Matthew 21:22 Meaning All Things

Prayer is the mind turned toward its Source in perfect trust, and what it truly asks in that trust is already given. To ask believing is to ask without the ego's silent conviction that the request will fail; it is to want one thing so wholly that no contrary wish divides the wanting. A mind at war with itself asks and unasks in the same breath, and calls the confusion unanswered prayer.

What love wills for a mind, a mind may always have. The receiving is not a reward for asking correctly but the natural answer to a request no longer opposed from within. When the whole mind wants only what is real, it finds that reality was waiting to be accepted all along.

You usually pray, if you pray at all. Often it is a plea flung out from lack, a bargaining with the future, the anxious mind trying to arrange reality more to its liking. Underneath the words runs the quiet certainty that you do not have, that something essential is missing, that fulfillment lives in a moment not yet arrived. That inner posture of scarcity is what you keep receiving back, because it is the state you are living from.

The believing spoken of is not talking yourself into optimism. It is a shift in the ground you stand on, from the restless wanting of thought to the deep sufficiency of presence. When you grow still and inwardly aligned with this moment rather than at war with it, you stop asking from lack and begin to sense that what you truly seek, peace, aliveness, the felt reality of being, is already here. Prayer offered from that fullness is not really a request. It is a recognition of what was never withheld.

Prayer here is not words said aloud to a distant God but imaginative motion toward the wish already fulfilled, a movement of feeling into nearness with what is desired. To ask is to assume, and to ask believing is to take the assumed state as already so and give it the tones of sensory fact until the mind accepts it. Belief is the whole of it, because belief is what a person is actually resting his awareness upon.

What is received is always the exact state held in that certainty, not the state merely wished for from a distance. A person who stays faithful to the felt reality of his desire, without turning back to check the facts, finds it hardening into his world. The receiving is not a reward granted from outside. It is the natural outcome of an assumption that a person has believed into being.

Asking sets a target, but the believing is what steers a person toward it. When a picture is held without the quiet argument that it cannot happen, the mind's goal-striving machinery gets a clear order and begins to move on it. The words of the prayer name the aim. The belief behind them decides whether that aim is treated as a fact already granted or as a wish quietly doubted.

So the receiving is not a reward handed down for saying the right thing. It follows the settled inner conviction that the thing asked for belongs to the one asking. Belief comes first, and the world answers second. A man who prays while braced for disappointment has, in a sense, already asked for the disappointment. The one who prays believing has told the machinery within him where to go.