While just about everyone has been brought up to trust that prayer involves pleading to God to help, save, fix problems and bring us things nowadays, that is not true prayer nor its purpose. Prayer in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is quite different and incredibly beautiful. Greater than a song, it is joyous exchange of Love and thanks between God and His Creations that employs the forgiveness process to correct the mind until the Prayer Song is all that remains. It’s the ticket home so understanding true prayer, and forgiveness, will probably be worth enough time in retraining your brain.
Prayer is exchanging (sharing) a Song of Love and Creation or judgments of the ego based on what you require (agree with) in the mind. There is no other way. In the Course, the mind (content) is split between God and the ego; and you are choosing continuously with a side as cause for effect.Forms (all things of the world) are miscreations reflecting the ego’s judgmental thought system. We’ve managed to get up (miscreated this world) and may give it up anytime by correcting your brain (forgiveness). True prayer requires this correction of your brain as God has nothing to do with forms.
What Prayer is Not:
Because you are always deciding, everything you ask for when you pray is what counts. Once you plead in prayer to have God fix an application problem with another form problem, you’re asking the ego mind for help (not God). Those forms and needs are deemed more important than God’s Love that will remain hidden to the amount you select the illusion.
All external things (forms) are needs. Other labels are wants, desires, status, problems, sickness, human love (special relationships), gifts and goals in this world, etc. They are everything you choose as substitutes for God’s Love and the ego will distort the objective of prayer through the use of them to help expand the illusion. Therefore, prayer cannot be about “forms” or “needs” in any way.
The Purpose of Prayer:
The Song of Prayer is defined by the Course as a Song of Creation, Love and gratitude being sung from the Father to the Son and returned from the Son to the Father. God gave this gift of Love to His Son at Creation in order that it’s a single voice shared by both the Creator and Created. Continuously sharing Love and Creation backwards and forwards extends them forever in eternity. That is prayer’s purpose.
Within this form world of illusion, this prayer is still something special from God offered through the Holy Spirit, the memory of God in the mind. It’s how you reach God in the illusion. Anyone who has ever remembered the tiniest instant of this all-inclusive joy must begin questioning what he could be choosing (praying for) and how to change his mind so he can have that all the time.
True Prayer and Forgiveness:
True prayer is: (1) asking to get what’s already there, The Song; and, (2) along the way, using forgiveness (correction of the mind) to give up the ego forms or what’s not really there. Joining with Love in true prayer is requesting nothing (i.e., no illusion, forms or needs) and that means you end up receiving everything (Love). One problem. a course in miracles One solution.
Forgiveness (correction of your brain) is a part of true prayer and makes the procedure go quicker. Prayer is timeless and goes on forever, and forgiveness is the illusory ladder in time that returns your brain to this endless exchange. Forgiveness disappears once the mind is completely corrected and remembers only The Song.
The big secret of true prayer and forgiveness is to focus on disregarding and giving up the things you think you need and need in the illusion, even the specifics, as this asks for the mind to be returned to Truth (Love). You are not furthering the illusion. You are agreeing with God that (a) you are a mind; (b) this form world isn’t real; (c) you made a mistake; and, (d) it is possible to choose again.
Using correction of the mind (forgiveness) places those forms and needs on God’s altar, or in his hands, as idols which are nothing more than whatever you have chosen to become more important than God’s Love. No longer wanting anything before His Love, the only effect God could return is your remembrance of Him. The more you quit, the more meaningless the planet becomes and the faster you sing His Song.
Prayer in the Illusion:
Since the mind still resides with God, the Course says you don’t need to decide alone and should ask the Holy Spirit for help deciding and await the solution. Otherwise, you’ve already decided with the ego. In the event that you must make a decision on the spot, you’ll get the correct “need” answer right then.An answer can be an echo of God’s Voice from the Song of Prayer. You are not requesting the echo itself. You’re choosing the gift of Love from The Song giving up all form needs. “Need” answers in the illusion are contained within that echo even through the correction of your brain process. They’re met at the amount of the forgiveness ladder it is possible to understand and accept.
