Yesterday, I came upon a paragraph in a book that set my entire mind into a spin. I took it personally, because, I believe I’m a perfectionist at heart. I want to do everything correctly, even pray. The paragraph from Ernest Holmes read: “The moment we think we have to pray to compel something, that same moment we are exercising the willpower which is now up against a proposition it cannot possibly meet. Prayer is not mental coercion; it is not willpower, and it is not concentration. We shall never arrive at a correct method of spiritual treatment nearly by learning how to concentrate for any length of time on a particular object. That is not what we are striving to arrive at.”
Suddenly, I looked back at my many hours of meditation and prayerful thought recently and wondered if what I really wanted to do was convince God to give me something out of selfishness. I had to take a step back for a moment, because the thought of being selfish in prayer took the breath out of me. As you know, your breath (the prana) is your life.
That evening, I attended a great class that focused mostly on prayer treatment. I brought up my question. What I began to understand about prayer was not new, but certainly clarified in my subconscious exactly how to pray without feeling like I’m taking something that isn’t mine.
You see, we can’t pray for something that we already have. In spirit, I am already whole, complete, prosperous and completely loved. If I am the arm of God in this earth reaching out from Spirit as a creative conduit of God, then I already have the attributes of God at my access—completely. What I don’t have is all of this matter in consciousness as an effect in my life. This is why we pray or treat for the effect—Not to change God, but to change our minds to be one with God!
Only once in the Christian bible do we hear Jesus asking God for something. This one time is in the Garden of Gethsemane. Every other time Jesus prays for a miracle, he simply sees his oneness with God and produces wine, bread, fish, and weightlessness as he walks on water. He had no grown-up Christmas list for God—just a complete knowledge of who He was in God’s Creation. This alone created mastery in prayer. We need to understand it to be successful in our own prayer life.
If we go to Spirit with a set of grievances and a Christmas list of items we want, Spirit doesn’t compute these specifics. We came to the this earth fully fortified to create (as we are made in the image of Creator God, just like the Master Jesus) and manifest that which we need to survive and have a purpose, which all of heaven is willing to help us with.
However, when you say to spirit, I want a tall, rich, muscular guy with blonde hair and blue eyes, Spirit doesn’t hear any of that. Spirit hears things like, “Attract to my life the best spiritual partner with a kind and compassionate heart, as you know better than I what I need in my life. My heart is open to this right and perfect person, as I know my prayer goes forth with perfect grace, as I plant the seed into the subjective mind knowing it will not come back to me void.”
This kind of prayer can be answered, because the seed from which you pray has a life of its own, like planting a tomato seed. You can’t expect to get a carrot when you plant a tomato. So, when you plant a seed, you really have only an idea and an objective behind a natural law that already exists. You have no way of forcing or coercing that seed to grow. You can nurture it. You can water it. You can keep it safe from pestilence. But you cannot make it go from seed to bearing fruit in two days. It’s not possible. You would have to go against the Law of Nature to do that.
Many of our prayers are trying to do exactly what I just described. What we must do with prayer is find the common denominator with Spiritual power and our desire. To do that, we must create a way for us to have life more abundantly, without depriving anyone else of something that is rightfully theirs. We must create a template of perfect love to nurture, knowing that only Spirit knows what to do, how do it and does it by means of our words and actions.
Raymond Charles Barker says his prayer of prosperity like this: “Spirit gives me the ability to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, with whom I want to do it, in the way I want to do it.”
Notice that nowhere in this prayer does Mr. Barker talk about money. He simply speaks to the law of prosperity in his life, which is brilliant. God doesn’t know money. God knows abundance and perfect love for you. This kind of prayer will be answered, you can be assured of it.
Coming Up: More about prayer!
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Chosen to show his new hypnotherapeutic techniques on The Learning Channel (TLC) and also given the opportunity to teach at the world conference for Learning, and received the award of excellence for Helping Overcome Obesity in Nashville, Bo Sebastian is the writer and director of Finding Authentic You and Uncommon Gay Spiritual Warrior. Go directly to Amazon/Amazon Kindle to buy any of his wonderfully inspired books: ]
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