Who to Pray To

Pragmatic prayers: three rationales that may lead to the highest possibility of having your prayers answered.

Presented here are three rationales that may lead to the highest possibility of having your prayers answered.

Each rationale begins from different premises, yet all turn out to lead to the same conclusion as to how best to have your prayers answered — or to be better protected from unlucky harm, such as a car accident or becoming the victim of random crime.

For True Believers

If you can’t get your prayers heard, you need to engage an interested advocate as a go-between between you and God.

We are divided by many different religions, and each one claims to be the only true one. Even though many modern attitudes make room for tolerance, there is no room in the founding texts of Western and Middle Eastern beliefs for shared supreme entities. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam each believe that there can be only one true God.

If indeed there is only a single true God, then — since no single religion has a majority of the earth’s population — the remaining majority of the world’s people are wasting their time in useless rituals and fervor, worshiping a false god.

Today, almost all major religions believe their god or gods are merciful. If that is the case, then decent and virtuous people who prayed to the wrong god may be forgiven after death. They may not have had their prayers answered during life, but they will not be condemned in their afterlife. They can enter heaven.

All cases assume a person’s life on earth influences the afterlife spirit’s essence. That is, if you leave behind loved ones, your spirit will be aware of that. Another way to say it: if you die and your soul has no recollection of the life left behind on earth, can that still be considered you? What defines you in the transition from life to death?

So — if your virtuous parents or grandparents are in heaven and aware of those left behind, wouldn’t it make sense to pray to them as intermediaries, to possibly intercede on your behalf with the one and only true God?

This way you avoid the mistake of possibly praying to a nonexistent god. Your departed loved ones provide a channel; you simply have to live by the common virtues demanded by all religious beliefs, so that you qualify for heavenly protection.

If you are very cautious, you can be a vegetarian. Already accepted in some branches of the major religions is that you don’t need a rigid dress code. In essence, belief rules are man-made, shaped to suit current majority sensibilities.

Based on this rationale, your best bet to have your prayers answered is to pray to your departed loved ones — those who remember you and who led pious lives, and are therefore in heaven now — to help channel your prayers to the one true God.

A Consumer-Reports Comparison of Belief

Rating beliefs by their record: which caused the least harm and suffering, and best protected the well-being of their adherents over the millennia?

The criteria used in comparing the religions here is a rating of which ones caused the least harm and suffering, with the best record of their believers’ overall well-being over the millennia of their practice.

Today, many knowledgeable people rely on reviews and product comparisons before buying, subscribing, or joining anything. You don’t want to be part of a religion that does not have a good historical record of protecting its adherents.

There is now a long history of all the current traditional religions. Unfortunately, all of the “big three” have a poor record on violence done on behalf of — and violence suffered as a result of — the belief. Slaughter based on those differences continues to this day, because of intolerance of differences in belief.

Monotheism, which was a big step backwards for mankind, resulted in the most fanatical and genocidal human behavior in history. Polytheistic beliefs, on the other hand, are more tolerant of people worshipping other deities. People of polytheistic beliefs did not use religious justifications for violence against people of other beliefs on the mass scale seen among monotheistic beliefs.

There is one very large body of believers who believe more in the individual human spirit than in an immortal single god. This belief system extends from the teachings of Confucius over 2,000 years ago, which taught how to live a harmonious, civil life emphasizing respect for elders — especially one’s parents and deceased ancestors. This philosophy promoted the ancestral worship practiced by the majority of Chinese to this day.

This pragmatic belief system has the best record of tolerance of other beliefs and the least loss of life due to, or as a result of, such belief. The lack of religious freedom in China today is the result of a totalitarian communist government, and has nothing to do with ancestral worship. The mass detentions of Uighurs in China are an attempt by the government to quell secessionist fervor that had led to numerous terrorist attacks by Uighurs on Han Chinese in the recent past.

Empirical Evidence Consistent with the Belief

Afterlife phenomena fall into two broad categories: effects localized to the site of death, and effects that can occur anywhere.

Afterlife phenomena can be separated into two broad categories, based on oft-told stories throughout history of what people have experienced of deceased activity.

In one case, the experienced effects are localized to the site — or to objects present at the moment of death — of the deceased. In the other case, the effects can occur anywhere.

Localized phenomena

The first category, localized effects, are common threads in many ghost stories. Ghosts usually appear at, or very near, the site of death. In haunted-house stories, the deceased usually died in the house.

My son moved into an apartment where the prior tenant, an elderly woman, died in her bed and was discovered only when neighbors complained about odors emanating from the apartment. Her ghost appeared in the apartment, and my son told her that she had died. She did not appear to him again after that one incident.

The most significant case of a localized ghost story in recent times involves the Ghosts of Flight 401. In this localized event, when the plane crashed, some of the spirits of the two pilots transferred to nearby cabin instruments instead of a house. These apparently undamaged instruments were recycled into other planes in the Eastern Airlines fleet. The deceased pilots’ colleagues, and passengers on planes where the recycled instruments were installed, reported many sightings of the ghosts of the two pilots who died in the crash. The corroborated sightings were so significant that a TV movie was made based on them — and Eastern Airlines responded by removing all the recycled equipment to stop frightening passengers.

Non-localized phenomena

After this tragedy, there was never another fatality on any L-1011 in the Eastern fleet, even in subsequent accidents. Other airlines continued to have fatal accidents involving L-1011 aircraft. Two subsequent Eastern L-1011 flights with potentially fatal failures of engines and flight controls were miraculously landed without injuries to passengers — as promised by the pilot ghosts in some prior sightings. Look up all incidents involving the accident-prone Lockheed L-1011 on Wikipedia and you will find that fatalities did occur afterwards in L-1011s owned by other airlines.

Another non-localized but directed afterlife effect is the one that forms the basis of meaningful interaction between the deceased and the living world. This particular non-localized effect can form with close relatives of the deceased.

A recent example of living–spirit interaction comes from the Ghosts of 9/11, which tells of a deceased father communicating with his daughter in vivid dreams — but not with his surviving wife in that manner.

Other stories involving the Ghosts of 9/11 suggest that soon after death, a spirit’s energy is at a maximum, whereby it can commune with any loved ones through signs: the rustling of leaves at a particular moment, or the timing of other seemingly natural events as meaningful signs of communion.

In my case, that occurred the day we buried my mother. A sudden sprinkle of snow began as she was laid into the ground, and the snow stopped at the end of the ceremony. A few months later, my night-blooming cereus plant — which I had kept for several years — bloomed for the first time on her birthday, and emitted an intense fragrance that matched the scent of the flowers at her funeral.

Now, nearly fifty years later, I continue to think about her and visit her gravesite, where I try to mentally visualize everyone in our family, to help maintain her spirit’s coherence and relevance to our growing family. As I explain later using science, I believe a forgotten spirit is a spirit that will either fade away, or lose any connection with the living world.

In a recent event in my family’s orbit, I was shaken by the death of the only grandchild of my father’s third wife. She was buried at our family gravesite, but her daughter by her first husband had moved far away many years earlier. They are Christians, and her grandson had attended parochial schools. Her grandson died while helping a disabled motorist change a tire on a highway. At the time of his death, at age 23, he was a First Lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Armed Forces.

I believe her spirit vanished after receiving too little reinforcing energy from earthly relations, and therefore was not aware — not able to protect her descendant, who died in a chance accident of timing. That type of event is something that should be within the realm of ancestral spiritual intervention.

Every time I visited my mother in the cemetery, I also paid my respects to her. I believe my attempts to convey best wishes to her daughter and grandson were in vain, because I am not a genetic heir and hence not tuned to her channel. Nevertheless, I will continue to pay my respects whenever I visit my mother, because I don’t want to take the chance of offending any spirits.

There is another interesting, well-documented case, in which a woman in Ireland left behind six children after dying in childbirth. I am sure that moments before she departed, she desperately wanted to protect her brood, and went to the other side with a strong spirit determined to help her children. Her spirit remained strong for a long time — perhaps because of a combination of determination and the constant thoughts of her six living children, who remained in town and must have frequently visited her gravesite. After a two-decade journey, her spirit reincarnated into a girl in England. That girl had constant, vivid dreams of her past life in Ireland and the six children she had left behind. In adulthood, she researched her dreams and reunited with “her” now-elderly children in Ireland. That is the amazing story of Mary Sutton.

Recent high-profile suggestions of ancestral intervention

Recent high-profile suggestions of ancestral intervention on behalf of genetic survivors can be found in recent presidents of the United States. A fervent shared goal between the deceased and the related living provides the greatest incentive for spiritual assistance.

Trump, never a religious man, worshipped only his father. On his desk in the Oval Office while he was president was a portrait of his father. While alive, Fred Trump boosted his son Donald and bailed him out when he ran into trouble. Probably Fred’s most impossible dream was for his son to become President of the United States. After he died, he probably moved heaven and earth and achieved this seemingly most improbable dream — all things falling into place at just the right time, with Steve Bannon in the U.S. and Putin in Russia.

It is well noted that during the election, Biden often spoke of his late son Beau, and Beau’s wish that Joe could be President. On the Sunday just before Election Day, Joe — despite a hectic final schedule — paid a visit to Beau’s gravesite. It is apparent that during the election period and afterwards, Joe visited Beau’s gravesite several times.

In Kamala Harris’s case, her deceased mother had always encouraged political activism in her daughter. Kamala paid tribute to her mother in her inauguration speech.

Barack Obama’s mother, an idealistic woman, had high hopes for her son to be a successful font of ideals for the world. After her death, that came true.

More recently, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, thanked his mother in his inauguration-day speech. She died during his campaign for mayor, and it was her dream that Eric would become mayor.

On the CBS show 60 Minutes on January 16, 2022, I learned that the country star Chris Stapleton struggled to achieve recognition until shortly after his father’s death. He mentioned he loved his dad, and that it was a great loss for him. He had released unsuccessful singles before his father died. On a road trip shortly after his father’s death, he wrote a song for a new single that instantly propelled him to the top of the charts, making him an enduring superstar. Is that just another coincidence? I don’t think so — because of the timing of most of these recent events, which needed a little more help than just luck, and the fact that they occurred shortly after the death of a loved parent or child.

Using Science to Explain Chinese Ancestral Worship

Life is a form of energy — and in this universe, energy is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes form.

Our life is a form of energy. In this universe, energy is constantly changing form — in processes like combustion, where carbon fuel is converted to heat, and in solar panels, where light is converted to electric energy.

When we die, does all the energy that we hold as living things suddenly vanish? Right now, 90 percent of the energy in the universe is called dark energy, because humans have not yet figured out its nature.

The human organ that consumes the most energy in our body, when there is no physical exertion, is our brain. At death, is this energy — invested in our memories and thoughts — completely extinguished? Or can some of it change form and exit our bodies as a component of dark energy?

A fundamental law of physics is that in the entire universe, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only change form.

Our brain energy is a form of coherent energy: it is organized, not random. Wi-Fi is a form of coherent energy. Noise is a form of random, unorganized energy. Another fundamental law of physics says coherent energy will lose its coherence over time if not reinforced with new input.

For human spirits, that means that if someone is forgotten, the spirit will eventually vanish into background noise.

My postulation is that only genetic relatives of the deceased can transmit new, reinforcing thought energy to the deceased to maintain its existence.

To me, my belief — which fits a framework obeying the known laws of the universe — simply makes more sense than beliefs that require immortal deities, which both contradict and cannot be explained by any laws of the universe. In this universe, nothing stays the same forever. Not even atoms.

Belief in all-powerful, immortal deities has resulted in countless lives taken savagely throughout history in their name. It continues to take its deadly daily toll today.

In my belief, everyone has their own close deceased relatives, and no one need care about — or be distressed over — other people’s beliefs.

My belief in this afterlife and its connections to the living does not need an eternal heaven or hell, or even good and evil. It simply subscribes to having a loving relationship with family elders, to ensure their spirits’ warm remembrance and benign intervention, whenever possible, to protect their living loved ones.

It is no accident that the two most populous nations in the world are dominated by beliefs that do not subscribe to a single all-powerful deity. In those two countries, the people multiplied and survived in greater numbers than in places that prayed to, and sought protection from, monotheistic all-powerful gods.

I was taught as a child in this country that humankind took a great leap forward when it adopted monotheism. Today, based on all that I have learned about human history, the adoption of monotheism was a huge step backwards for mankind in terms of tolerance for people of other beliefs. The intolerance — and even fanaticism — bred by blind belief led to numerous genocides throughout history. The ancient Greeks and Romans, who believed in many gods, and other polytheistic pagan believers of old, never committed genocide on the scale of the intolerance bred by monotheism.

In conclusion

Is there existence after death?

Yes.

Does your afterlife depend on how you behaved while alive?

No.

Do good and evil play a role?

No.

Can prayers be answered?

Only if you pray to close genetic deceased — and only if a good prior relationship existed.

I repeat here the famous figures who exemplify the thesis above. They all had a deceased close relative who remained in their thoughts: Trump and his father; Obama and his mother; Harris and her mother; Biden and his deceased son Beau, who reportedly wanted his father to run for president again. And George W. Bush became President because his father, living at the time, had installed the Supreme Court Justices who handed his son the presidency.

Good and Bad Qi

I was a non-believer, like my dad — a lifelong atheist. This is the story of how experience changed my mind.

I was a non-believer, like my dad, who was a lifelong atheist.

In the mid-1960s, after more than fifteen years in this country, my parents were finally able to buy a house in Flushing, Queens, New York City. They found an attached two-family house for themselves and my married older sister, who by then had two young children.

The house they chose had very bad Feng Shui — bad enough that even a dabbler in Feng Shui would recognize it. It had a dagger-like tall industrial chimney facing the front door. The property was wide in the front and sloped downhill toward a narrow backyard. A previous tenant had died in the house.

Two years later, in my rent-controlled apartment in Harlem near Columbia University, where I was working, my wife and newborn son were mugged in the apartment lobby. We quickly moved into the basement of my parents’ house, in a safer neighborhood.

By then, my brother-in-law had already had a nervous breakdown, and a niece had fallen down the stairs and was facially scarred for life.

The day I moved in, I threw out my back for the first time, lifting heavy boxes of books into the house. My back has bothered me on and off ever since. Shortly after, my wife developed a thyroid problem that eventually led to its removal. On two different occasions, my parked car in front of the house was totaled by cars that careened directly into it, badly injuring the occupants of those cars.

On different days, a dog and then a cat were run over in front of the house. I witnessed one of the gruesome scenes as it happened.

Finally, before my second year living there, my mother took her own life in the house.

I then put two and two together, and moved out as quickly as I could.

One day I visited my sister, who continued to live there for another year. On that visit, my son fell on the concrete floor of the basement and was hospitalized with swelling in his brain. The doctor told me he might have epileptic seizures in the future. Before my sister moved out, she had a miscarriage. Almost no occupant of the house was spared some serious harm.

In later years, I found out that both female spouses in our attached neighbors’ two-family house had died there. I also learned from neighbors, after I moved out, that a house behind ours was known to be haunted.

Adding up all the harm in the span of less than four years, I became convinced that there is validity in Feng Shui — that bad Qi exists, and that its presence is hostile to life’s Qi.

Following my mother’s death, unmistakable signs of her spirit’s existence were revealed to me. I detailed those incidents in Rationale 3. Now certain of my mother’s spiritual presence in the afterlife, I began praying to her to protect our family. That is how I started to think about ancestral worship and its links to Chinese tradition.

Seeking good Qi

Of course, when I moved out, I sought a house with obviously good Feng Shui. To make sure, I sought out the seller’s family history there and their reasons for moving. I was told he had raised several children there, prospered, and received a promotion that relocated him to Florida. One of his married daughters also chose to relocate there to be near her parents — which is wonderful. The house they lived in must have had good Qi.

The long and short of it is that I grew my family there and prospered as well, in the fifteen years that I stayed. My wife and I both earned our PhDs, and my two elder sons were admitted to Harvard while we lived there.

Ignoring the signs

I did not do so well after I moved to a house in New Jersey — and it was predictable. I suspended my convictions because I had always dreamed of a house with a tennis court and a big pool, near the city where both my wife and I worked, and near an express bus to Manhattan. It was also the only one I could afford with that combination of amenities. I thought the house would be great for my children and future grandchildren.

The only thing that would have made me hesitate was if someone had died there. That was negative — but the seller had divorced his wife shortly before selling the house, and his financial situation, from what I could gather, was diminished.

I eventually paid the price for ignoring those unpromising signs. In addition to added family strife, my kids all moved far away, and I made a terrible investment that I am still saddled with today. I purchased an expensive industrial property nearby that turned out to be contaminated. Today, thirty years later, I can’t even give it away, since the next owner would have to do an expensive cleanup. I was exempt from the cleanup because the state misrepresented the property to me with a negative declaration before I purchased it. I have been personally saddled with onerous, constant repairs almost every week for the past fifteen years.

Shortly after my purchase, the U.S. signed NAFTA. Soon, all local manufacturing went to Mexico, and the building became vacant. For almost five years, all my salary went to pay the taxes and insurance on the vacant property.

I finally moved out of my dream house, since none of my children or grandchildren were there to enjoy the now-overgrown tennis court and the algae-filled, unused pool.

The moral of the story: do not lust for things so much that you compromise your better sense. There is something to Feng Shui — and it is better to have good Qi, like wind at your back in a sailboat, than to head into it.

Secular Gatherings & Meditation Centers

For those who value a regular community get-together: groups that meet with social and informational programs to support a sense of community.

For those who would like a regular community gathering, some groups that meet regularly with social and informational programs to support a sense of community are:

• Sunday Assembly
• Ethical Culture Society

The organizations above are a good alternative in the evolution of human belief.

Another, lesser-known international organization does not have as its purpose to be a community of religion-adjacent wanderers; instead it seeks to help people reap the benefits of meditation, and to learn about key pressure points to relieve pain. So, in essence, it is more than just a community of secular socials. This group is unique in that touch — the most important of human supportive interactions — is used in a directed way.

I know the New York City group is successful, with much positive testimony from attendees over the past few years. The main goals of the NY group are:

1. To teach members the successful meditation technique.
2. To help members — and other people who come in simply for pain reduction — through a combination of mind healing and trained, directed massage for people off the street who come in to relieve pain.

In NYC, they have a space at 16 Allen Street in lower Manhattan, which is open every day for members to meet casually and help others, with group meetings on weekends where experienced members hold classes teaching progressively more advanced techniques.

Visit their website — and forgive the archaic verbosity; their centers and techniques work — for phone numbers and to find local centers that may be near you:

• Meditation Centers — locations list

I am affiliated with the NYC chapter, located at 16 Allen Street on the northeast corner of Canal Street and Allen Street, in lower Manhattan.

About & IANDS 2026

This framework will be presented at the 2026 conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies in Seattle.

Abstract

This lecture presents a pragmatic, cross-cultural framework for understanding post-mortem consciousness that integrates ancestral worship traditions, documented after-death phenomena, and principles consistent with modern science and physics. Drawing on Chinese ancestral belief systems — which are often misunderstood as religious rather than experiential — the talk proposes that consciousness undergoes an energy transformation at death, allowing limited, non-eternal interaction with the living.

The model distinguishes between localized after-death phenomena (such as site-specific hauntings) and non-localized, relational interactions between deceased individuals and close genetic relatives. Using reported cases of shared-death experiences, visitation dreams, aviation-related phenomena, 9/11 communications, and reincarnation research, the lecture explores how remembrance, emotional bonds, and directed attention may sustain post-mortem coherence of identity.

Rather than relying on immortal deities or moral judgment systems, this approach frames afterlife interaction as finite, relational, and energetically constrained — offering an inclusive model accessible to believers, seekers, and skeptics alike.

About Nathan Chao, PhD

Nathan Chao, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Engineering Technology at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York, where he taught electrical and engineering technology courses for many years and supported student success across disciplines. He holds a B.E. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD, and has extensive experience in higher education and technical instruction.

In addition to his academic career, Dr. Chao pursues independent research and writing on human consciousness, near-death and related experiences, and cross-cultural models of post-death interaction. His work seeks to bridge phenomenological evidence with pragmatic frameworks that are compatible with scientific inquiry while honoring lived experience. He brings a lifelong commitment to rigorous thinking, interdisciplinary exploration, and compassionate inquiry into topics at the frontier of consciousness studies.

About Warren Chao

Warren Chao is Nathan’s son. Warren is a computer scientist who graduated from Harvard University and assists his father with NDE research.