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Editor’s note: A few years after writing the above, I discovered that the ancient philosopher Plotinus shared my view that prayer is not primarily petition but contemplating one’s connection to the All, the entire universe of divinity’s domain.
While I differ with Plotinus on the issue of an impersonal God – there are good reasons to view God as a person (but not a legalistic sky-god on a white marble throne) – the ancient philosopher is on the right track, an excellent perspective, to view prayer as much more than an exercise of plea-bargaining, of me-ism, and presenting Santa’s wish-list.
The following was written by Dr. Margaret R. Miles on the work of Plotinus:
prayer, not primarily petition but contemplation of the whole
Plotinus described an integrated worldview that does not depend on belief in a god or gods, rituals, or holy texts, places, or practices. Instead of an authorizing deity, he focused on values, ethics, and attitudes that together articulate a philosophy of life.
His philosophy required acceptance of the “richly varied” universe and included a commitment to values and actions consistent with this generous and inclusive worldview. His thoughts can be useful to contemporary people who reject supernatural beings, explanations, and prayers addressed to a deity, yet who feel a lack of “at-home-ness” in the world without a comprehensive conceptual structure.
Plotinus’s teachings and writings respond to the following questions: What is the source of life and the nature of the universe?
Before getting to his focus on body, it’s important to start with Plotinus’s ideas on beauty. Plotinus taught that no one can understand the world who has not been startled and instructed by its beauty. Beauty’s message, he said, is the unity of all life, a gift of the impersonal source he called the “great beauty.” Recognizing beauty is a transformative experience. A person can recognize beauty by her kinship with it, for her life is one with universal life. He wrote:
There must be those who see this beauty . . . and when they see it they must be delighted and overwhelmed and excited. . . . These experiences must occur whenever there is contact with any sort of beautiful thing, wonder, and a shock of delight and longing and passion and a happy excitement . . . you feel like this when you see, in yourself or in someone else, greatness of soul, a righteous life, a pure morality, courage . . . he who sees them cannot say anything except that they are what really exists. What does “really exist” mean? That they exist as beauties. (Ennead 1.6.4–5)
According to Plotinus, no one is born with a natural capacity for perceiving beauty; it is not inherited in the genes or automatically acquired in the process of socialization and education. The perception of beauty is not due to a mystical experience, either. Rather, it can—and must—be trained by the practice of contemplation, a practice that Plotinus describes in some detail. In short, what you (can) see is what you get—either broken shards, randomly scattered, or the unity of “richly varied” life.
Plotinus described an intricate and complex universe in which life circulates from a source he usually called “the one.” The name points to an impersonal energy that Plotinus also, on occasion, called the great beauty, the father, the self-sufficient, the good, or even god. He alternated between impersonal and personal terms for the source of life, but he insisted that “the one” has no attributes and no intentions. Life is the fundamental element of the universe, intimately connecting all who share it.
Contemplation reveals the bond between living beings. Although bodies are separate, Plotinus believed that all human beings share the same soul. This is demonstrated, he said, by the fact that we cannot feel one another’s physical pain as we can feel one another’s emotional pain. Strengthening one’s identity with soul, the bearer of life, results in intensified identification with universal life.
The All is a single living being which encompasses all the living beings within it... This one universe is all bound together in shared experience and is like one living creature, and that which is far is really near... And since it is one living thing and all belongs to a unity nothing is so distant in space that it is not close enough to the one living thing to share experience. (Ennead 4.4.32)
Such a worldview has obvious implications for practices that damage the natural world and that sicken and kill people and animals. Indeed, it can inspire action based on the awareness that the community of human responsibility extends to all living beings.
To this end, Plotinus advocated prayer. Plotinian prayer is not petition, however, but contemplation that redirects a person’s attention from personal concerns toward the whole.
He gives instructions in the practice of contemplation by which a person imagines the real, the whole that we seldom recognize due to our fascination with our own bit part. For although life itself is trustworthy, utterly safe, the particular configuration that coagulates as “my life” will eventually lose focus and slide into the ocean of life.
I do not have the luxury of banqueting at ease on Olympus with the “blessed immortals,” [that is, to live in isolation above the mass of humanity, disconnected from the main]. To wish, to imagine, or to act as if we do, Plotinus said, or to be shocked when confronted by old age or death—whichever comes first—is to miss the greatest opportunity we have: realizing our connection to the all, of training ourselves through contemplation to see the great beauty of the whole circulation of life.
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