Prayer is a very useful tool if one is praying in the right way. The spiritual guru Paramahansa Yogananda gives excellent guidelines of how to pray in his lesson Communing With God Through Prayer. He emphasizes how when we pray our minds should be completely absorbed in the prayer communing with God as if we are not separate from God. Prayer, he states, should not be mechanical. We have to mean it when we pray and prayer must be done with great intensity combined with complete love and devotion. Prayer cannot be emotional or intellectual, he goes on to say, and is best done when our minds are still and we feel the presence of the Divine. 

In the Bailey teachings prayer is useful, but in the book Externalization of the Hierarchy it is emphasized in numerous places that prayer alone is ineffective if it is not followed by action on our part. Between pages 230—240 what might seem like a long rant exists on this very point indicating that too many people pray wanting the Hierarchy and Avatars to rescue them without wanting to  do their part. For example we find this quote, “This new world will not come as an answer to prayer or by the passive wishful thinking and expectation of the peace-loving idealist and mystical visionary. They point the way and indicate the needed objective. It will come when the mystic and the man of vision awakens to the need of the hour and comes down from the world of dreams, of theories, and of words into the hard arena of daily and public life. He must be willing to fight for that which he desires and knows to be good and true and right, and must stand firm against those who seek to distort the vision and to arrest its appearance, arming for battle so that final disarmament may be possible” Externalization of the Hierarchy p. 243 

Combining the thoughts of Yogananda and the quotes from the Bailey material we might say that prayer is only effective if we experience ourselves as “at-one” with others and in that sense of at-one-ment we are praying to be infused with spiritual qualities so that we can enhance our ability to make a difference by working with our Planetary Logos (our conscious planet) to be a better receptacle to do our part. That helps the Planetary Logos, spiritual Hierarchy* and Avatars to have helpers so that they can be more effective.

When we pray as helpless children only wanting our Planetary Logos, the spiritual Hierarchy* and Avatars to rescue us, we are really acting more from the consciousness of Groups 3, 4, and 5 which are prone to magical and mythological thinking. They want superheroes to come and save the day as they sit there helpless and passive. They recognize God Transcendent (out there) but fail to also experience God Imminent (in here). Those in Group 6 (especially those who are materialists without spiritual aspiration), tend to remove God altogether and make themselves into Gods instead. They have reached the heights of selfishness and arrogance. In their deluded ways of thinking they want others to worship or pray to them because they cannot appreciate how far they are from true recognition of the Divine.

As we reach Groups 7, 8 and 9 (as Probationers, Disciples and Initiates) our way of approaching prayer shifts. We discover God Imminent and in time learn to combine that realization with an awareness of God Transcendent becoming essentially non-dual dualists. Knowing we are at-one with the Divine it may seem odd to pray because prayer feels like we are praying to ourselves. This is a distortion of non-dual teachings because we are only asserting one aspect of Divinity, the imminent. (Ironically, this kind of “non-dualism” is actually dualism since it embraces the imminent unmanifest side of Divinity and negates the transcendent manifest side setting up a this not that exclusionary paradigm). The more one reaches Group 9 the more God Imminent and God Transcendent are both realized and valued (the true non-duality as non-dual dualism embracing both). Now prayer is more an attempt to spiritualize ourselves inwardly in communion with and service to the Divine (which in this case is at first our Planetary Logos, or our conscious planet that we factually “live, move and have our being” within). Once we reach this state of awareness, prayer is truly powerful.

In conclusion, use prayer. Absorb yourself into it with devotion and love. Then ask for the changes in the world you want to see combined with an open mind and heart that is capable of receiving the changes you need to make, to become not only more Divine, but to help create a better world.

Copyright © 2025 by Dr Lisa Love. All Rights Reserved.

*(Note: The spiritual hierarchy is not some oppressive selfish know-it-all group who sit above others with a sense of superiority. Rather as used in the Bailey teachings the term “hierarchy” refers to a group of wise, inclusive, compassionate human beings who have perfected their hearts, minds, emotions, etheric and physical bodies so they are fit to be of service to humanity).

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