444—Talk to God Part 8: God Hears Prayer (Three Pointing Out Instructions)
Pointing out instructions—I don't explain it to you conceptually, but I try and just show you what you already know.
This is Part 8 of a series Talk to God. Part 7 here. Part 6 here. Part 5 here. Part 4 here. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.
(This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [April 13, 2025] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin).
We’ve got to be fearless
There is a very beautiful text that talks about these epic figures, the three fathers and the four mothers, in the original Genesis text of sacred canon. It says that there is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of Sarah, the God of Rebecca, the God of Rachel, and the God of Leah, the God and the Goddess of each.One master says, ‘But I don't understand. Isn't it the same God?’
And he responds, ‘Well, yes, but of course, absolutely not.’
Because the way the infinite Divine moves through my unique prism is irreducibly, qualitatively, stunningly special and unique. And sometimes we lose access to the fact that we need a shared text. We've lost shared text in culture. We have no shared text. And once we have no shared text, we have no shared Story of Value.
What is a world spirituality as a context for our diversity?
What is a world religion as a context for our diversity?
The shared Story of Value doesn’t mean that everything becomes bland. It's not a blender. Rather, everything becomes so distinct and so unique that we come together through our irreducible uniqueness.
If you are Irish, do Irish poetry and become so freaking Irish that you become universal.
We're all playing the same music. It's the same Story of Value.
But we play it uniquely.
We need Hinduism. We couldn't live without Hinduism.
I couldn't live without Kashmir Shaivism.
And we need the Solomon lineage.
And we need mystical Christianity.
We need the deep Iboga traditions.
We need deep African transmission, and we need every possible form of Sufism.
We need every instrument to play its part to perfection in the Unique Self Symphony, which becomes a bottom-up, self-organizing Reality. It's not top-down.
In Unique Self Symphony, every human being plays their Unique Self, and every collective of human beings — every religion, every nation, every group, every communion — plays its instrument, and we are animated, we are motivated, we are pulled, we are allured by our uniqueness.
Isn't that beautiful?
The strange attractor in my life is my uniqueness.
My irreducible uniqueness was not an accident of Cosmos. There is uniqueness from the first pressure waves at the very beginning.
When we play our Unique Selves in Unique Self Symphony, we've got to be fearless.
Last night, we did a Passover Seder, the original Last Supper, this great lineage tradition.
Here in One Mountain, Many Paths, we want to do some Ramadan, and we want to do some Easter, we want to do some Sufi celebration, we want to do some Kashmir Shaivite celebration. My native tradition is in the Solomon lineage, so we were doing that practice last night, and we ended the practice with a chant. The chant is kol ha’olam kulo. The words are very simple, written by one of my teachers several generations ago.
Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge,’
V’ha’ikar lo lefached klal ‘The essence is, don't be afraid, be fearless.’
It’s not that there aren’t things you should watch out for. It's not that you should be fearless in a foolhardy way. But when it comes to taking your unique risk, which is utterly necessary to realize your, my, our, Unique Self, lo lefached klal ‘be fearless.’
I got some heat for doing the eulogy last week, and I want to respond to it in a very tender, profound way. People talked about all the problems, the critique of Andrew that lives online and may well be legitimate. Andrew wrote a book about it, apologizing and responding, and so, I take it as a given that all the critiques might be right. Some critique online is dead wrong, and some critique is right. You have to look and investigate.
But my response to someone who says that a person can't transform; that even if a person suffered for ten years, we are going to freeze-frame them in their fall and demonize them — a very tender response to that is: Fuck off! Tender. We've got to be fearless in that way. Fuck off!
We are kind. We've got to be kind. Our hearts have to be open. There is room for everyone. And there is certainly room for someone who spent his whole life madly dedicated. Yes, people make mistakes along the way. And if they apologize, if they recognize their mistakes (if they were, in fact, mistakes), then we receive them again.
We hold people in their complexity.
We identify a person not with their demon, but with their daemon.
We have to be audacious. We have to be fearless.
I hope that this response to that critique came across tenderly.
Cosmos is intimacies
Are we ready to go? Are we ready to go, my friends? We've got a big week. This is the eighth week that we're talking about prayer.
We want to restore the technology — the sacred technology of the interior sciences — which is called prayer. Prayer doesn't mean what we think it does. It's like the word God: The God you don't believe in doesn't exist. The God you don't believe in, I don't believe in either. There is, wrote one master, heresy which is faith — a deep sentence, meaning: I am denying, I am rejecting the small God.
I am rejecting the caricatured God.
I am rejecting the God that says that Spirit only moves through me and not through you.
I am rejecting the Spirit that claims to speak for the Divine voice that says that only this piece of land is sacred and not that piece of land, and only this mountain is holy and not that mountain.
It's all sacred. It's all alive. What is that great sacred text from The Sound of Music? The hills are alive.
We are going to talk about prayer. We have to reclaim prayer, evolutionary prayer. We need to reclaim prayer.
It is the last week we're going to talk about this, and this is a crazy big week. I am insanely, insanely excited to be with you. And I am also madly privileged. It is the great privilege of my life to get to talk to you all on Sunday morning. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
We want to now get to the core of prayer.
What is Cosmos made up of? What is the stuff of Cosmos? What's its quality?
The quality of Cosmos is what I would call intimacy.
Cosmos is intimacies.
You might say,
- Gafni, get serious. Really? We've been with you for a while. You've gone a little bit too far. Cosmos is intimacies? Really?
- Really!
But you'll say,
- Well, no, no, it's not intimacies. Cosmos is atoms. We all know that, right? Hello! Democritus first introduced the idea, and by now it has become much more credible. We've done lots of science on atoms. (Let's use atoms to stand for the whole molecular atomic subatomic, quarks to protons, neutrons, electrons to atoms to molecules. Let's call it all atoms.) Reality is not intimacies, Gafni. Reality is atoms.
But what are atoms?
Atoms are intimacies.
That's actually true. An atom is not a thing. An atom is a set of relationships. That's actually what an atom is. The thing called an atom doesn't exist. An atom is a set of coherent intimacies.
The God we don't believe in doesn't exist. The name of God that we've tried to articulate in this new Story of Value (which is the ground for a world religion as a context for our diversity) is the Infinite Intimate. The Infinite, God, is the Infinite Intimate. Infinity is madly in love with the productions of time, writes Blake (and Blake is an ErosValue mystic deeply influenced by the Solomon mysteries of the Renaissance).
The Infinite Intimate manifests Reality. The Infinite Intimate says, I want to put my light in a package, and packaging is everything. Reality is about the manifestation of the right packaging, right container. I have a dear friend with me here who's spending his life on using and leveraging the right packaging to change the world. It's all about packaging.
Packaging is not just the outside. The container is not just the outside. The container shapes the contours and generates something new.
The Infinite Intimate manifests Reality. Infinity is in love with finitude. Infinity desires intimacy. God is not just the infinity of power. God is the infinity of intimacy.
God is the Infinite Intimate who manifests Reality, which is the story of the emergence of ever deeper, ever wider, ever more intense, ever more good, ever more true, ever more beautiful configurations of intimacy. Reality is made up of configurations of intimacy. Atoms are configurations of intimacy.
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The dignity of human existence is that my matter matters
What does intimacy mean?
Intimacy means that there is not just third person — not just it.
And it is not just first person — not just I.
Reductive materialist science says, It's all third person.
Classical Hindu, Zen, Cabalistic meditation say, it's all first person. Thou art that. Tat tvam asi, it lives in you.
Those are true. Those are faces of Reality.
But there is another face, and that other face is the face of the Infinite Intimate, which is the personhood of Cosmos.
It's the second person. It's the space in between the cherubs.
The voice of the Divine emerges from the space in between the cherubs atop the Ark of the Covenant in the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Jerusalem temple, from which emerges the wisdom of Solomon, which shapes at the contours of Reality. That's the personal.
When someone tells you, it's not personal, they are lying. It's all personal.
But personal is not personality.
It's not a separate-self personality. It's not the personality that Einstein said was an optical delusion of consciousness. It's not just a separate, monadic, isolated, dissociated, lonely personality. No, my personhood is not my separate-self personality. My personhood participates in the personhood of Cosmos, which begins with the personhood of protons and moves all the way up.
And then, out of this shared Field of ErosValue, this shared Field of pulsing Eros and aliveness, what emerges is my irreducible uniqueness. My irreducible personhood. Reality having a Talia experience. Reality having a Krista experience. Reality having a Dr. Kincaid experience. Reality having a Chahatie experience. Reality having a Elena experience.
In other words, when I emerge from the Field — from the seamless code of the universe, which is seamless, but not featureless — I realize that I am a unique feature of that seamless field. I am irreducibly unique because uniqueness is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, and I incarnate that uniqueness in my personhood. And my uniqueness — my irreducible uniqueness — causes in the Infinite Intimate, in the Divine, a shocking self-recognition. Divinity — She, He, It — recognizes Itself, Herself, Himself through me in a way that She didn't yet understand Herself.
I add something.
The most shocking realization of the interior sciences in all of human history is:
The dignity of human existence is that my matter matters.
I matter. I'm not replaceable. I'm not fungible. There are no extras on the set. I add to the real, and the real is the Divine. Reality equals Divinity, and Divinity has personhood. Personhood doesn't mean grandpa in the sky or grandma in the sky. God is not just the infinity of power. God's the infinity of intimacy.
At the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang three quarks need to be in right intimacy, or it's over. Gone. Destruction. Disappearance.
An atom is a configuration of intimacy.
A molecule is a configuration of intimacy.
Reality is the progressive deepening of intimacies.
Evolution is not merely from simplicity to complexity. Evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies.
And there is an ultimate intimacy between the Infinite Intimate and me, and you, and we. I matter. There is more God to come. It's a shocking sentence. You can't even speak it. Words don't even hold it.
There is more God to come.
And who is the more God to come?
We are.
I am.
You are.
Literally. Not figuratively, not metaphorically — but substantively. I am co-substantive with the Infinite Intimate. My story participates in God's sacred autobiography. My personal story — my clarified personal story, my deepest heart's desire is the deepest heart's desire of a unique face of the Divine that does not exist without me.
That's the dignity of being a human being.
It's why I feel called.
It's why on my best day, I say, Oh, my God, I want to do something. I want to contribute something. I want to step up. I want a seat at the table of history.
That's the beginning of prayer.
Prayer is the realization —
that I matter infinitely,
and that the unique quality of intimacy which is my essence — the unique configuration of intimacy which is my irreducible Unique Self — is madly desired, madly honored, madly held by the second person of Reality, the second person of God, by the Infinite Intimate;
and that this is an ontological Reality.
and that there's a conversation that is dying to take place.
Prayer is a realization
As we said a couple of weeks ago, when God initiates that conversation, when God invokes that conversation, it's called prophecy. It's beautiful. When human beings initiate and human beings invoke the conversation, it's called prayer.
I hope we are going to be together for many more decades. I pray and hope. But if there is a last thing I'd want to tell you, this might be it. This is so deep and it's so important.
Reality is conversation. The structure of Reality is a set of conversations. Just feel the joy of conversation. Feel the Eros of conversation. You can't pay for an erotic conversation. An erotic conversation means it's Eros. It's ErosValue. It's a live conversation — on the Inside of the Inside, where you feel this ultimate intimacy with a friend, with a beloved, with a tree on a good day.
But imagine that you are missing your best conversations. Can you imagine that the best, the most wondrous, the most stunning, the most enlivening conversation — the most awake, the most suffused with goodness, truth, and beauty?
You are missing all those conversations.
That's my conversation with the Infinite Intimate.
What is the conversation about?
I was talking to a friend of mine, let’s call him N. He's a very beautiful man. He was a senator in the United States. His father was a senator, and he grew up in that world — an elapsed Catholic, then Presbyterian, then Episcopalian, little Reform Jewish, and little secular humanism.
N said to me,
- Marc, I heard from a bunch of people that you were a very serious thinker. But then I heard that you talk about prayer, and I realized I can't take you seriously. Because everybody knows, prayer is a myth. It's obviously a myth.
This guy had become very well practiced in Buddhist teaching.
I said to him,
- Well, you don't believe in prayer. I get that. You think prayer is ridiculous. So, what do you think is real? What do you believe in?
- Well, prayer is a dogma. I believe in meditation, awareness.
- Oh, that's not a dogma?
- No, no, that's a realization. That's real.
So, I said to him,
- Prayer is a realization. Prayer is not a dogma. Prayer is a direct realization.
Ken Wilber had written, in Up from Eden, of prayer being part of the world of dogma, and we had a deep conversation for two, three years. We kind of broke through, together, to this deep realization:
Prayer is a realization.
When I shared this with N, he said,
- Okay, so, show me.
I realized he was well practiced in Tibetan Buddhism, and in Tibetan Buddhism, they do so called pointing out instructions. It means that I don't explain it to you conceptually, but I try and just show you what you already know.
This particular pointing out instruction that I want to share with you just came down. I want to share it with you. But I want to just ask you for something:
If you can, turn off your mind.
But don't go pre-mind. Don't go irrational.
Go trans-mind. Trans-rational.
Keep all your mind. All your mind is there. But now go to a bigger, wider mind. Aurobindo called it an Overmind. Try and feel the pointing out instruction, not in your mind, but in your body, and it'll give you direct access.
God hears your prayer
Just ask yourself a question, can you hear my voice?
You can hear my voice. You can hear my voice. That works. You can hear my voice.
What in you allows you to hear my voice? Ears allow you to hear my voice. My ears. I've got ears. Ears work. That's good.
But is it really your ears? It's not just my ears — it’s my brain, and my attention. But my brain, and my ears, and my attention are part of my consciousness. There is an entire non-local field in my body, this wider consciousness that allows me to hear you, and my ears are an expression of that, or interwoven with that.
That's just simple science. So far, we are in straight science.
Now, stay close. Your consciousness, your beingness expresses itself in this very beautiful continuum of interiors and exteriors. My ears, and my brain, and my consciousness, it's all happening together. If that part of you — your consciousness — can hear me, let me ask you a question:
⁃ Is your consciousness separate from the Field of Consciousness? Is it just you? A little skin-encapsulated ego, separate from the Field of Consciousness? Does your consciousness live by itself in your beautiful skin-encapsulated ego body that you're working on, and putting cosmetics on, and doing everything to make it work?
No.
No, no, no. Your intelligence (let's use that word) hears me, but is your intelligence separate from the Field of Intelligence? No.
If your intelligence can hear me talk, is it at all possible that the Field of Intelligence can't hear me talk?
Of course not.
Let me say it again.
If your intelligence can hear me talk, is it in any way possible that the entire Field of Intelligence cannot hear me talk? Of course not — because your intelligence participates in the Field of Intelligence.
That is exactly what we mean when we say, God hears your prayer. That is exactly what it means. That's it. Done. We just threw out 2,000 years of sophistry. We threw out 2,000 years of abstract theology. It's direct. It's a direct access. It's a direct pointing out.
If you hear me, how do you hear me? My ears? What are my ears? Part of this field of my intelligence.
Is your intelligence separate from the larger Field of Intelligence? Obviously not. That's what Einstein said: The notion of a separate intelligence is an optical delusion of consciousness.
So, if you can hear me, is it at all even vaguely possible that the larger Field of Intelligence cannot hear me? Obviously not. Meaning, God hears prayer.
Done! It's shocking.
All of a sudden, I realize that Michael Jackson got it right. You are not alone. You are not alone.
In other words, when I pray, I transcend my loneliness in a way that's virtually unimaginable.
Now, step two. Tears in my eyes.
The Infinite Intimate, God, is receiving my prayer.
I want to ask you a question,
- What's the experience of the Infinite Intimate?
I want to go into that — that's where we want to go — but I want to do a step in between.
The biggest gift you could possibly give me, and my birthday is coming up, is:
Just open to this.
It's so beautiful. I'm going to try and, with your permission, give you a direct transmission of what it means that the Infinite Intimate actually hears me, is paying attention to me in this insane, profound way.
We talked earlier about the third person of God, the third person of Reality — hundreds of billions of galaxies, galaxies upon galaxies, hundreds and hundreds of billions of galaxies, unimaginable, trillions and trillions of light years, verse upon verse, multiverse, an unimaginable expanse of dazzling energy and power, and a beauty of complexity, that makes calculus look like just a single line; the most unimaginably, dazzlingly complex, beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, set of infinite space, complex, wild truths of unimaginable depths and expanse. All of that is the third person of the Divine.
Imagine all of that third person of God sitting on a chair — contracted into one point, sitting on a chair, looking at you, paying radical personal attention to you.
That is the experience of prayer.
Don't think about it. Just get it. It's more direct.
The infinite third person sitting on a chair, all of that, sitting on a chair, looking directly at you, and just saying, I want to hear every single word you say.
That's prayer. That's what prayer is.
That's the second pointing out. That's the intermediate step.
It's so shocking — and we're dealing now in ontology.
We are dealing in Reality.
We are not dealing in some kind of mystical fling, we are dealing in the interior sciences, the nature of Reality itself.
Not to know this, not to know the nature of Reality is to be insane.
Its insides are lined with love
The third step.
What is that Infinite Intimate?
All of the third person, the Field of Intelligence that hears your words, all of that third person sitting as it were on that chair, looking directly at you with rapt attention — mad, infinite placing of heart, placing of attention. The infinite love — because love is the placing of attention.
What is the Infinite Intimate thinking, feeling?
What does He, She, It feel as It is listening to you?
That's the third step.
I want to ask you to imagine the most tender moment that you've ever had.
Can you do that? Imagine the most tender moment you've ever had in your entire life. It could be with a baby in your arms. It could be with a beloved. It could be with a brother, a sister, a friend. It could be deep in the belly of divine nature. It could be at a creative moment where your whole body just melted with quivering tenderness in its fierce beauty. Imagine the most tender moment you've ever had in your entire life.
Now, double it. Double that tenderness.
Now, triple it. Now, times five.
Now, times 10. Times 100. Times 500. Times 1,000. Times 5,000. Times 10,000.
Tenderness. The world quivers. It's about to melt into the pure pool, the elixir of tenderness. Tenderness exponentialized.
Now, hold that. That's the first quality.
Imagination is not for children. Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi teacher, says, imagination is the quality of the highest realized person. Imagination allows them to grasp the inner nature of Reality.
Imagine a second moment in your life, your most intense feeling of raw, pulsing desire. Imagine that feeling, whenever it was — your most intense, pulsing, throbbing, tumescent moment of desire.
Now, double it. Now, triple it. Times five. Times 10. You know where this is going. Times 50. Times 100. Times 1,000. Times 5,000. Times 10,000.
Now, we have exponentially amplified and deepened profound, quivering desire.
Reality is about to melt into tenderness and about to explode into desire.
Now, mix the two together. Merge them together. That is what the Infinite Intimate sitting in a chair feels inside — for you and about you, looking at you in this moment. That's Reality. That's the inside of Reality. It's what Solomon meant in his song when he said, tocho ratzuf Ahava ‘its insides are lined with love’, with pulsing, tender love.
I am madly loved in every moment. But not a Hallmark love. Not a tinsel love.
Love is the pulsing Eros that cares infinitely, that's willing to sacrifice itself.
When this Christ moment emerged, this disclosure of Christ is the Infinite Intimate saying, I am so wildly, insanely, madly, passionately caring about you that you can nail my body to a cross so that I can hold you, so that every place you fall, you fall into my arms.
And it doesn't matter whether it's Krishna and Radha, or Rama and Sita, or Rumi with the friend, or Adonai hu Ha'Elohim, or Ein Sof, or the earth and the sky, or the African sacred deities. It's all an expression of this infinite pounding love that recognizes me, that knows my name.
Do you understand that? To live without that realization is insane.
And to allow the reductive, materialist, dogmatic fundamentalism — not scientific, but scientistic — to reject it is insane.
And to allow religious fundamentalism to claim it and hijack it for itself, is insane. ‘Only if you follow my ritual in this way and you believe this dogma, only then does this prayer thing work.’ No, that's nonsense.
Both of those — the reductive materialist scientism and the reductive fundamentalism of its religious elk — have stepped out of the Field of ErosValue, the Field of the Divine, the Field of LoveIntelligence and LoveBeauty, which lives irreducibly uniquely in you, as you, and through you, in which the infinite personhood of Cosmos cares for infinitely and needs desperately.
There is no human dignity without this realization.
And all the Prozac in the world, and all the medicine journeying, and all the good science cannot address us until we know that we are personally addressed by the Infinite Intimate that knows our name, that madly desires us, that cares infinitely, until I know that my matter matters. Beloved KK, Dr. Kristina Kincaid, when she works with people, often talks about this capacity to know that your matter matters, like this experience of mattering.
But mattering doesn't mean I've got a job that's paying a shitload.
Mattering means I matter to the Infinite Intimate.
Mattering means I know that my matter is made of what matters, and I matter uniquely, in a way that no one that ever was, is, or will be mattering — other than me, and that Infinity knows my name, and desires me, and cares about me wildly.
Ask for everything
Last step, my friends.
What do I pray for?
What do I do when I pray?
What do I say?
There is a whole movement within the Human Potential movement, liberal Protestant circles, some reformed Jewish places, some Eastern religions, which say, No, no, no, if you do real prayer, you don't ask God for stuff. That's too low.
That is exactly wrong.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need. I just want to end with a story, but it's a sacred story. In Hasidism, it's called a story which is the chariot, the ultimate medicine journey.
My teacher (he died in 1848, but we talk all the time), his teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher was the Master of the Good Name in the Solomon lineage, the Baal Shem Tov, the person who was the name. Name means Unique Self.
There is a hidden story that is passed down about the Baal Shem Tov. He goes to visit people, and when he goes, he has a wagon. And Alexei is the wagon driver, and Alexei always faces not the horses but the Baal Shem Tov, and the horses know where to go. He calls a bunch of his top students, and he says, there is this couple that lives on the outside of Kozhnitz at a particular hamlet, and we have to go visit them.
They get to Kozhnitz, and they ask for this couple and, and everyone looks at them and says, I don't know why you want to see them. They are a poor couple. They've got a couple of goats, a cow, there may be a chicken, but they can barely subsist. They live in this rundown place at the edge of town. And the Baal Shem Tov says, yes, that's where I want to go.
They get to this place, and the Baal Shem Tov doesn't send his attendants. He goes himself, and he knocks on the door. (And of course there were no pictures then, no photography.) He says, I am Israel Baal Shem Tov, but his face is shining — complete, utter, wild, radical radiance. And they realize it's really him.
And he says,
- I am here.
- Thank you for coming, they say.
He says,
- I am hungry. I want a meal.
They barely have money themselves. They can barely subsist. And the disciples are ashamed, and they try and whisper to the Baal Shem Tov, these are poor people. And he says to his students, guy, guy, ‘go.’ I want my meal.
So, they make him a meal. They slaughter one of the chickens. They get to lunch after this big meal he has eaten. And the Baal Shem Tov usually fasts. It's now lunchtime. He had come early in the morning. He says to the couple,
- I am the Baal Shem Tov. I want another meal. I am hungry.
Now, at this point, the disciples are mortified. What has gotten into his head? Doesn't he realize he's going to bankrupt them? He demands this huge lunch. And now they've got just one cow left. And he says,
- Make sure dinner is on time.
They slaughter the cow, according to the ritual laws of no pain to animals. They give him everything. The wife is crying. She doesn't even understand. Now, they're completely penniless. I mean, nothing. (There were no pennies then, but kopek-less.)
The Baal Shem Tov says, let's go. And they go. And they get back to Medzhybizh. The disciples are completely ashamed, and four of the disciples leave the Baal Shem Tov, because they can't believe that their master could be that unethical, but a couple of them stay.
Now, it's a year later.
The Baal Shem Tov bangs on his shtender, on the place where he studied in the study hall, and he says,
⁃ It's been a year since we went to that couple. (And no one wants to remember that.) We're going back. You come, you come (the two that were there with him the year before that had remained). And Alexei, you drive. And a whole bunch more disciples, you come.
They fill the wagon.
Of course, the two disciples that were there a year ago are devastated. They're filled with shame. They get to the place outside of Kozhnitz, and they see not a broken-down house, but this resplendent, beautiful home. And there is this attendant, and there are horses. And they say, is this the home of that couple? The attendant says, yes, yes. This is the wealthiest, most successful, most charitable man in town. They all go in with the Baal Shem Tov. And the Baal Shem Tov smiles and he says,
- Tell everyone what happened.
And the man says,
⁃ I would pray every day, but I never wanted to bother God, or ask God for anything I needed because God is busy. God's got stuff to manage, places to go and people to see.
And the Baal Shem Tov said,
⁃ I knew that this man's prayer would open all the heavens, but he wouldn't ask for what he needed. So, I had to travel here to Kozhnitz, and I had to take away everything — breakfast, lunch, and dinner — until he had nothing.
And the man said,
⁃ Indeed, that's what happened. When you left, I had nothing. I had nothing. I had nothing. We live here at the edge of town, I went into the forest. My wife was devastated, and I couldn’t feed my children. And I just laid down on the floor of the forest. And I screamed to God, Help me, help me! I've done everything I could. I can't do it myself. I need — and I went through everything I needed. I need this, and I need that. God, I've got no place else to turn. Help me, help me!
And the gates opened. All the gates opened.
There is nothing more holy than the depth of my need
That's how we pray. We don't pray in sophisticated Latin, or Hebrew, or Sanskrit. That's not what it's about. It's about my heart pouring out. My intimate, throbbing, yearning heart, falling, embracing the Infinite Intimate, and saying, Oh my God, help me!
Prayer affirms the dignity of personal need.
And you know what I ask for in prayer?
The Baal Shem Tov said, ask for everything! Ask for everything! There's no need too small.
Because that's the dignity of personhood.
Reality is a story of human need. And when I clarify my need, there is nothing more holy than the depth of my need.
That's really what evolution is.
Evolution is love in action in response to need.
We need each other, my friends.
We need each other in the Unique Self Symphony.
We need each other in friendship.
We need each other in mad love, in mad honor.
It's one world. One breath. And it's one heart. It's one power. It's one universal nation under God. We need each other. We need each other.
So, let's pray.
We have a prayer that we do every week. And the prayer is called the holy and the broken hallelujah. It's Leonard Cohen's prayer.
Hallelujah is really his prayer. Hallelujah is the word of prayer. Hallel means drunken intoxication and pristine praise. It's the holy and the broken. There's a blaze of light in every word. It doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.
Let's pray. And as we pray, ask for everything.
Ask for everything. Nothing left out. Ask for everything. Because that's the dignity of being a human being. Hallelujah!
This is Part 8 of a series Talk to God. Part 7 here. Part 6 here. Part 5 here. Part 4 here. Part 3 here. Part 2 here. Part 1 video here.
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