AVOID COMMERCIAL SPIRIT IN PRAYER

[Guest guest]

Prayer saves. But what are prayers but thoughts? Many a person

fancies that he must put forward a definite demand in prayer to the

`highest' powers and get it granted by force of prayer. There is some

truth in this mixed up with much error and confusion. What comes

often after prayer and is supposed to be the result of prayer, is

very often something fixed up by a higher power which, as part of its

plan, produces the thought of prayer first. Prayer often proves to be

the immediate predecessor, but not the efficient and direct cause of

the result. `Post hoc, ergo propter hoc' (i.e., After that; therefore

due to that) is what we frequently say and believe. Many a man says

`I prayed; I got it. So it is prayer that got it'. But this is

neither logically nor theologically sound. The fact is that prayer is

a means of placing one in contact with higher beneficent powers and

there it serves its primary purpose. Incidentally when a devout soul

is deeply concentrating on God, what happens is that the soul gets so

thoroughly saturated with divine that divine power infiltrates into

the Jiva and the combined power or the higher power (both are same,

despite difference in names) produces certain results. It is the man

of prayer that draws down divinity i.e., turns divine at the moment

of intense prayer and is responsible for certain results (Etad hyeva

aksharam jnatwa yo yad ichchati tasya tat. KHATAUI (2)16, i.e.,

Having realised the Imperishable, if one has desire, that is

fulfilled) even when the results have not been previously fixed up,

as the result of previous karma.

 

It is always good to pray, because it brings one in contact with God.

The prayer, however, that is found most common in society is

occasional prayer for a definite material object, and there it stops.

It is always advisable to avoid the commercial spirit when dealing

with God. We should not bargain with God. Nor should we say, `I will

pray to you only for such and such an object being gained'. The

thought of God purifies the soul, and the purified soul gets power to

draw God more and more into it. The commercialised soul, if too much

oppressed with the contemplation of the worldly benefit is

handicapping itself and preventing its purification, that is,

saturation with God idea. (Purity means having God-idea and impurity

is lack of God or God-idea). The very idea of material objects may so

obsess a mind as practically to obliterate the thought of God. God

then becomes only a secondary consideration, a sort of side element,

a weak coloration when the main object before the mind's eye is

worldly gain. Such approaches are deplorable, however attractive the

object to be gained by prayer may be. One ought to have prayer

without concentrating too much on worldly gains. Concentration on God

alone is purity. Purity means power, and when a soul is thoroughly

pure, then the objects entertained in the mind of the prayerful soul

some time previously, that is even before the prayer began, remain in

the subconscious i.e., at the back of the praying party's mind and

may come to fruition by the power of the purified and strengthened

soul. This is an incidental benefit, which ought not to turn the

scales when one considers how he should pray. Prayer is primarily and

essentially only an affair of the soul with God. All intervention of

outside objects is an interference with the soul's concentration on

God. Prayer must be purified by very keen practice – i.e., it must be

shorn of all undesirable elements just as we keep off the floating

moss repeatedly when we bathe in a tank. In case where however one is

in dire extremity and prayer comes out from him for a much needed

object, in spite of oneself, as was the case with Chandorkar on the

Harischandra hill, then prayer cannot be condemned at all. Prayer is

a natural vent of the heart. We leap out at what we want on the wings

of prayer. It is God Himself that has implanted this tendency to seek

God's help to attain objects of great importance to one's material or

spiritual life and each time we so seek, we should stress in our mind

that God is our first and final object and that other objects form a

temporary and partial diversion or screen.

 

Courtesy: HH Pujyasri B. V. Narasimah Swamiji

(Shri Vasuki Mahal Shirdi Sai Baba Trust, Coimbatore, India)