PREFACE
Here we argue for praying to yourself for that is all you do anyway.
We are told that if you follow the religion of the self, that you brazenly make yourself the only authority and abandon any suggestion that God or something outside you is the authority. But in fact making God your authority is making your religious ideas the authority. So God stuff is the religion of the self snuck in the back door with all the individualism and arrogance.
We warn that praying too much is looking for answers inside you or where to go for answers which is much the same thing. Too much navel-gazing like this leads to depression. You will look within and find too much disappointment for the answers are not there. You will sense you should go for that calming walk and it will prevent you having an expected temper tantrum later that day and find out it does not work. You will feel guided to go the library for the prayer book and it will not be there. You will feel guided to go to Mary's shrine and it will be shut. You will have prayed for the answer to climate change and realised you have no clue. Your search for answers is arrogant for you think they are at your fingertips when they are not. It is no coincidence that praying societies or ones that stress meditation and which advocate self-analysis to see how you are doing with your top relationship, the one with God, have many suicides, melancholia and psychotic breakdowns.
Too much looking inside leads to creating problems you want to see there. A cycle of perpetual self-diagnosis sets in. Break that cycle.
It is best if you do not pray but if you are you know now what to pray to.
YOU PRAY TO YOURSELF
When things go wrong
You can adjust to change
You can accept the bad
You can move on
You need to remember that you can be patient with yourself
You need to appreciate any progress no matter how small
People pray - they think it helps them to feel hopeful for the future. It is not prayer that works - it is the points given above. People are trying to use prayer as a trigger for them but it is not necessary. If you pray for magical help, that risks making the problems no better if not worse.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is the most dangerous and powerful fallacy of them all. It is translated as after this, therefore it is caused by this. It makes people believe in magic and prayer. The more these things are practiced the more the fallacy takes hold. They make excuses for why magic or prayer didn’t work. They say God or the gods had better plans.
The prayer, “May I be free from suffering” really means I empower myself to refuse suffering and to accept it when it is unavoidable. It is the dwelling on your consent to be helped helps not prayer or god or anything. Consenting to whatever help may come even if it will not come is still helping for the alternative certainly is not helping.
The power of your subliminal side
My subconscious is the part of my mind that functions remarkably like it was another person inside me. It will comfort me if I treat it with respect and ask it for guidance and strength. This is not prayer but merely good psychology. Prayer is only pretending it is not your inner mind you are communicating with and getting strength from. This is the reason prayer seems to help those who do it enough and who do it daily. I “pray” to my inner self often and my faith grows and grows and I develop as a person.
Your unconscious mind remembers everything that ever happened to you. Imagine a computer hard drive. It has lots of information stored on it that it is not using right now but it is still there. This is like your unconscious mind. You have a file open on the screen. This is like your conscious mind.
The subconscious mind behaves like it has a mind of its own. It is able to make you have coherent dreams and is behind many reports of religious apparitions. It is clever. It is smarter than your conscious mind. The flashes of genius that one can experience come from it. They feel spontaneous because they don't come from your conscious mind.
When you have a lot on your mind and do something without concentrating on it or realising you are doing it, it is the subconscious mind that has taken over to perform the task.
There is no magical law of attraction. But it is true that good thoughts attract more good thoughts and vice versa. You can consciously want something and use the law to get it. Success would be expected. It doesn't come. Why? Because the subconscious is programmed to nullify the powers you consciously exercise.
The consciousness mind can do this too. You can want to do well at an interview. You are that part of your mind is telling you that you will mess it up. The doubt then hits you strongly during the interview and you fail. But at least when it does it, you can spot its dangerous influence and do something about it.
The subconscious mind is stronger than the conscious. The conscious mind depends on it. Thus we need to take more care of the subconscious than the conscious.
It is vital that we meditate upon the essential truths of life and how atheism makes you a god every day and study it. This helps reprogram the subconscious.
If we perceive that the message of atheism is true, this knowledge will change the subconscious beliefs.
Free will, according to some, exists in the subconscious. If so then it decides what we will do even though we think we haven't decided it yet. The fact that decisions are made before we consciously make them has been verified by science.
Nothing appears in the conscious that didn't appear in the subconscious first. The subconscious mind and the conscious mind can only be reconciled and will work together better the more you try to have a consistent and realistic and open-hearted approach to life. The subconscious mind spots contradictions. You need to be a rational person to be able to deal with it effectively. If you feel and think you are a wonderfully confident person, and don't apply for the job you want because you feel inferior, then you are programming your subconscious to work against your feelings of confidence. Your wonderful confidence is an illusion.
We must behave in a way consistent with our knowledge of the truths of atheism. For example, to say that you are the Merciful God of your own life and then to, say, worship the God of the great religions contradicts this. You put a block in the way of the tremendous possibilities for yourself and others that come from your recognition of your own divinity. Other ways this can happen is by allowing others to pray for you, considering joining a God religion or simply by allowing your name to remain on its roll of members. These things can cost you your mental and/or physical health and even your life. Moreover, do the right thing for you and you will receive blessings and freedom in this life and they will be manifest for you again in the next life.
It is a mistake to suppose that you can pick and choose out of the true philosophy. To use the power of the mind to bring positive changes into your life, it is necessary to be consistent. Your inner mind is cleverer than it seems. Your mind has thoughts and realisations that you are not aware of. Pick and Mix holds back but embracing the truth offers you freedom.
Ignorance, inconsistency, feeling or believing we don't deserve something much, and failures in knowing what we really want and why are the reasons why the subconscious works against us.
Talking to my deep mind will help clarify my thinking and feeling and pave the way for possible solutions. More importantly I could be able to deal with it if they fail.
Those who pray say they pray to God. But God if he exists will always do the right and best thing so why ask him to do it? Also, why would you need to pray much? Would it not be enough just the once to ask him to do his will?
When I talk to and trust in my inner and deepest self to work behind the scenes for my betterment, beneficial “coincidences” start to pile up. It is important to look out for them and welcome them. The stronger my faith, the more they will happen. The more I change beliefs that undermine them to beliefs that affirm them and are consistent with them the more I will see how lucky I am and how lucky I can make myself.
Write the successes down in a Diary. This reinforces your belief in your power and attracts even more blessings.
Keep a coincidence diary for both insignificant and important coincidences.