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 minds 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 partys 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 souls

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 Gods help to attain objects of

great importance to ones 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. " ...........