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Another story is gathering in my head. It's another one-off, separate from the main series I've been writing. It's intense. (SHUT. UP.) So much so that my main problem is working up the courage to start writing it. I think it's gonna hurt, frankly.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'd like to present to you a book I've had for many years, one that is little known, but revolutionary in its impact. It's a small book, and it's fundamentally a work of translation. It's called Prayers of the Cosmos, and it's by Neil Douglas-Klotz, who writes about religion and psychology and is also a poet and artist.

The book is very simple. It takes the two best known Christian prayer-passages (the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes), gives you the original Aramaic (with the King James version on the facing page), then a phonetic breakdown. After that, the book takes each line separately and gives you first the Aramaic, then the English, then a list of possible translations (more on that below), and then a little essay on that line and its components, the syllables and sounds in the words and their meanings. Then as a nice addition, there is an exercise in breathing and tuning you can do to use the line as a meditation point or mantra.

I tell you, the book is a revelation. I had no idea of the scope of the divide separating us from the original words of this man. It's unbelievable. Here's just one example:

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( 1. Our Birth in Unity )