“The prayer that Jesus gave us, the Lord’s Prayer can compare with, and even be said to surpass the The Emerald Tablet by Hermes Trismegistus, the most perfect monument that any intelligence has ever bequeathed to mankind. As a matter of fact, the Lord’s Prayer is a variation of the Emerald Tablet.”

Here is a unique interpretation of this magnificent Prayer from a lecture given by the Master at the Bonfin in 1962:

“Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us into temptation,
But rescue us from evil.
For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours for ever. “

In the course of his teaching, Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that has been recited by Christians everywhere, ever since, and which we know as the ‘Lord’s Prayer’, or the ‘Our Father’.

Contained in this prayer is a very ancient science handed down by a tradition which had existed long before Jesus’ time. But it is expressed in such a condensed, encapsulated form in the Lord’s Prayer, that it is not easy to grasp the full depth of its meaning.

Jesus came to replace fear with love. Instead of being afraid of that terrible God, we can now love him and come close to him as a child with its father. This was the novelty of Jesus’ teaching: we can love God with tender devotion, for he is our father, we are all his sons and daughters.

‘Our Father in heaven…’   Yes, and if our father is in heaven, then we can be sure that we too will reach heaven: one day the father and his children will be together. There is marvellous hope in these words – the hope of a glorious future. God has created us in his own image; we are his heirs; he will give us kingdoms, he will entrust us with the organization of planets, he will give us everything.

‘Hallowed be your name’. God has a name which we must know before we can bless or ‘hallow’ it. Christians are not accustomed to calling God by name, they just call him ‘God’, but Jesus was heir to an ancient tradition, and he knew that God has a mysterious, unknown name.

We must bless and sanctify God’s name in the purest light of the spirit. A name represents, summarizes or contains the entity it designates, so that if we are infused and penetrated by the holiness of light when we utter the name of God, we have the power to draw him into ourselves and into everything around us, to sanctify all objects and all living creatures.

light heart

It is not enough to go to church and repeat: ‘Hallowed be your name’, we must hallow his name really and truly within ourselves.

If we do this we will know the extraordinary joy that comes from having the power to illuminate whatever we touch, whatever we eat, whatever we look at.

‘Your kingdom come’… From this we see that the kingdom of God does exist and that it has its own laws and its own harmonious organization. To imagine what it is like is totally beyond us! But we do seem to get a fleeting glimpse of it every now and then in our purest, most spiritual moments. It is no use relying on our experience of earthly kingdoms, with all their disorders, conflicts and madness, to guide our imagination.

It is possible to establish the kingdom of God on earth; there is a whole body of teaching and methods to bring this about. The trouble is that we have been asking for it for the last 2,000 years, and it still has not come, because most people do very little to make it come.

With this second petition, ‘Your kingdom come’, we have moved from the domain of the mind and spirit to that of the heart.

coeur +

God’s name must be hallowed in our mind, but his kingdom must come in our heart, for the kingdom of God is not a place, but a disposition or attitude, that reflects all that is good, generous and disinterested.

Two thousand years ago Jesus said that the kingdom of God was at hand: this was true for some, but not for those who wait for it to come from the outside and do nothing about the inner reality.

‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. The whole of Initiatic Science is summed up in those few words. That is why Jesus gave us this prayer, so that we should learn to adjust our own will to the will of God.

The task of the material world is to attune its vibrations and even its physical forms to those of heaven, to conform to the qualities and virtues of heaven so as to manifest here, on earth, the splendour that exists on high.

He says ‘May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Everything is already perfect in heaven; it is here, on earth, that there is still a lot to do. So we have to come down to earth, consciously and deliberately, and be ready to take risks and get involved with material things, to spiritualise matter.

This is the only way to conquer the material world and bring it to life, the life of the Spirit; for the life of the Spirit has yet to manifest on earth as perfectly as it does in Heaven.

To be continued…

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, from a lecture given at the Bonfin in 1962.
Izvor Book 215,  The true Meaning of Christ’s Teaching
Original Edition 1985, Chapter 1

…Click this link to read the full transcript of the lecture…