Below is the first chapter (unedited) of the book. Enjoy! Be-warned, it is not a Christian friendly book (nor a Christian bashing book). After being raised Christian and even serving as a pastor of a church at a young age, I latter in life had a life altering event take place within a Wiccan environment that changed my perspective of life, the world, spirituality, and even being human. Peace to all.
Chapter One
My Soul Cried Out
“It was at that moment, without hesitancy, an urgent appeal surged forth to anyone, anything in the universe with the capacity to change the inevitable“
The year was 1983, and summer break categorically became the best of summers. The world was at my command on the edge of seventeen with senior year activities. I was dating a young lady from a rival school (who later had the pleasure or misery, depending on one’s view, of being my first wife) and driving a rad Mustang with DIY Radio Shack-installed speakers covering the entire backseat. My summer job of sacking groceries provided ample money for gas, and Blackie (my pet dog) just gave birth to eight of the cutest, most robust, inquisitive litter of puppies any pet owner would be proud of.
Life in rural Arkansas was simple, and time was plentiful. My grandmother (grandma), who provided a large share of my raising, was a child of the Depression era. She had little schooling and could not read or write beyond a few words and her signature. She married my grandfather (grandpa), an equally educated man, at a young age in the nineteen thirties. Their life’s journey was full of hardships and poverty, a type of life many experienced during that era of American history. My grandpa was a tough, hardworking, cantankerous man who was sometimes a drunk. His opinion of sons was far more favorable than that of daughters, making life for my mom challenging amongst three brothers.
Grandma was a “churchgoer,” and Grandpa was equally a “non-churchgoer.” Much of my early life was journeyed in the midst of these two worlds. The world of the “good” churchgoer with a sense of moral direction and the world of the non-churchgoer who, according to society, needed a sense of moral direction. There was no middle ground; it was a binary choice, and this standard judged everyone. The local gossip, which didn’t need social media in the seventies and eighties to be a dominant force, always split the talk along these lines. The community judged you according to this standard. Blaming a person’s ills on their lack of church attendance or failure to adhere to “God’s” word. I remember such talk when Grandma’s lady friends were around. Their conversation often included, “If only Sally could get her no-good husband in church, all her problems would vanish.” This type of religious pressure permeated the air I breathed as a young person.
This southern, low-income community environment was prevalent throughout the South during the twentieth century. Nonetheless, with such influences in my adolescent years, I enjoyed rock music, Friday night football, fast cars, and other teenage activities. But always, in the back of my mind, was an overriding voice of the church and its teachings.
With these things in mind, Saturday morning in 1983 was like any other: having breakfast, playing with the puppies, calling the young lady, and planning our day. In prep for leaving, all the drivers in the family performed a ritual with the puppies. The puppies were kept in a safe area within our large three-car carport. The ritual was to count all puppies in the area before backing a car from the driveway. There I was, counting puppies and thinking of the day with a young lady… six, seven, eight… all there. Count them again for good measure; seven, eight… all there. Check under the car, just in case one escaped… all clear. I started the car and backed down the driveway. To my complete horror, a puppy escaped and found itself under the car, with devastating results. The emotional pain in the moments after the incident, while holding and loving the puppy before his internal injuries claimed him, is more than my memory can bear.
At that moment, with the puppy holding on to life, I begin to pray (to anything or anyone) for a miracle. Seeking intervention to change the perceivable outcome and restore the order of normalcy. It was tragic, life-changing, and emotionally scarring for me. The prayers ended in vain as the nightmare followed its course.
I admit the story is a depressing, heartbreaking opening to a book seeking the origin of prayer. But this tragic event and other similar events in my life led me to pursue why we pray, or in other words, seek the origin of prayer. The question, “Why do we pray?” is vague and heavily merged into religious methodologies. A common theme surrounding the use of prayer is its correlation to a time of tragedy or the foreseeing of imminent tragedy. The religious aphorism “There are no atheists in foxholes” arises from such a preface. All seek (pray) for “divine” intervention when facing certain death. My experience and research provide a hypothesis such behavior is not religious or divinely inspired. Instead, prayer is an intrinsic reaction to a situation—a triggered reaction during the course of an event. In the same manner as an accelerated heartbeat, fight or flight, tears, laughter, and other naturally occurring responses; prayer will manifest itself organically. Organically, in this context, is to originate without using any artificial stimulants such as religion, training, or culture. In its purest form, prayer exists without any outside requirements. But, as will be considered, non-organic prayer (the natural prayer under the influence of non-natural forces) produces a trained, religious, or culture-based prayer. These prayers are mutated from their natural state, much like a non-organic food product is mutated from its natural state by the influence of external forces (fertilizers, pesticides, or chemicals).
To assist in differentiating instinctive behavior from trained behavior, consider another childhood story. I was about five years old and at home with my mom. I was playing with various toys about her feet while she ironed the laundry. From another room, the phone rang (in those days, there were no wireless phones or cell phones), requiring her to leave the room. Mom looked at me and said, “Don’t touch the iron; it is hot!” before answering the phone. Like any five-year-old, I received this warning as an invitation to investigate. While she was on the phone in another room, I reached up and touched the base of the iron. Instantly, I drew my hand back. At that exact moment, she knew I failed to heed her warning. Most likely because of the instinctive and desperate cry of pain coming from my lungs. The behavior I displayed after touching the iron was not a trained behavior. No one taught me to jerk my hand away from the hot surface. No one taught me to yell from the pain. There was no logical thinking delay between the time I touched the hot surface and my reaction to it.
Part of this type of instinctive reaction stems from the processing compartment of our brain. In “lesser” complex brains like rabbits, the input of a lovely-smelling lettuce leaf causes many natural reactions. The rabbit turns toward the lettuce, bites it, consumes it… all without delay (or little delay) between the neurons that executed the smell input and the neurons that triggered the eat-it-now response. Most humans, unlike rabbits, have a more complex processing compartment in their brains. The processing compartment intercepts the input to eat and “reasons” about the action before relaying the message to eat. This human behavior of intercepting the message between input and reaction has evolved over the eons and gives humans areas of distinct advantage over less developed brains.
Humans retain some inputs that bypass reasoning and send an impulse directly to response mode. For instance, the jerking of my hand from a hot iron did not pass through the reasoning area of my brain. The brain takes the quickest path available to send a response to remove the hand from danger. This method of bypassing (or very strongly trying to bypass) the brain’s reasoning area and invoking an immediate response is (for the purpose of this work) instinctive behavior. If the behavior resides in the reasoning area long enough for one’s conscious to consider it, this writing will consider this type of action a trained behavior. This instinctive type of natural, untrained behavior is a subject of focus when searching for the origin of prayer. It arises without thought or training, an evolved natural response to a given input type.
The petition to greater power for intervention in a dire situation appears to be the standard method of operation for instinctive prayer. A religious person trained from an early age may develop daily rituals such as a daily prayer time. This behavior is not a subject in the quest for the origin of prayer. Trained behavior, by definition, overrides or enhances the natural-driven desire or instinct. The trained behavior is filtered out to understand the origin until a picture of the pure, untrained, instinctive nature emerges.
Having been raised in a typical southern religious environment with training in “God’s” ways. Sunday church services were as much a part of life as school, friends, and family. Christian behavior was expected and permeated every aspect of our community. By the time I was sixteen, I was heavily active in church activities, leading many of them. I attempted to read the bible routinely, say a prayer for the world, and live by the church’s teachings. Yet, on that tragic day in 1983, no training prepared me for what happened. As the horror unfolded, my soul did not find comfort in any church message or training. My heart did not pause and say, “This is a time to lean on God.” What happened at that moment was guttural, instinctive, and without forethought. I cried for help… I saw a mortally injured pet gasping before me, and my heart immediately desperately searched for ways to undo the damage. My soul cried for a path to change the inevitable picture before me. At that moment, without hesitancy, an urgent appeal surged forth to anyone, anything in the universe with the capacity to change the inevitable. I didn’t think of a “God” or my church training; instinct took over, and I cried to the universe for help.
The instinct was so strong it overwhelmed the moment and burst forth through the tears, transcending the apparent hopelessness before me. It was an instinctive cry for something I had never witnessed or experienced before, a cry for a future different than all my experiences predicted. My logic was at an end. Every door I saw before me led to the same destiny… tragedy. It was as if, at that moment, with every door closed, my emotions found another door to knock on. A door giving way to where one did not obey the rules of nature, where death wasn’t the ultimate destiny. It was this door my heart seized upon and begged for mercy, help, and intervention. The origin of this guttural, instinctive response has lingered in my mind for decades.
The origin of this natural response is the genesis sought within this writing. My response was not trained. It was not thought of beforehand. It rose up and took charge, much like the auto reaction of me pulling my hand away from a hot surface. This guttural response as a primitive prayer is the inspiration for this work. Attempting to answer such questions as: is the response autonomous or survival-based? Has it evolved as life has evolved?
In any study, proper definitions must be provided to communicate and direct research properly. As such, prayer’s definition must be forged. Without the definition of prayer, there is no origin to aim at or actions to understand. In forging a definition, various attributes of prayer will be analyzed. Once the attributes are well defined, a formal definition of prayer will be derived, encompassing its attributes. Several preliminary definitions will be used to better understand and forge this definition. In the same way, instinctive prayer versus trained prayer is distinguished, and other ambiguities are highlighted, discussed, and defined where appropriate.
Consider a fundamental characteristic of prayer described by Vigilantius around 400 A.D., “Only the living pray.” Most people will grin and nod in affirmation at such a benign and obvious observation of prayer. Yet, on examination, several ambiguities arise. Does living include non-humans? If so, does it include all animals? What about plants? Is the Earth living? Readers familiar with the Christian faith may recall the scripture saying, “The whole creation has been groaning,” a cry for help. Again, is the Earth considered living? At a minimum, the term life needs defining to understand what entities can pray. The second ambiguity of Vigilantius’s statement is to answer the question, is prayer restricted to humans?
Often, in research, one question leads to another. If part of prayer’s definition is uniquely human, then humans must be distinguished from other life forms. One must define life to categorize what life is human and what life is not. Quickly, we arrive at Dr. Seuss’s wisdom, “Sometimes the questions are complicated, and the answers are simple.” The questions concerning prayer’s attributes are complicated and require rigor to separate instinct from religion. Shall we “pray” that Dr. Seuss’s wisdom holds and that the answers discovered are simple?
Late in life, I returned to college and eventually completed my doctorate in computational science and engineering with an emphasis on theoretical physics. I learned early on a central building block of physical sciences is the ability to predict nature. A stone tossed into the sky will return to Earth with accurate predictability. There is no record of a hand-tossed stone not returning to Earth due to gravity. Once discovered and formulated in the language of mathematics, these laws of nature have provided humanity with incredible advances. Over three hundred years ago, Newton found a few of nature’s laws and how they can be expressed in equations. These equations have led humanity to global navigation, combustible engines, flight, moon exploration, and many other advancements. These advancements were achievable not because of Newton’s laws, but because nature behaves in a precise and repeatable manner. The stone always returns to Earth.
Imagine if the stone returned to Earth on some tosses and others; the stone never returned but kept sailing away into the emptiness of space. Because our logic is trained by our experience to understand that the stone will return to Earth, this scenario sounds like a silly sketch from Monty Python. But it wouldn’t sound silly if there were no experiences to draw from. There is no history of experiences to provide us hope the stone will do anything different than Newton’s laws predict. Even before they were put into the language of mathematics, these laws of nature constrained humans with boundaries of what was possible. Even without the laws written, humans understood the stone would return to Earth. Lacking the knowledge of elemental chemistry and understanding of oxygen, our ancestors knew one could not breathe underwater. These scenarios may seem trivial, but their subtle creations of restrictions to possible outcomes play a critical role in our everyday lives.
One does not walk in front of a moving vehicle without expecting to be harmed. If a person drops a thin glass onto concrete, the thought of it breaking enters their mind before it collides with the concrete. Our mind subtly determines the future as the glass accelerates to the floor. In an event more directly related to prayer, consider a skydiver. They jump from the plane and soar toward the Earth below. Previous experience provides comfort; the chute will deploy when the rip cord is pulled. It is when the unexpected happens that nature’s boundaries take center stage. If the rip cord fails to deploy the chute, the mind and body instantly move into a higher awareness and urgency state. The body instinctively enacts behaviors like adrenalin, elevated heartbeat, and increased observation. Another not-so-obvious instinct is a person’s inner calculation of how long before impact occurs, giving credence to urgency. These instinctive impulses react to the boundaries of nature, such as gravity, impact, terminal velocity, and the mortality of human life.
During this type of event, instinctive prayer often emerges when all the laws of nature agree to a certain undesirable outcome. These natural laws have bound the person to a future event they desperately wish to elude. Every scenario played out in the mind returns to failure due to a known law of nature. The situation is hopeless, and just as the glass was shattered on impact, the skydiver foresees their demise on their impact. At that moment, one often seeks ways to violate the laws of nature, overcome them, and wield them to their desires. A second consideration is to “believe” a law of nature may have been missed in their previous experiences, a law whose discovery is needed to obtain a positive outcome. If only they could bend the laws or find undiscovered laws, the outcome would be changed/manipulated to a favorable end. The need to rise above the constraints of nature’s laws often appears within primitive “instinctive” prayer. This need seems to work as a trigger to elicit an emotional response.
In the medical industry, it is not uncommon to hear of instances where doctors, having done all they know to do, relinquish their control over nature. At these times, the word miracle is a familiar part of the nomenclature. It represents an event in which the constraints of nature are superseded or temporarily changed to avoid an unwanted outcome. Understanding the meaning of miracles, nature’s constraints, and how they play a role in prayer is one area discussed in the quest to define prayer properly.
In religious realms, prayer is frequently coupled to one’s behavior. For instance, the more “righteous” one lives, the more “powerful” their prayers are. Within Christianity, the bible proclaims “the prayer of a righteous person avails much”. It is as though religion seeks to imply a law of nature upon the act, much like Newton’s law (paraphrased): for every action, there is a reaction. If one performs this “righteous” action, they obtain a “power” to overcome the laws of nature and obtain a miracle. In basic form, this philosophy teaches if one defies their natural born tendencies (titled sin in Christianity), they can obtain supernatural powers of prayer and defy the natural laws of the universe. This concept may appear separate from prayer, but research’s logic demands it be considered. Discussed later in this work is how this type of philosophy paves a path to regret. Regret, on inception, places one in a situation of seeking never to repeat a past event. To avoid repeating the actions, one aims to change their behavior to overcome the situation should it befall them again. Concerning regret, this work considers the role of morals in the expectation of success in prayer, even when the prayer emerges naturally.
Modifying one’s behavior to obtain a supernatural response has two conflicting human opinions. The first is there is a god who loves you and anxiously awaits you to call out to him/her so they can provide your miracle. The second is what type of god who knows what you need declares I will not give it to you until you fall on your knees and beg for it. It appears these two opinions are far removed from each other. But are they? Trained behavior often overrides nature’s guidance and leads to frequently conflicting interpretations.
The first chapters are dedicated to defining being human, morals, life, nature’s constraints, regrets, and other complex, controversial components of prayer. Once these definitions are forged, a formal definition of prayer is created, and the search for the origin of prayer is underway. In researching primordial prayer, a wide net will be cast to consider if it is uniquely human. Of course, this work will attempt to answer the question, is Dr. Seuss’s “the answers are simple” reflective of the complexity of prayer? Lastly, an endeavor will be attempted to answer whether observable hints of primordial prayer exist all around us, in humans and nature.