Владимир Дубковский – Nectar for Your Soul (страница 20)

Strong desires are always fulfilled if you wish for them properly. We’ve already revealed one of the secrets of the proper technology for fulfillment of dreams; recall what was written a few lines above: “In my thoughts it already hung on the wall.”

The prayers of the faithful also come true. The strength of prayer is very great, but it also needs to be constructed correctly. When we delved into this question, we revealed without surprise that “ignorance reigns” here as well: none of the believers we’re acquainted with knew how one needs to pray! Psychic processes are very similar to technology; if you don’t follow the specific guidelines, the result will always be failure. In the case of prayer, failure is everywhere the absence of a result.

What did our research about this topic show? People practice two forms of sending up prayers:

The first: they find a special prayer book, choose a prayer to fit the occasion, and sit before an icon and read the text.

The second: gazing at an icon (either in church or at home) they turn to God with some sort of concrete request, formulating it arbitrarily, in their own words. They ask for healing for themselves or a loved one, provision of a desire, or deliverance from something undesirable. Having completed their prayer, they return to their usual routine and wait for God to provide (heal, emancipate, etc). When God doesn’t fulfill anything, they go again to the icon and repeat the ritual. And again they wait. After many unfruitful prayers they begin to think like so: “It means I’m not worthy enough for God to hear my prayers.”

This situation reminds one very much of that which happened to the majority of readers of Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret. People thought up a wish, imagined something related to this (as Rhonda Byrne advised) and waited. Since nothing came true, they declared it a cheap book and Rhonda Byrne’s advice – not valid.

With God it’s different; you can’t call him a cheat. As such, in the case that prayers aren’t fulfilled, people instead denigrate themselves.

But the essence of the matter is this: both in the case of unfulfilled desires according to Rhonda Byrne’s recipe, and in the case of unfulfilled prayers the technological process was violated because it was completely misunderstood.

Prayers, like desires, come to fruition only under observance of specific conditions. If these conditions are violated, there’s no chance for their fulfillment!

The difference between simple desires and desire expressed in prayer is not great, but it does exist. When a person “simply wants” something, he or she doesn’t turn to someone in person; their request is directed to impersonal space.

In prayer the exact same wish has a concrete address: a saint or the Creator Himself.

The first and most important condition is faith

When we talk about prayer, we’re talking about faith with many faces, each of which is very important. We’ll examine each of them.

The first face is faith in the Creator, in His omnipotence. Believers don’t have a problem with this part, that’s why they’re believers.

The second face is belief in the fact that every person is always within God’s field of vision; that he hears and looks after everything. Difficulties don’t arise here either. God’s status as Omniscient is firmly entrenched in the consciousness of every believer.

The third face is unconditional faith that a prayer will be fulfilled. And this is where everything’s messed up. Of the many dozens of believers that we surveyed in person, not one had that sort of unconditional faith. People believed this in principle; they admitted its possibility, but not 100%. But even 1% of doubt will break a prayer. It’s impossible to be partially pregnant. And as they say, a spoonful of tar spoils a barrel of honey.

We propose that regarding unconditional faith in the power of prayer, things aren’t just in a bad condition among the students we polled. The majority of believers throughout the world don’t possess such faith (since they received their faith along with their birth certificates, as written about earlier). If this wasn’t the case, the world would be different. Hundreds of millions of people are daily praying for the world, health, love and material well-being. And yet no sort of changes take place, whether on the planet as a whole or in the lives of those doing the praying. We need not to prove this. If a prayer finds fruition, it is instantly declared a miracle – a rare phenomenon. A vivid example of this is the story of the canonization of Roman-Catholic Pope John Paul II.

Canonization means being counted among the ranks of the saints, and usually takes place in two phases, the first of which is beatification, which means being held as one of the blessed. One of the necessary conditions for beatification is the occurrence of a certified miracle after the death of a candidate (for beatification) and in response to prayers to the deceased.

The Vatican began this process almost immediately after the death of the pontiff on April 2, 2005. According to the traditions of the Roman-Catholic Church, the question of canonization can be posited no earlier than five years after the person’s death. However, taking into consideration the merits of the deceased and the fact that even on the day of his death millions of believers (according to the testimony of journalists) were chanting “Santo subito” (“immediate sainthood”), the new Pope Benedict XVI decided to break with tradition and on May 13, 2005 announced an early start to the process of John Paul II’s canonization.

It would seem that finding the necessary miracle would present no problem: undoubtedly millions of Catholics throughout the world turned their prayers to the deceased pontiff. But no such thing occurred! With great difficulty and after half a year the Vatican found just one such desired miracle. This was the healing, unexplainable from the point of view of medical doctors, of a nun who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The healing of this nun, whose name was kept a secret, occurred soon after she prayed for John Paul II directly following his death. In March of 2007 the secret was revealed and the happy nun came forth with the story of her healing in a press conference, becoming a sensation.

However, one miracle is too little for canonization, proof of a second miracle is also necessary. Years of searching lead to the revelation of an incident in which a resident of southern Italy was healed of throat cancer. The healing occurred thanks to the prayers of the sick man’s wife, which were directed to John Paul II. The woman asserts that her husband began to recover immediately after she saw the deceased Pope in a dream, where he promised that the woman’s husband would surely be cured.

At the same time, thousands of famous cases of miraculous healing have occurred throughout the ages and in all countries. What’s more, some of these came about after believers turned to a certain saint or directly to God and others under other circumstances in no way connected to God.

Nobody disputes the numerous healings from appeals to icons or powerful saints, which are known to all, and as such we’re not going to dwell on them. But we need to focus a bit on non-divine healings, as they hold the key to understanding many phenomena of interest to us.

In Russia, and for that matter in many other countries, the methods of healing of Doctor Georgiy Sytin have received wide fame. Sytin is currently an honored academician, a scholar with a name known around the world and the author of dozens of books printed millions of times throughout the world. If the idea got into someone’s head to declare him a saint because of the miracles he has caused, the search would present no problem whatsoever; Sytin has performed miracles (from the point of view of traditional science) daily over the course of several dozens of years. Thanks to him thousands of people have been healed of various illnesses, and grievous ones at that.

On the cover of one of his books (The Thoughts, which Create a Man’s Youth) are included the words of Soviet Pilot and Cosmonaut, Hero of the Soviet Union V. M. Zholobov: “I have been following the achievements of doctor and academician Georgiy Nikolaevich Sytin for many years. It’s clear to me that what he is doing can’t be done by entire institutes, by all of academic science, or by all of world medicine. It’s impossible to award him any sort of scientific degrees or medals, or any sort of awards.

What he’s doing is inconceivable. Medicine can be proud if after even a hundred years it comes close to the results regularly achieved by this genius” [22].

Who is this unique doctor? And what are these inconceivable miracles he performs? As an aside, they are considered miracles only by the ignorant; Doctor Sytin himself gives a completely different explanation. This explanation will be very useful for understanding how, in principle, a person’s wishes are fulfilled, regardless of whether or not they take the form of a prayer.