*I’m new writing and would love to hear your feedback in the comments about how I can improve. Thanks!
Prayer is mostly associated with the act of pleading to God. In desperate moments even bargaining with God. It has long been an act that is either part of a religious ritual; a ritual done repeatedly or habitually to be in conversation with God, or to let God know our wants and desires, and something we resort to in challenging times.
I’ll be focusing on the latter.
Prayer can bring us comfort. It can be a good reminder that there is some force bigger than us at work, and that we are not alone in the universe. But more often than that we attempt to make these pleas or bargains to “ask” God for a different circumstance, a desired outcome, or help with a situation that feels to big for us to deal with alone. We ramble our wants out in the abyss in the hopes that someone or something will step in and save us.
This perception of prayer gives plenty of fuel to skeptics, atheists and pessimists. “You see, not even God could save you” . And perhaps they’re right. You could even forgive the most loyal allies of praying for loosing faith because they asked, so why didn’t God send help?
Because using prayer to ask is getting it backwards.
I once heard the saying that in prayer we ask and in meditation we receive. At the time it made perfect sense. Set your intention (through prayer) and then align to receive it (through meditation et al) . I’ve even given this advice to many others while talking about the benefits of meditating, particularly if the person was trying to understand and learn more about manifesting.
But as profound as this quote seems to be, it’s still not quite right. So if the true practice of prayer is not to ask, why should we pray, and more importantly, how should we pray?
For these answers I am calling upon Neville Goddard who’s extensive knowledge and teaching on Scripture, the Law of Assumption and Human psychology have completely re-arranged the way I see the world. In his writing NG, quotes substantially from the Bible, not because he is Christian, but because he understands it as symbolic stories about human psychology,
“All it’s (the Bible’s) characters are personifications of the laws and functions of the mind; the Bible is psychology rather than history”.
He also notably adds throughout his work that Jesus is a metaphor for the Imagination. It’s a lot to unpack here, and he is a teacher I will come back to many times, but for now I am giving the little bit of context about the writer and his take on scripture as the doorway to what he says about prayer.
Why should we Pray?
Prayer, like meditation, is the portal to the subconscious. If you accept the idea that it is your subconscious that is the part of you that is in direct communication with God, then you know that what’s in your subconscious is producing your reality. What we believe to be true, on a subconscious level, is what our reality will conform to.
Have you ever had a situation in life when you felt absolutely sure of the outcome only for that outcome to turn out quite differently? We commonly concur that that was God’s way of putting us in another direction, etc. But the only way that can happen is if your subconscious didn’t believe what your conscious brain was trying to make true. God didn’t close any doors, but will keep giving you chances to open them.
I used to buy lottery tickets on occasion and felt sure every time that I would win… this time! But it never happened, and that’s because my subconscious is likely full of beliefs such as:
The probability of winning is so low
You’ve never received huge amounts of cash
Etc.
So even though my thinking brain was feeling quite optimistic, my subconscious has whole set of other belief systems going on that contradict my desire. Since the subconscious is the only part that matters, it doesn’t count how much I affirm something until my subconscious accepts it as true.
It’s also important to note that the subconscious is not concerned with if something is true or false. It will accept what you tell it.
So why should we pray? We pray not to beg, but rather to saturate our subconscious with the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Praying is to claim it, not to ask for it. “The moment you accept the wish as accomplished, the subconscious finds a means for it’s realisation”.
In real life this looks like and inspired action that you take, a sudden urge to do something that might feel random, taking a different route to work that leads to an unexpected encounter. The things we might call light bulb moments or coincidences or synchronicities, are the result of our subconscious communicating with God and God doing the work to light the path. We should pray then, to reprogram our subconscious.
The Success of Prayer rests on Claiming rather than Begging
NG claims that when men pray to God, they pray to something that does not exist. Which relies on the premise that God is not an entity as with think of him/he/it, but rather a state of consciousness.
With this in mind, if we are in the conscious state of being poor, and pray to God for riches, then we will be rewarded with that which we are conscious of praying, i.e more of being poor. It follows then that asking from a state of lack will only bring more lack.
So rather than begging to God we must claim that which we want. In other words we must BE rich in our conscious state, in order to obtain riches. If we can achieve the same state of that which we desire (instead of the opposite), then it will be given.
“The very moment my claim is established to the point of conviction, that moment I begin to draw unto myself the evidence of my claim”.
When we think about manifesting, or trusting the universe, or what we attract, this makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Not only does it quickly dispel the critics of prayer (because they are arguably right to criticise such futile begging), but it also explains why our prayers often go unanswered, or why life feels so unfair sometimes… we’ve been doing it wrong.
It’s not that some people are lucky and others are not, or that some are the chosen and others are not. It’s that some obtain states of consciousness (either deliberately or by default) that allow desirable things and others do not. This may still seem a bit unfair, but when you think about it’s the fairest type of world we could possibly live in, because we all have the ability to choose our conscious state and therefore the reality we live in. And since the re-arrangement of our conscious state is achieved entirely from within, anybody can do it. It releases us from looking to the external world for answers, blame or judgement, because those things have nothing to do with anything.
How to pray is as as simple as praying as if it were already done. Imagining the feelings you would feel as if you had it, and perhaps quite obviously, giving thanks. So in your prayers, there is no need to beg, doubt, bargain or compromise. You can simply give thanks to God for lighting the way for you, and accept that while God might orchestrate the path for you, you are the one that allowed it light up in the first place.
It’s already yours.
*I would love to hear you thoughts on the topic or my writing in the comments!