FROM LIFE OF SRI SHIRDI SAI BABA BY NARASIMHA SWAMI PART 2/60

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FROM " LIFE OF SRI SHIRDI SAI BABA " BY NARASIMHA SWAMI Part 2/60

 

...... " 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. " ...........