Believe and Receive – Day 4 – 10 Day Prayer Challenge

A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating. – Eckhart Tolle

One of the most challenging issues for anyone on the Journey of Prayer is the issue of belief.

Most people who pray will claim to be believers in God.  Yet most people who pray do not have their prayers answered.

As believers they will claim that they are complying with the second step of the three-step process “Ask, believe receive.”

However, the word “believe” as used here in this 10 Day Prayer Challenge is more deeply related to the word “confidence.”

The word confidence translates as “With faith in.” (con = with – fid = fidelity – ence = action)

The question then is, “Do you really have confidence that what you ask for will be given?”

The belief that most people claim is an intellectual belief rather than a faith build from inner experience and INNER KNOWING.

Belief is in the creed rather than the FEELING and intuitive energy from which the words of creed or religion or spiritual teaching are written.

Most believers and religious teachers have never had an experience of INNER KNOWING.

To that extent they have never been graced an experience of certainty.  They have never KNOWN what it is to be connected to Divine inspiration where there is absence of doubt and fear.

As a result, prayer must be directed from the separate sense of the personal self rather than an experience that is the allowing of the transpersonal SELF.

Belief comes from the knowledge of ego rather than the KNOWING of the soul.

For most people who claim to be believers the experience of belief is a cerebral choice to affirm the teachings from a religion or wisdom school.

This is the equivalent of opening the map to the territory without ever taking the journey.

It is important to open the map, but it is more important to move beyond reading signposts. (Eckhart Tolle – The Power of NOW)

The tragedy of religion is that most of those in authority are map readers of a territory they have never travelled and who have a vested interest in ensuring that you never travel this territory.

This is because when you became a KNOWER of Divine Intention you will no longer give them the authority, they claim to have but do not.

Belief is an initial stage of spiritual progress. But that concept has to be transposed into conviction, into experience. – Paramahansa Yogananda 

The problem with the word belief is that it is a fixed intellectual position.

Mystics who are KNOWERS of the territory assure you that the further along this journey of Divine Intention you travel the less you know.

Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. ― Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching

For many believers in a particular religion or school of metaphysics the map of the territory becomes the major part of the journey that they never take.

This is not the same as authentic faith.

This is confidence gained from inner KNOWING beyond the limitation of personal experience. This is INNER KNOWING whereby you are KNOWN through. It isn’t knowledge. It is insight.

The challenge is that before INNER KNOWING can happen you have to be willing to let go into the unknown.

You are willing to move from a fixed position of belief into a position of unknowing. (The Cloud of Unknowing)

The willingness to enter the UNKNOWN is the beginning of authentic faith. It is where you make it your intention to be KNOWN through by Divine Intention.

This faith position is affirmed by the mantra “Thy will be done.” (The Lord’s Prayer)

This radically changes the position from a focus on you to a focus on the way the Divine expresses through you.

It moves your energy from personal assertion to the willingness to trust that you will be given what is yet unknown from the transpersonal.

The result is that rather than you dictating to the Universe as is the now popular Law of Attraction you open yourself to the flow of Divine Intention and the REAL attraction.

In this way you are aligned with Life. You are now entering the experience of prayer as a way of Being in the World.

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God. — Meister Eckhart

In step three of the “Ask, believe and receive” process you are open to receiving.

However, what will be received is what is intended to be received through you provided you are open to such receiving.

The Universe created you for its own purpose and glory. It isn’t for you to dictate the way in which this is to be given expression.

Most all prayer at Level 1 (more on this later) is directed to the Divine by way of dictating what the personality wants to happen within this time and space dimension.

It doesn’t work that way. The Christian mystic Miester Eckhart said it rightly when he declared.

When the higher flows into the lower the lower is transformed by the Higher – Miester Eckhart (1260-1328)

Notice the word “flows.”

The lower relates to the personality. The Higher relates to Divine Intention. Notice the direction of the flow.

The direction moves from the Higher to the lower – not the other way. The request of the personality (lower) doesn’t flow to the Higher.

Willingness to be open to the unknown rather than belief in a fixed position as derived from a concept or outer authority opens the heart to the flow of Divine Intention.

Prayer is answered when you are open to being prayed through.

This is an energetic relationship beyond words. It is a relationship with the Silence and the Still Small Voice within that guides your purpose in alignment with Love’s Purpose.

This is the paradoxical experience that various modern mystics have referred to as Stillness that Speaks (Eckhart Tolle) or The Thunder of Silence (Joel Goldsmith).

Prayer is where you become a servant of Love’s purpose which is your real purpose.

This is not something to believe in (other than as a first step) but a journey that you alone are here to explore and allow to come through you in your own way.

It is an EXPERIENCETIAL journey. The mystic Rumi says it this way.

It’s your road, and yours alone.

others may walk it with you,

but no one can walk it for you.

― Rumi

Beware those who will tie you to walking the Journey of Prayer in their way.

You are a unique expression of Divine Intention. How that intention is to be expressed through you is not a belief. It is an experience beyond belief.

It must become a KNOWING. It must become the dance that you alone are here to dance. You are here to learn to trust the way in which the Divine dances in you, through you and as you.

In this kind of relationship, you can declare “Inside I’m Dancing.” In this kind of relationship, you can declare as the poet Anna declares in A Land Not Mine

The Secret of Secrets is inside me again – Anna Anathova – A Land Not Mine.

If the Journey of Prayer remains at the level of belief (Level I) then it becomes dogma. It becomes fundamentalism rather than fulfilment.

Belief is a necessary first step on the path. This is belief in the possibility of discovering that within you which is beyond belief and beyond words and concepts.

The words and concepts are signposts inviting you to step out unto the journey of direct revelation.

Belief is the equivalent of basecamp. You must leave basecamp to ascend to the summit of revelation and transformation.

It is the revelatory experience of Divine Intention flowing through you that saves you and not your belief in such revelation.

The Achilles heel of organized religion might be that we tend to tell people what to see instead of teaching them how to see. – Richard Rohr – The Naked NOW – Learning to See as Mystics See.

The Journey of Prayer becomes a way of SEEING which is also a way of KNOWING and being KNOWN through.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. ― Meister Eckhart.

The Journey of Prayer starts with the necessity of believing in the possibility of revelation and awakening.

If, for example, you have the intention to learn Chinese as a foreign language you need to have the belief that it is possible to learn such a language.

You wouldn’t go to China declaring that that you believe in the Chinese language. This is the equivalent of the missionary out to convert others.

You must practice and make the language your KNOWN experience.

When you engage with the “Ask, Believe and Receive” process the “belief” must be grounded in direct experience. If all you have is intellectual accent then don’t expect to move through the process.

It is necessary to grow in the soil of belief and harvest of direct experience of contact with Divine Intention.

Insert Photo Credit

This 10 Day Prayer Challenge is being written as from the beginning of August 2021.  It often takes more than a day to write, edit and add images to one day of content.

Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action. – Thomas Merton

Below are links to those days of the challenge that have been written as of 21st August 2021.

• Day 1 – What is Prayer.
• Day 2 – Prayer and Intention
• Day 3 – Preparation for Prayer – Part I
• Day 4 – Preparation for Prayer – Part II
• Day 5 – Ask and it is Given
• Day 6 – Believe and Receive.
• Day 7 – Levels of Prayer
• Day 8 – Challenges of Prayer.
• Day 9 – Benefits of Prayer.
• Day 10 – The Prayer Process.