As a child, I would pray for good marks. Growing up I would pray for good college, good job and of course, good girlfriend. I never cared to understand the full meaning of prayers, much less of what I asked so confidently in those prayers. God, to me was an elderly, long bearded guy, dressed in a long white robe, sitting with his goddess wife (somehow still very youthful) in the clouds with a magic wand that could make wishes true.
I never bothered to know why my wishes came true and that of others didn’t. I never bothered to know why sometimes my wishes didn’t come true. God was up there, I was down here and I had a good satisfaction level with god. Of course, there was room for improvement and I was happy to allow the time and space for it.
As I entered the real life that exists outside the school and college, my belief in god was shaken. I saw people who didn’t believe in god, who didn’t pray every morning, doing better than me. They had more money than me, they had bigger cars, bigger houses. All in all, there lives seemed so much better than mine. Even if I adjusted for what people called ‘all that glitters is not gold’, they still came out tops.
This apathy continued even when I was ‘winning’. The trust had been broken. When something works, it works all the time. Otherwise, it’s just pure chance, a gamble, unreliable.
As a result my prayers became customary, like those inane weather (or politics) conversations between two strangers waiting in the same room and feeling compelled to talk. Then, the prayers stopped completely. I half expected god to strike down on me. He didn’t. That was it. If god didn’t grant favors on prayers, if god didn’t punish the people who didn’t pray, what is the point of it all?
What is the point of prayer? At least, what is the point of prayers as we know them?
I don’t know whether god exists or not, but there is someone very real who is definitely listening to your prayers: you. In those silent moments, when you sit down and fold your hands (or not) and talk honestly to god, a deeper you listens and, because it cannot recognize true from false, it accepts your message.
When you pray to win, you tell yourself that you are losing. When you pray to get something, you tell yourself that you are lacking in something, that you are deficient. When you pray to become something, you are, in fact, telling yourself that you are incomplete. In that sense, through unintentional auto-suggestions, prayers could be leaving you feeling deprived and needy all the time.
On the other hand, a prayer of gratitude leaves you feeling complete and happy. A prayer in which you count your blessings, leaves you feeling abundant. A prayer in which you count how, through you, many people have been helped, leaves you feeling empowered. These are positive prayers which reaffirm you, leave you feeling abundant, complete and as a result, liberated.
As I discovered, a prayer of gratitude isn’t easy. It’s quite awkward in the start. You might start with broken fragments of sentences, of conversations. The skepticism could be so deep that you might not be able to come up with a single sentence of gratitude. If you keep at it, however, words will flow, sentences will come out naturally until prayers will become songs that are sung through you, not by you. You will be like the flute, unaware, that it is she who creates the beautiful song out of the air it breathes.
As the song becomes spontaneous, as your prayers run deep, deeper than your mind, you will experience something exceptional. You can call it meditation, but it is really indescribable. It can only happen when your mind has been by-passed. Away from wrong-right, less-more, good-bad and other mental markers, there is a place you will visit.
In this place, you will experience joy, not the temporary excitement that we confuse with happiness. In this place, you will experience the warmth of an embrace long due. In this place you will experience succor like the first taste of spring water after a long desert trek. In this place, you will experience a gentle, idyllic glow, glimpses of which you must have seen on some lazy winter afternoon as sunlight tiptoed around you.
It is the place where you were born before you were born. Here, you will feel simultaneously, part and whole, gross and sublime, drop and ocean. It is a place from which every thought arises like a ripple and through its ebb and flow carries you to your truest desires. It is also the place to which you will ultimately return, as you came. As a drop dissolves in the ocean.