Don:

I believe it was okay for you to ask the question you asked. This isn't the same thing, but if I had bad breath I'd rather have people tell me than spare my feelings, so I could do something to fix the problem.

I believe there are a lot of people in this World that have physical problems either because of psychological issues, an entity is attached to them, or a combination of these two factors.

I've told people about a psychological approach and usually they aren't real open to hearing what I say.  I figure they might have even more difficulty accepting the possibility that an unfriendly entity might be causing them problems.

I'm not one hundred percent certain, but I don't believe that it is always a matter of people preferring their beliefs so strongly that they are willing to hold onto their physical ailments. Rather, their way of understanding hasn't reached the point where they are able to consider an alternative way of thinking that will enable them to deal with their problem.

I thought I'd chime in on belief systems and the fact that he dismissed the question as hateful.

How many hands do you have? What if I told you I could pray and perhaps cure a condition that was causing you extreme emotional pain, if only you would give up your belief system that you have two hands, and instead accept that really you have three hands.

Maybe you would see this as cruel and hateful, because it is more than obvious to you that you have two hands and not three, and my assertion to the contrary means nothing because it is asking you to believe the impossible and untrue.

This is why I don't stomp on other people's belief systems on purpose (not saying I don't do it accidently.) They believe what they do because it is obvious to them; if what they believe weren't obvious, they would believe something else, and then that thing would be obvious.

MA

Keep in mind that I made no claim to be able to successfully pray for his 2-year-old son's healing.  I merely asked him a question which should have had a clear Yes or No answer: Would CH rather see his son healed in a way that seemed to confirm the intervention of a higher power than reaffirm his atheism by relying on (in this case) ineffective medical assistance.  The reason, I believe, that CH was so threatened, and hence offended, by the question is this: he could not tolerate even the possibility that faith in a higher power might at least in principle provide the solution to his heart's most desperate desire.  For very close-minded people, their rigid belief system (in this case atheism) is the nonnegotiable glue that keeps them together.  Therefore, it is unthinkable to even consider the possibility that they might be wrong, even if a healing of their most beloved were at stake.  CH could not bring himself to answer the question because it was too painful for him to admit this harsh truth about his unquestioned belief system as his top priority. 

Don

I didn't suggest that somebody bow to a guru. Perhaps God (or one of his helpers) would help simply because he is a nice guy.

[quote author=032E230C2E242F332E24410 link=1346277979/6#6 date=1346667147]"If that person can't handle hearing and reading about differing viewpoints, perhaps he should isolate himself from the World by locking himself in his bedroom (no TV, radio, telephone or internet connection allowed)."

Taking away one magical power and replacing it with asking someone to bow a magical power called The Divine Healing of Guru X, and the "offer" presented is still the same.

Rondelle:

Sort of related, I'm not into fundamentalisn. On the other hand, I don't assume  that all shamans are legit. Some of them might gain assistance from unfriendly beings. Unfortunately, some people are naive and therefore are overly trusting of shamans.

"For example, I believe that unconditional love is a good thing. Does anybody want to fight me on this later point?"

Someone say they like a guru, non-duality or a course in miracles - and you would be fighting ... yourself?

Rondelle:

Consider this example. In the office I work at there are small groups of friends and I suppose they love each other. Yet there are people within the office who get ignored by just about everybody including the groups of friends.

I figure that if the group of friends people understood about unconditional love, they'd open their hearts to everybody rather than acting as if some don't even exist.

Another example is racists. One might say that they love people they consider acceptable, but what about others?

I've found that the more I have allowed myself to live according to unconditional love rather than conditional love, the better my life experience has become. It isn't an all or nothing process. The more we allow ourselves to live according to unconditional love, the more we'll do so.

Try to think of it this way- would you say Pure, Unconditional God?

Of course not.  God IS.  You can't modify God.  Same thing with Love.  It is a state of being.

Re-read the quote from De Maupassant.

So when people say they "send" PUL to others, what they really mean is an affection, or an emotion.  Love is not an emotion.  Because it's a state of being, it cannot be "sent."

I realize PUL has been around this board for ages and is in Bruce's books, but if you say that love is impure or conditional, I'll then respond by pointing out that it could not, by definition, be love to begin with.

As De Maupassant points out, it really is not even a word.

R

Rondele,

If a spiritual question with a clearcul Yes or No answer is too threatening to answer, this for me signifies a question that gets to the heart of the matter of a truthful worldview.  So I don't apologize for my question.  Instead, I consider it the most important question  CH (the close-minded atheist) could ever answer, because it exposes the lethal vulnerability of his perspective.

But your counterpoint scenario also makes an important point; and I offer 3 points in response: (1) To be meaningful, every worldview must at least in principle be falsifilable. If I predetermine that no evidence or experience could even in principle count against the truth of Christianity, then I render the case for Christian truth untestable and therefore meaningless. So if a shaman's prayers for healing succeeded where a Christian group's prayers failed, I would take that as evidential--but evidential of what?

(2) Not necessarily as evidence that the Christian belief system was flawed, but evidence that this shaman had a relationship to ultimate power superior to that of that particular Christian prayer group.  Of course, that concession in itself would refute any black-and-white notion that the shaman's religious outlook was entirely false as opposed to the truth of the Christian belief system.   But then Jesus and Christianity already distinguish spirituality from intellectually held beliefs and concede that true spirituality is more important.  And Jesus concedes the fact that a pious Jewish faith healer who does not follow Him can nevertheless be used by God to heal.   

(3) But in fact my life experience points in the opposite direction: for example. tens of thousands of Muslims convert to Christianity as a result of visionary encounters with Jesus or visions directing them to places where they can hear the Gospel.  I have had some of these ex-Muslims speak in my church and witness to this phenomenon and Christian missionaries in Muslim countries have returned to bear witness to such visions as a key to their success in evangelizing Muslims.  In Nepal, 95% of the recent 500,000+ cionverts to Christianity have allegedly converted as a result of divine healing!

Still, I never expect any honest seeker to take my word for it. True, I can make the rational case for the historical evidence for the truth of Christianity.  But such a case doesn't prove anything; it merely has the potential to open minds for an honest and open spiritual quest.  What makes all the difference is self-authenticating personal experience of Christ's presence and power. 

Ahmed, for example, was a Ethipian Muslim mullah with AIDs.  After Ahmed received unwanted prayer for healing from a Christian couple, Jesus appeared to him in his hospital room and touched him on his forehead.  This touch resulted in his instant conversion, even though the Quran acknowledges Jesus as a true prophet and even though Jesus said nothing to Ahmed.  To experience itself conveyed an inner knowing that Chnstianity was true and Ahmed became a devout missionary for his new cause, after (by the way) Jesus had cured him of his AIDs!  I know this directly from the missionary who now mentors Ahmed.

For internet Muslim testimonies about such dreams and visions, google, for example:
(1) Kamal Saleem: A Muslim Cries Out to Jesus

(2) Dreams, Visions Moving Muslims to Christ

Don

"Prayer actually did have a completely failed result for me already, actually a completely negative outcome, in fact, the worst case scenario happened. But I would probably turn to it again regardless because.... in the end, when things are out of your hand.... why not?"

One day you're cleaning the dinner table, you walk to get the pasta and the ceiling falls crashing down out of the blue. The area surrounding you and the pasta are home free. You become a devout Pastafarian and start to have faith in the divine healing powers of Spaghetti. You tell your family and friends about the life changing incident, and some of them in turn go on to make a ritual of tossing Spaghetti to heal people. Unconscious Pasta obedience seeps into the everyday lives of people. 'Oooooh my Macaroni'. 'Pasta you' when people sneeze, for good luck and a happy Pasta meal. One day while kneeling to a pack of Spaghetti in the nearby store, there's a robbery, it's out of your hands, and it turns out bad - several bottles of water get shot at and hurt, but are patched up and refilled. You start to notice cracks in the ways of the church of spaghetti. Hmmm. You were told there was no I in spaghetti, even though it was when you decided to examine it. Hmmm. Spaghetti uses water to get comfy, bendy and wam, yet doesn't really care about water, and gets very stiff when discussing other culinary options. With this in mind, you don't go to the next pasta gathering in San Francisco with spaghetti in your hair.

When something doesn't work out anymore, does it make sense to continue in that same circle, just to place bets all around the table? For you, maybe christianity works out better, or buddhism, wicca, new age, the church of the coffee or something else. Even then, later on, maybe you're on the move again, towards something, better, hopefully.

People have been helped after asking Jesus for help. Heck, going by what Berserk wrote, they received his help even without asking for it and while not believing in him. I don't know of anybody who has been helped by pasta.

My feeling is that God doesn't want us to worship him. It's okay to love and respect another, but what is implied by worship? What kind of being would desire to be worshiped?

Quote:

Remember, in CH's case, I wanted to pray for his 2-year-old son's large tumor on his heart, a tumor that had caused cardiac arrest and then brain damage.  But I wasn't just trying to demnstrate compassion and social solidarity with those who care about CH's plight; I wanted to pray in a way that makes a decisive difference.  CH's close-mindedness to a prayer experiment destroyed whatever confidence I had that prayer might heal his son.  But I was struck by the fact that in the next few weeks I learned of the healing of 2 huge tumors, one vanishing and the other calcifying so as to be rendered harmless. 

The Bible teaches  that effective prayer follows certain principles and is a craft that must be learned and honed.  So if someone says, "I prayed and it didn't work," my initial response is that the prayer might have fallen short of minimal qualifications.  Of course, this response runs the risk of making the power of prayer unfalisifiable in principle.  So any argument for faith based on prayer easily begs the question.  For this reason, any rationale for faith based on prayer-induced experience must be deeply personal.  The question is, does one's evidential experience and inner knowing persuade one to believe in God or Christ?  Whether the answer is Yes or No, the answer is nonrational (niether irrational or rational)--a function of the validity of one's intuition and assumptions.  If anyone in interested is setting up a prayer experiment, why not PM me about it and will establish a basis for such spiritual quest.

Don

Masters of Light often pray when they have a big task at hand. Energy is intelligent. It moves in certain ways. If your prayer is deep and intense enough energy will come to work for you. And your inner thoughts and devotion can reach higher spheres and be picked up by higher Masters. They will help too if they can.

Prayers are like affirmations and mantra's. You have to learn how to do it and then you can do great things with them.
I worked with affirmations in the past and I had very clear results with them.
And I also know I have been helped by high spirits of light in the past as a result of prolongued concentration of my mind.

In ancient Egypt priests in the holy temples also knew about this concentration of the mind and used this to their advantage. I have read some amazing things about that.

Quote:


Do you mean in terms of kiloWatts or Volts? We don't have the tools on Earth to measure that. I don't know if they have tools in the spheres of light to measure it. But the results can be very visible.

There are requirements for prayers. They must be sincere and realistic for one thing. Prayers don't reach a destination. They have an effect.

Masters don't respond to every and any kind of prayer. They also take in account a persons own evolution that has to be followed, the state of it's mind, of it's soul. They see things in a much wider perspective then people on Earth. They can also look in previous lives and see how karmic threads originated there, for example.
In some cases they have to let things follow it's natural flow, in other cases they are able to do something. But I don't know the difference between those things. That is also very specific to each and every individual.

If you read "A View into the Hereafter" many things may become clear to you about this.

DocM wrote on Sep 6^th, 2012 at 8:53am:


You seem to know more about the Masters of Light then they do themselves.
When did you last meet them?
Why should prayers only be reserved for Earthlings? That's absurd.

Just the type of reaction you can expect from someone who is tied up to a Bible or Koran, etcetera.

This is startling to me, because my response to Mogen was that ANYONE can pray effectively (regardless of religion) - that there was no prerequisite to be a master to see prayers realized.  In response he said my answer was what you would expect from a Bible thumper.  Really?

(3) Well, let me insert the 4rd paranormal adventure I encountered during my Buffalo visit.  The day after I performed the marriage, Mike and Karen drove me to the south coast of Lake Ontario.  One highlight was my tour of the Van Horn Mansion.  Across from it was the old grist mill that the British burned during the War of 1812.  Yes, the Van Horns supported the American cause and paid the price for it. 

The mansion was particularly interesting due to the old kitchen and kitchenware, all the period piece clothing, furniture, pots and pans, and the attic where the servants lived, an attic that was 20 degrees hotter than the rest of the mansion.  I don't know how the servants survived the summer heat.  It was even more interesting because there was no first floor windows--only Friench doors--and no closets--only closets that became mini-hallways to the next rooms. Why?  Because homes were heavily taxed for each window and each closet.

Most interesting of all was the 2nd floor creepy female mannequin, that gazed out the window of the cigar room.   She was inserted there to mimic the ghost of Melinda, the 21-year-old wife who had an affair while Mr. Van Horn was away on business.  For this indiscetion she was murdered and her corpse waqs hacked to pieces which were buried all over the house's grounds.  The mannequin was located where the ghost of Miranda was later photographed from outside as she gazed longingly out that window.  I saw the photo of her ghost!  The haunting continued until cadaver dogs snified out enough of the scattered bones to bury them in one place of honor on the grounds.  The full story of all the paranormal manifestions of Melinda is told every Halloween druing mansion tours.  I wish I could go back and hear more stories.

Don

In discussing the power of prayer, I like to give recent examples.  Last night (Saturday), I talked to Laurie who had just finished a spiritual retreat which our church supports with several volunteers. On Tuesday night, Laurie had a dream about a new woman who had recently attended church.  In the dream, Laurie's 3-year-old daughter pointed to the new woman and asked, "Why is that man going to shoot that lady?"  Laurie didn't see the gun and had never met the woman's husband.  So all she could do was take this as a call to prayer.  She got out of bed and fervently prayed a long time for this new lady's sruvival.

The next Sunday, another woman approached Laurie and asked her, "Did you hear what happened to X (the new woman in the dream)?"  Laurie replied, "No, but did it happen on Tuesday night?"  Her informant replied, "Oh, so you've heard!"  "No, but I had a premonition dream about her on Tuesday.  Tell me what happened."  "Well, she and her husband got into an argument tha got so heated that her husband got his gun out and pulled the trigger to kill her.  But the trigger jammed.  When the trigger jammed, he calmed down and she and her husband reconciled."  She pressed no charges.  The hope is that the husband will  join this woman in church soon.   

Don

Bill is a leader in my church.  He works for Avista, our regional power company.  Bill had asked me why I never asked him to share his testimony.   I replied that I never knew he wanted to do so.  In fact, I had asked others about this possibility and should have asked Bill as well.  Let me narrate just one of Bill's experiences. that he shared with me just this afternoon.   

He was in the process of repairing a downed high voltage line and thought (wrongly) that he had taken all the neceessary precautions for handling it.  He heard crackling and realized that he was in trouble.  He dropped the wire and walked away from his position.  But when he happened to look back, he noticed a growing fire in the soft grassy soil.  Bill returned to put out the fire, but  then noticed his two footprints in the middle of the 4 ft. square flames.  In Bill's mind, God spared him from certain death by electricution. 

Don