Prayer
What is the purpose of prayer? Does it help? Should we pray? If so, how should we pray?
When you pray, you are summoning forth the creative forces of the Universe. We have observed that when you pray, the vast majority of you pray from a position of lack. There are those of you who approach prayer as if you are beseeching the will of that which is greater than you. If you can appeal convincingly to that greater, more powerful being, then you will get what you want. We have said repeatedly that there is no higher authority in your life than you. Your will is dominant in the physical world. Within you is the power to create, within you is the wisdom of ages. They are not outside of you. When you pray from a position of lack, the Universe can only deliver to you more of the same. If you approach prayer from a position of feeling weak or incapable, then that image of yourself becomes dominant in your manifesting. However, this does not mean that you cannot call upon assistance, for there are many beings who are in service to humanity. What we encourage you to do is to acknowledge that you are able, and have the right, to summon forth energies unto yourself in a multitude of forms.
It is important for you to acknowledge that you are a multidimensional being. As such, the greater part of yourself is at one with the power that creates worlds, with what you call God. As you pray, you are literally summoning forth this power to create in your world.
This is a prayer we suggest: “Source of all life that is non-physical, may I always honour this part of myself. May your presence be expressed through me as it is expressed in other realms. Supply me with all my needs for today and release me from my limitations as I release others from their limitations. Keep me from illusion and deliver me from fear.”
All words have energy, just as thoughts do. Words are thoughts expressed and they carry with them the message of your intention. Words are charged either with positive energies of love that help you to expand, or they are charged with the energies of fear that cause you to shrink away from who you truly are.
Try out an experiment now. Chant each of the following words for 30–60 seconds. After 15–20 seconds, you will have begun to resonate with the energy of a particular word, and as you begin to chant beyond the first 15–20 seconds, you will be bringing that vibration deeper into you, becoming the quality that the word expresses. First, chant the word “Joy”. Notice what happens. How did you feel? Did you start laughing? Did a smile start walking across your face as if it had a mind of its own? Now try the opposite. Chant the word “Fear”. What happened? What did your body do? Did you cross your legs? Start breathing in a different way? In this exercise, you started to resonate with fear, and your body began to react to that energy. Now chant the word “Love”, and allow yourself to chant this word for at least a minute so that you can undo the energy of fear that was brought in as part of our experiment together.
Words have power. They summon forth compatible energies. So the words you speak have an impact on the way you experience your reality. If you constantly tell people how hard you are trying to find a new job, you will continue to create more trying hard. If you continue to tell people how you hate something, you will increase the amount of things that you hate in your life. Just as you have control over choosing what you think, you also have the power to consciously choose your words. No matter how you are feeling, you can change your mood and feelings simply by repeating an empowering word in your mind, or out loud, for a minute or two.
This may not change your mood for the rest of the day, but it will have lifted your energy temporarily, and every time you lift your energy, the more accustomed you will become to a higher vibration. And it will then become habit forming. Love and joy will become a habit, and that is a habit you probably will not want to break! Try these things out. I would rather you believe these things through experience than simply take my word for them. The next time you are in a place you do not particularly enjoy or your mood has taken a downward turn, spend some time repeating a word that gives you power and observe what happens. Words that carry positive energy are: Love, joy, abundance, trust, happiness, delight, laughter, yes, forgiveness, and any other words that energise you.
In addition to creative words, there are affirmations, statements that affirm how you wish to recreate yourself. Affirmations help you focus on a particular goal or desire. Affirmations are statements like: I am joyful and abundant; Abundance is my natural state of being; All good things come to me easily. It is important that all your affirmations are stated in the present tense. Remember, the Universe always gives you exactly what you want, so if you affirm: I want a new home (with the feeling that you dislike where you are), then you will continue in your wanting of a new home. The Universe will agree with you: “Yes, you are wanting a new home.” This may seem like a cosmic joke, but so many of you hold a vision of things in the future, that they continue to remain there—in the future! When you desire something and your desire for it is dominated by your dislike of what you have, the Universe cannot deliver it to you for you are focused on not having it. You can say, “I want a new home”, and if you do so with the feeling of expectation and excitement, it will be yours.
Create your own affirmations and choose words that are the most empowering for you. Make the affirmations easy-to-remember ones that roll off your tongue effortlessly. An affirmation that is too long or complicated will not assist you to hold the mental focus on what you want. Once you have your affirmation, you can either dedicate a time of day in which you will chant your affirmation for 10 minutes or more, or you can repeat it to yourself as you go through the day. A combination of both is more powerful, and combined with visualisation you will be well on your way to creating whatever you desire.
For visualisations and affirmations to be powerful they have to be nonspecific, not being attached to a particular object. If you are affirming that you want to find your soul mate, for example, you will be doing yourself and the other person a disservice by affirming that you want a particular person. Before starting, ask that what you visualise serves the highest good of all. Never bring into your visualisations a sense of competition with others, nor an intention that others meet with misfortune. What you send out comes back to you—that is a Universal Law and the Law of Attraction.
What is our greatest blockage to creating what we want?
The reason why most of you are not getting the things you want is because of the balance of your thinking. The vast majority of you pay much more attention to the lack of what you want than to focusing only on the having of it. In addition to this, you tend to set up resistance and other thought patterns that lead to the obstruction and undermining of your creations.
It is by getting into a downward spiral of negative thinking that you set up resistance to creating what you want. Many of you do this for a few minutes each day, and most of the time you are not even aware that you are doing it. Let us give you an example. You go to the grocery store and you want to buy some apples. On picking up a bag of apples you notice that a couple of the apples are rotten. Your thought continues:
Hmmm, typical. You’d think they’d put out good produce for the prices they charge.
Well, service and quality are not what they used to be.
It is always so difficult to get what I want.
It is the government’s fault.
If it weren’t for them, I could have what I want.
The Law of Attraction acts with thoughts as well as words and as you think the first negative thought, and couple it with an emotion such as frustration, anger or annoyance, you intensify the thought, which draws to itself a thought similar to itself. The next thought arrives, and so on and so forth, until you have a downward spiral of thoughts that have taken you far from your original intention.
Let us work with another example. You are walking through a shopping centre with the intention of buying new clothes for yourself, and you bump into a friend or colleague.
“Hi, how are you?”
“Doing fine, and you?”
“Just great! Wish it would cool off again, this weather is just too hot for me and the kids.”
“I know what you mean. Mind you, I don’t like it being cold either.”
“Well, if you listen to the farmers, the weather is never perfect.”
“I guess that means the price of bread will go up again.”
“Well, isn’t everything just getting more and more expensive?”
“I know, I can hardly make ends meet. Each month seems to be a bigger struggle than the month before.”
“You know, they were laying off people at the supermarket last week.”
“I know. I heard. My biggest fear is losing my job.”
“Yeah, all this hard work and toil, makes you wonder what life is all about.”
“Tell me about it. All I seem to do is work, work, work and have nothing to show for it.”
“Well, I have to be off. Have a nice day!”
“Yes, you, too. Bye for now!”
Did you notice the downward spiral? Once you have offered that the energy of a conversation take a particular direction, and there has been a response to that direction, there must be a conscious choice to turn the energy around so that it may ride the upward spiral instead of the downward one. Although you may see such seemingly idle chat as harmless, we want you to understand that no chat is ever idle! No thought is ever idle! All thought is active and all thought creates. As you think these thoughts and confirm them with your words they proceed to go out into the Universe to bring you more of what you have offered in thought and word.
The real issue here is that most of you have become reactive beings instead of the conscious creators of your world and of your experience. What we mean by reactive is that you spend more time responding to circumstances than you do to giving thought to the circumstances you want to create. At the heart of all resistance is the belief that you are subject to the circumstances of the outer world. You believe that the actions of others, of governments and other authorities, control your life to such an extent that it is not possible for you to have what you want. Resistance has become such a large part of your society that nations have created armies and weapons of mass destruction in order to protect themselves against those things that they wish to resist. With your very resistance you are drawing to you that which you are resisting. Nothing outside you can exert itself upon you or influence you in any way whatsoever without your invitation. And the way you invite things into your experience is through giving your attention to them. You have heard the expression, “What you resist persists.” This is a high truth indeed and these simple words express a deep understanding of the Laws of the Universe!
As a species, you have become so convinced that you need to resist that which you don’t want to experience that you have created entire industries to keep things at bay. A pharmaceutical industry, defence industry, and charities that wage war against cancer, hunger, aids, poverty, ignorance, and all manner of things. You band together to form political groups, parties and forums that have the sole purpose of being against something that a particular group or nation doesn’t want. Have any of these things changed? Have they become less, or is their incidence increasing? We hear you say, “But don’t we have to face reality? These things do exist; they threaten us and exert themselves against us.” And we say to you: Reality is the last thing you need to face! Whose reality? Theirs? Yours? It is your function to create the reality that you want to see and experience. This does not mean that each time you pass a beggar on the street you shrug your shoulders and say to yourself, “Well, that is his reality and I have nothing to do with it.” What we are suggesting is that, if you feel drawn to help such individuals, you assist them from a position of prosperity and not from a position of lack.
If you were to assist this ‘poor’ man because you see him as being poor and in need of your charity, you are assisting him to remain exactly where he is, and adding to your own sense of lack at the same time. If you choose to assist this man with the attitude that you are, through your actions and words, simply reminding him of his natural state, which is that of abundance, you will go a long way to assist him in changing his reality into one that is more pleasing to him, if indeed that is what he wants.
As with our discussion on karma, it is not what you do that is important. The real key always lies in the thought and motive behind the action. It is the thought and motive that determine the energy that is shared with the ones you are assisting. Even without your words, they are aware on some level of the thoughts and energy behind your actions.