I'm Writing a Book on Christian Prayer for Autistics

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I call upon the Archangels, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel, and try to call them daily each morning, all of them. I like to think of them surrounding me and filling me with light, my whole house with light, and even the whole community and the planet. A beautiful, wholesome white light of Divinity. This is effective for cleansing the mind of unwanted influences such as fear, hate, or even minor things like grumpiness. My prayer is transactional, I am getting something of value to me every time I pray, not in the future but right then and there, power.

Sounds like LBRP.

Have you ever heard of or worked with Rufus Opus's Seven Spheres? I have it and have a lot of the implements made but have a little bit of crafting to go before everything's ready. Hoping for this summer but man... the wand's gotta be right!

This is interesting. I really didn't think those on the spectrum would be so into feeling things about prayer or experiencing any connection with any power.

I'm very pragmatic. To me prayer is simply a form of communication. You need to communicate to maintain a relationship.

Being thankful is a big part of it for me because I think that's very good for our wellbeing, to stop and think about what we have that is good and not to always dwell on the negative. And who wants a friend who is always asking for things but who never shows any gratitude? Why would we be less of a friend to God.

I also think that praying for others is good because it makes you think beyond your own base needs and gratification. Also makes you think about how you can help others.

Another thing is to ask for strength. I think that God cares about us and wants us to feel supported. Asking shows that we do believe that he will support us.

But I don't feel these things. Prayer doesn't make me well up with any emotion. It's not how my brain works and I think God understands that.

If I'm touched by something that happens in my everyday life I will stop and say thank you to him. I'm not completely devoid of emotion. But religious experiences aren't something I experience. And I don't think that makes me any less faithful or any less close to God.

Yes and I have taken to performing it in the astral when I'm just too tired to do my version in the physical. Either way, it is effective. I do not own any book by Opus (prob. a psuedonym) but have many others, and have gotten bad about not getting around to reading or practicing them, but after all, I'm not retired, and I have quite a busy schedule to crunch on the day to day. It is just me keeping this household going now that my husband's left.

I didn't really want to unmask right away as New Age, because there is a strange hostility on the RC side against anything of that sort, as I have observed from reading editorials in the Catholic news media. They (conservative and mainline at least) really equate all of it with the Adversary and are quite paranoid on the subject. Even so there are many overlapping practices like prayer and magic ritual that we share with the RCC, and it is my hope perhaps individuals can discuss things in a civil manner.

Address one key word as being important--CONSISTENCY!! !

When Quakers pray, they are listening to God rather than talking to God. The occasional instance when I go to a church service I am astounded at how noisy it all is with all the verbal prayers, calls and responses. My thoughts are, How can anybody clear their mind and hear God under these circumstances?

As regards to rituals...I have tried many over the years and they all lose their power when repeated over and over again. Rituals become empty forms. I realize that other people find comfort from ritual.

I vary my rituals, so they evolve over time. I took the skeleton left by my elders and poked around with it, rearranged some bones, added some too. There are also variables such as - clothing, lighting, incense... Beyond that, much of what we do in life is, in fact, ritual if you think about it...we are creatures of habit. When someone says they don't do ritual, it means they are not aware of the many rituals they perform on a daily basis.

Oh it is definitely both ways. Often we "speak" to God through our thoughts in ways that can't fully be put into words.

The idea is two parts:

Part one: an essay on autistic prayer

Part two: 52 ~500 word devotions. Each of them will include a Bible verse and I'm guessing that psalms will make up a1/3 of those. The repeating structure can also help with constancy.

If you consider every day habits as rituals, that is not the usual meaning of the word. Ritual: a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order.

I may brush my teeth every morning, but that does not make it a ritual.

There is ritual and then there are Rituals. Where did rituals begin? What was their origin?

We tend to be systems people and I notice that what most of us are looking for is specific applications.

This is part of why things like tarot, kabbalah, and alchemy likely draw a slightly higher percentage of aspies than NT's, ie. on one hand we're less reverent of taboos (and in many cases are living a bit to close to simply throw resources out the window for the sake of social appearances) but it's also because these are a bit like Linux/Ubuntu open-source versions of religion, ie. a way of interacting with religion and spirituality that's clement to the way engineers and programmers tend to see reality. The other way people can go with that is back into Catholicism and various kinds of Eastern Orthodoxy because they tend to have those sorts of tool kits in ways that were later pulled out by many forms of Protestantism for coming too close to idolatry (examples being the rosary, the Jesus prayer, etc.).

I often also hear a couple things being brought up quite commonly by people who are practitioners of esotericism - 1) the spiritual disciplines that Ignatius Loyola wrote for the Jesuits and b) there's another book which I believe is from the 18th century of Catholic origin, I have the author's name on the tip of my tongue and it's one that got a lot of veneration from later Golden Dawn authors but it's another where the Catholic church liked it until they didn't and it went from being really popular to quite rare for said reasons. I'll have to see if I can find the second book's name and reference it later. Both of these would be worth looking at.

I think there are different degrees of ritual. Obviously, brushing teeth and the rites of something like Divine Liturgy or Mass would be of radically different degrees but I think many of those on the spectrum tend to make ordinary things more ritualized than most NTs do.

Yes, I think autistics tend to have their own religion more often than NTs: I remember reading that several times in more academic works I read as preparation for the book I'm working on. I fully admit in my teens I did that as well: I had figured that angels and aliens were just two people interpreting the same experience differently, for example.

Aha! You did reply to me although tangentially through another person's message. Is this the beginning of negotiations between New Ager and Roman Catholic?

Anyway, my thought is brushing teeth does possess a degree of power, in the case of one who brushes in the morning, wakefulness. Morning rituals prepare me in every way for work, the nightly rituals, for bed, the spiritual rituals, for clean living and purer thought.

On that last point - I'd say the next logical step is view that whole scenario, ie. people seeing angels or aliens based on different lenses, throw that up against Jacques Vallee and then throw it up against Donald Hoffman's Case Against Reality where you throw the fairy phenomena as its called up against some form of functionalism with multiple realizability (a bit like what you have if you think of a very hierarchical animism that loosely amounts to panentheism). The question then is - if we were anything like muscle tissue getting an impulse from a nerve, what would downward causation from nature in that sense look like to us? Probably like dazzling and incoherent signals that in the end aren't there for direct communication but rather to get us to do some particular thing.

My hope there - is that these are more than just sleeper's spasms, otherwise there's a good chance we could be toasting ourselves as a species by the end of this century.

Regardless though yeah, prayer is best served for truing oneself up inwardly with the universe.