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The "Alter Ego" and the Indwelling Spirit
"The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Spirit of God that dwells within the human mind."
Our "alter ego"--its beginnings
When first learning to make use of language, many children are prone to think out loud, to express their thoughts in words, even if no one is present to hear them. And with the child's dawn of creative imagination it evinces a tendency to converse with imaginary companions. (996)
In this way a budding ego seeks to hold communion with a fictitious alter ego. By this technique the child early learns to convert its monologue conversations into pseudo dialogues in which this alter ego makes replies to the child's original thoughts and wishes. Very much of adult thinking is mentally carried on in this same conversational form.
A primitive form of prayer was much like the semi-magical recitations of our earlier ancestors--which were prayers not actually addressed to anyone in particular. Such techniques of praying tended to evolve into a dialogue type of communication parallel with the emergence of the alter ego concept.
As it was conceived by successive generations of praying mortals, the alter ego evolved up through ghosts, fetishes, and spirits to polytheistic gods, and eventually to the One God, a divine being embodying the highest ideals and the loftiest aspirations of the praying ego.
And thus did prayer function as a most potent agency for the conservation of the highest values and ideals of those who pray.
Enlightened prayer has its greatest potential for advancing the spirituality of humanity when it recognizes not only an external God but also an internal divine Presence functional in the individual.
Certainly when we pray, we should be striving to grasp the concept of the Universal Father on Paradise. But for the individual to also grasp the reality of the indwelling Father-Spirit on a personal basis, experience indicates that the most effective weaponry is by reverting to the concept of a nearby alter ego, just as the child mind is prone to do.
Having grasped its value in our minds, experience has also demonstrated the extraordinary rapidity with which this alter ego concept can advance us from a commencing point as mere fiction to the reality of experiencing God's indwelling Presence--a real, genuine, and divine Presence with whom we are in a personal relationship, yet who remains the very essence of the living God, the Universal Father.
And so childhood instinctive behavior can naturally evolve from a game played out in childhood imagination to actual dialogue between the mature mortal mind and indwelling Divinity.
The role of prayer
The simple prayer of faith evidences a mighty evolution in human experience whereby the ancient conversations with the symbolism of the alter ego of primitive religion become exalted to the level of communion with the spirit of the Infinite--and to bona fide consciousness of the reality of the eternal God and Paradise Father of all intelligent creation.
Prayer ever has been and ever will be a twofold human experience: a psychological procedure intertwined with a spiritual technique. These two functions of prayer can never be fully separated. But prayer must never be so prostituted as to become a substitute for action. All ethical prayer is a stimulus to action and a guide to the progressive striving for idealistic goals of transcendent attainment.
When the prayer seeks nothing for the one who prays nor anything for his fellows, then such attitudes of the soul tend to the levels of true worship.
Aside from all that is transcendent in the experience of praying, ethical prayer is an effective way to equip the self for higher attainment. Prayer can induce us to look in two ways for help--to the subconscious reservoir of prior mortal experience and for inspiration and guidance to the superconscious borders of contact with the indwelling Spirit of the Father. (from 996/997)
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