This exploration centers around how much or how little one human being can accomplish with prayer directed to the divine for some targeted outcome or benefit. We’ve learned in this project that there are a lot of inputs and variables that affect a prayer’s overall effectiveness. There is a belief quotient in the existence of the divine and its willingness to intervene in human affairs. There is the belief quotient of the worthiness of the self to engage with and make solicitations of the divine. And finally, there is the question of focus, attentiveness, and concentration brought to bear in the saying of a prayer or prayers. This suggests that the “energetic reach” of prayer will vary widely from person to person, and even, when considering a single person only, from prayer to prayer. And so “energetic reach” would appear to be an average over time, and never a constant value for a single person praying. What is Creator’s perspective?

What you are describing is a true and quite real phenomenon. You are not the same person moment to moment because there is a flow of energy and an intention, created by your very thoughts, taking you in differing directions depending on the inner motivation for the thought and its context, its history, and its potential for doing something that could affect your life or even alter it drastically. So you will put great intention into avoiding a head-on collision while driving, for example, even though you might be quite inattentive crossing the street in front of your home, to go on a walk, and not look carefully both ways because you have done it so many times when there is light traffic or none, and your thoughts are elsewhere. That is an unfocused attention, with respect to the goal of staying alive at least, the focus is simply misplaced in terms of what would be the best order of importance for your survival. You can think of that the same way in setting about to launch a prayer. Not all prayers are alike of course. Some people pray for small things, some people pray for huge, huge things because their needs are so great, so severe, so life-determining. The latter will, of course, automatically have a quite high and intense level of intention behind them. A prayer done out of duty for the umpteenth time, perhaps while sitting in church and doing it by rote out of habit, may have little inner conviction, because the words stream through your mind almost with no effort, and that is because of the habit factor. We would tell you that things are not always what they seem on the surface. We look deeper within the person in assessing things like power of intention. There are many, many times when the conscious self is fairly oblivious to the inner workings of their own mind but, on multiple levels beyond ready conscious awareness, there can be quite strong inner conviction something is needed, and desperately, that is of only minor concern to the conscious level. Even though you might consciously have a fainthearted prayer launched, from your perspective and awareness, if parts of your mind are desperately seeking a solution for the dilemma that is the purpose for the prayer, they may well supply plenty of intention to get the divine realm into high gear and working avidly on your behalf to change something for the better. So this is not as simple as it seems on the surface, but it is true that intention is all-important because the divine realm pays much more attention to what you are intending in launching a prayer than the words themselves. This is why you can say a prayer out of duty, that is half-hearted or not truly meant at all but simply paying lip service out of a sense of obligation, but your heart is not in it. Such prayers will have little influence because we cannot act on them. The most important thing you need to know about launching a prayer, and what to expect from the divine realm, is that the divine realm can only answer a prayer using the energy of intention of the one who is praying. If your intention is meager, there is little, or even perhaps nothing, we can do to bring about something new for your benefit. That meager intention might be because of having a shaky belief in the divine to begin with. That will restrict what we can do, it is keeping us at arm's length. A meager response to a prayer can also be due to your own self-imposed limitations, seeing yourself as unworthy, for example, of divine intervention. If you are too negative about your own self-worth and are in a state of fear to an extreme degree, because you think your problem is so powerful nothing can be done about it, that is the mirror image of a low self-esteem energetically. What you are decreeing is, you are helpless, you cannot be served, not even God can rescue you, you are insignificant, and the power of your adversary will dominate things, and so on. All such inner doubts, fears, and the beliefs underlying their generation will govern the nature, the quality, and intensity and focus of any intention, on any subject, and this includes launching prayers as well. Because we follow the intention, you are prescribing the medicine. It will be a sugar pill if all we can do is give you a little bit of encouragement, if you have put handcuffs on us through your meager belief quotient. Or, it can be a powerful curative treatment through a series of maneuvers to benefit you in tracing out and healing, once and for all, the deepest, darkest recesses of the watershed moments your karma will deliver to you again and again and again, until that actually gets accomplished. Such negative karma underlies most of life's difficulties, so this is serious business we are discussing.