Retroactive Prayer
Maybe the spotlights of consciousness aren't curating a passive illumination of the immediate environment, but lighting up the possibilities of an infinite landscape.
Ironies and Outliers
Can prayer reach backwards through time?
It’s easy to throw the question at science for the convenient and efficient answer that points to a lack of any convincing evidence; obviously not.
But science can often be a self-defeating form of inquiry, undone by its own greatest strength of needing validation to derive any true meaning.
When faced with the immeasurable, this need is the Achilles’ heel of scientific scrutiny, which is too quick to disregard the unknown and unverifiable, allowing mystery to slip through the margins of the mind.
And so we have ironies and outliers that bubble up from the unquantifiable. Those things that undermine logic and laugh at causality, breathing life into the possibilities that lay beyond the reach of the scientific method.
The impossibly possible - entanglement, duality, retro-causality; all things that prompt wonder at consciousness’s true potential.
“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.”
– Edwin Hubble
Lighting up consciousness
Light is a carrier of information; electromagnetic radiation is how the universe communicates its structure to us, encoding energy, memory, and meaning across incomprehensible distances.
And we still don’t fully understand how it works.
Light doesn’t subscribe to any laws of time as we know them - it moves through time rather than within it.
From light’s point of view, no time passes at all. The moment of emission and the moment of absorption are one and the same — a coalescing past and future.
And if consciousness, like light, can operate on such non-local principles — able to influence, entangle, and observe across distance and duration — then it could be that intention and awareness (and prayer) aren’t bound by the ordinary sequence of cause and effect either.
So our attempts to reach backward in time may not just be some futile superstition but an unconscious intuition of how reality actually operates — as a vast, luminous field where information and observation (and meaning by extension) constantly play off one another.
Transmissions of the mind
In 2015, a team of scientists performed a study seeking to capture evidence of the non-local ability of consciousness (/mental entanglement) by way of measuring light photons:
“This study was designed to test whether specially selected participants in Italy could have an effect on our detection devices in Durham, NC, over 7000km away… selected participants would establish the necessary state of mind and attempt to travel out of body from their physical location in Italy to the bioenergy lab at the Rhine in the US… I would set up the lab to monitor changes in light measurements in our bioenergy lab.”
In 2023, I had asked the co-author, John Kruth, about what the results meant when it came to the potential of consciousness to move through space and time:
"If this effect was a result of entanglement, it is acting similar to other effects that have been described by quantum physicists. Though it is an anomaly which doesn’t fit into the materialistic model that has driven physics for centuries, it is clearly a repeatable and predictable phenomenon…
…Quantum entanglement transcends our materialistic understanding of matter and cause and effect, so these events would also be interpreted to transcend traditional ideas of space and time.”
And so we once again arrive at the crossroads of interpretation.
From this fork in the road, we have the potential to believe in the traditional, hardline approach of the scientific method or take one of the several strange, roundabout exits that quantum science has begun to pave.
Ironically, our ability to choose either route, if not both, is mirrored by another prominent principle out of physics that serves to also support the idea of retroactive prayer: the observer effect.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.”
- Max Planck
There’s something that needs to be said about the act of observation inherent to all organisms - something that language can’t [yet] grasp.
Because there’s a lot more to the observer effect than meets the subatomic eye, and there’s a lot to be carved out from between the 1s and 0s that structure the world.
In parsing it all out, there arises a point and purpose behind the ability to discern through the mayhem of reality - sparks of meaning generated from each enacted possibility.
To collapse wave functions of probability and actualize potential, from states ideal to states real, is to not only take on a posture of agency, but its to also create meaning through the process of choice.
In other words, conscious awareness seems too extravagant and too intricate to fall within the regular parameters of reality and the tepid requirements of survival; it seems to be built and meant for much more.
“Consciousness is the ground of being. Observation collapses possibility into actuality.”
- Amit Goswami
Intending Schrodinger’s Cat
In particle physics, the observer is king, able to create or destroy via discernment.
The measurement that comes after the event is what decides any given state of being, technically allowing for a future observation to retroactively determine a past condition.
But what if that observation carries intention; a present intention influencing a past outcome by collapsing a probability wave along a new interpretive axis.
Consciousness seems to move through space and time in ways that can’t exactly be measured.
In relativity — something to which we all cling to in order to make any sense of the world— time’s not a flow but a dimension; past, present, and future all coexist simultaneously but in a sequence.
The question is, how or where is consciousness throughout this process? How does the observer move through the tenses?
If all moments are equally real, then can a prayer of today not, in principle, touch an event yesterday, as both are points on the same four-dimensional manifold?
Consciousness may merely move its point of attention along a timeless fabric, unbounded from any need for uni-directionality.
Maybe the observer can modulate probabilistic outcomes non-locally—retroactively or prospectively; maybe the spotlight of consciousness isn’t curating a passive illumination of the immediate environment, but lighting up the possibilities of an infinite landscape.
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true depends on what we believe. What we believe depends on what we perceive. What we perceive depends on what we look for.”
- David Bohm
Participaction at a distance
Where this all starts to become remotely convincing is on the subatomic play fields of the physical world.
Rebelling against any limits of space and time, concepts like entanglement hint at an unbounded and non-linear substrate flowing between all systems.
Intention could hypothetically flow through these networks in ways immeasurable; instantaneously if not retroactively, or applicable by connection more than by consequence.
In 2001, a study led by Leonard Leibovici examined the efficacy of remote, retroactive prayer on outcomes in 3,393 patients who had already had bloodstream infections between the years of 1990-1996. The patients had been randomly assigned (retroactively) to two groups – one group for which a remote prayer was said, one control group. The prayers were said after the medical events in question were over.
While there was no statistically significant difference in mortality between the prayed-for and control groups, there were statistically significant shorter hospital stays and shorter durations of fever in the prayer group.
Building from this ephemeral foundation, it’s argued that prayer can thus be a participatory act in the co-creation of reality, riding the circuit of consciousness that consecrates meaning and observation.
“The universe is a participatory phenomenon.”
- John A. Wheeler
Moving with purpose
Like with anything, it’s up to us individually to decide what any of this really means.
And, like with anything, momentum can be built up and destroyed depending on the moves made through the airwaves of human ambition that span out across space and time.
Increasingly, the momentum seems to be surging of late, as more attention is being paid to the power of conscious observation.
Quantum physics provokes our imagination while instruments of measurement become more capable to transcend our perceptible limits of reality.
Regardless of how effective our consciousness is at moving through the present and into the future — or through the present into the past — it’s meant to derive meaning from its movement through time either way.
Whether we can or can’t effectively influence the past, we can - at the very least - derive meaning from it.
And that alone is an indescribably powerful ability that we seldom seem to appreciate.
