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Prayer and meditation both come with user’s manuals written by sages, seers and saints. The manuals point to a higher reality. In a skeptical age, it has taken brain scans and stress research to confirm that prayer and meditation are real. There is no doubt that both are useful, with observable physiological effects. On that basis alone, they can bring the benefit of inner calm and homeostasis, and most probably aid in the healing response, without needing belief.

What is prayer meant to be?

Everything about prayer happens in consciousness and nowhere else. The message is sent and received in consciousness; the results are noticed in consciousness; one’s expectations, beliefs, and intentions are rooted in consciousness. Jesus proclaimed the existence of God inside each person, and “inside” means in a person’s deepest consciousness. Therefore, prayer is one process: consciousness interacting with itself. Religions enforce a division between the one who prays and the one who answers, but why? Stripped of religious vocabulary, a prayer is nothing more than an intention. Either that intention comes true or it doesn’t.

Once we put the issue on this basis, we can talk more rationally about how intentions come true. Does consciousness have the power to make dreams come true, to rescue people by bringing unexpected solutions, to heal illness, inspire faith, and surmount crises? A massive amount of evidence from the world’s wisdom traditions says that a heartfelt intention arising in awareness possesses all these powers. There isn’t space enough here to elaborate on the point at length, but anyone who delves seriously into the power of intention will come to the conclusion that having a prayer come true depends much more on the consciousness of the person who’s praying than on an invisible, fickle, unknowable power who may or may not be listening.

The Mysterious Realm of Cause and Effect: On the other hand, consciousness is undoubtedly real. How to explain its origins remains a mystery, but we all think, and one mode of thinking is to intend for something to happen. If this something is within physical reach, you can reach for it. Grabbing a pizza, starting the car, getting out of bed in the morning—our choice to connect cause-and-effect in these cases is considered normal and natural. Other intentions seem supernatural because the link between cause and effect is invisible.

What Happens to Prayers: This brings us back to prayers. Let’s say that a prayer is a classical event, or feels like one. You, a unique individual, have a particular request, which you voice in words that no one else is speaking at that instant.  What if this classical event gets processed at a non-local level? The notion isn’t far-fetched, because it seems that the mind-body link does consist of fluctuations at the quantum level. If this is so, then any thought, not just a prayer, has quantum implications, and if that’s true, suddenly we have taken a trip into the realm of the non-local.

Your prayer will be answered, or not, depending on events happening out of sight—but not out of mind. By expanding our definition of mind, we can account for answered prayers, and even set down their behavior. Once a prayer is allowed to leave the classical world, it doesn’t become supernatural. It enters another level of Nature, and what happens there is fascinating.

Quality Of X-Ray Film: Be Prayerful