Ask and you shall receive, ask and you shall receive, ask and you shall receive, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Haven’t we heard enough of this absurd and trite spiritual idea? Hasn’t this been mentioned in the Bible 3000 years ago and by New Age charlatans on YouTube yesterday?
Yes, it has and it will never stop. It is the most powerful of all spiritual ideas and when put into place properly, becomes the most powerful tool in our tool kit to rearrange and upgrade our life.
So the topic is not going away. The misuse or misunderstanding of the idea is also not going away either. Either you know how to use this principle, or you don’t. If you do learn how to use it, the universe is unlocked for you, you have the keys to the kingdom.
The conversation here is fleshing out a greater understanding. And here it is: Ask equals attention. What on earth does that mean? It means quite specifically asking is perfectly synonymous with attention. Whatever you put your attention on is exactly the same as asking.
We often think of asking as folding our hands neatly in prayer, closing our eyes, and saying “God please give me fill in the blank“. Now, this certainly is a form of asking, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it nowhere approaches the depth of what the true and most powerful asking is.
The most profound kind of asking is the attention that we pay to our life all day long, moment by moment, through thick and thin, our chronic and habituated focus on whatever has our attention.
The deepest kind of asking that results in our most powerful kind of receiving is what we pay attention to all day long. Asking is attention. While we might occasionally throughout the day verbally ask God for more money, or a better relationship, or a nasty problem to be resolved, we might find on closer examination, our attention is focused on the problem all day long.
This means that whatever the problem is will only magnify in our experience. Asking, being exactly synonymous with attention, is the lens or the frame that we place around our reality, and similar to a camera, whatever we point our focus on will only expand and magnify in our experience.
Understanding this principle “asking equals attention”, meaning whatever we’re paying attention to all day long is what we’re receiving, will literally revolutionize your life in the twinkling of an eye.
The stunning realization that we are always asking, because we’re always paying attention to something, becomes the most powerful understanding within our being.
We realize a momentary interruption in our chronic attention to ask for something we want, when the vast majority of our attention all the rest of the time is focused on what we don’t want, makes us realize something has got to change.
To ask and receive effectively, we simply must learn to take our chronic attention off of the problem or the dilemma and redirect it toward what the solution is. This is the meaning of the great spiritual phrase “judge not appearances, judge the truth“.
The appearance of things, the current condition of things, so-called “reality as it is“, can be so compelling and overwhelmingly real in our experience, that we are hyper-focused and literally addicted to looking at it. This means, in many cases, to ask for what we really want means simply to redirect our chronic attention off of what we don’t want. This requires great discipline, great willingness, and great diligence. Nothing less than that.
This is why this great spiritual principle “ask, and you shall receive“, is so often doubted or misunderstood by so many. They don’t understand that to ask means to pay attention to. When they get this point and realize to unlock the power of the principal means to redirect our focus, i.e., what we pay attention to, then the lights come on once and for all.
Everything you have in your life you’ve asked for. The bulk of your experience is the result of your chronic attention all day long, a.k.a. your chronic asking. Want something different? Pay attention to something different. Want the same thing over and over and over again? Keep your attention focused where it is.
Of course, the great tool for redirecting our chronic attention is meditation and true prayer. In meditation, we remove our attention from all worldly things and we place our attention on God, Source, higher consciousness, infinite intelligence, whatever you choose to call it. Putting our attention on the infinite, Being itself, brings in more of that, which is love, truth, beauty, wisdom, harmony, serenity, and well-being.
Meditation is attention on perfect goodness. That’s why it delivers exactly that, in perfect accord and fulfillment of the principal “ask and you shall receive”.
True prayer, the other great tool, is removing our attention from the appearance of things when it is less than satisfactory and placing our attention on what it is that we want instead. This can be done verbally, viscerally, or in our imagination. This means it is our responsibility to think, feel, and see in our mind’s eye, our imagination, what it is we want and desire, instead of the problem so abundantly apparent right in front of our eyes.
Whatever it is that we must do to redirect our attention, our deepest asking, we do it. We realize once and for all, to the depth of our being, whatever we pay attention to is only going to magnify in our reality. Unless and until we change our attention, i.e., change our chronic and habitual asking, we can’t change what we receive.
Now that you understand this, you can never go back to the old perception that you’re not getting what you’re asking for. You’re only and always getting what you’re asking for and this is going on all the time, operating as an unstoppable magnet in your life. Asking equals attention, a principle of existence every bit as dependable as gravity, only more important, as it determines everything that falls into your experience.
Now we’ve learned what asking is and how it works. Wherever you place your attention, that is your most dynamic form of asking. Place your attention wisely.