PRAYER SAVES

PRAYER SAVES

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 prayerwithout 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.

HH Pujyasri B. V. Narasimah Swamiji