Creative Prayer- long extract from The Powers of Thought

People have a great many misconceptions about prayer. They imagine that what counts are the words they use. No, very often your words fall short of the mark, they never manage to get up to heaven. Your mouth may murmur words, but you are not really praying if nothing vibrates within you. To be sure, the words you say are very important for the realisation of your prayer, but only if your desire and your thought are already powerful on the spiritual plane; if this is the case, then the words are like a signature which allows the forces on high to be set in motion.

Suppose that you want to awaken a feeling of love for God in yourself: as feelings are a purely psychic reality, you do not need to use words; you can achieve this simply through the strength of your desire. But if you want to obtain something on the physical, material plane, then the spoken word is necessary.

But, in spite of this, it is the intensity of your thoughts and feelings that are the essence of your prayer for, without that, you could recite words for hours on end but you would not get any results; your prayer would not be answered. As a matter of fact, you can feel it yourself when your prayer has been heard. There are days when you experience such a sense of strength and fulfilment that you know that heaven has heard you at last.

This does not mean that you can expect immediate results om the physical plane. No, the realisation will not be immediate, but your prayer has been heard, your request has been noted, and that is all that counts: to know that you have been heard!

Everything depends on the intensity of your prayer, therefore, and this intensity always depends on your ability to disengage your thoughts and feelings form all extraneous preoccupations. This is why your attitude is so important: you must feel yourself to be totally free of other involvements. For an hour or two, leave everything to one side,and immerse yourself in spiritual work, for that is the only way for your prayer to be answered.

As there is a correspondence between the subtle world of thought, feeling and energy, and the world of matter, every time you manage to rise to a higher level of consciousness, it attracts very pure materials from the cosmos which you can use to build a body of light, a body of glory. You must begin by working on the spiritual plane; the material plane will automatically follow on from there and transform itself.

Everything spiritual has a material correspondence; every particle of matter has its correspondence on the spiritual plane. You only have to work on the spiritual plane by means of your thought and prayer, for it is these invisible currents that attract elements from the sublime regions on high. Initiates have always based their work on this law of correspondences, and if they have such total trust in divine wisdom, it is because they know that what is divine within will be divine without.

Their only concern is to make sure that what they do themselves is divine and harmonious. For the rest, they know that the laws of nature are faithful and true and that whatever is accomplished on the spiritual plane will, one day, be accomplished on the physical plane.

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov The Powers of Thought- Creative Prayer