Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 12, 2016 • 21 Comments
Human Nature, The Source
Recently someone asked me what might be the most important question of all. I no longer think much about prayer for reasons that will become clear to you below, but Denise’s question wonderfully captures the conundrum that many sincere people face:
“Angels, spirit guides, dead loved ones, God. If we need help, to whom do we pray? Sometimes I think God is pretty busy and maybe I shouldn’t bother him but I worry if I don’t do it right, it won’t work out. Frankly, most of my praying is begging which I know is the wrong way.”
We are taught to think of God as a religious figure, and of prayer as a religious act; and since religious are fear-based superstitions, we tend to fret that we might do it wrong. We don’t want to use incorrect words, to irritate or harass a busy God, or even to offend some spirit we should be praying to instead of directly to God. And if we do it wrong, what might happen to us then?
Before we can begin to talk about prayer, we first must set the stage. Just what is God, anyway? And what is prayer?
God is all that exists. We know now based upon abundant evidence that the only thing that exists is an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, intensely loving and therefore probably self-aware. That is what God is! And nothing whatsoever except God exists. Everything else that we think of as real is an illusion being continuously manifested by God, and that includes space and time. So God is eternal, by definition. And fortunately, each human mind is part of God, so our minds are also real and eternal (Whew!).
God acts in our lives through God’s minions. Each of us has one or several spirit guides who also are part of God, and we each have at least one guardian angel. Every person you see is a walking crowd! We are told that God never takes human form. As best I have been able to determine, God acts in our lives through guides and angels and through direct contact with our minds.
Then, what is prayer? In a very basic way, our contacts with God and with God’s minions are not supplications and thanks offered from outside of God, but rather they are communications that originate from within the very Mind of God.
What does all of this suggest about how we should be praying? Here are my thoughts:
seen communications from spirit guides that suggest that they won’t “eavesdrop” if we want to talk to God alone, but the evidence is strong that they are aware of our prayers in the same way that they are aware of our thoughts. It’s their job!
interest of others. Remember that all of us are living wonderfully complex eternal lives! From our very limited perspective here, it is impossible for us to know what is best. For example, we are told that every child who dies is an advanced being who didn’t need to live a whole lifetime, but whose brief life and death are meant as a gift to you in order to assist you in your spiritual growth. That being so, then even the child’s death can be seen as God’s loving answer to your prayer.My own belief is that the best way to pray is by living with an open prayer-line. When I first realized that my mind is entirely open to God and to God’s minions, I kind of shrugged and resolved to live in prayer, since in effect I was doing that anyway. It feels to me now as if the top of my head is always open, day and night, and a beam of light is constantly beaming upward while a cascade of love is pouring in. I’ll admit that when I first deliberately opened my mind to God to this extent I was actively policing my every thought, but I don’t feel the need to do that now. God knows me thoroughly and loves me as I am, with every failing and every flaw. I pray to God every day the same gratitude affirmations, saying “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.” I might chatter to my primary guide, but for the most part I simply feel his presence. Whenever something comes up, I assume God’s help in bringing God’s Own will into being, so I never feel the need to ask for an outcome. And a wonderful benefit to continuous prayer is the fact that when your mind is always open to God and to your guides in such a literal way, you feel 
so much more connected with them! You feel loved and accepted and empowered in ways that I never could have imagined before.
You are God’s best-beloved child. So long as you always keep that fact in mind, whatever prayer method seems best for you will be right!
Thanks Roberta, beautiful explanations of a subject so simple it is complex. We have a hard time accepting we are sooo connected and sooo loved. Your reminders are always very welcomed in my life.
Hello Mike! Prayer is “a subject so simple it is complex” – I love that! And it’s too often caught up in fear-based anxieties about what happens if we do it wrong. I love having the simple certainty that God loves me perfectly and it is impossible to sincerely pray in a way that won’t please the Godhead!
Hi Roberta
I think that is one of the best descriptions of prayer I have read. I recited the same prayers over and over for years, not from my heart, from memory, especially the one that said ” Please keep my children healthy, safe and happy”, since my son was in the Military. Then as you know, my wonderful son crossed over. At that point, I thought ” Why pray if it doesn’t work”. But I remembered what you had discussed in your workshop, and reiterated in this post. He is safe , healthy and happy, even if it wasn’t in the context in which I imagined. I began talking to God from my heart not just something that I memorized as a child, with no genuine emotion. Some are more like conversations, instead of what would be considered prayers. I recite your gratitude prayer which you taught me two years ago, with sincere appreciation. Since we live in a society of instant gratification, and wanting immediate results from prayers can be a challenging lesson. I learned to release the power of my prayers from my heart with love, grace and gratitude, no longer from my wants and fears. I know that God is is listening and everything happens for my highest good and from a place of unconditional divine love.
Hello Linda!This is beautifully said – thank you!
Hi Roberta,
This post struck a note with me. I’ve been in business 35 years and early this year went six months with no business, nothing! My wife and I were draining our savings since our expenses on our building are high. I even worried about losing it and our house.
After the fourth month of no work, I began thinking prayers, nothing rehearsed, just asking God and/or spirit guides in my mind for something to break loose. Two more months went by and out of basically “the blue” (nothing from advertising, nothing that I did whatsoever), projects came from such left-field directions that I have come to attribute them to my silent prayers. I’ve now got more work than I can handle and will be hiring again! What are your thoughts on the mechanisms by which some prayers are answered? My pragmatic, engineering mind says that in order for anything to get done, it requires some re-arrangement of furniture and that may take some time. From this experience, I feel that some prayers need physical time for them to have circumstances move in favor of them. What I’m trying to say is that, although God is in everything, doesn’t it make sense that even in prayers that are answered, certain laws of existence in this physical realm cannot be circumvented? That doesn’t forego some accelerated miracles such as what happened with Anita Moorjani,
Hello Ivanhoe! What a wonderful story. I’m so glad it turned out well! And this is a great question: what is the mechanism by which prayers are answered? The evidence indicates that essentially everything happens by mind-energy. We are literally co-creating with Source the reality that we think we see around us. I don’t know what you said when you prayed, but my sense is that you likely prayed from hope, confidence, resolve, determination rather than from fear, anger, or any negative emotion. And it worked! As for the time factor, yes, we know that sometimes it takes our guides and other actors a little time to bring things all together. It’s good to see you here!
Well said Roberta. Knowing that God is all there is changes prayer from supplication to the higher awareness of co- creation and engages prayers of gratitude and confirmation. You have illuminated the mysterious and reaffirmed our rightful place on the universe. Nicley done as always. Namaste:)
Roberta, Your explanation and associated commentary are, by my own reckoning–perfect. With our limited human, materialistic perspective, when we see what are horrific events, such as people jumping from the Twin Towers, the Jordanian pilot being burned alive, the jihadist beheadings, or think back to the Holocaust, or the atomic bombs destroying the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki– we can be overwhelmed with the apparent cruelty of life. But we have learned, or at least some of us from the NDE, that soul departs body avoiding the worst of these tragic scenes. Life is experience, good and bad, but a trifle in eternity.
You mentioned well that communing with God ought to take a positive tone; it might be added to that the Golden Rule also provides a guide for the topics we raise for God. In other words, prayer ought not exclusively focus on our own, narrow, needs. We are all in this together as children of God.
Lovely, Jack! To my mind, the only possible prayer to God is “Thank You! Thank you for my life, my work, all the dear ones I love, and the infinite perfection of Your love for me!”
It really is impossible for us to grasp the extent to which each of us is loved by God, and the fact that YOU are God’s best-beloved child! Jesus tried to tell us, but we heard Paul’s denunciation of our sinfulness a lot more clearly. Well, God sees us as utterly without sin, and God sees us truly.
You’re right: those who die in pain are out of their bodies pretty quickly, in the arms of their guides and angels and surrounded by love. All the horrible things that you describe are the product of people exercising their free will to make unloving and fear-based choices, and the great news is that if enough of us will work to raise our consciousness vibrations we will before long find that such horrors are no longer possible. We have the power to bring the Kingdom of God on earth. And now is the time to begin that process!
Once again Roberta, thank you….you have been such a light in my life.
I am grateful to God to have find you in my path!
Wow, Marguerite, thank you! I’m grateful to have you in my life as well, and if I ever can answer questions or be of help, please let me know!
Oh, I do love this article so much. How beautiful.
Thank you for really making my day, Roberta!
I’m glad that it resonates for you, Robin! I kind of debated whether writing about prayer might be seen by some folks as too personal, so I’m thrilled that you love what I had to say!
I’ve for a long time liked the idea of prayer as thanksgiving. My gospel scholarship is a little rusty and my bible isn’t handy, but I seem to remember that when people asked Jesus for instructions on how to pray, he basically said, “Just say, thank you!”
Your affirmation always intrigued me, but I change it a little. I think I have enough work to do, so I don’t want to invoke the deity for more — I’m lazy 😉 so I say something like , “Thank you for giving me the chance to make a difference. Thank you for showing me how.” 😉
But regarding prayer itself, in whatever form, what does it do? Not what do we expect it to do, but what does prayer accomplish? The Dalai Lama often points out that prayers and rituals are good if they work for a person, but it is only action that will change anything. Is prayer action? Can action be prayer. And what, ultimately, is our responsibility to God once we make contact?
Actually, Mike, your affirmation is essentially the same as mine! If God wants to pile on opportunities for you to make a difference, you are giving God leave to pile them right on you ;-).
Your question about what prayer does is a good one! Here is what I think that active prayer does:
1) It opens you to Spirit, and thereby it helps to raise your spiritual vibration.
2) It makes you feel empowered and not alone.
When you are living with an open prayer line, actually every action does becomes prayer. And prayer is powerfully creative thought: it actually helps to bring change into being.
What is our responsibility to God? To love God perfectly. That is all that ever is asked of us. And it is enough!
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t come back and drone on but another purpose of prayer occurred to me; it’s really a corollary to your #1 above: Prayer helps your brain distinguish between your own thoughts and the myriad thoughts that are actually just echoes of a culture run amok. The brain functions as a receiver, not a generator and most of our thoughts aren’t even from our own minds. But there they are in our heads, so they must be ours, right? They’re the effect of watching five minutes too much TV or reading too many twitter posts. Many times I catch myself “thinking” and realizing I don’t even really believe that! The thought is instead the reactive stuff of a culture that tells us how we ought to react to everything. When we pray, we learn to think with our hearts and our souls — our actual minds — and discern and choose the thoughts that we want as our own.
PS, I just read this from the Dalai Lama: “The Buddha doesn’t wash away our sins,” he said. “The Buddha doesn’t give us liberation. He shows us the way by which we can liberate ourselves.” When HH talks about “the Buddha,” I’ve begun to realize, he is talking about the divine, not just their personage of the teacher. Because if the difference in philosophy, he won’t talk specifically about God, but the notion is true. I think when we pray using our own thoughts rather than rote, the conversation reveals this notion. Which is essentially the empowerment we’re taking about here. We are free to make our own choices and liberate ourselves spiritually. I know I’m sort of just reiterating.
Another thought: prayer helps tamo down our ego. Even when we endure the worst of experiences, it’s not something that is happening TO us, but something we are participating in. When our ego diminishes, we see how even our suffering is a part of a greater experience and our understanding of our role as we participate can be enlightening. It took me 58 years to learn that and I remember the day it sank in.
Dear Roberta,
I think these two great works of art perhaps express perfectly what you, in your own inimitable way, are helping people understand with simple words, deep searching, and great purity of heart:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/1c/f3/15/1cf31530101f658587f365801be81224.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLkmMEEiNBk
Love and gratitude are the ultimate yin and yang,
Fluid, non-dual, above, below and behind creation.
Thanking you deeply,
Nicholas
Thank you, Nicholas! This is really lovely, and what you’ve written is poetry. Thank you so much!
Dear Roberta,
Thank you for this! You have been in my life since 2017, after I reached out to you for advice after my beloved Standard Poodle, Chloe had died. You were so kind to me – your advice and your gift of “The Fun Of Staying In Touch”. Since then, I’ve learned so much from your teachings and podcasts and interviews. Today, I was thinking – is there a right way to pray? So I came to your website and asked that question. Low and behold, you had the answer! And amazingly enough, what you describe is what I’ve been doing! Gratitude and immense love shooting from my heart to God and all of those that I care for. I can’t tell you how much you mean to me dear Friend. Please keep up your amazing work and know that you are truly a gift from God. Thank you Roberta! xx Brigette
Oh dear lovely Brigette, thank you so much for saying this! It is my whole joy and my delight to be in your life as a helper, and if you ever have another question please don’t hesitate to reach out again!