Masters' Guide to Prayer and Meditation

channeled by Mataare
compiled and edited by Carolyn Hawkins

Available through www.Amazon.com in January 2010

Masters’ Guide to Prayer and Meditation is an inspirational and instructional compilation of channelings by the Guides in Spirit, who demystify prayer and meditation with immense wisdom and exquisite gentleness, providing methods to survive more peacefully and successfully in the world.

You must still your mind in meditation. In the stillness of the quiet mind you must know who you are, You must do this because even though you have touched this experience many times, you need to depend upon it, rely upon it to get you through.You need to know that center because wisdom and truth guide you from that center                  - Miriam

Next time you find yourself frustrated with someone say, “God, help me and help that sick guy too while you are at it!”                                                                                                                                    - Chief Great White Eagle

Meditation is like Great Spirit talking to you, having its way with you. Meditation practices change all of the time. However, prayer is a gift given to you. If you have it, it stays.                                                                        - Merlin

To see God when you meditate, you have to want to see God more than anything else. How do people get that way? Great Spirit compels them and puts them in a position where that is so for them.                                        - Sun Bear

A Note from Sun Bear

Hello everyone, I am Sun Bear. I come here to talk about the spiritual journey, your spiritual journey, and about the importance of prayer and meditation. To do this I will tell you a story about Mataare, our medium. I love to tell stories.
Now I think if you were to question Mataare about when he would consider his spiritual journey to have begun, he would probably pick the date of his initiation into a particular form of meditation that was to lead to self-knowledge. I think that date was about thirty years ago. On the other hand, he may pick a date eight years prior to that when he told his father that he was going to search for the truth in a different way than in his church, and then took a beating for that.

Really though the journey begins for anyone when they look within themselves and ask, “What is really going on here? What is really going on with me?” That questioning started with Mataare very early, leading to some very, very difficult things.

We, Guides in Spirit, came around Mataare very early, but he had no real awareness that we were there, even though he would engage with us in a not fully conscious way. It was a subtle awareness that he had of us. I do not think that he really became aware of us trying to communicate with him until maybe 1975 or 1976 or so. You see, he thought he was searching for us, something mysterious, but in fact, we were calling to him, and he was seeking to respond to something he thought might be there. He was not searching for something that he had no consciousness was there, but he was responding to something that he had some consciousness was there.

The kind of thing I am speaking about is a calling. That calling led Mataare in some places he never expected to go, never wanted to go, never thought he would wind up, not simply because of ignorance on his part, but because of guidance. That is to say, some places you can end up are because of ignorance and error. However, some places that can challenge your spirit, you could well be guided to these places. This happens all of the time. Guidance to these places happens because of your sincerity to answer the questions, “What is really going on here? What is really going on with me?”

I remember a particular incident with Mataare when he was walking over a bridge to get to his job at a factory. I think he was nineteen and in college. Every day he was afraid to walk over this bridge, because when he would walk over it a voice would come into his awareness and it would say, “Jump. Just die now. Jump. Die now.” Mataare was afraid that this voice would get so strong one day that he would follow its command and jump. On this particular day though, he recognized that he had heard this voice many times throughout his life. He had heard it while standing by the subway tracks, “Jump. Jump in front of the train. It could all be over right now.”

He was afraid of this voice, and did not know that this was the voice of his pain and anguish. He did not know that this was a disembodied or disconnected element of his own psyche. All he knew was that he was very afraid. He did not feel he could always remain in control, never knowing when this voice would win and he would feel like he had lost. Yet it was because of this that he started to seek with a greater and greater passion, gusto, and urgency to try to heal this fear that he knew was inside of him.

The way he tried to heal himself at the time was that he started to ask people in the factory where he worked, “What do you do? How do you live? What more is there to life?” He would see people who had worked at this factory all of their lives, and he wondered how they could end up like that. He wanted to know how that happened to people.

He finally asked a friend of his what he did, and the answer was, “Oh, I go and watch football and maybe have a pizza and a beer.” Mataare wondered to himself if he would end up like that as well. Then he thought to himself that it just did not sound right, so he asked another older man. This older man, probably in his forties, was from the West Indian Islands, Caribbean. Mataare asked him, “How do you get through every day like this? How do you live your life? Don’t you want to look for something more?”

The man looked at Mataare and said, “Sure. I will tell you what we do. Stick with me buddy.” Then the man took Mataare behind the back of the warehouse and introduced him to his favorite liquor saying, “This is how we do it here.” Mataare started to like this man, and although there was some liquor involved, Mataare felt the man held some wisdom. However, after a while Mataare began to think that this would not really work for him.

At this time, Mataare was living with his fiancé and going to college. His schedule at school changed, so he had to get a different job than the factory. This did not stop his questioning though. He started asking different people around campus how they lived, and he started hearing about different spiritual teachers, maybe Reverend Sun Yung Moon and the like, who were popular in the 1970’s. This led Mataare to start a search for the truth. However, every time he would hear a discussion about things like knowledge of self or know your self he became disgusted. He would wonder, “Who cares about this? What does it mean to know your self?”

He had no inkling whatsoever about what these people were talking. The fantastic inner experiences they spoke of sounded to him like what he had heard about acid trips and things like that. He was fascinated enough though to become involved in a group and began meditating, after some initial difficulty turning his consciousness from the outside focus, which by the way he did not know his consciousness focused that way.

If you do not know the different between inside and outside, you do not know what inside is. You think it might be an emotion, a feeling, a space trip, cosmic drug experience, or something else like that, but what is it? What is this inside and what is outside?

Mataare had not a clue what any of it really was, but at the time when he began to meditate, his focus was very much external. He spent a lot of time thinking, but that was not inside or within himself. He even spent a lot of time reflecting, but much of that was somewhat self-centered fear oriented thinking and had nothing to do with the higher inner realm. So to turn away from self-centered negative thinking, to turn away from outside focus to something altogether different was not an easy thing to do. It is not something that anybody really, really wants to do either unless there are no other choices.

Why would someone want to know a greater reality unless the lesser reality had failed totally and completely? If there were anything left in the outer reality for them, why would they turn to anything else? Therefore, the outer reality has to be completely exhausted first, because it may appear to be more available. Why go inwardly if there is another way to go?

By this time in Mataare’s life, he already had many experiences into the higher dimensions, dreams, out of the body experiences. He had been searching for a long time. Yet when he finally came to meditation and tried to sit for that, he just could not do it. It was so difficult for him.

After a while, he ended up moving into an ashram where he found people who loved to meditate. Still, for him, meditation was an extremely difficult effort. He wondered why it was so hard for him. “Why is it so painful? My back hurts. It is so painful that I do not even want to do it.” He persevered though, meditating an hour in the morning and an hour at night.

It took about two years to develop, but after seeing others meditate much longer than he and love it, he entered into a competition with a few other people at the ashram to see who could meditate the most. Because of this Mataare developed discipline in his meditations. That motivation is not what reveals the inner reality, because that motivation does not remove the outside world from being of great significance. Even with much practice and discipline there can still be many things in the outside world that are of interest.

It is good to have interests, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is important because one learns about a certain aspect of their own identity in an intercourse with the outer senses. All the stimulus and interactions that take place outside can develop a healthy sense of self-esteem and ego, which is also necessary for what comes later. Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with what it takes to go from the finite to the infinite, which is a mighty leap. If someone wants to go from mortality to a consciousness of the infinite, that is a very serious matter.

Well, one day Mataare had a discussion with somebody about his difficulty meditating. This person told him that to make contact with Spirit you had to want to make contact more than you wanted to be alive. Somehow, that message finally got to him. “I don’t want to meditate like that. I am just trying to get through the hour. I do not want to do that more than I want to live. I don’t want to do that more than I want to do anything.” Mataare’s conclusion was that this person was experiencing something in his meditations that Mataare had never touched. He also concluded that he did not know the passion this other person had.

Thus began Mataare’s month long determination to shift from whatever consciousness he had about meditation to that kind of passion he saw in his friend. This determination met with various successes. More importantly, having actually forgotten his friend’s message about wanting to meditate more than he wanted to live, it had become a pattern for Mataare to try to meditate intensely.

Now of course he had some very powerful experiences and thought he had reached the point of deep meditation, although really he had much further to go. It may have been about a year and a half later he had developed a rhythm of meditating that was now more regularly long and intense, and he had begun to enjoy the practice, even though his experiences were not high.

Then one day Mataare came across another sort of religious path called Astara. It claimed to be able to manifest entities, one in particular called Zozar or Zarathustra. He practiced these techniques and one day Zarathustra came to him. Mataare had a very dynamic experience. It reminded him of the experience he had when his guru came to him in meditation because of his passion for meditating.

At first Mataare’s passion for meditation developed by his friend, who told him he had to want to meditate more than he wanted to live. Then the second development of his passion for meditation came when he felt unfulfilled and decided to pursue another religious practice. Then two years later there were another set of powerful experiences, which lead fives years after that to yet another powerful set of experiences that involved us, the Guides in Spirit.

What I am saying is that there are many stages of shifting of consciousness and conditions. Therefore, the best way to approach this subject of meditation is to be prepared to do it for the rest of your life. If that sounds too rigorous, difficult, challenging, austere, then it is a good idea to find out what can trigger your passion for the breakthrough to the other side.

Mataare developed discipline, and after several years of intense meditating, he was more adept and had become conscious of inner realms, refining his own connection. This was good because that connection was what one day would become the only thing he could rely upon, being the only thing that is real. At that time, Mataare did not understand it in that way.

Although the negative voices in Mataare’s head went away, after a few years he started to hear other voices. He did not know these were our voices, his Spirit Guides. In fact, he was so devoted to his particular teacher at the time that he would try to keep out any other influence apart from that teacher. This left him in conflict within himself between his inner experience and what he felt was a discipleship with his teacher. Out of this great inner conflict came a greater contact with us.

When we came to him, we did not tell him to leave his teacher. In fact, over time we guided him to work with three or four other teachers, for they were all helpful to him in some vital ways that helped save his life and his spirit. He did not know that eventually that contact would have to be completely reliable within his own innermost nature, because that is the purpose.

Now remember, nobody was around telling him this or reassuring him. In fact, because of that lack of reassurance he had a breakdown. I am sure there was more than one in his life, but that breakdown, in the space of that psyche breakdown was when we came and he began to channel us.

We would come to him and talk to him in his dreams. We led him to channel for his friends, and that led to his work. But his own personal work was certainly not over at that time just because he began to channel. He has lots of journey to go, lots of work to do, lots of transitioning to make. He has had many relationships, maybe two marriages, bankruptcy, and fights with the IRS, sickness, hospitalizations, near death and death experiences, heart stopping, asthma, all kind of things. You know, like a normal life, but he still has much journeying yet to do.

You may look upon that and say, wow, how hard. I hope I do not have to do that,” but look at your own life. Look at what you may have gone through or are going through now. Does your life seem normal to you? Look at the struggles you have faced. Look at what you have lost and found. Look at what you go through day-to-day. Look at where you are right now. Can you say your life has been easy? Maybe you can say your life is blessed, but can you say it has been easy? Can you say that everything has turned out the way you always expected or wanted it to turn out? In fact, have you not asked yourself from time to time, “Why is this happening to me this way? What is going on here? How did my life come to this?”

Did you ever think that possibly you might have to get to a point where there is nothing left, no more aces up your sleeve, no more alternatives, nothing left for you to hang onto outwardly that means that much to you, until you are completely reliant, dependent upon the truth that speaks to you within your own heart? It is not that you have nothing outside of you that captures your attention and creates emotional difficulties for you, but are you expecting any one of those things to be your security, your guarantee, the thing upon which you can ultimately rely in a pinch? If all else fails, then do you have the job, the bank account, the child, the parent, the money, the position, the land, the prestige, something you can get your hands on to pull you through or is there God? Is there the Infinite or not? Is there the truth or not? What are you doing here? Who are you anyway?