Eric Butterworth Unity Podcast #5
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It is probably true that the most confusing aspect of religion for most persons is the subject of prayer. The people asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” He replied on one occasion, “After this manner therefore pray ye.” Then he added the words which we’ve called the Lord’s Prayer. They were looking for a verbal formula, a kind of “open sesame” which would get God’s attention and obtain His help. They were dealing with God out there, up there, trying to soften His will, encourage His help. As we’ve come to know, the Lord’s Prayer is not a supplication, but a series of affirmative statements. We discuss this occasionally; that’s for another time. But the key to Jesus’ ideal of prayer is not in the words of his prayers at all, but in the perceptions that they reveal.
Because prayer, you see, is not something we do to God, a performance we stage for His benefit. The Sanskrit word for prayer is “palal”, P-A-L-A-L, which literally means “judging oneself to be wondrously made.” In other words, it’s a means of getting our self-image regulated, lifted up. Prayer is something we do to ourselves, not something we do to God. It’s the creative act of getting in focus, and our true nature. So prayer is not supplication, it is not pleading, it is affirmation.
No doubt, the most difficult step in really getting the message of truth is unlearning a lifetime’s conditioning to the idea of God up there, to whom we go on bended knee, begging for His mercy. So, for many persons, it’s veritably a quantum leap to the New Age concept of the omni-action of God through the spiritual potential within ourselves. It’s probably true, many persons coming into the study of truth simply jump into the practice without rightly identifying it as being the law of our very being. So in truth, you begin to use affirmations to speak the word about difficulties.
So you find yourself, even before you understand what you’re doing, saying such things as, “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid,” even when you’re paralyzed with fear. “I’m a rich child of a king,” when you haven’t got a dime to your name. People probably call you Pollyanna, but because you feel kind of good using positive words, you keep on doing it.
But often, there comes a time when you have to face up to the fact that your difficult experiences no longer seem to respond to these affirmations. So it’s time to retrace your steps, to get acquainted with the underlying principles. I refer to the New Age concept. This has become a convenient catchword that encompasses all kinds of preoccupations that have lured people out of the orthodox stream into studies of religion and medicine and nutrition and the psychic and all manner of things related to extra senses of the person. You may have seen the Forbes magazine article in the recent issue on the subject of New Age activities. You may have been surprised that the article began with describing a Sunday meeting right here Avery Fisher Hall.
It went on into holistic medicine, crystals, channeling, and all sorts of belied things considered it to be New Age concepts. Though the article was somewhat complimentary to us, it was obvious that the writer didn’t really catch the spirit of what we’re about. Last fall, there was a front page article in The Times dealing with, again, New Age teachings. It cited such what it called ‘cry out ideas’ as metaphysics as a “pernicious effect on American business, politics and domestic relations.” You’ve heard as an example to the US Army recruiting slogan Be All You Can Be. You’ve heard of this as an evidence of the insidious influence of [inaudible 00:04:42] Judeo-Christian ideas, which is a kind of sad indignation of a humanistic view. There’s no such thing as a divine potential in the person.
But returning briefly to the matter of prayer. As we say, it’s not pleading, it’s not reaching up, it’s not supplicating with God out there. The purpose of prayer basically, when we understand the allness process, is to stir up the gift of God within ourselves, to take charge of our own lives and assume responsibility for the problems and their solutions. This study of truth, as we call it, is based on the principle of the divinity within the person. It deals essentially with wholeness. The universe is whole. You are created in the image and likeness of that wholeness. It is your imprisoned splendor of perfect life, of creativity, of abundance, of the free flow of intuition and guidance. True prayer is a process of releasing this inigness, identifying with and as this cosmic energy flow, what Jesus calls the Father Within.
As I say often, God can do no more for you than He can do through you. Jesus says it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. You don’t have to create this kingdom within. It is already established as the reality within us. So there’s a creative intention to unfold your divinity, your divine potential. There’s no need to ask God for it, only to affirm the truth, to reclaim your good. Jesus says, “Come ye blessed, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” He’s perfectly clear. And it’s wonderful.
So the basis of prayer should be the affirmative word speaking the word of truth. However, it is important to understand that an affirmation, the statement of truth, these words that we call affirmations, they’re not spoken to make a thing true. You don’t say a thing over and over and over, hoping it’s gonna be true for you. This is a misunderstanding. It’s a matter of re-focusing your consciousness to that which is true. You’ve been centering upon limitation. You lift your conscious to center on that which is positive. The word affirmation comes from the Latin root ad and firmare, together it means “to add firmness”.
So in the healing need, instead of asking God to heal you, you realize that God is life, the life of your life. You’re not affirming this silly God is gonna do something for you, or this God’s gonna change his attitude. Within you, there is that which is whole always, even before you ask, even before you begin to tell God that’s what He’s supposed to be for you. So the need in prayer is to constantly identify that of you which is whole. You affirm I am one with the creative flow of life. I’m healed now. You’re touching a dimension of yourself which is always true. Even though it may be frustrating, it’s true. There’s always an allness within your illness, as we say.
It’s not trying to turn on something in God, or to get God to do something for you. It is to stir up the gift of God within you as Paul would say, to awaken your consciousness to the ever presence of God life within you. As much is written and taught under the banner of truth, it is brain oriented. It is a study of mind out of the context of the whole. Normally, the brain and the mind are considered as synonymous. I suppose this has been the influence of modern psychology, which has been striving to throw off the stigma of the mystical and become an exact science. Psychology was originally the science of the psyche or soul.
But after long years of uncertainty, it shifted its approach to become a science without a soul. There’s now evidence of it swinging back again in some branches of psychology. But in general, the field of psychology remains brain oriented. Young street urchin may have caught the idea of the transcendent mind when he says, “I ain’t got much brains, but I know how to work those I got.”
He’s suddenly aware of a mind power that is more than his brains. Actually to say that the mind and the brain are the same is about like saying life and the body are the same. Mind is not the brain. Mind uses the brain as an instrument through which it expresses. The brain is material. The mind is non material. The brain is limited to your body. The mind is a movement within the limitless mind of the universe. It is confusion on this point, and there’s a wide spread confusion that gives rise to the tendency to deal with the human mind as a fact collector and a word dispenser. So often, we talk about racking the brain trying to find an answer or recall a word. It is this perception that has given rise to the practice of what is called mind programming.
There’s a lot of confusion on this point. Many students and some teachers in truth, are influenced by this perception. So for the affirmation and treatment process, it is fundamental to the whole practice of truth. It is receiving the process of mind programming and not a suggestion. You see, the missing piece in the puzzle of mind is the super conscious dimension, the super mind dimension. Attention is normally centered on the conscious and subconscious phases of mind. The subconscious mind is the memory mind that handles involuntary functions of the body like a giant computer going about its complicated tasks in an efficient way. It stores up the memory of experiences. It adjusts attitudes and feelings, and sometimes harbors negative poisons that conflict with the smooth operation of the system.
But on the positive side, it forms patterns out of which our lives become regulated and controlled. By the nature of the subconscious mind, the negative patterns can be changed. One can be, in this process, transformed by the renewing of the mind. But the oft overlooked aspect of mind is the super conscious mind, which can best be described as your mind at the point of the infinite. Or looking at it from the other side, the infinite mind that is present as the wholeness of you. There’s a statement often made, especially by those involved in more of the mental science approach to truth, that you are what you’ve had impressed on your subconscious mind. This is followed by a program of feeding the mind with positive influences, exposing yourself to creative things.
So there’s a tendency to believe that if you read a lot of truth literature, speak a lot of affirmations and statements, you’re building these things into your subconscious mind. The fact is what you are is the result of how you’ve been using your mental processes, whether negatively or positively. See, though it is rarely identified as such, what we call new thought or metaphysics, even New Age Religion, has been influenced by two different sources. One is the what we call Christian Mysticism or the transcendentalism of people like Emerson. The other is meta science approach, which has little to no spiritual context, but has its roots into people like the Swiss researcher Du Puysegur, French physician Franz Mesmer, both of whose early experiments lead to what was called artificial somnambulism, hypnotism and mesmerism.
Later, there’s the work of the Frenchman Emile Coué, who made famous the statement, “Day by day, in every way, I’m getting better and better and better,” which in turn has given rise to today’s mind dynamics and mind control and mind programming. So in practice today, the distinction between mental science, what I call Christian Metaphysics, is very subtle. It’s important to see. Not to put one down or lift the other up, but to better understand where we are and how we use our own mental activities in our spiritual awareness. Many of the same sophisticated techniques are used. Many cases you probably couldn’t identify the distinction without knowing the motivation of the student.
But we can say simply that the mental science approach deals with the mind out of the context of the whole of divine mind within the individual. The sub conscious mind is worked with sort of as a computer. Maxwell Maltz calls it the cerebral mechanism. One teacher, Rex, is ecstatic as he proclaims, “I can do all things through the power of my subconscious mind,” which I say is taking Jesus words slightly out of context. The premise is that a person is what he’s had impressed on his subconscious mind. So there’s a concerted effort, undoubtedly sincere, to feed the mind with positive influences. So in this perception, education is a matter of feeding the mind with good information. Religion is feeding the mind with spiritual values.
But you see, you don’t have to build truth into your subconscious mind. If the thing is true, there is already the essence of it in the mind, viewed as creative expression. So the need is not to fill up the mind, but to wake up the mind. Get that distinction. It’s not to fill up the mind with truth, but to wake up the mind with that which is truth, to release your imprisoned splendor. You can be healthy because you’re innately a whole creature, not because you say it over and over and over again. You can be healthy because you’re a spiritual being, not just because you affirm this truth. You can be prospered, because the substance and creativity of infinite mind are the root reality within you always.
So you affirm these truths and have self realization treatments on it, not to make them true, but to lift your awareness to that of you which is true changelessly and eternally. Now this is not to infer that mind programming is not good. The idea is very valid and very helpful. But you see, normally, it deals with only a part of the mind. It assumes, for instance, that you must choose a goal and build it into the fabric of consciousness by process of Auto-suggestion. For instance, the statement is used often, “Building a self image”. It’s an oft stated goal by self image psychologists. But the question is “Where do you look to find that good image for the self?”
If you need a new self image, where do you get it? The normal human tendency is to look around you, influenced by appearances. You look though magazines and you see the inference of someone who has that suave look, that confident look, that very successful aura. I wanna be like that. So you build that image into your consciousness. You wanna be like her and be successful like him. Paul gives an important word of advice that is so appropriate here. He says, “Don’t let the world squeeze you into its own mold. But let God re-mold your mind from within.” Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold, but let God re-mold your mind from within.
This within is not a vague and mystical thing. It’s just as real as the subconscious mind. It is the super conscious mind. It is the whole of God mind at the point of you, or your mind at the point of God. It is that of mind, it is what Jesus called the Father, which knows your needs even before you ask, and His good pleasure just to give you the Kingdom. At the point of the super conscious within you, there is the true image of you as God’s child created in his image and likeness. So the new self image that you desire and need is not something that you build into your consciousness, but something which is already the root reality within you. Again, the need is not to fill up but to wake up. Wake up to what you really are.
Let’s look at the technique of setting a goal, and throughout a suggestion, programming the subconscious mind to work it out for you. Think of it in relationship to your job, your work, your field of endeavor. You ought to be a success at what you’re doing, of course. Everybody wants to be successful. But there are obstacles and problem people involved. You’re frustrated at ever turn, seems that nothing is working out right for you. So you take the, let’s say the mental science approach. You visualize success in your job. You program your mind with confidence, creativity, enthusiasm for your work.
You constantly say over and over, “I am successful. My work succeeds. People are harmonious with me. Everything works out right and fine.” This is good and this is helpful. But what if the basic need is that this thing is not your field, that something within you is inwardly rebelling, leading you to consider making a change, to change fields, to change jobs, to move in another direction. In the mind dynamics approach, you may set a goal and willfully ride roughshot over the subconscious mind, possibly even trampling the flower of potentiality, creating inner frustrations, leading to other problems. Probably achieving success but with ulcers and nervous disorders and physical breakdowns and addiction to alcohol or drugs.
The important thing is the root of this affirmative process is to listen to what your consciousness is saying to you. As I say often, say what you’re listening to, not just listening to what you’re saying. You think only programming the mind with certain attitudes, you’re listening to what you’re saying. It becomes a thing almost of the ego. You need just to say what you’re listening to. Which of course, implies that you must listen. A person who is involved purely with a mental approach to truth doesn’t think too much of listening because he doesn’t deal with the intuitive process at all. He’s simply trying to fill in from the outside, rather than wake up from the inside.
Say what you’re listening to, not just listening to what you’re saying. As Montaigne puts it, and I love this thought, “Put your ear close by yourself and hold your breath and listen.” Put your ear close by yourself and hold your breath and listen. Listen to the heartbeat of the universe which is manifesting in you. It’s leading you and guiding you in a way that is right and good for you in your ultimate unfoldment. Be willing to accept the fact then that something within you might be leading you in a new direction. You listen, be ready to follow it. Another illustration. Suppose you’re in a harrowing experience and you’re living in fear of some dread consequence.
You could tell yourself, “I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I can handle this situation. I know that I’m confident and capable and I can do it easily.” That’s far as is a kind of an Auto-suggestion technique. You’re filling your mind with an attitude that you hope will lead you and guide you. You’ll probably be helped by this. You’ll be helped by Coué’s suggestion, “Day by da, in every way, I’m getting better and better and better,” because it works. But because you may have paved over the emotion without a transcendent link, it’s quite possible that the fearlessness may disappear in a crisis.
On the other hand, if you begin by knowing the truth, knowing that you cannot fear because you’re a spiritual being, that in truth there is no fear. As a process, God has not given you a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of sound mind. To affirm, God is my help. I cannot fear. You know that you cannot fear because you’re related to that divine flow within you. You tune in on it. This is not Auto-suggestion, similar as the approach may seem. It is turning to the ground of your being and identifying with the strength of the almighty. You see, Auto-suggestion is conditioning the mind from without. Affirmation is conditioning the mind from within. Say that again.
Auto-suggestion is conditioning the mind from without. Affirmation is conditioning the mind from within. It’s very subtle, so very important. Another instance, suppose you experience some pain, physical pain, emotional pain, whatever, you decide that you’re gonna speak a word for this, so you take an affirmation or statement of truth or statement of realization. You say, “I have no pain. There’s no pain. There’s no pain in my mind. I’m free from all kinds of pain.” And the pain will probably disappear. See, the important thing, when one becomes perceptive in the knowledge of truth within his wholeness, realize that pain has a message. Pain is telling you something. Pain is a signal that has some very definite guidance within it.
So the need is to listen. What is your pain saying to you or about you? The need for most of us is to go through things, get rid of the pain. I wanna get through this. I wanna be free from it. It’s the most important thing in the world to get rid of this pain. But the need is not to go through it, but to grow through it, and to understand that growth is what life is all about, and always looking for that which life’s experiences are saying to us, what they’re telling us, wanna get the message of this pain. You’re not simply trying to dispense with the problems, but to dissolve the problems by solving the inner needs.
Much that passes for affirmation and prayer and healing is a kind of Auto-suggestion. So when you use a healing affirmation, you may be unconsciously trying to make it true by repeating it over and over again. But again, you don’t change God by praying to God. You will not change God by saying words or thinking certain thoughts. Sometimes the study of truth is a journey into a land of all sorts of strange doctrines that lead us to believe that we should make God do our bidding. That’s the perception maybe, but the study of truth is for the purpose of gaining a power which will enable us to do things we otherwise could not do.
One teacher says, “God is an impersonal power and He must do what you want done, when you get into it and speak the words of truth.” God must do what you want done. The implication is that until you treat or affirm truths, that God remains static, that your prayer turns God on. When you pray rightly, as one writer puts it, “Pop! God comes in.” One thing is certain. God is never going to come in because God never went out. There’s no way that you can get God to come into your life, or into your mind. If the attitude of prayer or speaking words of truth is to get God to do something, then you’ve lost the context of the wholeness of life, the wholeness of your awareness and universal substance.
See, when you deal with the mind out of the context of the whole, you’re taking your identity within that spirit. This is what I call practicing the absence of God. We do this more than we know. God is an omni active force of intelligence in life, whether you know it or not. As we’re told, “He that keepeth Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps.” The power is always present, always active, automatically responding to the needs without help from you. Of course, that’s not entirely correct because the frustration of that activity is in your consciousness. You must release that frustration and say “yes” to the creative flow. So God is your help, your health, your prosperity, innate potential, all of the time, not just when you’re telling Him that’s what He’s supposed to be.
But if it is your potential, then it is you, even before you affirm it as the truth. So when you begin speaking words of truth, not just suddenly getting on your high horse and being the salesman to wonderful things you’re gonna make things happen in your life. The prayer treatment identifies with that fundamental truth within your nature and simply says, “Yes”. When you really understand the process, affirmations become simpler and simpler and simpler, perhaps just “I am life.” But knowing that basically within yourself this is true already, you simply say “Yes”.
So the most powerful, the most positive, the most effective affirmative treatment is when in your conscious is you know the truth, and simply say, “Yes. Yes.” When Jesus said the Kingdom of God is within you, people probably laughed at him. People are still laughing, trying to make it happen, make it appear, by trying to program it into your mind. Jesus was talking about another dimension of this life, a depth of consciousness. It was not somewhere to go, but something to know, someone to be. When you affirm the truth or give a spiritual treatment, it is not you who is doing the treating, not really. It is the healing all that is working, not you.
In other words, it is not will, but willingness that is needed ‘cause Jesus said, “Not I but the Father within he doeth the works.” Often a person has been conditioned in his knowledge of truth by a sort of mind dynamics approach. So he’s not thinking in terms of the allness of him, the spirit that in dwells him, the super conscious mind which is an ever present flow within him that seeks to fill his life with good. He thinks only of trying to program my consciousness so that I will be healed. He begins to speak words which he calls treatments, long phrases that he says over and over and over again. As if it’s something that he’s doing to his mind, to his life.
Jesus said, “It is not I, but the father within, he doeth the works.” So the great healing process ... If you will, the great healer is not an attitude that you assume in trying to help yourself or someone else. It’s that divine flow which is ever present which you tune into, that you say yes too and let it express. A very crude illustration would be if you’re a great battleship grounded on the beach. You stand there wondering how you’re gonna get this battleship back into the sea. You might imagine, if we use the same attitude that we sometimes do in our prayer treatment, if you could just get thousands of men and women to stand here and push with all their might and push it back into the water.
That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? ‘Cause you would say just wait for a change in the tides. Let the water easily float it and carry it back out to sea, without any effort at all. So in the same sense, let the treatment do its own work. You may use a set of affirmations which you call a treatment. The words that are used don’t really identify whether you’re involving mental science or spiritual treatment, but how you use them. You speak the word quietly. Someone used to say, “Like a feather on the breeze.” Not saying it loudly in a loud voice over and over again, but speak it as if you’re saying, “Yes” to the intimate flow. And let the treatment do its work. Just relax and let it happen.
And that “let” is an indication of great faith. We often think faith is doing this, but faith is this. Let it happen. Let it be. We get all caught up in words and suggestive statements. Jesus said something that is kind of hard to understand because it seems sort of cryptic. He said, “The words I speak are not my words, but the words of Him who sent me.” You say, well that means that he’s speaking God’s words. God is speaking through him. In a sense, that’s true, but only in a transcendent sense. We realize it’s about ourself. The words I speak, not the words of my affirmations and true statements that I’ve conjured up in my intellect, but they are the divine creative word that expresses through me, and I am simply tuning in to it.
When you get still enough and close enough to your innate oneness with the presence, as you speak words of truth, the word you’ve voiced spiritually speaks itself into expression through you. And your words simply become a kind of conduit through which the spirit flows. You let your words be channels through which the creative word flows through. You may glut your mind with affirmations and mind conditioning statements, but if you’re not moving beyond will to willingness, if you don’t let as Meister Eckhart says, “Let God be God in you,” no matter how the situation or need unfolds in the short term, in the long term, you’ve not solved your problem, you’ve simply buried it.
We do this more often than we know in our truth approach because we fail to allow the divine flow within us to lead us in recognized ways, because we fail to listen to the spiritual process. And again, as Montaigne says, put our ear close by ourselves and listen. Now, let’s not make a big issue of the difference between affirmation and Auto-suggestion and mind programming. We simply use this today as a means of checking up on ourself, because it may be a matter of semantics anyway. Many of you who use techniques of Auto-suggestion may actually be aware of giving focus to a spiritual source. Many students of Christian meta physics in their affirmation of treatments may really be trying to change God or to condition the mind from without.
So just by the words we use or the things we do, we can’t really tell what’s happening. What counts? So we keep reminding ourselves of our wholeness, oneness with the allness of life such as intelligence, reminding ourselves that it is the Father’s good pleasure, and the Father has created flow within us, Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. We don’t have to build this Kingdom. We don’t have to constantly, as the old fundamental education people would say, “lamb it in, cram it in, there’s more to follow.”
You’re cramming in truth in yourself, building this Kingdom of God within you. You don’t have to do this. The Kingdom of God is within you. It is the divine possibility of you, always. So it’s important that we do not retain the old rote learning idea from education, thinking that truth is a series of absolute beliefs that you build into the consciousness. Quite often someone says, and I’m sure you’ve all thought about this at sometime, if you could just take a child, an unspoiled little child into a laboratory of spiritual growth, expose him through all of his formative years to only positive things, condition him to think in keeping with spiritual law, wouldn’t it be wonderful?
He would become a completely well rounded and spiritually integrated person, we think. But it isn’t true. Simply because truth is not words, it is non verbal essence. You could fill the child with a whole vocabulary of meta physics, all the ideas out of all the favorite books that you have, fill his mind with all the daily word lessons, with all the lectures, all the great ideas that you’ve heard, fill his mind with only these things and nothing else. All you had ... give him a spiritual indigestion. ‘Cause truth is a non verbal essence, a perception, a motivation. The child needs to have a spiritual conditioning environment in which to grow, spiritually motivated adults as role models. He needs to be surrounded with love so he can easily identify with and as the love flow within him.
He may ultimately demonstrate mature conscious with truth. But it will not simply be a repertoire of affirmations and meta physical slogans. It will be in his ability to meet the changing challenging experiences of life and love and poise and equanimity. So again, the idea is not to isolate ourselves from life, and build into our mind all these meta physical ideas, as much as we may think that this will simplify the process, but rather to work to wake up the mind, become alive and alert to that conscious, the truth, which is already within us. It simplifies things. Grown up people say there’s so much to learn, so much to know. And then you hear things of truth and say, “Gee, if I only knew that.”
Fact is, you already know it. And you see this at times when you may be reading something. We’re all voracious readers, I think it goes along with being true students, we can’t help ourselves. But when you read something, suddenly something clicks and that’s wonderful, that’s wonderful. You think you’ve just discovered a new idea. I just gotta get that into my consciousness. It’s already in your consciousness, that’s why you recognized it, that’s why you’re excited about it. Just say yes and go on. Don’t let yourself be deluded that the goal is to fill your mind with all these meta physical truths. The key is to wake up the mind, not to fill up the mind. It’s a very important thing that simplifies the whole process.
If you could just get still and let, and experience that oneness with the divine flow, it would all be there at our fingertips, the tip of our tongue. Not that we wouldn’t suddenly have meta physical answers for everything ‘cause that’s not important. We would feel a sense of inner guidance. We’d feel confidence in this flow within ourselves, because we would regulate, take time, to get still and listen, to put our ear close by ourselves and hold our breaths, and listen, and then follow after.
If you’ve been following the idea that truth study is programming the mind with ideas of truth, then give some consideration another way. That’s a better way. You might say it’s deprogramming the mind with a kind of denial or de hypnotization, letting new light reveal those negatives for which you have been blocking the divine flow, because the great truth is, if a mind be set free from fear, from hatred, from prejudice, from hostility, it will spontaneously flow forth with perfect and abundant life. As Jesus puts it, “You shall know the truth. And the truth shall make you free.”
Let’s be still for just a moment. And put our ear close by ourselves, and hold our breath, and listen. Let’s just remind ourselves now, each of us is a whole and complete spiritual being, the Kingdom of God and its allness is in wrapped within you, not as something that you put in and build up, but something that you’re born with, and reborn with, and reborn and reborn, as you become progressively aware that which has been yours from the beginning. Just take a moment now to put your ear close by yourself and hold your breath and listen. And remember, true prayer is not listening to what you’re saying, but saying what you’re listening to.
When you hear that creative word, you affirm it in a positive statement. You say yes to it. That’s prayer. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. So be it.
