You can't get there from here.

Shall we pray to God's presence and power in the cosmos, opening ourselves to the infilling of Spirit, or, shall we pray centering on the Spirit within, and allowing it to emerge?

According to the Roman Catholic Church, which holds that God must prepare our souls to accept his blessings (ostensibly by bestowing the gift of faith via prevenient grace), God moves from the outside in, from the cosmos into ourselves (again, only with his assistance), and thus when we pray to God we are praying to an external presence and divinity, not to an indwelling spirit. As Dr. Tom points out, much of traditional Protestantism is based on this idea of prevenient grace, which itself came out of the Calvinistic concept of the inherent wickedness of mankind.

If man is inherently sinful and human nature is basically evil, the sole way to affect a change in mankind must fundamentally come from an external spirit, from an outward separate source, from a higher and inherently more powerful station. Thus, traditional Christianity holds that God is indeed “out there”, and not "in here," and our prayers are directed externally, out to the cosmos.

We begin to look from the opposite perspective when we understand that mysticism can be agreed to be the identification of self with and movement toward the Divine.  When we pray centering on the Spirit within we are following the mystical theology of Charles Fillmore, wherein he characterizes, "holiness is consciousness that God is not out there as a separate entity but dwells within as an all – pervasive spirit. If God is the very structure of reality, as Paul Tillich proposed, goodness and holiness must lie at the heart of all things. Individuals may distort that goodness by using their divine power of free will, nevertheless all mortals "live and move and have our being" in God's Spirit, "for we are his offspring." (from Glimpses of Truth, page 114)

One can make a simple argument and say that it is impossible for anyone to actually be separated from God, being that God is both omnipotence and omnipresence. And since there is no separation from God, one is inherently and unavoidably praying to Spirit within. One can also draw on the New Testament for support for this perspective in Paul's writings to the church at Corinth found in 1 Corinthians 6:19:

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own.

We find further support for the spirit within perspective in Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Mount: "Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." This instruction would have little or no usefulness if its goal was not attainable, and if we can pursue the perfection of our heavenly Father, we must certainly be like him in nature and makeup.

So, which way is it? From my life experience, I identify with an inclusive theology that contains both perspectives, or allows for a paradox of the two perspectives to be sensible as a way of walking in faith. And thus I believe that this theological question is not a subject for a definitive answer, but actually a milepost or bridge along the way that must be crossed in walking the path of becoming more heavenly perfect, while at the same time embodying and expressing outwardly "the imprisoned splendor within."