FROM LIFE OF SRI SHIRDI SAI BABA BY NARASIMHA SWAMI

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FROM " LIFE OF SRI SHIRDI SAI BABA " BY NARASIMHA SWAMI

 

……“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 the divine that divine power infiltrates into the Jiva

and the combined power or the higher power (both are the 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 jnaatwa yo yad ichchati

tasya tat¬ Khat, 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. Anyhow, Chandorkar’s thought and longing constituted

a good prayer on account of its earnest faith and contact with Supreme Power and

Mercy.

 

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, 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, as was the case with

Chandorkar on the Harischandra hill, then prayer cannot be condemned at all.

Prayer is the 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. â€â€¦â€¦