This is a YouTube video titled "Prayer is Intention to Purify" containing a recorded conversation from October 2010. The dialogue features Robert J. Strock discussing his motivations and experiences with prayer, emphasizing sincerity, faith, and the transformative power of intention. The conversation explores the spiritual and emotional aspects of prayer and its impact on personal presence and relationships.
So, Robert, you talk, I've heard you talk before about prayer, and I understand parts of it. But I guess what I'm really wondering is kind of what your motivation is for doing it. What's your hope in it? Or what are you trying to get out of it by doing it? Maybe that's a silly question.
No, I don't think it's silly. When you said, what's my motivation to get out of it? I thought that was just such a beautiful way of clarifying exactly why I'm doing it. Because my motive is to purify my moment, my day, my life. And I'm in some kind of a recognition that I'm in a state of mind or state of heart or lack of heart that is suffering in some way is incomplete in some way. I might be frustrated, I might be agitated, I might be impatient, I might be empty. And I'm really wanting to access a part of something inside. And it's very hard to describe, but there is a faith based on my prior experience that if I ask for a pure quality like patience or trust or kindness or to come forth as much as possible, that it actually will change the tone and the tenor of the next few minutes of my life. And when you make a sincere change of intention or prayer, it means that you really want something to be different than it really is. And so it changes your thinking. And it just feels good to want something better. It feels good to want a life that is going to be more helpful to yourself and other people around you. And so that very act or that very reaching inside for a pure quality of being is one of the most potent forces in the world. And sometimes I visualize it as being like a whole orchestra up there. And you need tenderness. You're going to have the sweetest violin sound is going to come by and you're asking for the most beautiful music you've ever heard. And then you might need some kind of, let's say, courage. And so you might have these radical drums going. Or maybe it's animals. Sometimes it's animal sounds. And you're going to have a lion roaring for courage. And so you're praying for the lion to come inside you. So prayer is really being in a human state and asking the divine side of you to come forth as soon as possible, as much as possible. And one of the key things in my experience is you can't demand it. It's not like being a two year old and having a little tantrum and saying, damn it, I want peace to come right now it has to be really sincere and heartfelt. And the moment it is, something does change. You might not get exactly the full quality you want, but whenever you're asking in any kind of sincere way, your heart opens a little bit, you breathe a little bit differently, your eyes get a little bit more juicy. Does that make sense to you?
It does, I guess the part of it, and I feel like it's the faith part of it that keeps it sincere in a way that I guess that would be that I would get caught up in trying to pray so that I could, knowing that I might feel one of those more essential qualities, that I'd be trying to get one of those. As if I could control it in some way.
Yeah, well, I think that the whole point is the part of you that's asking isn't self centered. So it's not like I will get it as if that's some devilish having your hand in the cookie jar. It's more like I'm emptying myself out from my self centeredness enough to actually want something purer to come through. And so it's a benefit to everybody around you if your prayer is answered. And it doesn't require faith in the abstract sense. It requires sincerity. And in a certain way, I guess you could say that a faith is built based on having some experience where when you've asked in the past, things have gotten a little bit better. I can look back and look at hundreds of different moments where I'll have a meeting with somebody and I'll say to myself, I'll ask inside, may I be as present and as sincere as possible. And almost invariably when I remember to really be there enough to do that, I'm a little bit more present and sincere. So it doesn't require faith. It actually is better than faith. It's a trust. It's a trust born out of good experiences that benefit everyone. Sa.
