Imagine, for a moment, that you are a wise and benevolent king. Hundreds of subjects come to your doors, from different corners of your kingdom, to relay the news and make requests of you in your courtly palace.
Some come for help with a plague ravaging their community. Others come with an appeal for greater harvests. A rare few (increasingly rare these days) come simply to give thanks and offer gifts.
Imagine, now, one of these subjects appears in your court, approaches your throne, and says, “I am wealthy. I am abundant. My family is rich. I am intelligent.”
Being a benevolent king, you might be amused. Who is this fellow, and what does he mean by this performance? You might confuse him for your court jester.
As he goes on to list these affirmations — statements which seem in total contradiction to the facts — it gradually dawns on you that this subject is actually making demands.
He expects you to make him wealthy, to make him abundant, to make him rich, intelligent, and powerful. And yet he is going about it in a very strange way.
With some regret and disappointment, you would have to dismiss this silly man from your court as an especially rude and inconsiderate fellow. You have hundreds of subjects, each coming to you with requests, each in various degrees of pain, each wanting the best for himself and his people.
But here this fellow is telling you how things should be, commanding you, as if the deed was already done, as if he hoped to hypnotize you, the all-powerful king, with some cheap parlor trick. Who does he think he is, exactly?
But being a benevolent and good-natured king, you don’t develop an ill temper against him — you forgive him for his strange quirks. But I daresay you wouldn’t be particularly inclined to indulge in his ‘affirmations.’ He lacks far too much humility for that.
This is a very simple approximation of what ‘affirmations’ must sound like to the Divine Creator of our universe. You tell God, the divine mind and source of all intelligence, “I am intelligent.” Well, if you are so intelligent, what do you need God for?
Of course, under the surface, we all know the affirmation is a lie: the words themselves are a falsehood. If you were intelligent, you wouldn’t need to affirm it.
What you actually have in your heart is a desire, a request, a supplication, a hope, a prayer, not an affirmation. You do not have divine self-confidence — what is divine in you is a deep, heartfelt, painful desire to be better than what you are.
And God knows this — He knows it all. And so, He knows that you do not think you are intelligent, and most probably you are not, and yet you are telling yourself, and telling Him, that you are intelligent. You are lying to Him, trying to play a trick on Him, the very person whose help you most need. You must appear a very paradoxical creature.
With a little more humility and a little less affirmation, your request takes on a tone much more appropriate to the situation. It may ring a little something like this:
“My Lord God, thank you for all that you have done for me. I come to you with a deep wish to become more intelligent. I want to become someone worthy of intelligence. I want to have the strength of will, the patience, the love of knowledge and dedication to the truth necessary to be an intelligent person. I know I am full of pride and conceit; I know I am blind in so many ways, and my ignorance causes pain to myself and to the people I love. I want to be humble enough to gain discernment, to tell apart right from wrong, to see things instead of being so blind. I beg of you; help me to become worthy of intelligence.”
I cannot give you the empirical proof that such a prayer will be more effective than an affirmation. Far be it from me to teach you how to pray at all. I cannot even prove that prayer alone will solve your problems. That is up to the King.
But what I can convince you of, I hope, is that making affirmations is not appropriate for our personal relationship to God. When we make an affirmation, we are acting as our own authority. As long as we do so, we cannot enter into a relation with a superior authority.
All that we are doing, when we affirm, is relating more deeply to our own desires, our own wants and needs, and not to a higher power. We are delving deeper into ourselves, and not opening ourselves up to God.
And without a relation to God, nothing is spiritual. We are worshipping ourselves by affirming ourselves, when we should be affirming the greatness of the loving God who created us and all things.
Only then can we hope to invite more of that greatness into our own lives. Until then, we are simply digging ourselves deeper into our ruts.
