Years ago

It was in the early 80’s and at that time I was going to a traditional Church with a membership of at about three hundred. It was on this Sunday that I got a beginning glimpse of the sense of “WE are all One”.   Traveling to church I was listening to the radio and heard that Saddam Hussein was bombing the heck out of Iran.  As I settled into my seat at church, we moved through the normal Sunday rituals and then it came time for prayer requests.

As the prayer request basket was going around the minister began his prayer with a request to God that Saddam Hussein be punished and God intervene and stopped this evil man. As he was saying this you could hear various members of the congregation say –“Yes, Lord!”  Yes!!     For me, hearing this was incongruent with my spiritual understanding of the teachings of Jesus.  I thought about this and then I wrote my prayer request and gently put it in the basket.

Thoughts

A couple of minutes later the minister began addressing the prayer requests from people in the congregation.  Some of these included requests for healing, financial help etc. Then the minister came to a prayer request that made him stop.  The minister cleared his throat and one could tell that he was visibly shaken by the request.   He looked around at the congregation and cleared his throat again and asked the congregation to redirect their prayers to focusing love on Saddam Hussein and asked that Saddam’s eyes be opened to love and stop the bombing. As he read the prayer request you could hear whispers, mumbles etc. across the congregation.

Today, I laugh now at myself, but at that time my thought immediately went to thoughts of self-preservation!  Would he publicly ask who had written the request?  Visions of being taken out in the town square and being flogged began to flow through my mind and I prayed to God he wouldn’t publicly ask who it was that wrote the request!    The whispers gently subsided among the congregants and they began to pray that light and love be shown and that we are called to “love our enemies”.  The rest of the service proceeded as usual and with a sigh of relief, I made my way out the door and to my car.

What changed

I turned on the radio in my car and then less than 3 minutes down the road the radio announcer came on and made a “special announcement”.   He said” We don’t know why, but the bombing has stopped in Iran”.   Goosebumps ran up and down my body as I heard this news.

Could it be that the power of the energies of the prayers the congregation sent changed the course of the bombing?   For this one brief minute of prayers being directed on love and not hate and revenge; could these prayers have caused this change?   For one moment in time the bombing had stopped, and the news announcer could not figure out why the bombing had stopped.  Some would say: “How could that be? There is a time difference between the two countries! But to God there are no different time zones.

Of course, the bombing did resume.  I think it resumed because the focus of most of the people in the world were focusing on energies for revenge etc. instead of energies for love.

What if?

What if?  What if this group of people being of the same mind, the same heart the same focus caused the bombing to cease? What if the inflow of love in that moment of time reached the heart and mind of Saddam Hussein and his leaders?

The phenomenon  of the collective conscious, the sense of Oneness  and its’ impact on creating change  has been demonstrated over and over again in the Maharishi Effect in studies, Studies that demonstrate that only one percent of a population meditating on positive change can cause a decrease of 16% crime rate. http://maharishi-programmes.globalgoodnews.com/maharishi-effect/

Again, the Universe/God as some would say; responded to our commands/prayers and the idea of “we are all one” and the power of the collective consciousness demonstrated that we have that power to join together in a sense of Oneness and create a much better world.

Something to think about

This is something to think about as we seek to increase the light and love energy in the world!!!  If we send love out to everyone including those who appear to be enemies -what would change?  o