Although I am not ordained into any organized religion, I have lived my whole life with prayer, and have dedicated myself to learning the true nature of prayer and what makes it work.
It all began at an early age. I remember going to Sunday school as a boy and hearing stories about how Christ and the prophets performed miracles, such as changing water into wine, parting the Red Sea, healing the sick, and even raising the dead. Those stories stuck with me, and continued to pique my interest.
Sometime during my high school years, I prayed that God would teach me the truth behind miracles, promising to teach others what I learned. At that time of my life, everything looked great. I was a straight-A student, had earned a full-tuition scholarship to DeVry University for Electrical Engineering, and was headed for a career in a highly profitable field in which I had great interest and enthusiasm.
For a variety of reasons, I found myself failing at DeVry. I was trying to work full time while going to school full time, and couldn’t manage my time effectively. I started sleeping late, missing classes, and my scholastic career was quickly coming to an end.
Eventually, I dropped out.
For someone who had always done well in school, this was a monumental failure. The rest of my life came crashing down like a house of cards. Eventually, I hit bottom. No home, no car, no money, no job, no friends, and no one I could ask for help. As I left town (on foot), I found a penny on the ground, which was the ONLY money I had at that time.
I was truly starting over with nothing.
The Discovery That Changed Everything
In high school, my interest in miracles led me to delve into ESP and similar topics. As my life tumbled downhill, I started grasping at anything that promised to teach me how to tap into the power of miracles.
I read the Bible, and other than a series of generic suggestions to “have faith,” there wasn’t anything there which explained HOW to do that.
I turned to books on other religions, ESP, astrology, mysticism, magick, and even witchcraft, looking for some clue that would help me turn my life around and get it back on course with the vision of success I felt I deserved. In the course of a single year, I had read (at least a part of) several hundred books.
Nothing seemed to help, until one morning, after wandering the streets all night, I walked into a bookstore to get out of the cold, and found The Miracle of Mind Dynamics by Joseph Murphy, who instantly became my favorite author!
As I stood there reading the words on the page, I felt an incredible sensation rise up within me. I learned to pretend that my prayer was already answered, and to feel its reality within the moment. (This was a suggestion I never found in the Bible.) Instantly, I felt my whole body relax, and bursting forth was this unbelievable feeling of joy and satisfaction as I imagined that I would be given enough money to rent a place and get back on my feet again.
That was about 10:30 in the morning. About 4:30 that afternoon, I received the results of my prayer when I found $70 on the sidewalk! With this sudden windfall, I was able to rent a cheap room for a week (very cheap, and very run down) and get a little food to keep going.
The very next day, I went back to the bookstore and bought three of Joseph Murphy’s books, The Miracle of Mind Dynamics (the one I read in the store), The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, and Your Infinite Power to be Rich.
Today I own 14 of his books, with multiple copies of some of them. I like to buy multiple copies so I can give them away when I feel someone needs what the book offers.
Experiments in Prayer
Most of the time, I would experiment with simple things that didn’t involve other people, like changing the weather. There was one summer in particular when I was living with someone who had a small garden and didn’t want to water it every day. At one point, she commented that it would be nice if it rained a little each day. A few minutes of thoughtful action did the trick. Every day for the next three months, a small amount of rain would fall from the skies.
During the same time period, a tornado was reported to be heading in our direction. When I saw my girlfriend running around to collect her animals, I told her to calm down and that I would pray about it. I sat down, focused my mind on dispersing the tornado, and within a matter of minutes, the news station reported that the tornado had dissipated.
Because I lacked faith in prosperity back then, my prayers for money rarely worked. There were a few successes, though. One such success occurred when I worked at a die-cutting shop, a place that does finishing work for printers. As a day-laborer hired merely to do odd jobs, I had absolutely no control over the amount of work that came into the shop, yet I was able to consistently get the specific number of hours I wanted each week. Each week, I picked a different number, such as 40, 45, 42, 46.5, or 49. At the end of each week, my timesheet was consistently within a half-hour of what I specified to myself at the beginning of that week.
I’ll never forget the time I was talking to one of the press operators about this and mentioned how I had decided I would get 48 hours that week. His reaction was, “We don’t even have enough work to keep us busy for 40 hours. There’s no way we’ll get 8 hours of overtime!” I smiled and simply said, “We have no idea what other jobs are coming into the shop. We can only see what’s here now. There will be more jobs coming in the next few days.”
The other press operator (we had only two presses operating on second shift) thought the idea was intriguing and was open to the possibility. Within a couple of days, a large job came into the shop, which required foil stamping and needed to be out the same week. End result: the first press operator only got 40 hours that week, yet the second operator and I got 48 hours, proving once again that my prayer process worked.
The next week, the second press operator and I were talking about this and he suggested we go for maximum overtime. I thought it would be an interesting experiment and prayed by setting my intention accordingly. (Without a doubt, the SIMPLEST form of prayer possible.) By this time, my faith was so strong, I KNEW something special was going to happen.
Maximum overtime turned out to be 60 to 70 hour weeks for months on end! That special rush job was done so well we ended up getting far more work from it than we bargained for! My paychecks were FAT to say the least! I was smiling regularly for the first time in years.
Notice here that I was not running a business. Nor was I a salesperson in this company. I was simply a day-laborer brought in to fill a low-level position. I also wasn’t asking God to make things happen for me. I simply “decided” what I wanted, and felt assured—had faith—that I would get it. I didn’t spend any time during the week thinking about whether I would get what I wanted or not, nor did I question the process. Once I set it in motion, I let it go and only checked at the end to verify that my timesheet matched what I had specified.
From the many experiments I performed, I had solid proof that I could get the results I wanted from prayer. Exactly how this worked was still a matter of debate, and I continued to test many different techniques and combinations of techniques for years afterwards.
Despite many suggestions that faith was the only requirement for prayer, my experiments led me to conclude that there were three keys to unlock the power of miracles. I knew that faith was one of those factors, but I also found that mental focus was a factor, as well as something I now call “harmonic resonance with God.”
All of these factors will be discussed in depth in this book.
Relationship Success
One of the most enjoyable results of prayer is the wonderful relationship I have with my wife, Linda. When I decided it was time to pray for the “perfect” relationship, I started by looking at the beliefs I had about relationships, and considered how I could increase my faith in this area.
I would say that the most important new beliefs were: 1) as long as I use prayer to create what I want, my life will always get better, and 2) every relationship is like a walk in the woods—sometimes you run into brier patches, but if you continue, you get to see glorious splendors. Both beliefs are based on faith—faith that there will be good times ahead.
Once I knew what new beliefs would support my prayers, I began working with self-hypnosis. (I would use a different process now.) I spent a few sessions a week programming the new beliefs into my mind so my reaction patterns would support the goal I set. Then, I started performing a form of prayer I call creative daydreaming.
In those sessions, I would enter a light to medium level meditative state. While in that state, I would affirm “I am now creating the future I want, and the images I play in my mind will manifest into my life. My inner mind knows the best way for this to happen, and it brings this about in the best way possible.” (Again, I would do it differently today.)
For the next period of time (probably about 10 – 20 minutes), I would daydream about the relationship I wanted. I saw myself meeting someone who attracted me, and I saw her being attracted to me as well. I saw us spending lots of time together, and while seeing these things, I felt the emotions I knew I would feel when the events actually happened. I felt the most intense feeling of love I could imagine feeling. I felt the emotion of happiness, the emotion of desire, and all the other emotions that fill a good relationship. And yes, I daydreamed about wonderful sex.
After each session, I would feel very much at peace. There may have been a slight feeling of emptiness since the relationship was not there at the time, but I felt as if it would come soon enough. In essence, I felt as if I had spent some quality time with the woman of my dreams, and although she was gone, she would return later.
I continued to work with these prayer sessions nearly every day for several weeks. Then I had to focus on other tasks, so I let it go. (This was during a period of rebuilding my life after some failed experiments.) In a few months, I met Linda, who is now my wife. As soon as I met her, I knew she was the one. Virtually everything I visualized, including many elements I had never experienced in a relationship, are now a part of our life together.
Business Success
As you may recall, my life took a major downturn after I left high school, to the point where I became homeless. Living in such desperate circumstances proved to be a major handicap, as I quickly lost any faith in my ability to succeed. (Probably why we have the saying, “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”)
Although I had experienced limited success in financial matters, such as in the die-cutting shop example, true prosperity continued to elude me for many years. (If I had only known then what I know now….)
Over time, I discovered several techniques to build my faith (discussed later in this book), and the more I used them, the more my results improved.
Along the way, I also learned photography. Eventually, I started working for Lifetouch doing school pictures, Olan Mills doing portraits, and a local company doing weddings. I also started pursuing freelance work in my free time.
All while praying that I would be successful.
A breakthrough came after I created my own “not-so-subliminal” tape to help reprogram my inner beliefs about money and success in general. I simply recorded myself repeating dozens of positive statements about what I thought were important beliefs to have. When I played the tape in the background while doing other things, it became subliminal since I wasn’t focused on listening to the recording.
Within a few months, I was making good money as a photographer, and having a great time doing it. In fact, there were some jobs where I walked away with the equivalent of $1,000 for each hour I was there!
An even bigger breakthrough came when I prayed again for increased prosperity. In those prayers, I imagined owning a business which paid me a large, regular income and didn’t require my personal involvement on a day-to-day basis. As I exercised, I pretended that my company was being handled by employees, and when the phone rang, I pretended it was a big order coming in.
At the time, I had no idea what kind of business it would be, but I knew it could happen simply because I was praying for it.
In the following months, I started noticing many suggestions to start a business on the Internet. I had no idea how to create a website, and frankly, I didn’t want to learn, so I resisted the idea. However, the more the idea was suggested to me, the more I realized that God was trying to tell me something.
What got me off my butt and online was an idea I heard while listening to the audio version of One Minute Millionaire by Robert G. Allen and Mark Victor Hansen. I heard that there were website services to help you create an instant Internet storefront using a point-and-click interface.
The idea intrigued me, especially since the authors claimed it would generate a passive income with no day-to-day personal involvement. Although the resources they listed were no longer available, and the process wasn’t as easy as they said, I did find a way to set up a website using a point-and-click interface. And thus, my first website (www.KeysToPower.com) was born. (It’s changed a lot since then.)
One thing led to the next, and within a month, I was making money online. The more I learned, the more money I made. The nature of the Internet allows quick, cheap testing of advertising, impossible in any other form of business. And although I made many mistakes and spent a ton of money on my education (buying ebooks, software, and marketing courses), the business was “in the black” (had earned more than I had spent) in less than 6 months. Almost impossible with any off-line business!
Over the years, my prayers have continued to produce tangible results. My relationship with Linda keeps getting better and better. My business grows more profitable, and has brought in as much as $5,000 in a single day.
Now, I get to spend my days the way I want, and life is good.