The Text - Section 36
36. PRAYER
Greetings in the Name of the Lord. Blessings for all of you, my friends; blessed is this hour.
To seek God is the most glorious and gratifying of all activities. To find God is perforce a
slow and gradual process. To seek and to find God means liberation; it means freedom from your
inner chains. In order to find God, you must go, as we say, "on the path."
The "path" does not mean that you walk down a road that is already there for you. When you
first decide to walk it, there is no path yet, you have to make it. You are actually a "pathfinder" in an
unexplored jungle, seeking the way through wild shrubbery and growth, setting down one foot after
another in a slow but steady process. In this jungle you constantly create soul forms with your
thoughts, feelings, and actions.
In the average human soul there is such a jungle. It is not at all bad or criminal. It is merely
confusion, error, lack of self-knowledge, deviation from divine law: it is ignorance that creates a
wilderness through which you have to find your way, with God as your final goal. Your inner
stubbornness and prejudices create conflicts in your soul, as well as in your outer life. These may be
seen as rocks and stones, high mountains which you have to dissolve. You have to make your way
through your various faults, which appear in your soul as unruly shrubbery and often as poisonous
growth, instead of turning away from them as you did before you decided to go on this path. And
there are rivers to cross, wild waters to manage and rechannel. These are your uncontrolled
emotions -- uncontrolled only because you do not understand their origin and real meaning. There
are precipices to jump, my friends -- your fears of life as it actually presents itself, your fears of pain
and disappointment. To master your life you have to jump into the unknown; to lose your fears you
have to go through them. You must not turn away from your self-created precipices, which need
not exist in the first place if you were to understand and take life as it is. After you "jump" you find
that there was no precipice!
The jungle I speak of is not merely an analogy. These forms exist in actual fact. They exist in
subtle matter. On the path, you find your way through all the difficulties that exist within yourself.
The path is not easy. It is a long mountain climb, very steep at times and often shadowed,
enveloped in darkness. At other times, when you have won a small victory the sun comes out and
you rest for a while; the scenery becomes a little more friendly and brighter. Then you go on again.
Sometimes you cannot see the goal for a long time; you know what it is, but you are far from direct
awareness of it.
For quite a long while at the beginning of the path, it seems as though you are going around in
circles, always encountering the same scenery, apparently not moving from the spot you started
from. This would be discouraging if you didn't know that it is an illusion. Actually, you are moving
on, and the circle is what I call "the spiral." This is an inevitable experience on the path.
All your faults, errors, ignorances, and their complexities create one big vicious circle in your
soul. This circle consists of individual faults which affect and interact with one another and cause a
chain reaction. To break this vicious circle, you have to understand thoroughly the individual faults
that constitute your vicious circle. You have to concentrate on one after the other so as to find the
link of cause and effect within your circle. The whole circle cannot possibly be understood
completely from having made the round only once. When you complete the first round, you start
again. Each time you start again, you gain a slightly profounder understanding of the various
highlights and individual points in the circle until eventually you see the whole circle in your mind
and understand the interdependence of all your negative qualities. Then you will cease to experience
your faults as unconnected. Until you reach this perspective, you have to repeat the round often. At
the beginning this seems to you like senseless repetition, lacking in progress. It is not! Without
going through this most important part on the path you cannot become free and reach the light.
Thus the circle becomes a spiral leading upward very gradually.
Some of you may think you know your faults already. This will be so only to the extent you
have been active on the path. You may know some of your faults, but others you have not yet
discovered. As I have said before, there is a vast difference between knowing and knowing. To
what depth do you know? How much can you connect your faults with your good qualities? And
your faults with each other? Can you really grasp and understand your fears, insecurities, and
complexes from the point of view of your faults in relation to their deviation from the divine laws?
Until you reach such understanding, you must go around and around in your particular vicious
circle.
By now you know that all faults come from pride, self-will, and fear. It is essential that you
see and feel how each and every one of your faults derives from one or all of these three basic faults.
Find the common denominator. This is not easy if you are to understand it emotionally. For that
you have to go through the faults and their connections step by step, again and again; you have to
follow the vicious circle through until you grasp it well enough so that you can break it at one point.
Every time you conclude one round and start the next, you follow an upward-winding spiral. At the
beginning the upward slant is so slight that you do not even notice it. But later on, you will clearly
feel that every time you start anew, you have gained a profounder insight into your problems, and
you will not be discouraged anymore by an apparent standstill.
At the very beginning you do not know or feel that there is such a vicious circle in you. You
experience such confusion that you do not even know where to begin. Although you know some of
your faults and all of your outer problems, you cannot as yet connect the one with the other. That is
the most difficult part at the beginning. Everything within yourself is still disorganized. You do not
know where to begin, what to hold on to. The moment you focus your attention on one complexity
or problem, other things come up that apparently have no connection, and you become confused.
Only self-discipline and perseverance will get you to the point when you finally can see the whole
picture of the vicious circle, how one defect is caused by another in a chain reaction. When you get
to the point of clarity, you are moving into a major phase. You must not get discouraged when at
first the disorganization is so great that you do not know where or how to start. After a while
everything will no longer be running like sand through your fingers. You will have something
definite to hold on to, a clear picture of this cycle.
The vicious circle consists of a multiplicity of character defects which, at various points, will
draw together and show you major problems that can be looked at and worked with. When you
progress further, you will find one major point that is the key to your entire personality and to all
your problems. You must find that key yourself, and you must do it through your own labor. To
tell it to you would not do you any good.
The forms I speak of do exist, my friends. And we, in spirit, can see them clearly. On the
path, the forms vary with each individual, for no two people are alike or have the same outer
manifestation of inner problems. An infinite variety of good and bad currents influence one
another.
I promised you that I would speak about prayer tonight, because it is one of the most essential
requisites to develop and advance on the path. Without prayer -- and putting your intentions into
practice -- nothing can be accomplished.
Now what is prayer? Many people have no questions about it; they just take it for granted.
Many others cannot understand prayer. They say -- in their own way and not without logic -- why
should God grant a human being help or grace simply in response to prayer? Why should someone
else who works but fails to pray not receive it? This argument seems, at first sight, logical. But the
simple fact is that a person who does not pray will never be able to act or experience fulfillment like
the person who has learned what proper prayer is and practices it. I will now try to explain this to
you.
God's grace, God's help, and God's light exist all over the universe. God does not decide to
give or to withhold it, my friends. The experience of God's love depends on how receptive one is.
It is up to the individual, in the body or as a spirit, to breach the wall that separates the lower self
from God's grace, God's strength, God's mercy, God's love, and all the other divine attributes.
Prayer is essential to achieve this goal. "How?" -- you may ask.
In the first place, prayer is the best exercise for learning concentration. Without the ability to
concentrate you cannot achieve anything in life. You need to be able to concentrate when you are
on the path. Many systems exist in your world that advise particular, separate concentration
exercises. My advice however is that prayer and concentration exercises can be combined.
There is no better way of learning to concentrate than by a systematic way of praying. By
focusing on an object you will not learn concentration any better than you will by zeroing in on what
you want to pray for. You can simultaneously derive the benefit of prayer without losing time by
concentrating on some non-essentials. Anyone on the path must learn to focus attention on what is
really essential. Concentration on an object is not essential, but may be better than nothing, so that
someone who has no belief in God may at least learn concentration.
Daily prayer is important because of the concentration and the discipline that are prerequisites
for the process of purification. How can you be on the path if you cannot give yourself a necessary
and regular discipline? How can you be on the path if you are unable to concentrate on the
mainstream of your life, specifically your spiritual development?
You learn to concentrate when you pray, for instance, for your loved ones. First, you engage
in the mental process of thinking of them; then to that mental process you bring your feelings and
the depths of your soul, your deepest wishes for God's grace. The same procedure should be
practiced in praying for your enemies. Here the mental process may not be so difficult, but uniting
your feelings with your good will may be a lengthier task. Pray for individuals you know, as well as
for humanity and all spirits in the universe as a whole. Pray for peace, the spreading of truth and the
fulfillment of the Plan of Salvation. Pray for all the blind creatures who are still in darkness. Pray
for the purification process of more and more individuals. Concentrate on the thought forms of
everything you have learned: the necessity for self-unfoldment through self-recognition; the
overcoming of the lower self; the rechanneling of wrong currents, and the attainment of love,
brotherhood, humility, and the union and development of all beings. Such thoughts create clear,
light, and good forms that will definitely have effect.
This most creative activity will strengthen your mind, even if it does nothing else. Of course,
your thoughts will stray at the beginning. Of course, you will have difficulty maintaining and
focusing your attention, but that is the work to be done. If you do not let yourself become
discouraged by the inevitable initial hurdles, eventually, little by little, you will learn to pray better.
When your thoughts wander, just start where you left off without any self-reproach, being mentally
and emotionally as relaxed as possible. Prayer is a training that is part of your development.
In addition to the concentration and discipline prayer helps you achieve, you benefit in that
during prayer your frame of mind will automatically be different from when you do not pray. This
will occur in more ways than one. The simple fact that you decide to devote a certain period of
every day to prayer, making a disciplined effort to concentrate on others and expressing unselfish
desires, already creates a definite change in the organism of your subtle bodies, as well as eventually
in your physical body.
Most people are not capable of cultivating compassionate and good thoughts throughout their
daily lives. While they can succeed in prayer, outside of it they fall back into the bad habits of their
erring souls. Love, well-meaning and unselfish goodwill, can be expressed in prayer, but only some
of the time when you are not praying. When something goes wrong, most people are unable to feel
what they can sincerely feel when they pray. So the importance of prayer lies not only in training
your ability to concentrate, to discipline yourself; you also learn to cultivate thoughts you are unable
to sincerely feel when you do not pray. In prayer you may sincerely wish well those who have hurt
you. Outside of prayer, you cannot do so as yet. At the beginning, for some people this is difficult
even in prayer, but eventually they will succeed if they try again and again.
Prayer has a wonderfully cleansing effect on your soul. Of course, the ultimate aim is that
your whole life will become a prayer. But that is a long way off. None of my friends are far enough
advanced yet seriously to live a prayer. When you are that far, you will not have to sit down at a
certain time each day and pray, because you will then emanate prayer by every breath you take, by
every thought passing through your mind; even your unconscious feelings will be prayer.
Oh, I know there are many people, particularly nowadays, who force themselves to think
positive thoughts. But that is not what I mean. Prayer must come from the heart, from the
innermost recesses of the mind. If emotional currents do not follow suit in harmony with the
positive thoughts, then there is a self-deception that may bring greater repercussions than if you
stated clearly and simply where you stand in your own mind. To find the truth about yourself -- the
chasm that exists between your thoughts and your feelings -- prayer is necessary.
It is vital that you learn to focus your attention on yourself -- not selfishly, but constructively.
Your attention should be focused as well on your problems from a spiritual point of view, if you
want to advance on your path. In prayer you will automatically tend to view yourself, your faults,
your problems, and your experiences in a different light than you would have done if you were still
affected by the often unspiritual influences of your usual surroundings. Developing a concise
understanding of yourself and your problems is another requirement. It introduces an order into
your soul that cannot be maintained without your unceasing efforts. You will then learn to realize,
deeply, that your outer problems are nothing else than the manifestation of your inner shortcomings.
It is not easy to reach this understanding. Only by clear-cut and concise expression -- at least in
thought forms and clear statements -- will you reach this point. How many of you still separate your
problems from your shortcomings, even if you do know in theory and in principle that a connection
exists? How much work does it take to make the connection between the two? That part of the
work should be done also in prayer.
You can, if you prefer, call it meditation. It is the same. Through meditation you take the
trouble to clarify and to present your problems concisely to God and to yourself. You must know
God wants you to find out the truth within yourself. No one can find answers and develop without
daily prayer.
Ordinarily your thoughts run wild. You concentrate, perhaps to excess, on a minor detail,
overemphasizing the effect instead of going to the cause. People often do not bring into focus what
is of real importance unless they are in prayer. I do not wish to imply that everyone who prays goes
to the heart of the matter. There are many who pray daily, using ready-made prayers, or perhaps
self-made ones, but without doing what is most essential for their purification. However, any
person who wants to be on the path will often find the strength and the desire to do so when
praying, in direct awareness of the duty to do God's will. Otherwise, one is tempted to follow an old
line of thinking and reacting, shirking the real issues.
Another important element of prayer is that anyone who approaches God in prayer will
automatically have a more humble attitude. Even people who constantly blame others and the
world, or fate, or God for their miseries will, at least during the time of prayer, change their way of
thinking and become more humble. Gradually but surely, this new attitude will become theirs at all
times. Others, who feel strongly -- although they may not be conscious of it -- that the whole world
revolves around their ego, that they are the most important beings, will learn to feel differently by
cultivating thoughts in prayer that gradually will affect their emotional currents and their entire
outlook on life. People who feel their ego to be the center of the world tend to judge everything
from a subjective point of view. Such people -- many of whom also display goodwill toward self-
development -- have an inner image which makes them feel that they are the highest, most
important creatures in the universe. Even their idea of God is cut to order to suit their personal,
unpurified needs. There are many who are too proud to ask for a favor. When they pray they have
to learn that. A special kind of humility is summoned up when one asks and accepts a favor from
someone more powerful. How many feel ashamed to do so and are even proud to feel ashamed?
Isn't that a sign of pride? In prayer you learn to humble yourself; it is another medicine for your
soul, another cleansing.
Prayer helps thin the wall between you and the divine forces waiting to stream into your soul.
You have to make this inflow possible through your own efforts. Just as your negative reactions and
thoughts create forms of confusion, so thoughts and feelings you cultivate in prayer create good,
clear, and harmonious forms. These forms will eventually help you change your inner and often
unconscious attitudes rooted in pride, self-will, fear, and error. They equip you to be the pathfinder
through your own jungle and wilderness.
So, my friends, do not tell me, "I love God and I try to be a good person; I do not need to
pray unless I feel particularly inspired." This is utterly wrong. The further you are developed, the
more is expected of you, and the greater is your duty to overcome what is most difficult for you.
God will not make it easier for you to arrive at this daily discipline by sending you the necessary
inspiration and "mood." You have to learn how to overcome the difficulties of making this daily
cleansing process second nature. The more difficult it is to summon the discipline for the daily
prayer, the more you need it! It is a fact that whatever you neglect on your path, whatever way you
deviate from your life plan, will create new repercussions in your life.
The person who has already made prayer a daily discipline must be careful of an opposite
extreme -- the extreme of routine. Routine is always apt to become the pitfall for many good things.
One of the difficulties in experiencing the perfection of divine harmony is to find the happy medium
in everything and to resist extremes which are always temptations. You have to find a proper
balance.
By routine I mean that you go on praying for the same things and the act itself gives you a
certain satisfaction, as of a duty done. As long as the daily discipline is difficult to muster, you have
to fight to attain it. Once it does become second nature, do not cease praying, but be wakeful that
your prayer remains alive. Be mindful and wary that you do not just say words that have also
become a habit, and that, though they are good words as such, you do not feel as strongly about
them as you did when they were new.
Furthermore, pray according to your daily needs. You do not remain at the same point,
particularly when you are on the path. Your phases change as you move around your personal
vicious circle. And life will bring challenges and experiences for you -- big or small -- according to
your present developmental needs. Thus different problems will come to the surface at different
times. Be watchful and adjust your prayer accordingly, to keep it forever new and alive. The various
points of your vicious circle will come up in turn, as time goes by. Each point may be at the surface
for a certain period -- for a few weeks or even months at a time. You cannot concentrate with equal
strength on all the points in your circle, but there will come the phase where you can centralize a few
major issues in the vicious circle. Concentration on the overall picture can be practiced occasionally
when you make a major recognition.
To adjust your prayer to the phases of your development, you need to be watchful and
recognize how the daily events in your life and your reactions to them relate to your inner vicious
circle. You can thus resist the temptation of making your prayer into a routine. It will then remain
alive, ever changing according to your changing path. Gradually, you will be able to concentrate
better on what is needed each day and you will not disperse yourself. In order not to neglect the
many things for which you pray that have nothing to do with yourself directly, you may keep certain
highlights that you want to remember, but here again be careful that you keep your feelings alive.
Listen to the strength of your feelings. Take your daily needs -- not material needs -- into your
prayer and consider all that happens from the viewpoint of spiritual development, asking God for
help and understanding. You may have to struggle for this understanding. So it is necessary that
you then penetrate your unconscious with these new insights by forming the thought form from
various angles. Ask God each day what you have to learn. Ask for His help. This will gradually
impress your unconscious mind so that a good imprint can form within yourself. The process
amounts to instructing your unconscious. It keeps clearly in front of your mind's eye what your
immediate goal is -- the goal you can see now. It will also give you a better knowledge of how much
you continue to deviate from the goal when you observe yourself in your daily review.
If you who work in such a way on the path gradually dissolve the separating wall around the
soul, then divine strength and help cannot fail to flow into you. But you have to do it first, my dear
ones.
QUESTION: Isn't prayer also a confirmation of faith in God?
ANSWER: Of course it is. That is part of what I have been saying, although I did not
express it the same way.
QUESTION: Could you give us three or four highlights of what should be part of every
prayer every day?
ANSWER: The spreading of truth among humankind. Praying for unhappy souls and human
beings generally. Praying for loved ones -- which is easy. Your prayers should also be for those
whom you do not like. The more you dislike them, the more you should pray for them. Then try to
observe your feelings when you wish them happiness. Do not deceive yourself. Say to yourself, "A
part of me wants this; another part of me is still struggling against good wishes for certain people."
In this way, you will not be living a lie. Try it and ask God to help you to feel wholeheartedly within
yourself love for everyone, at least while you pray.
Everyone should pray for peace, for love, brotherhood, justice, the spreading of divine law.
But you can only be a great contributor to peace and brotherhood if you cultivate these qualities
within yourself. As long as hatred, resentment, and intolerance exist in you, you contribute to the
opposite of all that you pray for. Your realization that you are a part of the Universe and can further
or hinder divine truth, peace, and love, will make you feel more responsible, and your prayer for all
these highest values will not be divorced quite so much anymore from your own development and
your sense of participation with every other creature in existence.
The self-will, pride, and fear inherent in every human being will give way to humility, love, and
the willingness to have God's will done in all respects. But do not only pray for this in general; try to
observe in yourself exactly where you react, think, and feel differently from what is pleasing to God.
Pray that you may find out specifically what your fears are. And once this prayer has been
answered, pray that you can overcome your fears by being able to accept what you fear, provided it
is God's will for you and it is good for your development and spiritual growth. Pray for the ability
to embrace pain as well as happiness. Pray that you do not love your ego so much that you shirk the
healing agent of occasional pain. Pray for the courage to take pain in the right manner. Then, in the
ultimate sense, pain must be one with happiness. When you reach a certain point on your road to
God, you will not know the difference between pain and pleasure. Pain will be happiness and
happiness will be pain in a blissful sense. All is one in the end.
I realize, my friends, that these are merely words just now -- perhaps even dangerous words
for some of you. You should not try to force the state of being I am explaining here. You cannot
force it. Anything can be perverted, especially when it is forced. So beware of forcibly assuming the
states which I am describing here. Simply continue on your path, step by step, and every day you
will accomplish something. And that is good. Do not hurry. Results develop organically out of
immediate efforts and needs. If you pray for all this and, in addition, introduce your changing
personal problems into the fabric of your prayer, you will reap the fruits.
QUESTION: There are some theories that say that in order to achieve the discipline of daily
prayer, one should set aside the same time every day. I think that this leads rather to the routine
against which you warned us. Which is right?
ANSWER: You cannot generalize. For some people it is right to do it one way, for others,
another way. If a person continues to have difficulty in mastering a discipline, then the same time
and same place every day may be helpful. There are also cases when discipline can be just as well or
better developed if one does not bind oneself pedantically. This depends on the person's way of life,
on his or her character; on many circumstances. One cannot make a rule.
QUESTION: But to start the day with prayer gives a spiritual direction to the day; and, again,
the evening should be good for peace, is this not so?
ANSWER: Oh yes, I should say that every person can devote at least two or three minutes to
prayer when they get up and when they go to bed. But that does not necessarily have to be the time.
Some people may find another time of the day better, but they should still rise and retire in God and
with God. This does not take more than a few minutes and should be done in addition to the long
prayer that will take at least half an hour.
The important thing for the longer prayer is that you know you have sufficient time and that
no one is going to disturb you, so that you can be wholly relaxed. When that time should be is
different for each person. There is an individual rhythm for everyone.
Be blessed, my dear ones. Be in peace, be in God.