True Prayer

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True Prayer

For most people, if we look at what their prayer is, it is: “God give me this, give me that, God save me.” What we are seeking in prayer is not God. We are seeking security and happiness. Ultimately, what we want with prayer is wellbeing, but we are not willing to admit it. The first step is to be straight and honest with ourselves. Then we can see how to cross the threshold of limitations to true wellbeing.

It is time we realised that looking to God will not help until we look at our own foolishness. If we sincerely look at our deepest motivation for religion, we will see we have never aspired for the Divine. Our aspiration was never for the ultimate. Our aspiration is for comfort, wealth, power and pleasure. But we think God is a tool to achieve all those things. When we seek protection or material things, greed and fear have become the basis of our prayer. This does not work.

Ordinarily, we think prayer is a means to reach God, but what do we really know about God? If we are truthful, we must admit we have no direct experience of God; we are coming from a particular belief system. Using prayer to reach a God we have no direct experience of, can be illusionary. Thoughts and prayer can open a person, but at the same time they can create hallucinations. Once hallucinations start growing, they take on such a big dimension because the illusory is always more powerful than reality. An illusion has the freedom of becoming anything it wants. The cinema is more powerful than real life. We can just exaggerate it the way we want it to. When the illusory process gets exaggerated, it becomes more powerful than life. So, prayer can not only be misused, but can also be deceptive.

We need to understand that it is not the prayer which makes the difference, it is being prayerful as a quality and not as an act which makes the difference. Becoming prayerful means that our whole being has become an offering. It is a process of offering our own self. Being prayerful is a deep connection with the Divine inherent in everything and everywhere. It is a quality, a state of being. As we become prayerful, it is extremely beautiful. But that state is reached only when we connect to our inner nature. Then, the experience is absolutely joyous.

When we are really joyous, we are wide open and can receive. Prayer no longer becomes a monologue, but a beautiful phenomenon and a celebration which brings great joy. Then, we pray not out of fear or greed, but because prayer itself is the reward.

Patanjali, considered the father of modern yoga, goes as far as to say that when one knows how to be truly prayerful, prayer is not a means to reach God, but God is only a means so that we can pray.