It is always good to pray

[Guest guest]

...... " 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 commercialized

soul, if too much oppressed with the contemplation of

the worldy 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, and 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 gross elements just as we keep off

the floating moss repeatedly when we bathe in a tank.

In cases where however one is in dire extremity and

prayer comes out from him for a much needed object, in

spite of oneself, then the prayer cannot be condemned

at all. Prayer is a natural vent for 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. "