What is True Prayer

A Course in Miracles:

Prayer is a way offered by the Holy Spirit to reach God. It is not merely a question or an entreaty. It cannot succeed until you realize that it asks for nothing. How else could it serve its purpose? It is impossible to pray for idols and hope to reach God. True prayer must avoid the pitfall of asking to entreat. Ask, rather, to receive what is already given; to accept what is already there. (S.1.I.1)

The premise of A Course in Miracles is that we are in Heaven with God dreaming that we are not. We made up this world and these forms to be special and to hide from God.

We are the Son of God, the Christ. We are perfect. Prayer, in the Course's definition, is not used to ask for something. We are perfect. What would we need? True Prayer is used to commune with God and is a tool to help us remember who we are. In True Prayer we join with God. We might tell Him how much we love Him and how grateful we are that he created us perfect, just like Him. We might tell God how grateful we are to be completely taken care of by Him, forever safe and totally provided for. Then we become quiet. In this place of wholeness we can relax into our oneness and completely surrender. This is the Song of Prayer.

Then sometime later an inspired thought might come to us about some “problem” we have, a new way of thinking about it. This would be known as the echo of the Song. It's not the Song but a fringe benefit of the Song. It's not the purpose of the prayer. The key was joining with God in love and gratitude. You forget everything and get lost in His love. You become filled with the Spirit. Then having joined with the Holy Spirit, you, however temporarily, remember who you are and see the way to negotiate whatever you need to negotiate. We cannot ask God to fix our dream. He has nothing to do with it. But we can commune with Him, remember who we are and instead of making the situation real we can peacefully use it to get home to God.