Theodore Orenstein

How To Connect With God

Meditation is an effective form of prayer. It’s a time-proven technique developed over thousands of years to help you connect with your inner spirit, which will, in turn, connect you with the unity of all — what some call God. Meditation enables you to shut out the noise and clatter of everyday life and calm yourself down so that the loving sense of unity with all things within you can be sensed. 

Prayer is not a spectator event. It is not sitting in a house of worship, watching and listening to others reading from a text to which you cannot relate. Prayer is not asking for favors from some omnipotent being. It is not something you recite without lingering to understand its spiritual meaning.

Praying and other religious rituals should not become merely habitual, an end in themselves that amounts to simply going through the motions. Allowing that to happen will prevent you from finding your true infinite nature.

Praying is feeling the presence of God, your Oneness with all things. Not a humanoid God outside of you, but the essential Oneness of all that can be found in your spirit. Connecting with your spiritual source will allow you to find the inspiration and meaning of your life. 

It can be done anywhere. The nature of the Oneness is found not in the heavens — or in a house of worship — but within yourself. If you search outside for God, you will be forever searching. If you seek God within your heart, you will find the umbilical cord that connects you with your eternal Oneness.

Praying or meditating establishes a feeling within yourself that opens up the world of the spirit, which has always been within you. It is not of time and space. It is, in fact, the peaceful yet fully aware state in which you find yourself when you free yourself from time and space. 

The peace you have been seeking is already within you. It is not a destination or an achievement to be won. It is not something that may come in the future. It is present and available to you right here, right now. You just have to learn to feel it within yourself. 

It’s important to note that this achievement can’t be found with your thinking mind. It is an insight. A pure recognition without thought. A revelation. An awakening.

Just let yourself float with it. Open yourself to it. You will discover that this is the place where awareness and revelation take place, where you can find your true nature and purpose. You will feel a calmness and inner quietness. Through that peacefulness, you make yourself receptive to sensing the Oneness within you.

It is a gradual process. The One will not come to you at the beginning. You must regularly open yourself up to your spirit using the techniques described in my upcoming book, Awaken Your Soul, and elsewhere. It will eventually come. Don’t seek it. Just make yourself open to it. It will find you. The door to your divine spirit will be open to you. 

This must be done regularly in order to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the noise, rush, and pressures of everyday life. Doing it regularly will make it progressively easier and easier to transform your consciousness into a meditative state. 

Unless you regularly connect with your Oneness, you will eventually lose your spiritual inspiration, and it will become only an intellectual memory of a great experience from the past. It is best to connect with your Oneness every day, but at a minimum every week, and it does not have to be for a long period of time.

Use Effortless Effort In Prayer with God

The purpose of meditating or praying is to quiet the spatial and analytical parts of your brain so that the intuitive portions of your brain can be felt. Material life is tough, active, and urgent. It tends to hide the more subtle presence of your internal eternal self. Turn off the TV so you can hear your heart.

When you begin meditating, you will start in the material world. But with continued meditation, you will connect to your Oneness and inner self. As you start the process, you will be trying to connect with your Oneness. As you practice and become more successful, you will find yourself no longer trying.

After all, trying is an act of the material world. Trying will keep you in the physical world. Trying comes from your ego and the world of the intellectual mind.

Let it go. Don’t try. By trying, you are seeking something you do not already have. You are assuming that what you want is not already here and now. It is and always has been here and now. You will attain it by allowing openness and harmony to overcome you, by letting yourself be absorbed into it.

Just be open and receptive. Let it come to you. It will. Life longs for life. If you open yourself to it, your spirit will find you. It has been waiting for you. You just have to sensitize yourself to it. Let it emerge.

Enter into loving awareness. You will grow into opening yourself up to perceptions that you did not previously sense. You will morph into an open concentration. You will become open and receptive.

In the practice of Tao, it is called “effortless effort.” Open yourself up to the beauty of the moment, and it will find you. 

Find Your Own Path to Oneness

Since we are individuals, each of our paths to Oneness begins in our own way, from our own place and from our current level, or stage, of consciousness. It is influenced by our family’s religion, ethnic heritage, our own life experiences, and the stage of development of our soul.

Inspired teachers from many traditions have taught us in slightly different words that there are many paths to the top of the mountain, but they all lead to the same place. The core of religious and spiritual beliefs — and even humanistic, agnostic, and atheistic beliefs — is the same thing. It is universal love, Oneness, a feeling of the unity of all.

Aren’t you greater when you are a part of a cause for a purpose larger than yourself? You become inspired to greater goals. When you feel the spirit of the Oneness, you will be drawn to follow it. It will lead you from your surface individuality to the universal spirit deep within you. It will free you of self-centered thoughts, and of your ego. 

You must not focus on the differences between your path and that of others. In order to be at one with the One, you must look beyond the differences to the commonality within all paths and all people.

Don’t think about it. Explanations will not help you. They satisfy the rational mind, and the rational mind is not the path to Oneness, to higher consciousness, or to spiritual enlightenment. As I have said, the One cannot really be understood intellectually. It must be felt, sensed, and “revealed.” It is intuitive. 

Think of a star in the sky. You cannot see the star when the sun is shining during the day. Only when the sun disappears is the star, which has always been there, perceived. Your everyday life is loud, and the subtle music of the eternal is very hard to hear above the din. Open yourself to listen to it. Eventually, continued regular meditation will allow you to sense the presence of your inner spiritual nature.

“The world is won by those who let it go,” said Lao Tzu, the spiritually enlightened founder of Taoism.

The spirit may open to you when you least expect it, but it is more likely to happen when you have quieted yourself. Again, it is not found through intellectual reasoning but by inner calm and clear openness. 

You sense it with your spiritual eyes, or what some people have called the opening of the inner eye. Many people have described it as light, because light is a very good metaphor for it. It is like turning on the light in a dark room and seeing it for the first time. But it is not a light in the earthly physical sense of the word. It is an illumination of your consciousness. An awakening, a recognition, a realization.

It can also be described as an opening. Your being opens up for the first time in your life. It opens to a reality that is more real than the earthly reality you have experienced up to then.

Buddha first tried extreme methods such as starvation and deprivation. He eventually found his Oneness by not trying. He found it through balance and by quieting the forces of the physical world.

You, therefore, will not find your true self through extremism or through hard effort. It is the opposite. You will find yourself when you are at balance. You will not find it when you bounce back and forth between one extreme attempt and another, but when you find peace at the place where your earthly vibrations are at a minimum.

This “praying” is the act of experiencing God, of universal love and unity. It recharges your batteries so that you can bring universal love into the way you live your life. 

It may be a new place for you, but it is not a scary place. Quite the contrary. In that place, you will find yourself at peace with yourself. You will be happy. You will have no fear of new ideas. You will be totally open to people with different beliefs and lifestyles. You will have lost your insecurities. You will see the value and beauty in all people and things. You will notice that people respect you and will be drawn to you.

You will have become a light to the world.

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