The Philosophers Fire Prayer

The sense of the divine is expressed above all by religious emotiveness, and by the means of rites, ceremonies, sacrifices from which it flows. It clothes its highest expression in Prayer, which accompanies this necessary ensemble. 

But Prayer, like the sense of the Sacred which it expresses, is from all evidence a spiritual phenomenon. And, as Dr. Carrel judiciously notes in his study, the Spiritual World is outside the reach of our modern experimental techniques. How, then, may one acquire a positive knowledge of Prayer Fortunately, the scientific world understands the totality of what is observable. This domain can, through the intermediary of physiology, extend as far as the manifestations of the Spiritual. It is therefore through systematic observation of the praying Man that we learn of what consists the phenomenon of Prayer, the technique of its production and its effects.  

Prayer represents Man s effort to communicate with all incorporeal or metaphysical Entities ancestors, guides, saints, archetypes, gods, etc, or with the First Cause, at the summit of the preceding pyramid. Far from consisting of a vain and monotonous recitation of formulae, true Prayer represents a mystical state for man, a state in which his consciousness approaches the Absolute. This state is not of an intellectual nature it therefore remains as much inaccessible as incomprehensible to the rationalist philosopher and the ordinary thinker. To pray, one must first make an effort to strain towards the Divinity. Think of God more often than you breathe... Epictetus told us. Very short, but very frequent mental invocations can keep man in the presence ofGod  

The Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom are the thirty-two first verses of Genesis, whieh is the whole first Chapter, and the first verse of the Seeond Chapter. See R. Ambelain The Demiurge, pp 98 to 102. 

We shall see later that we should understand this, from the interior voice which speaks inside us, and which joins with the Fire introduced into the subjecf , of which Limojon de Saint-Didier spoke in the epigraph quoted at the head of this chapter. 

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