From Pretending to Mastery

There are two basic ways of looking at life. The first way is to believe that we run the world, that we can shape our own destiny, and that we can carve our own success. At most, maybe 1-2% of the world’s population can even come close to “claiming” that they have done this, like those successful “entrepreneurs” who are rich, and getting richer by the day. According to their philosophy, the only reason there are poor people in the world is because those poor people aren’t buying enough motivational DVDs, or attending self-help seminars, or going for personal coaching.

The second choice is the authentic Jewish choice that says that G-d is running the world, and that the world isn’t running itself. This choice says that the world is being run by a Supreme Intelligence, or Supreme Being, who is kind and benevolent, and who has His own wisdom about what’s really good for us, His creations. And usually, we don’t have an inkling of what that might be, as so many of us seem to be walking around in the dark and we have no idea whether our own plans are going to materialize.

The people in the first group believe that they can plan and design life. We say to them: “you can’t.”

The advantage of being part of the second group is that when things don’t come easy and when they don’t go the way we would like them to, if we still have faith, then we still have the tools and strategies available to us to turn those failures into real successes.

In fact, the tools that are available to the people in the second group are even more powerful when things aren’t going the way we would like them to go, because when we get stuck (in the first way of looking at the world) and we can see that secular methods aren’t working for us, we are then ready to put ourselves whole-heartedly into the second choice.

So if you’re like me and have already been to all the life-coaches, all the therapists, all the self-help seminars and all the parenting workshops that there are, and you’ve already invested so much of your time and money and energy, it’s time to wake up and realize that there is a G-d in the world, and that when you give yourself to Him, He will help you. It’s when we finally get to that realization, that we can get really excited about prayer.

We realize that if we would have prayed really hard before we opened the business, it really might have worked out. Or, that if we would have prayed really hard every day for good health, that the health problem may never have appeared. Or, that if we would have also prayed on the “good days”, and not just when the problems came, things could have been so different.

Even if we don’t know how to pray, that doesn’t necessarily have to stop us, or slow us down. All that means is that I’m going to start off by praying to learn how to pray, and that G-d will help me to enjoy it! If I invest that type of energy into my praying, who knows what might happen.

A powerful tip that can help you to achieve anything in life is your ability to pretend that you already know how to do whatever it is you want. You can pretend to be a happier person, you can pretend to be a smarter or more organized person, and you can also pretend that you believe in G-d and believe in your prayers more than you presently do.

When a person whose emuna has dropped prays to G-d “as if” he had total emuna, don’t you think that G-d will recognize that they are trying to achieve real authentic emuna?

Okay, so right now you may still be full of doubts, right now you may be still be feeling skeptical – but still, you can “pretend” your way back to G-d.  By “pretending” that you have faith you are demonstrating to G-d that your deepest will is to find your way back to Him – G-d will certainly reward anyone who does this.