By Gonny 
Most people answer without hesitation: God.
It feels natural. Almost automatic. Prayer goes up, God listens somewhere above, and maybe, if the request is reasonable, humble, or desperate enough, something comes back down.
But what if that picture is already slightly off?
In A Course in Miracles, prayer is turned inside out. Not rejected, not mocked, but re-understood. Because the Course is less interested in to whom we pray, and far more interested in from where the prayer comes.
When I pray, something in me is speaking.
And something in me is listening.
That alone changes everything.
If prayer is asking for protection, improvement, healing, forgiveness, or relief, the question becomes: who believes these things are missing? Who feels small, unsafe, guilty, or incomplete? The Course would say: that is the ego speaking. Not wrong, not sinful…..just mistaken about what it is and where help comes from.
And then there is another Listener.
Not a distant God keeping score. Not a divine manager deciding which prayers are approved. But the quiet presence in the mind that already knows the Truth. The Voice for sanity. The remembrance of Love. The Holy Spirit, as the Course calls it, not separate from you, but within your own awareness.
Prayer, in this light, is not a message sent upward.
It is a moment of listening inward.
This is why so many prayers feel unanswered. Not because God ignores them, but because the mind is asking for confirmation of separation. Asking to be special. Asking for forms to change while keeping the underlying belief intact: I am something that lacks.
The Course is very practical here. It says: you always receive what you truly ask for. Not necessarily what you consciously say, but what you believe you are. If I pray as a frightened body in a dangerous world, I reinforce that identity. The prayer has been “heard”…by the ego….and the world obliges.
That may sound confronting, but it is actually freeing.
Because it means prayer is not about convincing God. It is about choosing again. Choosing which voice I want to hear myself through.
True prayer, as the Course describes it, is not begging. It is remembering. It is the willingness to let go of the idea that I know what I need. It is the quiet sentence: Help me see this differently.
And who listens to that?
The part of the mind that already sees differently.
This is why the most powerful prayers often have no words. A sigh. A pause. A soft “I don’t know.” A moment of stillness in which the mind stops instructing reality and allows itself to be instructed instead.
Children understand this instinctively. They don’t pray with theology. They pray with trust. Animals don’t pray at all, and yet they rest completely in what is. Perhaps that is why peace feels so natural around them.
So when I pray…who is listening?
Not a God outside of me deciding my worth.
But the Love within me, waiting patiently for me to stop arguing with it.
Prayer is not a request to change the world.
It is an invitation to let the mind be changed.
And that Listener has never missed a single word.
With love and light,
G.