Prayer has a central role in many cultures, with people believing it has a meaningful effect on themselves and others. The assistance often provided to others through prayer is based on the idea that the focused and intense thoughts of the person praying can have a positive impact. This effectiveness is thought to be due to the concentration and intensity put into the prayer. If the same level of concentration and intensity were applied without prayer, similar results could be achieved. It’s important to note that we are discussing the effects of prayer resulting from the power of the thoughts of the person praying. There are also other results of prayer, where the attention of a developed human, super-human, or nonhuman intelligence is called upon, which may lead to direct assistance being provided by a power superior to that of the person praying. However, for the purpose of our discussion, we are not immediately focusing on these types of “answers to prayer”.
Everything that can be achieved for the living through thought can be even more easily achieved for the deceased. As previously explained in the series on the Emotional Envelope, after death, an individual’s inclination is to turn inward and exist within their emotions and mind rather than in the external world. The rearrangement of the emotional body by the Desire-Elemental further serves to contain mental energies and prevent their outward expression.
But the person who is restricted in their outward energies becomes even more open to influences from the Mental World. The reason for this is that our mental life, for the vast majority of us, is totally subjective. We live in a thought-bubble of our own making. There, we process the thoughts we generated during our recently finished incarnation. As we know, thoughts are very real and physical objects in the Mental World. The amazing thing is that another monad can enter into this subjective bubble and communicate with a person going through the last stage of their return to their causal body. As a result, they can be helped, comforted, and advised much more effectively than when they were alive.
In the afterlife, a loving thought is as tangible to the senses as a loving word or a gentle touch is here. Therefore, everyone who passes on should be followed by thoughts of love and peace, along with aspirations for their swift progression. Many individuals linger in the intermediate state longer than they should because they lack friends who know how to assist them from the earthly side of death. Don’t expect much help from your social media friends. They never knew you anyway.
The founders of the major religions, who were knowledgeable about the afterlife, recognised the duty of those remaining on Earth to assist those who have moved on. That’s why Hindus have their Shraddha ceremonies, and Christians have masses and prayers for the deceased. Similarly, it is possible for thought to be transmitted in the reverse direction, from the disembodied to the living. For example, a strong thought from a lecturer on a particular subject may attract the attention of disembodied entities interested in that subject. In fact, an audience often contains a greater number of people in emotional bodies than in physical ones. I hope they are more awake than the students in the lecture and not fiddling with their “emotional” mobile phones.
Sometimes, a visitor attending a lecture may have more knowledge about the subject than the lecturer. In such cases, the visitor can assist by providing suggestions or illustrations. If the lecturer is clairvoyant, they may see their assistant, and new ideas may become materialised in a subtler form before them. If the lecturer is not clairvoyant, the assistant will likely impress the ideas upon the lecturer’s brain. In this case, the lecturer may mistakenly believe that the ideas originated from their own mind. This kind of assistance is often provided by an “invisible helper.” During my working life, I have written many a report that has numbered over 100 pages, and when I reread it, I thought, did I write that?
The power of combined thought of a group of people used intentionally towards a specific goal is well known to occultists and others familiar with the deeper science of the mind. In some parts of Christendom, it is customary to precede a mission to evangelise a specific area with deliberate and sustained thinking. This creates a thought atmosphere highly conducive to the spread of the teachings being contemplated, and prepares receptive minds for the forthcoming instruction.
The contemplative orders of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the recluses of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths, contribute significantly through their thoughts. We may think they are being self-indulgent, sitting there contemplating their navels, and some of them are. However, wittingly or unwittingly, they are purifying our mental world for all our mutual benefit. Ultimately, when a good and pure intelligence dedicates itself to aiding the world by spreading noble and lofty thoughts, it performs a definite service to humanity, and the solitary thinker becomes one of the elevators of the world.
An example of how one person’s thought atmosphere can influence another person, both consciously and subconsciously, is the relationship between a pupil or disciple and a spiritual teacher or guru. In the East, it is understood that a crucial part of a disciple’s training is to constantly be in the presence of the teacher and be immersed in their aura. The teacher’s various aspects vibrate with a steady and powerful energy at higher and more consistent rates than the pupil can achieve on their own. The pupil’s thought waves are gradually raised to match those of the teacher due to the constant influence. An analogy can be drawn from musical training where a person with little musical ear finds it hard to sing accurate intervals alone, but can do so more easily when singing with a well-trained voice.
What’s important is that the teacher’s dominant influence is continuously affecting the pupil day and night, without requiring conscious effort from either of them. This enables the subtle vehicles of the pupil to grow in the right direction. An ordinary person, acting automatically and unintentionally, cannot have even a fraction of the carefully directed impact of a spiritual teacher. However, the collective influence of many individuals can somewhat compensate for the lack of individual power. Consequently, the constant, albeit unnoticed, influence exerted by the opinions and feelings of those around us often leads us to unconsciously absorb many of their biases and prejudices.
An “accepted” pupil of a Master is so closely in touch with the Master’s thought that they can train themself at any time to see what that thought is upon any given subject. In that way, they are often saved from error. The Master can at any time send a thought through the pupil, either as a suggestion or a message. For example, if the pupil is writing a letter or giving a lecture, the Master is subconsciously aware of the fact. He may at any moment throw into the mind of the pupil a sentence to be included in the letter or used in the lecture. In earlier stages, the pupil is often unaware of this and supposes the ideas to have arisen spontaneously in their own mind. However, they very soon learn to recognise the thought of the Master. In fact, it is most desirable that they learn to recognise it because there are many entities on the mental and emotional planes who, with the best intentions and in the most friendly way, are ready to make similar suggestions. It is clearly necessary that the pupil should learn to distinguish from whom they come.
In the next presentation, we will discuss how thoughts tend to gravitate to localised areas in the Mental World and why.