I am not religious, but I’ve read a fair bit of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, most of The Bhagavad Gita, a little bit of the Quran, the full Tao Te Ching many times, and I’ve dabbled in a few other scriptures.

Of these I’ve studied the Tao Te Ching the most, and at some point I want to explore this 81 verse text even more. But to me one of the most interesting verses from a religious text comes from the book of Matthew in the New Testament:

Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

I think that this is more true than we think… and the challenge of this is in what we actually think. Yes, we all know that person that seems to be charmed, they walk through life like the world is their oyster and good things seem to happen to them all the time. And we also know an Eeyore, someone who seems to walk around with his or her own rain cloud, much like the gloomy character in Winnie the Pooh. In both cases these people seem to get what they want, although those things are drastically different from each other. But most people we know are not as extreme as these two characters.

Yet most of us inherently do spend much of our lives getting what we ask for. The thing we don’t realize is that:

We ask the wrong questions.

We seek the wrong things.

We knock on the wrong doors.

There is a lot of talk about the power of positive thinking, and I believe that the truth in it is that thinking positively allows you to ask the right questions, seek the right goals, and find the right doors to open up for you. Yet we often don’t ask the right questions. Have you ever wondered, “Why does stuff like this happen to me?” Ask and it will be given to you.

So often we want things that we don’t know how to properly ask for. We choose to look in the wrong places for luck, love, happiness, wealth, and success. We shut doors on ourselves, blocking opportunities because we don’t believe we are worthy, successful, capable, or even lucky enough to get through the metaphorical door.

This doesn’t mean we should blindly and blissfully go through life thinking positive and suddenly we will get everything we want. It does mean that we should question how we speak to ourselves, how we internalize the things that happen to and around us. When you think the world conspires against you, conspiracies continue to show up. When we wonder why other people are so lucky, we are unintentionally asking ourselves why we are not lucky? When we are bitter because someone else has an opportunity that we want our jealousy closes us off to finding our own similar opportunities.

It’s not magical. It’s not divine intervention. It’s our ability to open ourselves to opportunities and to see them as such. It’s recognizing how we limit ourselves in what we ask and seek… and allowing ourselves to find the right doors when opportunity knocks.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.