Prayer is quite possibly the most effective and powerful thing that we can do. It represents our direct communication with the infinite. It is truly amazing that we naturally have this capability!

Prayer is also something that no one can take away from us. It represents our sacred, most intimate connection with the divine. And with that being the case, it is curious that we sometimes have so little faith that our prayers are being heard.

The issue is not with prayer. The issue is the context within which we pray. The way to empower your prayers is to change to a more empowered context. There are basically two possible contexts from which to pray. Let’s examine each of them, starting with looking at some of our collective false assumptions.

There is a strange discrepancy between what we know in our hearts to be true, and what we see all around us in terms of the conditions on our planet.

Our hearts tell us that all should be love, and that pain and suffering are wrong and shouldn’t exist. Our hearts do not believe that there is any validity whatsoever in pain. In fact, as human beings, we will do everything we can to avoid the experience of pain altogether.

Yet pain exists, nonetheless. So how do we cope with this fact? When we can’t avoid the experience of pain, we do the next best thing. We rationalize it. We tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why pain, as unpleasant as it is, is necessary. We even go so far as to raise it to the level of a religious, spiritual experience.

There are so many questions inherent to our life on planet Earth. The greatest mystery we face is how to resolve the daily dilemma of duality. How do we reconcile the ever-present conflict between good and bad, right and wrong, love and hate, etc.?

But the question goes even deeper than this. If God is love, then why is there suffering? If God represents unconditional, divine love for every human being, then why do some people struggle in the most dire of circumstances while others seem to be gifted with unrelenting good luck?

The explanations for these quandaries are many. Some say it’s a matter of karma, where people suffer the consequences of their actions in future lifetimes. Others say that planet Earth is really a school where we are sent to learn important lessons about right from wrong. And then there are the religions that purport that God is testing us to see if we can follow certain rules that will lead to our reward or punishment, depending on how well we do.

Some people believe that it is important to experience terrible circumstances so that we will learn to appreciate the positive and seek it out. These are the people that often believe that we choose our circumstances, no matter how bad, in order to evolve.

But what if all of these explanations are wrong? What if there is something else that we haven’t even thought of?