Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want

It may be that the most effective way to trust your reality is through the power of prayer. Prayer and trust offer us seemingly magical methods for manifesting the divine desire. But, first you may have to shift old perceptions concerning prayer and discover a whole new inner vision about praying and prayer.

PRAYER AND TRUST

In the matter of prayer it seems that we often view God as a gigantic vending machine in the sky who will grant us our wishes when we put in the proper tokens in the form of prayers. We expect to insert prayers, then pull on the knob and hope that God will dispense the goodies. The God vending machine becomes the object of our veneration. We tell the machine how good it is and how much we worship it and expect it to be good to us in return.

The basic premise here is that God is outside us and therefore what we need and want is also outside us. This form of prayer is like practicing the absence rather than the presence of God. If we believe that we are separate from God, the vending machine approach to prayer reinforces and deepens that belief.

I prefer to promote the idea of prayer in its essence as a communion with God. Praying at the spiritual level then becomes communing with and knowing that God is as close as our breath. What we seek in prayer is the experience of co-existing with God. Prayer is our communication of readiness for the desires of this sacred energy to manifest through our human form. No separation, no absence of God within, simply the presence of this force within ourselves.

Therefore, the true experience of God does not change or alter God, but it changes us. It heals our sense of separation. If we are not changed by prayer, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to know the wisdom that created us.

The search for happiness outside ourselves rekindles an idea that we are not whole and relegates prayer to the status of a plea to a boss/God. We are then asking for favors rather than seeking a manifestation of our invisible, inspired self.

Prayer, at the spiritual level I am writing about, is not asking for something any more than the attempt to become a manifester is asking for something to show up in your life. What I call authentic prayer is inviting divine desire to express itself through me. It is a prayer for what it is that is for my highest purpose and good, or for the greater benefit of all mankind. Prayer at this level expresses my experience of oneness with the divine energy.

This may sound like a radical or even blasphemous notion to you, but it is the source of all spiritual traditions. Here are a few examples.

Christianity: The kingdom of heaven is within you.

Islam: Those who know themselves know their God.

Buddhism: Look within, you are the Buddha.

Vedanta (part of Hinduism): Atman (individual consciousness) and Brahman (universal consciousness) are one.

Yoga (part of Hinduism): God dwells within you as you.

Confucianism: Heaven, earth and human are of one body.

Upanishads (part of Hinduism): By understanding the self, all this universe is known.

Overcoming your conditioning in this area is crucially important. At first, you may be able to accept this idea on an intellectual level, but be unable to make it your authentic experience. So, I suggest you make prayer your experience by using it to replace the random, continuous thoughts that you have all day. Use your trust to commune with God rather than to be in a constant state of chatter.

Replace thoughts about your experiences with the experience of prayer. For instance, praying in this sense can be a sentence such as “Sacredness guide me now” or “Sacred love flow through me now” silently recited instead of thinking thoughts. Prayer in this form is tilling and clearing the inner self of ego chatter so that what you desire and what desires you can grow. My personal practice of prayer is participating in a communion with God wherein I see God within me and ask for the strength and the inner awareness to handle whatever confronts me. I know that I am not separate from this vital force that we call God. I know that this force connects me to everything in the universe and that by placing my attention on what it is that I want to attract to myself I am really doing nothing more than manifesting a new aspect of myself.

I then let go of the results and let the universe handle the details. I retreat in peace and keep reminding myself that heaven on earth is a choice that I must make, not a place I must find. It is my choice to live with the God force flowing unrestricted through me, and it is the way of co-creating my life at this moment. Trust, then, is the cornerstone of my praying, and with it comes the peace that is the essence of manifesting.

PEACE: THE RESULT OF TRUST

The highest self wants you to experience peace, which is a definition of enlightenment. You may recall that I wrote earlier in this book that I define enlightenment as being immersed in and surrounded by peace. The more you trust in the wisdom that creates all, the more you will be trusting in yourself. The result of trusting is that an enormous sense of peace becomes available to you.

When the ego insists on winning, comparing or judging, you will be able to soothe and calm the ego’s fears with the peacefulness born of trust. When you are able to trust, you know that God and you are one, like the glass of ocean water and the ocean itself. You are what the God force is doing, just as a wave is what the ocean is doing.

As this awareness grows you will discover that you are a more peaceful person and, consequently, that enlightenment becomes the way of your life. Being independent of the good opinion of others and being detached from the need to be right are two powerful indicators that your life is shifting toward a consciousness of trust in yourself and trust in God. Yet there are many people in our lives who disturb our state of peacefulness. Then, the question is how to handle those who consciously or unconsciously disturb our experience of trust and peace.

I once wrote an essay in a somewhat facetious tone titled “Your Soulmate Is the Person You Can Hardly Stand.” The essence of the essay was that the people in our lives who we agree with and share similar interests with are easy to accept and actually teach us very little. But those who can push our buttons and send us into a rage at the slightest provocation are our real teachers.

The person who is most capable of disturbing your state of peace is a person who is reminding you that you are not truly in the state of peace or enlightenment that results from trust. At that moment, this person is your greatest teacher. This is the person whom you want to treasure and thank God for sending into your life! When you can transcend the rage, anger and upset which that person appears to provoke, and instead say, “Thank you for being my teacher,” you have acknowledged a soulmate relationship.

Everyone in your life who can still push your buttons and send you into that frenzied state is a master teacher disguised as a manipulative, inconsiderate, frustrating, non-understanding being. The peace that is enlightenment means that you are not only at peace with those who share your interests and agree with you, and with strangers who come and go, but also with those master teachers who remind you that you still have some work to do on yourself.

Give thanks for those great spiritual masters who have arrived in your life in the form of your children, current or former spouses, irritating neighbors, co-workers, obnoxious strangers and the like, for they help you stay in an enlightened, peaceful state. They let you know each day how much more work you truly have to do and in what ways you have not mastered yourself.

Peace occurs when your highest self is dominant in your life. When you begin to feel peace as the result of trust, you are enjoying a healthy soul. Keep in mind that there is only one real soul, and that your personality is a vehicle for the whole. You cannot divide the infinite. There is no division. You must trust this awareness.

When you divide, you have moved out of identification with the God force and have taken up shelter in the ego. It is here that you will find an absence of peace and also an absence of trust in the wisdom that created you.

There are many things that you can do on a regular basis to make this second principle of trusting in the oneness a reality in your life. Here are a few suggestions to nurture trust in yourself and in the oneness.

HOW TO TRUST IN YOURSELF AND THE WISDOM THAT CREATED YOU

• Begin by admitting your confusion or failures. When you do this, you are dismissing any illusion of trust, which is in reality a false self-trust. Remind yourself that genuine trust involves letting go of all conditioning that teaches you that trust in yourself is based on being special or separate.

When you are honest with yourself about every aspect of your life, you discontinue identifying with separateness. You then become ready for the insight that trust in yourself and trust in ultimate truth are one and the same. Remind yourself often that you are a child of God and that you have the God force within you. Let the statements “I am it” and “It is me” rise from your inner being.

• Keep in mind that you cannot go to a higher ground if you are hanging onto a lower level. You cannot leave the physical world if you are so attached to it that you refuse to let go. The concept of trust involves surrendering and trusting the God force.

Imagine yourself falling from a precipice while clinging to a huge rock, believing that it will protect you. Letting go of the rock is a metaphor for surrendering and trusting. You will continue to live and breathe in the physical earth plane, but you realize that you are not only your body and mind, and that the rock is not your salvation. Your needs and demands cease, and you are one with the manifest consciousness.

Of course, you are literally still in the body, but you have also joined the manifest consciousness. This trust allows you to participate in the act of creation. Your current world will be experienced anew. The freedom and respect you receive from God will be bestowed by you on the circumstances of your world.

• Acquire a rebellious attitude toward the philosophy that preaches a style of God-as-boss who is authoritarian and a benevolent tyrant. Rejection of this model does not mean that you are an atheist, but rather a believer in the true meaning of divinity.

You are not required to feel inferior, to view yourself as a sinner and to prostrate yourself before idols and dogma in order to believe in God. Study St. Paul in the New Testament where he says, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” This is the kind of trust you must adopt in order to know your divine self.

• Trusting does not mean you never experience life’s valleys. There will be peaks and valleys as long as you live on this physical plane. There is no happiness without the opposite experience of unhappiness. Opposites are the way it is in the physical plane. Expect that this is also your reality.

Do not abandon trust when your ego thinks things should be different than they are. It is better to embrace trust when darkness is present, knowing that light will follow. Begin to look for the lesson in the darkness rather than cursing it. Trust allows you simply to observe the dark and unhappy times rather than identifying totally with those aspects of life. From this perspective you are not at the mercy of your ego energy, insisting that everything must be perfect, and that when things are not, you have reasons to give up your trust in the divine.

The valleys are merely the way of the physical plane, but they are not who you are. You are part of the unseen wisdom that created this entire physical plane and you can trust in it uncategorically.

• There is timeless wisdom in this old idea of trust. Any person can sense that problems are within, but the spiritually trusting person realizes that the solution is also within.

When you trust in yourself, you are not looking for solutions to your life problems in someone or something outside yourself. Instead, you remain in a state of trusting. Then, in a trustworthy manner, you can proceed to attract the energy to you that provides the solution.

• Take your most serious problems and turn them over to God. Say something like the following: “I have not been able to resolve these issues in my life and I have used every technique I know. I would like to show my trust in the divine force by simply turning them over to your divine hands. As I do this I know that the divine force that is you, God, is also me, and I trust that this action will lead to a resolution of these problems.”

I can assure you that this method puts you into direct contact with a higher power than can ever be found in a bottle, a bank statement, a contrary partner, an illness or anything on the earth plane that you believe is external or separate from you. I left all of the addictions of my life behind me with the simple words “I’ve tried everything else, now I am trusting God.”

It was not as though something outside myself was now doing it for me. I simply trusted that force, and it began showing up in my daily abstinence program. I trusted in the eternal wisdom and I also trusted in myself to receive that wisdom and apply it. This same process has been the source of all of the manifesting that has occurred and continues to transpire in my daily life.

• The presence of complete trust is evident in your life when what you think, feel and do are all balanced and in harmony. The presence of a distinction between your thoughts and your emotional state as well as your behavior tends to move you away from the trusting attitude I am encouraging you to adopt as you practice this second principle of manifestation.

Examine your thoughts carefully. See if those thoughts are totally congruent with your actions. To say “I believe in a healthy body” and to practice eating in unhealthy ways dissolves trust in yourself. Congruent thought, emotions and behavior are strong indicators of your self-trust. And keep in mind that when you trust in yourself, you are trusting in God at the same time.

When you are incongruent with your thoughts, you are showing a lack of trust in the divinity that is your essence. Be honest about any incongruency. Identify it and trust in your ability to transcend it, and the energy that you need for this transformation will be attracted to you. But if you hang onto the incongruency, thinking one thing but behaving in disingenuous ways, you will sabotage your ability to trust in yourself and in the infinite wisdom as well.

As you practice surrendering, acknowledge your fundamental richness rather than bemoaning the imagined poverty of your being. When you practice spiritual trust you are surrendering your ego, and all of its hallucinatory beliefs, to a higher power. You are just letting go and knowing that divine guidance is always with you.