Whenever the process for accomplishing what is called for in a Prayer involves communication with Higher Powers, I always specify that I want "crystal clear communication".

First, let's review what we've said in earlier chapters in this PART about the Devotional Prayer of Changes and Agency:

• The Power behind the Prayer is the All-Accomplishing Power of the Divine — our being in Divine Communion with Adi Da and immersed in His Divine State is how we access that Power.
• Except during the lifetime of a Divine Incarnation like Adi Da (when the Divine temporarily has the direct Agency of a body-mind), the Divine is merely present, as Adi Da said repeatedly. The Agency involved in the fulfillment of the Prayer is: (a) the devotee(s) engaging the Prayer; (b) other "higher beings" (greater-than-material beings) who have been drawn to help fulfill the Prayer because of the high vibration of the one(s) praying, because they are in Communion with the Divine; or (c) other human beings who we call on to help fulfill the Prayer, or who spontaneously appear to help fulfill the Prayer.

Is it possible to receive communications from Higher Powers and not understand them correctly? You bet! Whenever I add to a Devotional Prayer of Changes a section requesting "crystal clear communication" from Higher Powers, I always smile, thinking of the following parable:

So of course the joke here is that God did give the preacher the help he had been expecting, but the preacher didn't recognize it as God's help and so he didn't make use of it. He had thought "help from God" would take some other, less mundane form (e.g., perhaps an angel sent to carry him to safety).

The greater context here that gives rise to the communications issues is that the Higher Powers are at one level/dimension/vibration and we are at a lower level/dimension/vibration. So direct communication — in the "face to face" manner you and I can communicate — is generally not possible (although it often can be enabled over time by increasing one's vibration to the level of the Higher Power). For this reason, such Higher Powers tend to use various forms of indirect communication, and that's where potential confusion (and therefore, the need for "crystal clear communication") can arise.

Very occasionally, the Higher Powers are able to arrange an indirect communication that almost feels like a direct communication. A couple of chapters from now, I'll tell how I was sitting quietly in my office, when suddenly I was startled by a voice coming from my laptop that said, "Can I help you?" The Higher Powers wanting to communicate with me had temporarily "hijacked" my laptop and triggered one of the stock phrases ("Can I help you?") used by one of the digital assistants on the laptop, to start a conversation with me (which then went on to take more indirect forms of communication).

However, most of the time, the communication from Higher Powers is indirect, and must be correctly interpreted (when the communication is a synchronicity) or correctly deciphered (when the communication is a coded message).

For example, in an earlier chapter, I told the story of an angel communicating with me through a pair of dreams. In the first dream, I was shown a glowing white figure with rounded protrusions at the shoulders, that looked to me like folded wings. That told me the figure was an angel. Then, an hour later, I received the second half of the communication: the number "28", which I recognized as an "angel number" (given that an angel had appeared earlier and was the likely source of this second communication as well). There is a huge body of available knowledge about the meaning of each angel number, so I was able to look up the meaning of the angel number "28". In essence, it was: "when old doors close, new ones open" — which was exactly the guidance I needed to hear in that moment. So in this case, the communicated message, "28", needed to be deciphered, and the first part of the message (the revelation that the communicator was an angel) provided me with the key to deciphering the message. It was exactly like cryptography, where, when you receive a coded message, if you are in possession of the decryption key, you then are able to apply the key and correctly decipher the coded message.

And of course, when human beings solicit guidance from Higher Powers, they often make use of code systems of one kind or another to obtain "readings". Often someone develops some skill in receiving guidance through a particular code system, and then uses that particular system as their primary "language" for communicating with Higher Powers. These code systems include: tarot cards, ouija/spirit boards, automatic writing, pendulums for yes/no questions, dowsing rods, runes, tasseomancy (tea leaf reading), crystal balls, geomancy (reading patterns made on the earth or in the sand), lithomancy (readings using stones or gems), numerology, astrology/horoscopes, I Ching, palmistry, osteomancy (reading bones), aeromancy (interpreting signs from the air, wind, or clouds), pyromancy (interpreting messages from fire), oneiromancy (interpretation of dreams), light codes/light language, angel numbers, and sound frequencies. And there is a craft or art in using these code systems to give an accurate reading. There is a "base level" of intrepretation that is like a cryptographer's key, where they know if they see the letter "E" in the coded message, they should replace it with "N" in the decoded message. For example, if the code system is tarot, and the card that comes up in the reading is an inverted "Fool" card, the standard starting point for the interpretation of that card is "recklessness, being taken advantage of, or lack of consideration". But that's just the starting point. Then based on experience and feeling sensitivity, the reader interprets this card in the context of a person's life in this moment, to arrive at a far more specific interpretation (e.g., the lack of consideration the person showed in how they related to their mother when they and their mother had lunch together the day before the reading).

When the Higher Powers initiate the communication with someone who is not already adept in a particular code system, the indirect communication far more frequently takes the form of a synchronicity — a meaningful "coincidence" — that must be detected and correctly interpreted.

Synchronicities occur spontaneously all the time. The ultimate reason is because the Consciousness in which the universe is arising is prior to time and space, and all events — past, present, and future — are happening simultaneously There — all events are synchronous in Eternity. From the less ultimate viewpoint of the body-mind, synchronicities reflect the fact that the inner world of our own subjectivity and the outer (seemingly) objective world are not actually separate, and synchronicities are constantly occuring in which something in the external world is mirroring something in the internal world (or vice versa). The noticing and correct understanding of such synchronicities is very useful for growth (especially growth beyond the self-contraction, which creates the illusion that inner and outer worlds are separate) and guidance (since, because there is no real separation between inner and outer worlds, it is just as useful to consult the mirror that is the external world around you for guidance as it is to consult your inner thoughts and feelings). See the earlier chapter, The Summer of Synchronicity, for much more on these spontaneous synchronicities.

But when Higher Powers use synchronicity as a means for communicating, they are intentionally creating the synchronicity. From the standpoint of communication, they create an event that is ordinary in some sense, but extraordinary in some other sense. It is aimed at catching the attention of the person the Higher Powers are trying to communicate with. So that aspect of the synchronicity is like when someone calls out "Hey!", or whistles, to get you to turn and look at them.

Adi Da once gave a talk about doubt, in which He made the point that doubt was an expression of the self-contraction, rather than doubt of a particular thing or person, with an actual rational basis. When you were in a contracted mood, you could suddenly find yourself doubting things and people that you had complete trust in before, and that life had given you no rational basis to doubt. You simply start doubting them one day because, on that day, your self-contraction is more severe than usual — so you are projecting the mood of doubt onto many people and things.

Just as doubt is an expression of the self-contraction, trust is an expression of the open heart — the uncontracted heart. It is the natural disposition that accompanies devotees who are in Divine Communion with Adi Da. And, like doubt, which is not doubt of something in particular, but a mood — essentially, doubt of everything, a contraction from everything — trust is not trust in something or someone in particular, but rather the open-hearted disposition that allows you to feel a connection to everything and everyone.

That openhearted, uncontracted disposition restores one's connection to the world of people and things we are already familiar with. But that same openness also opens one up to entirely new classes of non-ordinary, often greater-than-material experience. Synchronicities, miracles, communications from higher beings, etc., all start becoming much more common experiences in one’s life when one is living in constant Divine Communion and the associated disposition of trust.

So trust provide provides an opening to all kinds of new experiences. But it, in itself, does not provide a guidebook for how to interpret or respond to, or manage, these new experiences. That is something that one learns discrimination about as one gains more and more non-ordinary experience. Trust simply opens the door to these new experiences, and that in turn allows one to grow in discrimination about those experiences.

So for example, in a later chapter on the Adidam Mission, I'll talk about how new devotees often have rather ungrounded ideas about how the Mission will proceed miraculously, without requiring any more mundane "leg work" of the usual kind (marketing, events, developing relationships, etc.) And that’s because, now being in Adi Da's Spiritual Company, they are experiencing all kinds of new spiritual experiences, and there is a tendency to make all kinds of ungrounded assumptions about what is possible, simply because one is in a completely new realm of experience, is to some degree fascinated by what is happening, and, because one doesn’t yet have much experience oneself, there can be a kind of romanticism about what is possible occuring in some people.

Faith, as it is commonly used in religious circles, generally means belief in something that can’t be demonstrated directly through the usual materialistic means (the senses, etc.). Faith, as Adi Da means it, is not a matter of belief. It rests on an ongoing disposition of trust, which opens your life to actual non-ordinary experiences. And then it is on the basis of those actual experiences (not on the basis of belief) that you develop your faith. So you have faith in God not because you’re believing in an unseen, imagined, "believed" God, but because every day, you are in actual Communion with the Living God.

So all the miraculous phenomena we are describing in this PART — that result from the Devotional Prayer of Changes — come out of this openhearted disposition of trust. And the more constant that trust, the more non-ordinary experiences simply flow into one’s life, and the more one develops faith in such experiences — even learning when to expect them. Such faith is a Spiritual Realization. You develop a very different sense of what is normal, and you then live on its basis.

It is on the basis of such trust and such faith that we can then streamline our life, and allow it to become more of a flow (through constant connection with What Is Greater), than a series of (egoic) problems. So when I described how we found ourselves at the foot of a house we were potentially interested in, and we couldn’t even reach the door of the house because of the impossibly steep driveway, the communication from the universe was crystal clear. But it was also the case that we had had many experiences of this kind before, and many communications from the universe like this before. So we could simply trust the communication as we understood it, and move on with our lives instantly — completely forgetting about this house, without, say, having to add an additional "doubting Thomas" phase where we required ourselves to complement the apparent communication from Higher Powers rejecting the house with an additional "rational", conventional basis for rejecting the house.

Obviously, if the communication from Higher Powers is ambiguous, it certainly could be usefully supplemented with more conventional information. But that's one of the reasons why my Prayer usually calls for crystal clear communication — so we don’t even need such additional sources of information when we need to make decisions.