I edited this and reposted as Moses' Secret of Positive and Effective Praying: the Perspective of Being, Being from, and Being of God
Moses knew the secret of positive and effective
praying. He learned it while tending "the flocks
of Jethro" (Exodus 3:1). Who was Jethro? Perhaps
Jethro was not exactly a "who", but a "what".
You see, many ancient Egyptians were extremely
religious, and there was a tendency amongst priests
to make things complicated and to take advantage
of the situation. Many priests were not actually
spiritual and had no way of demonstrating spiritual
power, so theirs was a life of doctrine. Doctrine
is lifeless, so no demonstration of spiritual
power ever really happened by them.
Moses, though, was genuinely spiritual, and God was
prodding his mind to maturity (Reuel, lit. God
associating to tend, to feed, to pasture). Moses
noticed that “Jethro” happened, and that it was
phenomenal. He understood that it was a real
demonstration of spiritual power. He had discovered
the law of increase, an aspect of the Law of God
(see Raymond Holliwell, Working With the Law).
The root word behind 'Jethro' means "to jut over
or exceed; to excel" (Strong's Hebrew and Chaldee
dictionary #3498). It is a surpassing abundance
of provision, where resource seems to exceed
capacity and needs are more than fully met.
Because the word 'Jethro' also contains a pronoun
suffix, it is further "his jutting over" or "his
excellence" (emphasis mine).
"His" who? Moses saw that Jethro is a phenomenon
of increase, a principle of expansion that "works",
and if it works, then there must be someone, an
invisible agent of cause, who is making it work!
This really gave Moses something to think about,
a puzzlement (Zipporah, a little chirping bird).
For instance, Job had been the richest man around,
and though he had lost everything, he received back
double of what he had had. Isaac, in desperately
hard times, planted during a famine and still
received a hundredfold of what he had planted.
Jacob fled across the Jordan River with virtually
nothing but his staff, and after years of being
cheated he returned to the Jordan as two bands
of people -- with flocks and herds to spare. Who
was the invisible causer of these undeterable
events of increase, and why did they happen? They
certainly weren't happening by themselves.
Moses, being a spiritually-minded guy, realized
that this providing was revelatory. Whomever was
causing the provision was doing it because increase
and expansion was his nature. Jethro is something
that happens because of what the change agent is. It
is imagic of that certain somebody's inner being.
Was some overseeing god favoring these guys?
Let's take a trip to ancient Egypt. This little
segue will prove invaluable to understanding Moses'
secret of positive and effective praying, because
Moses' underlying philosophical background was
formed by the ancient Egyptian myths. The core of
these myths was the basis for his worldview. (For
a wild ride in Egyptian myths, see Gerald Massey,
Egyptian Exodus: the Deserts of Amenta.)
The myths dealt with two different sources of
life which were the origins of two different
peoples -- the solar and the stellar.
Before I lose you, these were figurative images
of us. "Solar" means the sun-sprouted organic
life of the earth, i.e., the natural man.
"Stellar" means life from the heavens, the
spiritual man. These two different races of
people refer actually to the two facets of
consciousness within each of us.
We each have, or rather are, a physical
consciousness -- a "solar-person" of the earth;
and we have/are a spiritual consciousness, a
"stellar-person" from heaven. These two
consciousnesses are the two "people" within
each of us.
Let's review the count: one human, two minds,
which are two seemingly separate consciousnesses,
one of the flesh, and one of the spirit (or, if you
would, one's individual human mind and the original
mind of spirit). Each of us is this pair of
consciousnesses. Not has, but is.
Moses greatly enlarged upon this basic Egyptian
concept (and it is all that he is talking about
throughout his gospel -- that the two "different"
minds within us are, in fact, one).
Moses put the Jethro happenings and the two minds
together.
One night, perhaps while feeding brush to a
desert campfire, Moses burned the branches of a
shrub and watched as the branches burned . . .
and burned . . . and burned. "Hmm. Maybe there
is a hidden source of oil within the bush being
forced out by the heat or somethin'."
Ah-ha! An epiphany! "Oh, oh, that is what is
happening in Jethro!" Moses exclaimed. "The
individual, fleshly mind desires, which is heat to
the imagination. And the spiritual mind – which is
from and of the Creator -- expands like flame
creating the world according to the intensity of
the desires of the individual mind. Both minds are
. . . me! I become what I desire. I become by my
imagination; I am the agent of my own increase.
"There is a pattern, a mechanism –- YHWH! The
ineffable, Creator God desired and became me; I
desire and become whatsoever I desire, because I
am also the stellar person -- spirit. 'I' am a
package deal: the Infinite, my mind, and the
world I create -- we are all one!"
It is an equation: the power of life times the
heat of focused desire equals creation: Adam x rib/
Eve = Cain and Abel. Adam is the active power of the
life of the Divine (which is the "portrait" of God);
the rib and Eve are the intensity and focus of that
power’s desire; Cain is the acquired manifestation
of that desire, and Abel is the transitoriness of
the acquired manifestation (which is new moment
by moment, because creating is ongoing, continual;
it is perpetually re-sprouting).
The pattern is YHWH, which is the nature of God –
- and it is manifest as us!
The principle of Jethro, of increase and expansion,
is a feature of our nature, because God is IN us and
IS us. Moses' revelation is very clear that the animating
power which makes us living beings is God's own
consciousness, the very spirit of God, which was
imparted into us to make us us. Our consciousnesses,
which are to us "me", are really the Ineffable:
"And the LORD God (YHWH Elohim) formed man of the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of Life (the Spirit, his own consciousness);
and man became a living soul" (Genesis 2: 7).
It was the consciousness imparted by God that made us
living beings, and it did not and cannot become separate
from God who sent it. God's spirit does not piece,
it emanates. God goes with the sent, because he is
the sent. Each of us is an emanation of the divine
spirit, and there can be no separation or division
between him and us save in degree of awareness.
But why two minds? Well, three, actually. For God to
animate the Lifeless physical body of man into a
living being, that spiritual "person", YHWH Elohim,
God, has to join this physical "person" (the
manifestation of flesh, i.e., the mud-man) by dying
to (forgetting) his elevated state of being and
humbly flipping into being the state of consciousness
of the flesh.
Thus "crucified" upon this stake of death, the mud-body,
the now individualized consciousness becomes a servant
to the body. In this new state, the mind from the spirit
is conscious ONLY of being flesh (but it is STILL GOD),
while the original mind of the spirit is still conscious
of being God, because God cannot not be conscious of
being God. The individualized, “human” mind we think
with is the dreaming part of the spiritual original, and
it is our conscious awareness of being in this world.
The upshot is that we are the dreaming, self-
ignoranced part of God which became us in grace
to make us living beings, but we are still God.
And we create our world according to and by what
we imagine.
It is like an alien abduction, wherein we, God, have
taken over bodies for our own purposes. God rules as
man. This is the real meaning of 'Israel', for God is
the doer of the verb part of the word. This should
make you want to think good.
You have heard that God created the world by
speaking it into existence. THAT WAS US! Victor
Alexander says it so well in his translation of
Genesis 1:1 from the original Aramaic (v-a.com/bible):
"As the beginning, the Son of God creates the heavens
and the earth." This is so very true! The "mouth" of
God is the mind of man, and the world that now is
we are creating by thinking, desiring, and believing;
that is, by imagining. The beginning is right now.
"As a man thinketh, so is he (or she)."
We operate on the principle of faith. Creation is
a plan coming into existence. Creating is mental
determining a desired end. That is something we do.
Faith is believing that the determined end is. By
'is', I mean that it exists, even if it is as yet
unseen. Unseen does not mean unexperienced.
We determine the end that is our future. Nothing in
the universe -- not in a thousand universes -
- could ever deter what God has ordained from also
manifesting in the flesh. Everything in the holy
Sabbath plays toward the foreordained end. Faith
trusts that the forthcoming end already is, i.e.,
that it exists already.
This is the holy Sabbath: our resting in faith
until the determined end – which has already been
created by us –- appears.
We sail as Noah in our arks. Just as Adam created
his "living" world by defining the nature of all
the living things brought to him, and Noah created
the world he desired by receiving all the living
things brought to him, we determine, create, and
establish the worlds we want to live in by
populating our imaginations with living things we
desire, and believing those worlds to exist. And
though the world all around us should flood with
facts contrary to the possibility of our worlds
ever existing, if we persist in faith, the ends we
have created in imagination will harden concretely
into fact in the reality of our living worlds, and
we will plant our vineyards in them.
"The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and
in thy heart, that thou mayest do it . . . that
thou mayest live and multiply, and YHWH thy
Elohim (our own imaginations!) shall bless thee
in the land whither thou goest to possess it"
(Deuteronomy 30: 14-16).
The word -- the authority to create the worlds
we desire -- is given unto us! What we "say",
that is, what we think and believe in our hearts
proceeds into our FUTURE, which is the "land
whither we goest to possess". The "live and
multiply" is the abounding provision of Jethro,
which our imaginations will have created for us
in that future.
We create whatsoever we believe in faith, SO DO
NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING NEGATIVE in faith, else you
will possess exactly that in your future (does your
present world look anything like what you have been
thinking?). We have a lot of learning to do! Let's
wake up, translate, read and believe the Bible
properly; and let's think and confess mentally only
what good things we actually want to experience in
the future.
Accentuate the positive, for we are creating our
own tomorrows which we will occupy. Forget holding
onto things -- having is a poor substitute for
creating. If we are sharp-tongued, critical and
judgmental all the time, that is exactly what we
are going to experience. What a hell we can create
for ourselves!
Is that really what we want? No, of course not.
So "say", that is, think and believe with faith . . .
ONLY those things that are true, honest, just, pure,
lovely, of good report and worthy of praise. Envision
the best, the most noble, the most excellent and
most perfect end to whatever you desire. Imagine,
and thus create, THAT.
Neville Goddard said it this way in his lecture,
"I am all imagination": "Faith is subjectively
appropriating your objective hope."
That is, we hope for -- desire -- a certain objective,
Physical end. By faith we create that objective end
in our subjective mind, the imagination, and make it
our living place. We populate it with “living”
creatures, determining it so well that we can be
there, have it, and think from it as though it were
concretely real in our present reality. Once we make
our objective hope “concrete” in the subjective mind,
it will, in its time, become real in our objective
reality.
"Have faith in God. Whoever shall say . . . and
shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe
that those things which he saith shall come to
pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. . . .
What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,
believe ye receive, and ye shall have" (Mark 11:
22-24).