A Tale of How We Should Depend on Each Other

Here's a story from Thich Nhat Hanh's book, Being Peace, to illustrate the principle of what he calls "dependent co-arising."

* * *

Suppose you and I are friends. (In fact, I hope we are friends.) My well-being, my happiness depends very much on you, and your well-being, your happiness, depends upon me. I am responsible for you, and you are responsible for me. Anything I do wrong, you will suffer, and anything you do wrong, I have to suffer. Therefore, in order to take care of you, I have to take care of myself.
There is a story in the Pali Canon about a father and a daughter who performed in the circus. The father would place a very long bamboo stick on his forehead, and his daughter would climb to the top of the stick.... One day the father told the daughter, "My dear daugher, we have to take care of each other. You have to take care of your father, and I have to take care of you, so that we will be safe. Our performance is very dangerous." Because if she fell, both would not be able to earn their living. If she fell, then broke her leg, they wouldn't have anything to eat. "My daughter, we have to take care of each other so we can continue to earn our living."
The daughter was wise. She said, "Father, you should say it this way: 'Each one of us has to take care of himself or herself, so that we can continue to earn our living.' Because during the performance, you take care of yourself, you take care of yourself only. You stay very stable, very altert. That will help me. And if when I climb I take care of myself, I climb very carefully, I do not let anything wrong happen to me. That is the way you should say it, Father. You take good care of yourself, and I take good care of myself. In that way we can continue to earn our living." The Buddha agreed that the daughter was right.

Pondering Time, Space and Prayerful Energy

What does it mean to produce energy when we pray?

To me, this is one of the most mystical aspects of prayer. My mind cannot fully understand how this process works, how it is possible. I’d say it has to do with the fact that the mind, as the machine-work that helps us to access the spiritual qualities of the soul, has the potential to be a center of positive energy. As I become more adept at prayer, I improve my ability to generate more of that positive energy. When I pray together with others, that prayer becomes even more powerful because that combined prayer produces still more energy.

Though my mind may not fully understand how this energy gets produced, I know (in the conocer concept of "to know" – as in, to be acquainted with through experience) that when I fully concentrate my thoughts and open my heart in prayer, I can at times feel a physical effect – that of energy being produced. I have experienced this, at times, as a warmth in my chest. When an effect is produced upon my own individual consciousness, I, in turn, am possibly producing an effect on a larger “collective consciousness” of which I am a part. Pretty wild. By that account, our prayer has power to create change, to effectively change the world!

Lately, in reading a book I previously mentioned, The Energy of Prayer, I have been fascinated to think about how this prayerful energy is not bounded by our normal conceptions of time and space. For, when we pray, we and all other creatures are a part of this “collective consciousness” (God). Thich Nhat Hanh describes it in the following way:

“The collective consciousness is made up of the individual consciousness and the individual consciousness is made up of the collective consciousness. The two things make each other possible. It’s not that one comes first and the other comes later. There is no ‘above’ without ‘below’, there is no ‘inside’ without ‘outside’; the two things have to be there at the same time. The same is true with ‘I’ and ‘we’: they make each other possible.” (p. 58).

Let me digress for one moment from my original point, because this quote presents a fascinating question: can we prove whether God exists either with or without His creation? Can there be God without an “other”, a.k.a. without His creation? Is not God actually greater than the sum of all these created parts? Is not God the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end?
Returning to my original point, let’s pretend all agree that each of us individual human souls is already connected within a larger collective consciousness/energy/spirit (that we call God if we’re ok with the God label)… Thich Nhat Hanh writes about how there are there are two ways to think how prayer works when that object of prayer is another person for whom we want to pray. In one view (the one I find more traditionally engrained), the person who prays sends her/his energy to God to then transmit to another person on the planet. In the alternative view we and all other created things are part of this larger collective consciousness of God. By this latter view, “we don’t need to send prayers anywhere, because God is omnipresent. There is no need to convert God into some divine telecommunications satellite in the sky.” Space and time get crossed out of the equation and prayer is seen as being totally independent of these. Yet, the idea of "production" is something that we understand in the context of space and time, so what does it mean for energy to be "produced" through prayer if prayer were independent of these concepts? I’m much better at asking such questions than in coming up with the answers.

The Energy of Prayer

I'm currently reading an excellent book called The Energy of Prayer by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Here are a few snippets directly related to the energy of prayer that have stood out to me.

"When we send the energy of love and compassion to another person, it doesn't matter if they know we are sending it. The important thing is that the energy is there and the heart of love is there and is being sent out into the world. When love and compassion are present in us, and we send them outward, then that is truly prayer. In sending love outward, we may notice a change in our own heart. That prayer has begun to have a result inside us."

"Buddhism teaches that we need to have a practice to go along with our prayer. In prayer there has to be mindfulness, concentration, insight, loving kindness, and compassion. Anger, blame, jealousy, and spite are not enough. We need the energy of mindfulness, concentration, understanding, and love to put electric current in the wire. Otherwise, how can the words of our prayer reach the ears of the one to whom we are praying?" (see proceeding quote for greater context about the idea of this electric current)

"We know that when we want to use our telephone, it needs to have a wire and there has to be electricity in that wire. Prayer works in the same way. If our prayer doesn't have the energy of faith, compassion, and love, it is like trying to use a telephone when there is no electricity in the wire. The mere fact that we pray doesn't lead to a result."