Faith and fear make poor bedfellows.

Where one is found the other cannot exist.

What a profound yet infinitely true statement.

The quote is from “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.

We are no more that the sum-total of all our thoughts. We are what we think. If we keep thinking as we have always thought we will continue to get what we’ve always got. Its brilliance lies in its simplicity. You can literally think your way to success, think your way to riches and happiness, but the reverse is also true.

We believe that we can hide our thoughts. That they are private and therefore matter not but nothing could be further from the truth. Thoughts become habits, habits become character. We think in both our conscious and our sub conscious. However it is the latter that is infinitely more powerful.

Our sub conscious mind works 24/7. It never rests; it never sleeps. Its sole purpose in life is to please us; to deliver to us that which it perceives to be most important to us. So the question arises “How does it know what we want?” It’s easy; we tell it, either consciously or unconsciously. It locks onto our thoughts and from these determines what our goals are in life. If it picks up positive thoughts supported by positive emotions it will deliver good things and vice versa. The subconscious mind cannot lie idle. If you fail to plant positive thoughts into it, it will feed on the thoughts that reach it as a result of your neglect.

The sub conscious can however be programmed. Much as one will instruct an attorney the conscious mind can be developed and trained to pass positive thoughts into the subconscious. However you must speak its language before it will heed your call; the language is emotion. It has been shown that thoughts that are accompanied by strong emotion jump the queue and are dealt with before those that are processed through pure cold reason. It is therefore important that we cultivate passion and desire, love, faith and hope. We conversely need to guard against the equally strong influences of the major negative emotions, fear being the main contender, but also hatred, revenge, greed, anger and jealousy. Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time. They are mutually exclusive.

So what about prayer? Jesus made it very clear that for prayer to work it needs to be accompanied by faith. He said “Verily, verily I say unto you. If thou sayest unto that mountain be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea. If thou believest in your heart that it shall be so, then so shall it be”. That is where the saying “Faith can move mountains” originates.

However faith and fear cannot co-exist. If we have absolute faith we cannot have fear. Yet I put it to you that most men, and yes that includes Christians, only revert to earnest prayer when all else has failed; when they have tried everything else, nothing has worked and they fear the consequences. If they come to the Infinite Intelligence in prayer but in fear they are lost before they begin. Others mumble prayers read from prayer books or recite prayers learnt verbatim years ago. They too will fall on deaf ears.

The subconscious mind is the vehicle by which prayer is translated into spiritual waves and conducted through time and space to God. Prayer can only be made by the individual through faith and absence of fear. You cannot pray by proxy. You go direct or not at all.

What would you do if you were not afraid? What could you achieve? Are your thoughts holding you back? These are rhetorical questions. I leave you to ponder the answer.