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May/June 2006 Featured Stories
Prayer and the Divine Matrix

by Gregg Braden talks to Miriam Knight

M:  Gregg, I interviewed you a few years ago on your book The Isaiah Effect. I remember thinking at the time what powerful insights it offered on prayer. Now you have another book out called Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer. How has your thinking advanced since the last book?

G: First of all, it’s a very different book for me to have written. It is a small format book aimed at a general audience, with beautiful photographs from sacred sites all over the world. The entire book focuses on the lost modality of prayer that was only mentioned in passing in The Isaiah Effect. The key to this mode of prayer meshes very well with what quantum physicists have discovered in recent times.
Between the years 1993 and the year 2000, western science validated the existence of a field of energy that permeates the entire universe. The field is described in three ways: It is everywhere all of the time – omnipresent; it has been here from the very beginning – from the time of the Big Bang, if we subscribe to that being the beginning; and, what makes this really interesting, this field has an intelligence – it responds to human emotion.
That’s what links this information to the lost mode of prayer. The field responds to the thoughts, feelings, emotions and beliefs that we create in our hearts, in our minds and in our bodies by mirroring them back to us in our world. So the field literally serves as the container for the universe, the bridge between our inner and our outer worlds, and a mirror in the world around us of the beliefs that we hold within us.
The ancient traditions are very clear that human emotion is the language that speaks to this field. So this is where science and spirituality are really coming together, because scientists are now saying this field is out there. But what do we do with it?  The ancient traditions focused less on trying to prove the field was there and more on trying to find out how it works in our lives. They left us very clear instructions that say if you can create these kinds of feelings, beliefs and perspectives in your body, then the world around you will respond to what you’re creating from within. That’s the purpose of this book, to focus and elaborate on those techniques and what our life experiences mean to us. If we find ourselves hurt in the experience of life, how do we experience that hurt?  We don’t want to just sweep it under the carpet, we want to heal it. Within the context of this field, how do we go about doing that?

M:  Now that’s fascinating, because it’s saying that whatever we feel strong emotion about is what we’re going to have mirrored back to us, and if, for example, we continuously feel a negative emotion, we’ll be attracting back negative things.

G:  Well, it even goes beyond that. Professor John Wheeler of Princeton University, the coiner of the term “Black Hole”, was a contemporary of Einstein and is still shaking the foundations of western physics with his discoveries and theories. After recovering from a major illness in 2002, Wheeler said his illness was a wake-up call and that he was going to dedicate what time he had left to answering the great questions of  “Why does the universe exist?” “What role does consciousness play in the universe?” He is saying that consciousness itself is the creative force that has made the universe, something he calls genesis by observership. Our observations, he suggests, might actually contribute to the creation of physical reality. To Wheeler we are not casual passers-by in a brief moment in time; in what he calls the participatory principle, we are shapers and creators, building the universe as we go.
This perspective is also reflected in the texts of the ancient spiritual traditions – Hindu, Buddhist, as well as the pre-Christian and early Christian traditions. It is also what we have actually documented in our visits to monasteries in Tibet. They’re saying that, literally, the beliefs that we hold within us are the force that is acting upon the playdough of the universe to create out there a mirror of what we are seeing within ourselves. This is a very, very powerful concept. Because, it means that when we turn on the 6:00 news and all we can see is a frightening world full of threats, diseases, wars and disaster, we perpetuate that within us individually and collectively. And it may, in fact, reinforce in our world the very things that we would like to change, simply because we’re making that connection.

M:  That is pretty heavy. It not only shakes the very foundation of physics but also of religion, of spirituality, and puts the power and responsibility back in us…

G:  All this goes back to the beginning of quantum physics in the early 1900s. In the Double Split Experiment they found that the behavior of matter on the quantum level was directly influenced by the expectations of the scientist – the act of observation was actually determining the behavior of these quantum particles. Wheeler suggests a feedback loop in the universe by which we contribute to the ongoing creation, not just of the present and the future, but of the past as well. This absolutely shakes the foundations of everything that we’ve been led to believe.
Since we are made out of those particles, those experiments are showing us the freedom that is possible for us in the universe rather than the limits that science says that we’re bound to.
What we manifest is determined by the way we see ourselves in the world, by our beliefs. Bruce Lipton and I are going to be sharing a program where I talk about the physics, and he talks about the biology and the implications of how our beliefs impact our physical world, the health of our bodies, the quality of our cells, how long we live, and how we express ourselves in the past, present and future. It’s all based on very valid science that has been demonstrated under laboratory conditions for the last 20 years.

M:  It really fascinates me that you and Bruce came together to give these joint seminars. I think you’re calling it Bodies of Earth and Cells of God?

G:  Bodies of Earth, Cells of God. Bruce and I have always been looking for a good reason to work together. We found one. I’ve got a book that will be out late this year called The Divine Matrix and his book is The Biology of Belief. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, gave the term “The Matrix” to the field of energy we’re talking about. In 1944 he made a statement, “There is no matter as such.”  He said, “What we see as matter is actually energy held together by a conscious and intelligent mind.”  That’s a direct quote. He said, “Behind this mind is the Matrix of all matter.” So that divine Matrix is the stuff that our world is made of, and the Lost Mode of prayer is the language that this field, the Matrix, understands. And the book, Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer, describes the instructions that were left in very ancient traditions of how we communicate with this field.
How do we heal our bodies instantaneously?  And how do we age in life without deteriorating in our cells? We just came back from over 40 days in the monasteries of Tibet where people are practicing these principles. Through translators, I could sit down and look them in the eyes and say, “When you do that, when you facilitate that healing, how did you do it?  What happened inside your body?” You can’t do that with a 2500 year old text, but these principles still being used in a living culture. Now we can ask them again and again until we understand what it is they are doing inside of their bodies that causes what appears to be miracles in the world around us. And if they can do it, we can do it.
And what they are doing? They are using quantum principles that make sense to them, but that were lost to us in the west 1700 years ago when those very principles were edited from our most cherished traditions by the early Christian Church. Of course they didn’t call it quantum physics then, they simply called it prayer. It is a very different mode of prayer. It is feeling-based prayer where we feel that we are a part of all of creation and that we are empowered to participate, and I’m using that word very intentionally. It’s not about manipulating our world or imposing our will or levying our power against someone who has less power. It is the opportunity to participate in the outcome of a given event, and we do it through the language of feeling. Specifically, feeling a feeling as if the prayer has already been answered, as if the healing has already happened, as if peace has already occurred between nations.
This is the secret to the prayers of my Native American friends – when they pray rain and rain occurs within hours. They are not asking for a higher power to bring that rain. They are feeling the feeling of what it feels like to be in their pueblo village in a downpour, feeling the feeling of mud in their feet. They are feeling the feeling of crops of corn that are so high because there has been so much rain. And then the key is, they seal that prayer with gratitude and appreciation and thanks.
This is a subtle, yet very powerful difference between participating and feeling; between feeling powerless and asking for intervention or using the senses to speak to this field, to the divine Matrix, and feeling what we would like to experience in our world.

M:  I remember seeing, in one of your workshops, actually, a video of a woman undergoing a sort-of prayer session in China, hooked up to an ultrasound, and seeing a bladder tumor shrinking visibly as the monks prayed behind her.

G:  We use that video, with permission, from a very different perspective now because it’s a powerful demonstration that applies to this principle. There are three practitioners in a room with a woman who had been diagnosed by a western medical practitioner as having an inoperable cancer in her bladder. Watching the ultrasound screen we can actually look inside of her body in real time. This isn’t a time lapse, it’s real time and done in 2 minutes and 40 seconds, in the presence of these three practitioners trained to focus the feelings. They’re not focusing on making that cancer go away. They are feeling as if they are in the presence of a woman who is fully healed, fully capacitated, fully enabled, feeling what it’s like to be with a woman already healed -- and they are not judging the cancer as right or wrong or good or bad or trying to make it go away. They are acknowledging it is one reality of many realities. As our physicists say today, we live in a world of many realities. The one that we experience is the one that we focus upon. So they acknowledge that that cancer is a possibility and there are other possibilities, and now we’re going to focus on the one where this woman is already healed and we see that happen. We see her body respond in less than three minutes real time.
This was filmed in a medicineless hospital in Beijing. Over 10,000,000 people don’t have medical insurance there. They use this form of healing frequently because they don’t have any other alternative. The success rate is over 95%. After 3-5 years if the people follow the protocols of diet, exercise, breath and gentle forms of movement to stimulate life force in their bodies, the cancers don’t come back. The bottom line to all of this is about our beliefs. It’s about how we see ourselves and our relationship to the world. Are we casual observers passing through a brief moment in time, or are we powerful creators who are actually altering the fabric of the universe through the belief systems that we hold individually and collectively. The experiments show that the latter is precisely what’s happening, and that is what is shaking the foundation of western physics right now.

M:  I would imagine that that is the actual basis of the success of faith healers.

G:  I think it probably is, if we could actually document legitimate faith healing. Some cases, like John of God in South America, have been very well documented, while they don’t understand precisely why he’s able to do his seemingly miraculous healings. It defies western explanation, and the reason is that there’s a missing link. That missing link is the fact that the field exists, number one, and number two, that we communicate with that field through our beliefs. I think that this is where the next great quantum leap in physics will ultimately bridge all of our beliefs. It will be the bridge between spirituality and science, and between the branches of physics that don’t seem to fit in with the other branches of physics – the Unified Field Theory. I think this is the piece that is going to fill in that gap. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it?

M:  It’s incredible! What you’re implying, though, is that we don’t have to go through the mediation of a faith healer; that it is within the grasp of all of us to use this new mode of prayer.

G:  Precisely! And I’m going to qualify that. We do not need to go through anyone else, on the one hand. Now on the other hand, when I studied with the gentleman who created the film of the woman in the medicineless hospital that you mentioned, I asked him, “Okay, here’s a woman diagnosed by western medicine with an inoperable condition. They said they could only try to make her comfortable until the end of her days. And then she goes to another place in the world where three people believe in her healing in a way of believing that seems very foreign to our frame of reference, and in three minutes her whole life changed.” I said, “Okay, that happened with those three people who believed in her. Could that woman have done it by herself?” and he said technically she could have. However, there is something very interesting about us humans in that we seem to feel more empowered when we’re surrounded by others who believe the way that we believe, which is precisely what great masters such as Jesus and those before him…

M:  When two or more come together…?
G:  Yes, we feel more empowered when we stand in the presence of other people who believe or acknowledge the beliefs that we share. Obviously, we’re at a crossroads, a turning point in the history of our civilization. We’ve got about a decade to make some crucial decisions that are either going to lead us into an era of long-term sustainability or absolute collapse, and it all comes down to our beliefs. That’s what’s so interesting. It all comes down to the beliefs that we have of who we are, how we relate to one another, how we relate to the world around us and how we relate to the universe as a whole. The big picture comes right back to the experiments that scientists performed in the 20th Century and the teachings that have been with us for thousands of years that say that matter responds to emotion. The world responds to our beliefs. So if we go around looking for places in the world where we have to intervene militarily, the chances are we’re going to find them because the world around us is mirroring our individual and collective beliefs. It’s a very powerful principle, and helps us understand why angry people have failed to bring peace to our world.
I’d like to emphasize this modality of prayer is not linked to any one religion, but actually cuts to the heart of what the original teachings are all about. I also want to say that there are many modes of prayer and they all have their place; we all use them from time to time for different reasons, and this is simply another tool to put into our toolbox of prayer to use when it’s appropriate.

M:  What you said about this mode of prayer being more powerful when you’re with like-minded people, I suppose the converse is also true – that if you hold a positive belief and you’re surrounded by angry, fearful people, that you can be infected by or disempowered by that…

G:  About being disempowered, what it will do is test our belief in ourself. The great workshop of Life comes from being able to hold these convictions within ourselves in the presence of those who may not always support them, and to bring the change that we’d like to see in our world in that way. It is not to impose our will, but to share the power that we find within ourselves with others in subtle and non-threatening ways. Whether it’s in a corporate board room or at the family dinner table, I’ve seen this time and time again, when one person in the room changes the way they are solving a problem or respond to a threat, the whole room will change. People simply respond that way. So it’s not about trying to impress others with your knowledge about a mode of prayer, it’s simply about living in life what this connection to the universe means in our hearts.

New York Times Best selling author and computer scientist Gregg Braden is considered a pioneer in bridging science and ancient wisdom. His books include the groundbreaking Awakening to Zero Point, Walking Between the Worlds, The Isaiah Effect, The God Code, and his newest book, Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer. For further information, go to www.greggbraden.com