Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Q: DOES GOD REALLY ANSWER PRAYERS?

I think everyone of every religion and even those with no religion have prayed to God for something at one time or another in their lives. We just trust that God is there somewhere listening to our prayers and will decide whether or not to answer them. We are not sure what kind of discernment He uses to decide if we are worthy of having our prayers answered, but we all hold out hope that we have been good enough to warrant His favor.

I say His, using the male gender in referring to “All That Is” but I will assume that anyone reading this article is mature enough to realize that God is all genders, all races, all species, so He is also She and It. We all have a picture of God in our minds eye, and if I’m not being too assuming here, I would guess that many picture God as an elderly fellow with white flowing hair looking suspiciously like Charleton Heston, carrying a scale in one hand to judge us and a staff in the other to smite us if when we are being bad. I think it is quite possible that a few of our readers have even bought a picture of God painted on black velvet, being sold in county fairs along with those of Elvis. Oh, and usually He is pictured standing in the clouds of Heaven.

Ok, I’m just kidding, but I did need to make a point here, and to understand the point I am trying to make, you will have to take a leap of faith and believe me when I say that we are babes in the woods as far as our Earth civilization is concerned. We are very un-evolved in terms of evolution of consciousness is concerned. If we were to try to rate where we stand in the heap of universal consciousness development, on a scale of 1 to 100, our earth civilization would be about 5.

We have so far to journey, it is impossible to explain. I will not go into discussing reasons to prove to you that we are a beginning consciousness other than to ask, can you imagine any halfway developed civilization believing that you can achieve peace by constructing more and more nuclear weapons? Can you imagine any developed civilization bringing other species to the brink of extinction, saying that to not do so would cost us jobs? Can you imagine an evolved civilization continuing to create more and more babies adding to the misery of an overpopulated world when millions are starving? Enough, you know where I am going with this train of thought, suffice it to say, our beloved Earth is a beginning kindergarten world, as worlds go, a training ground for beginning consciousness that is here to learn through this earthly experience and become more.

Having said that, it should become obvious that we are still to some extent believing in old worn out, simplistic, primitive, children’s stories about myths and legends of a humanized God who created all human beings in His image and left the rest of the species to fend for themselves.

Who could believe for an instant that this omnipotent God could create the universe in six days and then get so tired that He had to sit down and rest on the seventh? It is for these reasons that I usually prefer the term “All That Is” for it conveys less of the false connotations that the name God (as we use it) infers. For these articles, I will continue to use both for some time with hopes to wean some from those misleading connotations. And how about this: If God looks Caucasian, then what does He look like to Orientals, Arabs or African Americans? Of course the answer is, we create God in our own image, not the other way around.

It is time we must take a step beyond the children’s tales and begin to understand true reality. If we can get beyond those simplistic stories and truly understand what All That Is, really is, then we can at least begin to understand the true nature of prayer and why it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.

Sometimes it is easier to tell you what All That Is, is not. All That Is, is not a person. All That Is, is not a human being. All That Is, is not apart from what you are.

You are a part of what All That Is, is. God is the most potent energy essence consciousness imaginable. God is what all of the initial “conscious” energy that created the universe is, and more. All energy is conscious of self to some extent. God is everything that is and more. God is more than the sum of all of its manifestations. If you want to see God, look around you at the flowers, the birds, the sunrises and sunsets, the morning mists and the rhythm of the seasons. Look at the healthy and the sickly, the gifted and the idiot. Look at the animals, the birds, the waves of insects that sweep across the continents. Look at the devastation of the elements and the flourishing of nature in its entire splendor. All That Is, is all of this and regardless of how you think about it, it’s all good. This is the closest you will ever come to God.

God was and is the original Creator and recognizing the vast multidimensional, exponential possibilities for His creations to also create, He endowed them with their own creative abilities. All consciousness from the smallest to the grandest therefore possesses the natural, latent, inner creative abilities inherent in God Itself. Plants, animals and humans contribute to this creation of our own reality, environment and personal life. This is NOT a symbolic statement. This creative process follows laws of the inner universe and it is not arbitrary. I have said this so many times that anyone reading my articles will probably tire of hearing it again, but here is the one Universal law of the universe.
YOU GET WHAT YOU CONCENTRATE ON.

Of course there are some qualifying and determining factors that affect this law and the actual materialization of thought into matter. A first thought, no matter how unnoticed to you, begins its journey into some kind of materialization. If it is not propelled by enough desire and intensity it will not form itself into our particular kind of matter. A thought must have duration and repetition over time. For a thought, desire or idea to physically manifest, (become real, hard, solid) it must be propelled by expectation. You will not get what you do not expect to get. Any physical object or event is a precise psychic focal point, where intense thought, desire and expectations drive atoms to coalesce into what we perceive as solid matter or movement.

All That Is, does not decide what prayers to answer or not answer and cannot and will not interfere in any way in the life of any conscious personality. So, now that we to some extent agree that God is not in any stretch of the imagination a human personality with human motivations, you will understand that to interfere by arbitrarily answering individual prayers would be nonsensical. You have been given life here on earth to create challenges and problems unique only to yourself, created with your full intent and to learn from them and to rise above them. Were they to be solved for you by any higher Entity or God, then you learn nothing. Every minute experience and detail in your life is experienced in the attention of All That Is. God therefore achieves exponential growth, multiplying Itself in nano seconds.

The answer is, prayers sometimes seem to be answered by God, because prayer is the most intensive thought process known to the human race and it works. Intense and continuing prayer itself contains all of the elements and requirements for the creation of reality that we unknowingly and unconsciously use every day, including the expectation of positive results. Prayer works because you believe it works. There is one other reason why prayer works, because the Universe leans toward creating good, meaning that events are more easily brought into physical focus and materialized, when they are of good intent.

Prayers are then answered not because some capricious, fickle God decided to grant his graciousness on someone in particular because they prayed and begged for help, but because of the inherent creative characteristics of prayer itself. Why do you think so many prayers seem to go unanswered? Because they don’t follow the rules of creating what you desire to happen. God is neutral. God does indeed know every sparrow that falls, but will never lift a hand to catch the falling sparrow, else how would the sparrow learn how to fly and not fall?

In fact, if we believe that when our prayers are not answered, that we are in some way not good enough or not spiritually qualified for His help, we set ourselves up for more disappointments in the future, in that sense prayer itself can carry within its scope some negative consequences.

We can then perpetuate a feeling of inadequacy and impotence. You are indeed vitally connected with All That Is, but She will not interfere. You are then, by praying, creating the answer you request in your prayer. The process is the same. If you need to feel better about this, consider that God, in a distant, removed way, created you and you create the answer to your prayer, so I guess, you could say that God answered your prayer.

You are here to learn that you are a co-creator of your own reality and how else would you learn than recognizing the similarity between prayer seemingly answered and other events that may seem to happen to you, when instead you are creating them, then perceiving and reacting to them?
Nothing ever happens to you that you have not created, permitted or acquiesced to.

When this lesson is finally learned it will be seen as the greatest irony in the Universe, perpetuated upon us by ourselves, that we have been creating our reality for hundreds of thousands of years, and you didn’t even notice.





3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a way to undo the manifestations/ effects of our negative thoughts?

W. Allan said...

Dear Anonymous,
Not all thoughts become manifest in earth reality. If the energy that propels the thoughts is insufficient for manifestation in the earth system, it will fall back into a system that requires less energy for materialization. Energy, once given reality as a thought, idea, belief, expectation or any other mental action, cannot be recalled. It is essentially eternal, as I might add, so are you.
Perfection is not possible in any reality system and man/women learn through their mistakes as well as through their triumphs and successes.
Physical reality is a learning tool, and the objects and events that you create are simply evidence of your progress or lack thereof.
Remember, energy cannot be recalled but it's effects can be changed or altered by changing the way you think about them. A thought, once thunk is eternal, and it is free to go its own way and is not hung like some eternal albatross around your neck. You are free of it and it is free of you, so it's effects are not lingering if you change how you think about it.
The one rule is that you get what you concentrate your attention on.
William

Anonymous said...

Thank you!