Within the depth-psychology and contemplative library, prayer is treated not as a peripheral devotional habit but as the axial activity through which the psyche either opens toward or closes against the ground of being. The corpus divides broadly into two registers. In the hesychast and Philokalic tradition — represented by Evagrius, Climacus, Maximos, Gregory of Sinai, and the Philokalia translators — prayer is understood as the ascent of the intellect (nous) to God, a progressive purification of the passionate faculty culminating in wordless, imageless communion. Here prayer possesses an ontological dimension: it is not petitionary address but the intellect’s very nature realizing itself. A second, Sufi-inflected register, most powerfully articulated by Henry Corbin’s reading of Ibn ‘Arabi, reconceives prayer as a creative, cosmogonic act — the conjunction of Worshiper and Worshiped that constitutes a new epiphany and mirrors the act of Creation itself. A third, therapeutic register appears in Twelve Step literature, where prayer functions pragmatically as a technology of surrender, guidance, and reconnection with an Inner Child or Higher Power. Running across all three registers is the tension between effortful, disciplined practice and the grace-given state in which prayer transcends act and becomes continuous being. The question of distraction, imageless attention, and the danger of demonic substitution further distinguishes serious contemplative psychology from merely ritual recitation.