Hi Focus,

Would you be willing to pray to the Highest Creative Source, and then see where you think the answer comes from?

Re: getting extra anatomical parts -- If you really need one due to accident or disease of the first one you were given, you could get results from prayer. It would seem like healing though, not like sprouting a
different one.
And have you seen Mystic Tuba’s comments on a third hand?  There is a third hand but it only shows up to your third eye...heheheheh

In fact all of this stuff is in another realm, Focus. I feel like you usually keep thinking within the confines of the physical material world. To move into the other realm all this has to be dealt with as a part of your Highest Good, not just for entertainment value. 

Best wishes, Bets

Humor, what a waste, being relaxed and enjoying some light fun with an open heart chakra.  One of these days while you're having your early morning jogs, I'll find you and bring along a tuba. I'm gonna join your running and play a weird but recognizable version of eye of the tiger.

Interesting. C&P'ed from the WWW. Harvey

Constructive Prayer

The inception, and the constant revision of one's impetus, is one of the important jobs in life. We are broadcasting even with our most secret
thoughts and desires. We are accountable for what we send out. Our desire does not die in our breasts. It goes out as something we have launched,
to run straight ahead on its appointed course until the force of its projection is exhausted, or until it meets a more powerful or deflecting force. It may be going and fulfilling its destiny long after we have forgotten it. That is part of our responsibility: to send out, as far as human frailty will permit, only wholesome impetus into the intricate crosscurrents of world life.

At that point we touch the subject of individual responsibility, into which we will go more fully when certain other needed concepts are attained. For the moment we will leave it.

Now of course impetus is being started all about us at every split second of the day. It is part of the automatic function of life, just as is spiritual contact. Without the one there can be no movement, no action in the world at all: without the other there could be no continued good thing. They must function, just as the heart must function, or life
ceases. But that is not to say that in the present state of things they function easily or well, nor that they cannot to greater advantage be directed consciously. We have seen that, as respects spiritual contact, our performance is inefficient. As respects the production of impetus, also, our sources are haphazard.

The deliberate daily production of individual impetus comes, as we have hinted, from the individual "formula" which we can take to mean, roughly,
the character. This varies with each. One may lack stability, another must overcome inertia, and so on. The formula carried into practice produces impetus. If this impetus is to be conscious and intelligent, we
must know our lacks and govern ourselves accordingly. That much, I think, is clear. But how are we to arrive at an adequate knowledge of these
lacks and an effective desire to fill them?

In discussing that we are fairly forced to use an ecclesiastical word whose connotations have so thickly overspread the meaning we wish to
convey as to make it almost useless. Yet there is no other. I refer to the word prayer.

Please discard from your mind all stilted conventional meaning it may have for you now. It has become largely, and to many, a childhood ceremony almost abandoned as life engulfs us; to others an unconvincing act; a petition for favors from an overlord; a ritual; a paean of personal praise. Forget all that. Start over again without preconception.
Let the Invisibles have the word "free and unsullied," as they expressed it to the author of THE SEVEN PURPOSES.

Next, as the first contribution to its meaning, assemble under it all that you have come to understand as the process of seeking spiritual
contact and permeation. This process constitutes the first step in ALL constructive prayer. "In that phase," said the Invisible, "it is an assembling and offering up of your best self for union with the Overstrength. Only when this has been made habitual are we ready to proceed further.

"It is only by the strength of this contact that you gain courage for the second step; to plumb the depths and know yourself. It is the inspiration
that quickens your perception. You cannot plunge all at once into a knowledge of your spiritual lacks, because that MUST come gradually."

"These two levels of prayer we must learn to perceive and use before they can give us more," Betty ended.

When the subject of prayer was first presented to us as such, the first step-the spiritual contact step-was re-expressed in terms which it might be illuminating to quote here. In essence, they told us, it is merely a
spiritual association approached with human warmth of desire; and amounts in the long run to the great lifelong companionship.

"I don't understand that," said Betty," I'll review it."

"I approach divine companionship in prayer as I reach for warm friendship," she went on after a pause, "only with greater expectation."

Then, as often, they showed her a picture; a statue of a figure poised for flight, as she described it, " a beautiful figure, more beautiful than the Winged Victory."

"It is so beautiful," she said. "The head is tip and thrown back. Deliciously free! I want to start out that way, too, with my head thrown back, in faith, facing the unknown! I want to be poised like that, too!"

That was all for the first day. A little later the subject was taken up again, and they repeated in this new terminology the old warning against the enfeebling type of relaxation, the letting go all holds and waiting to be lifted up. It cannot be repeated too often.

"Weak prayer does not fulfill its part because it just calls down, instead of rising to meet. This is still all part of the chemistry of prayer. You can conceive a spiritual being by the strength of your direct
desire for contact. You do it by calling for spiritual companionship or association. It amounts to very little unless something arises within you to enlarge your capacity to receive it and blend with it. Something within you must rise continually to meet the spiritual association. You cannot just wait for it to come to you."

So much for the first step of constructive prayer: that of spiritual contact and permeation, the reaching for the heights. Now let us consider further what was told us of the second: that of plumbing the depths.

"Prayer is the projection of your spiritual being, heart and soul," they defined, "It is the conscious assembling of your highest self. In offering up the spirit, you lay bare your own soul. It is the only way
you can recognize your own proportions. You face the sum total of yourself. It pierces all your coverings and trappings as an X-ray pierces the body. There is a terrible reality to it. This is its zone of action,
this compulsion to face your naked soul. "From dread of this people use only the surface of prayer.

"But there is no discouragement with this facing (of one's naked soul); no discouragement. Even mortification is submerged in eagerness to
reconstruct and harmonize. That is the big feeling prayer gives you. You must plumb the depths of prayer down to your timid soul in order to gain
impetus.

"Under the inspiration of prayer each one of us recognizes the WHOLENESS necessary to spiritual harmony. In proportion as he lacks is the urge to
acquire the wholeness he perceives."

"It seems," interpreted Betty, "to be a sort of chemical affinity among the parts that should make up each person's wholeness. Therefore, as soon
as spiritual perception is started a tremendous attracting power is set in motion, and you begin to assemble yourself. In that way the action of
prayer, even spasmodic prayer, does good."

"But persisted in," added the Invisible, "it is the great workshop of the soul."

"The assembling cannot all be done at once, you see; so they call it the workshop."

"Any level of prayer is worth while," went on the Invisible, "But for the strongest reaction you must plumb the depths. You must always, in anything, plumb the depths before you are permitted to go on to the heights."

"Yesterday my beautiful statue of faith," said Betty, "so eager for released action; and I didn't know why it was held back. It was held back for today's perception of the depth of self-truth.

" That's queer! I can't get to the top again at all! They say, until I can visualize my needs, I am bogged down. There is no hurrying over this;
got to stay right here until I can see my naked soul and start my impetus. I can't start it until I see myself, my fragmentary self. It is very hard to do; I am USED to myself."

"Then this constructive prayer consists in the visualizing of spiritual needs?" I asked.

"No," was the reply. "It's a visualizing of spiritual lacks rather than needs."

"If you need a thing, you lack it." I objected to the curious distinction.

"You don't gain the same impetus from one as from the other," they answered. "A mere need does not create a vacuum that sucks in; it doesn't set the same force in action."

"Distinction still not clear," said I, glimpsing that it was an effort to get a vital word.

"A lack looks like a hole," Betty helped us, "a sort of physical thing that you fill up with a rush, once you create it by recognition. A need is a kind of mentally desirable thing-not a big elemental thing. The
creation by visualization or recognition of spiritual lacks is the depth we talked of."

Constructive prayer, then, considered in its entirety, makes us aware of these lacks. From this awareness springs that defined, understanding impetus which thenceforward must guide our destiny.

In conclusion it might be inspiring to quote an example of approach to constructive prayer as reported one day by Betty.

"It's a beautiful form, a grand rhythm. In utter obliviousness of everything else I fling myself, abandon myself to one collective thought,
the beauty of a physical world. I sweep it whole right into my heart, everything, the little Alpine flowers on Kearsage top, the undersea gardens, the desert bloom, the frost crystals, the world of the
magnifying glass, the stars-all the physical universe. The manifestation of overpowering love and intelligence,-I gather them all in my own great
rush of worship. It's an offering, a concentration of my life's experience returning to its source. Once spent, I lie still and quietly life recharged filters back to me, recharged with vitality, strength and
eagerness to take my part, to be victorious with humility, conscious of the immensity of the scheme. When the renewed life flows back into me my
great effort is to retain it, to contain it all in all, for the force of the renewed life must be converted into world activity."

Short version - prayer is the projection of your spiritual being.

Well, that being said, also the impetus for a statue of a figure poised for flight, which is an enfeebling type of constructive prayer, in fact, a gradual distinction plumbing the depths to enlarge your capacity to receive and blend with it. Why? Because a mere need does not create a vacuum that sucks in. The little Alpine flowers on Kearsage top, not a vacuum, not a lack that looks like a hole, but something swept into the heart like a grand rythm in a beautiful form. That and surrender to (the star trek) borg mentality of one collective thought. Constructive prayer makes us aware of these lacks - to be victorious in renewed life. IMHO.

I think the point of prayer is to realize that there are no real limits, that you ultimately do not pray "to" an entity, but form a relationship, become more aware of varying degrees of relationship, which exist between "who you think you are" and your greater self. This encompasses all time, all space, and beyond. Therefore, it is beyond our words. It is an experience, and one in which you are not, and cannot be, alone. You may reach, you may yearn, you may accept, you may learn. Here, today, that is all we have, and it is Enough...

Focus27 wrote on Sep 4^th, 2012 at 9:06pm:

Like no other topic, this one requires as a starting point clarity about the limits of what we know and don't know.  Two errors must be avoided: (1) a doctrinaire appeal to a particular spiritual tradition as a source of expanding the limits of prayer's power beyond all other approaches: (2) a need to presume the equality of all spiritual approaches that are motivated, at least in part by love.  This bias generally assumes without evidence that Jesus is no more special as a source of spiritual power and intimacy with God than other spiritual leaders. 

Now one can always invoke exotic stories of fantastic claims from long ago or far away.  The real issue is what happens regularly, recently, and to people you know.  When I apply this criterion, no one can even remotely compete with prayer offered in the name of Jesus.  Recently, I've reported Laurie's dream one Tuesday night about an impending shooting of a woman who started attending her church near here.  Laurie fervently prayed for this woman's protection. The next Sunday, she learned that the woman's husband had tried to shoot her after a quarrel, but the gun jammed, and when he calmed down, the couple were reconciled.  I've also reported the healing of 2 huge brain tumors, the instant healing of a knee with bad arthritis and badly damaged ligaments, and the healing of of a Muslim Mullah's AIDs so convincingly that the healing converted this Muslim cleric to Christianity.  Several years, ago prayer healed a deaf mute in our church.  Recently in the Fiji Islands , a Christian revival brought with it the healing not only of many empty hearts, but also of several coral reefs (dead for 50 years or more!) and of toxic waterways the were suddenly and iinexplicably purified so they could be used for irrigation and other obvious purposes.  I share several DVDs in which eyewitnsses of these miracles around the world share their testimonies.

Here, then, is my challenge: Don't take my word for it.  Identify several spiritual traditions that loom as live options for you to explore.  Then pray to your higher self and see what that gets you!  Then pray to Allah and other gods that have captured your interest.  Include in the mix prayer in the name of Jesus.  But be warned of the bibilcal teaching that we must not put God to the test.

How can we avoid this trap?  (1) By reminding ourselves that God is not lucky to have us check God out; the opposite is the case.  (2) By not setting a highly specific condition that God must meet to secure our favor; God meets the needs behind our requests--not our expressed wishes.   So ask God in the name of Jesus to make Himself real through some need that He meets in an unmistakable way during the rest of 2012.  But here's the crucial point: Sinceerely offer to serve God with all your heart if He meets this need.  Pray this prayer in Jesus' name and then do the same for other spiritual traditions.  Just see what happens.  See what your experience confirms when you go about this quest with pure motives and an open mind willing to serve God if God makes Himself real to you.

Have any of you viewed toe Youtube videos I gave on my thread that feature the testimony of Muslims who converted to Christianity through such a experimentation? 

Don

What if the power of prayer was essentially linked directly to the placebo effect?

This would at least imply, not a certainty, but the proposition that prayer works because of the power of the human mind and not because of any actual deity.