirmed in our behaviour and adhering to our ‘norms’ – we carry on. But there is the inner guilt.

Thinking of what people might think of us is the key dark hole. We stay there because at least we are accepted in this with others who think the same. Thinking and thoughts can control us and they do.

We will often not do something overtly different to our set of norms because we are too frightened to leave them aside. It is frightening to be exposed. To be left without our protection.

So thoughts rule us. The personal thoughts of what 'our' people are thinking about us can govern us and keep us within the boundaries.

These boundaries are our prejudices. We might argue that they are not ‘prejudices’ that they are ways of living and functioning and getting us through life and along our way.

But our true nature is nothing to do with our race, our nationality, our family, our friends, our politics with a small and a capital ‘p’ and our thoughts are from our ego and they are dangerous. That is why we carry guilt. Because we know our true nature deep down. It might be so deep that we do not recognise it for what it is so we just feel uncomfortable and carry on.

What is our true nature then?

Our true nature is to be free of all boundaries and restrictions and prejudices. This is the essence of life.

I cannot make this mean anything of sense without declaring a fundamental understanding of what life is – at least in as far as I can make sense of it, not in the comprehensive sense of knowing the whole universe and the ultimate meaning of life. But in order for me to make sense of what it is exactly that Christ was teaching and what other religions and/or spiritual directions tell us, I realise that we are one being, but that we must reincarnate on this earth and live out different lives, like an actor on a stage. And if life is but a stage (as Shakespeare famously said) then we can also say that a stage is life. In this way we take with us our prejudices and play out our lives but with the underlying divine direction to learn to rid ourselves of these, to let go. But our conscious mind or our ego doesn’t know that. It is a bit like being thrown a huge puzzle to put together but with lots of pieces missing. Or like the Irish joke that goes like this: When I asked the Irish man how to get from here to there, the Irish man replied that, if I wanted to go there, I had better not start from here then!

The thing is that we have to start from here. We have nowhere else to start from. But that joke is not as silly as it seems as it holds a deep truth.

Often, I have pondered the words of The Lord’s Prayer. Actually, it is a lifetime’s work to understand it. It is related to why we are here (again). It is not a set of words put together for ‘worship’, it is a key set of words put together for enabling us to grow and to understand why we are here; it is about asking for help in our current predicament – our life – whilst we are travelling this incarnation; this is the journey. I am not speaking about ‘the meaning of life’; I haven’t got a clue and I haven’t got much of a clue about ‘the meaning of this life or my life but as the universe is a huge place and there are billions of unexplained things going on and I have got just my one person, I reckon that if I start with ‘what is the meaning of my life?’ then, huge as it is, it is not as huge as trying to figure out the unfigurable. And perhaps it is as good a start as any.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be Thy Name,

Thy Kingdom Come,

Thy Will be done on earth,

As it is in heaven.

God is in heaven, so we can reach him only by praying or meditating (they can be the same thing), by looking into ourselves and by contacting him for help from our deepest being, our soul. We can speak to him from our soul, not from our ego. This is because our soul has no barrier to him. Our ego does. Our ego uses logic and barriers whilst our soul uses knowing and love (that is why we feel guilty when we act from our ego and our soul is made unhappy).

We direct him to send his kingdom. We do not ask him to. We tell him to.

We direct him that we want his Will to be done on the earth, just like it is in heaven. Which implies that at the moment his Will is not being done here in its entirety, unlike in heaven where it is being done.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We direct him to give us what we need to progress through this life, day by day. Which implies that we need to be aware of the present, of the now, to understand the lesson or the food for thought as well as having the material food we need.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

This is one of the most puzzling lines of the prayer. If you read it in the way that you ask for forgiveness, just like you (obviously) forgive those who ‘trespass’ against you, you can almost believe that you just about forgive anyone, anything and therefore you will be sure to be forgiven. But I do not think that it means this.

If you read it in the way that we are asking God to forgive us in exactly the same way that we forgive others, we might realise that this ‘forgiveness’ is a bit baffling. We rarely forgive, that is why. Which means that if we rarely forgive then we ask God rarely to forgive us. That is what we are asking. But why would we ask that? Why wouldn’t we ask to be forgiven anyway, even though we might not forgive?

True forgiveness is to live your life in such a way that absolutely no grudge, prejudice or injustice affects the way that you feel at your deepest level and in the way that you behave towards people. That you feel constantly at one with everything around you – not because everything is good, but because everything is not good.

So how on earth do we get out of this one?

Chronologically speaking, there is no true differentiation between all of the great religions of the world. Buddhism was around long before Christ came to earth. What Buddhism teaches is to find awareness and that re-incarnations allow us to go through all of the lessons that we need in order to achieve this. When Christ came there was no contradiction, just a move forward because he actually provided a way out of continuous re-incarnations to achieve the ultimate. His sacrifice on earth was to take upon himself all of those guilts that we feel and enact out of human nature; living in Sin is living without God, that is all. His way was to give us heaven sent Grace to enable us to find our way forward beyond the constant karma and re-incarnation as Buddhism teaches by giving us a direct and unconditional foregiveness from God.

In a Buddhist depiction there is an analogy about receiving something (a package) from someone else that we do not want; perhaps it is hate or jealousy or anger. Buddhism teaches us to send this package back to its sender with love, so that we do not carry this and so that the sender will work out those issues his or her self. In Christ’s New way the story changes somewhat: Christ teaches us to take the package upon ourselves and then let it go upwards to the Divine, to God. In this way, both parties are relieved of the burden and both experience foregiveness as the sin is taken away. This does not contradict Buddhism, it merely takes us all on to a different way forward with the Christ himself intervening on our behalfs. He is giving us a way out and a way forward.

And lead us not into Temptation, but deliver us from Evil.

Still pondering these! Well, I am only human you see.