PRAYER

prayer as sustained attention · hypernormalization · stuck is the signal · corporate jobs as training · your vision is sacred

Sometimes it is hard to remind ourselves that we are holding out for the excitement of the light.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph. D. Woman who Run with the Wolves

i struggle to write about prayer because it is a topic that goes way beyond whatever the word count of this post is going to be, but anyway! my gratitude to my brain for the ability to write this in between crash outs. i anticipate another one in the next week or so, sometime before i do this. the intensity is palpable, all i can do is sit with it.

first, ‘prayer’ as defined in this post is sustained and prolonged attention. the kind of prayer activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil talks about in the essay Attention and Will : “Attention, when taken to its highest degree, equates to prayer, presupposing faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

this prayer isn’t formatted, doesn’t have full, complete sentences between a greeting and a close. as i understand the meaning and intent of prayer, it is a psychospiritual technology where imagination, emotion, drive and secrecy meet; activating every part of the witch’s pyramid.

being stuck in a job i didn’t like was simultaneously hating the same thing i was praying for, through focus.

nine to five jobs are training grounds for learning how to pray, specifically for the growth of the employer but i’m arguing in this post that we can use the skill for whatever we want.

i think the ‘presupposing faith and love’ part from the Weil quote is important here. many corporate jobs (especially the bullshit ones) require a level of emotional investment that acts as substitutes for faith and love, which might look like optimism.

we can look to the 2008 financial crisis as an example of this kind of prayer from the recent past. in the book The Stupidity Paradox, authors Mats Alvesson and André Spicer describe the years leading up to the crisis:

“A handful of people at all levels of the industry had pointed out some of the hidden problems in these financial models. However, these critics were a very small minority who were almost without exception ignored. Their old-fashioned messages of financial doom did not match the prevailing mood of optimism.”

Alvesson and Spicer point out that the reason bankers did not ask tough questions about their ‘fragile models’ was because they did not understand them. the prayer was sustained attention on optimism, undergirded by stupidity.

the authors go on to say: “Far from being ‘knowledge-intensive’, many of our most well-known chief organizations have become engines of stupidity... Not thinking frees you up to fit in and get along. Sometimes it makes sense to be stupid... The fact is, many managers try to ensure that smart people don’t use their intellect. There are many tactics that are used to do this... “.

recently my algorithm offered this video, where @/louisamunchtheory, describes hypernormalization as a way of being that combines collapse and stasis. the good news is, the system has collapsed. the bad news is we are under the stress of cognitive dissonance. this ‘hypernormalization’, imo, is prayer for the olde. we don’t know the new yet. it is a question we are still living out:

🦄🦄what do you want?🦄🦄

after describing prayer as attention in Attention & Will, Weil says: “Turning our minds toward the good ensures that gradually, the whole soul is drawn to it, despite itself.” 🦄🦄what do you want for your self? your family? your community? this planet? this is where we need to apply our focus, if the ancestors, the Black and Indigenous women and men who told us what was going to happen and who showed us how to create new worlds, are to be believed.

we have to admit that the olde system is dead first. the potential opportunity is that we can use the things we learned in that system to pray the vision.

all the posts in this series:

PROTECTION. corporations protect themselves, you need to protect yourself. here we’re talking about secrecy, boundaries, and charming an item.

CLEANSING. any corporate culture lack scarcity mindset shit must be cleansed out of your thinking. you cannot cleanse without protection and you cannot protect without cleansing, so these first two posts go together.

GROUNDING. as someone diagnosed with PTSD from childhood trauma, this one required the help of a therapist because it is and was painful.

SUPPORT. grounding pt 2. loneliness, isolation, when it feels like you have no one.

REBUKE IT. protection and cleansing pt 2. how to create and keep a spirit of rebuke when you need it.

PRAYER. protection and cleansing pt 3. corporate culture as constant, communal prayer.

RESOURCES

Video: The Mythology of Becoming an Artist by Vanessa Aldrich

Video: Basics of Mental Magic Witchcraft by Ariel Gatoga

Essay: Attention and Will by Simone Weil

Book: Woman who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph. D.

Book: Entering the Castle : Finding the Inner Path to God and Your Soul’s Purpose by Carolyn Myss

Book: Finding Soul on the Path of Orisa, Ch. 10 : Praying and Prayer, by Aladokun

Book: The Stupidity Paradox, by Mats Alvesson and André Spicer