A recent Thursday (May the first) was the National Day of Prayer (or the National Day of Reason for those of us still “Prodigal"), but the sites discussing the day didn’t seem very up-front on ‘what “prayer” actually is.

The grade-school Christian is told that prayer is � askin` `fer stuff,” and through that definition is taught/expected-to-learn patience or –understanding when the Lord delivers the requests gradually or –not at all (respectively).

If the Christian holds to the grade-school definition of prayer indefinitely, `e becomes very-disappointed with God (or -`imself) and thinks of God as a sometimes-operational coke-machine. That is ‘an insult’ to God; but that’s okay, because (like Einstein said) ‘God is too incredibly-awesome to even care what people think `E is.’

That’s why prayer–though one might incidentally ‘ask `fer somethin`’ while praying–is actually just a form of self-hypnosis … making yourself believe that you deserve the ‘good things’ you find. Prayer is indeed good for finding goodness!—if you find something you ‘already did ask `fer,’ you’re likely to see anything standing between-you-and-‘that something`’ as less a “roadblock” and more like a “hurdle.”

While the Christian 'sound-frequencies' may be the most-popular, the other ones use the same modulation!

Take Buddhism: In ‘Nichiren Buddhism’ (‘the Gohonzon-Gathering of Buddha Nichiren Daishonen of Latter-Day Bodhisatvas’), meetings feature a chanted prayer that means (something like) ‘Wisdom has the highest, best intentions and–so long as we hold to those intentions–Wisdom will carry us through to the end.’ Very-very few of these prayers ‘ask’ for anything—they are merely affirmations of Divine Law.

But the more those practitioners recite the five-to-six syllable mantra, the better they can handle both the good and the bad.

We are reminded again of Mother Teresa and her response to the question of ‘how she prays’: “I just listen.” And God’s response to her prayers: “He just listens.”

Extrapolating some ‘sense’ out of that (and remembering Alanis Morrisette’s portrayal of God in DOGMA, we find that all the current-affairs of your life rattle around in your subconscious mind (whether you want `em to or not), that ‘listening to God’ puts you into a sort of ‘reverence-channel’ over which you can communicate with Infinite Intelligence, that God thus hears your subconscious affairs on the ‘radio signal’-of-your-reverence, and that He adds them to the tones He picks up from others (in nearby situations) and uses your radio-signal to play back the full composition—showing you how any problems ought to be handled and how any treasures should be found.

The Buddhist chant works the same way, except it also tries to keep us aware of the environment-in which we’ll find the answer and/or –in which the answer will be created. As we recite this prayer, we ‘float down the river’ (being drawn naturally to the Middle). As we approach the Middle, we see water-life disturbing its flow—temporarily making it more like the rough-and-rugged riverside. These disturbances are seen by the subconscious, and through wisdom we see whether/how to straighten-out the disturbance.

That is the general purpose of prayer: to see the disturbances we could turn to prosperity and to help us ride-out the disturbances that would drown us before resting in the eventual prosperity!

(PLEASE NOTE: In speaking of Mother Teresa, we understand that the ‘God’ we’re praying to [directly] is actually “the subconscious understanding of the Divine Law;” but it’s much-easier to communicate ‘our gratefulness for the Truth’ if we seem to direct it to an entity than if we communicate it without any targeted entity in mind.)