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Prayer
Every kid in the entire world is a devout member of the "where-my-parents-make-me-go-to-church" religion. Every kid knows it, and takes religion with a grain of salt. At the boy scout camp (800 kids a week) all of the religions were represented, and there was a lot of good-natured kidding about it.
It was a good place, the scout camp. There were three divisions, and each division had a bugler. We had all the bugle calls -- reville, assembly, chow call, taps -- and about 15 minutes after taps came a bugle call called “prayer call”. You’d be in an 8-man tent with two rows of double bunks -- upper and lower, and after prayer call it was understood that every kid in that tent was doing his version of saying his prayers. Nobody knew what any other kd was doing, but everybody respected everybody else, and there was a reverent silence.
That’s a pretty good encapsulation of saying your prayers. It is a thing which evolves through the years, private and secret, and I think it continues from life to life.
Prayer is communication with the divine. Children are given rote prayers of a simple nature, to get them into the habit of talking to God. Many rote prayers embody good attitudes.
The best way for a grownup to pray is somewhere between rote approach and the “much-speaking” of the self-justifying ego-tripper.
“I am the knower of the known,” says Krishna in Bhagavad Gita. There is nothing that is known in all of creation that He does not know and of which He is not immediately aware. Nothing escapes Him, and He always understands. Everything. No matter how convoluted it gets.
And so, when we call His attention to something, it is we ourselves that we are attuning. He is already listening. And He already understands what it is that we would say to Him.
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Pray as yourself. not in someone else’s name -- not even Jesus Christ. The Godhead cares about each and every one of us, and He does not like intermediaries. He wants you.
Here is a good way: Join the hands into the prayer position. On your knees, bow forward parallel with the ground, and imagine before you the mystic cloud, like a light-coloured fog, shimmering and radiant. This is your invocation of the Presence which is already present, which is indeed never not present.
Any and every symbol of the Godhead is latently present in that cloud, and may be invoked. It is important to keep the discipline of prayer, of address -- your focus must remain strongly upon the Person you are addressing, and never allowed to lapse into what kind of impression you are making, or what someone will think of you.
If you can accept that “O” is the sound and symbol of the godhead, it is good to pray the Om, thinking of Him as “O”, and that “mmmm” is a sound we make when we are loving. The real truth is that we love Him. We cannot not love Him, since other than our Buddha-selves in Nirvana, which never appear in the universe, we only exist because He, as Vishnu, is imagining us. Everything we ordinarily know of ourselves consists of His substance, the substance of Brahman.
It is in the heart, not the mind. If our intentions are good, it does not matter whether our techniques are correct. The Godhead is always looking more at our intentions than at our actions. He is the most powerful Being in existence, yet He has feelings tenderer, perhaps, than even those of a baby. An attitude and intention to "be nice to" is better than "to serve". Show consideration, and treat Him gently and lovingly, as you would a loveable little baby.
Beyond that, Y’all are on your own. You and He go back a long way, and I’m not gettin’ in the middle of that old relationship. You two probably even have your own language, for all I know.
How to Pray More Powerfully
Many years ago, when I read in one of Yogi Ramacharaka’s books that there was a universal source of mind, and that you could will more mind to come to you from it, I thought that would be a good idea. So I went up there to the universal mind source and said that I would like to get some more mind.
“Chiiih!” they said. “You already have all the mind your concentration can handle. Go work on your concentration, then come back.”
I think everything improves if concentration is developed. Thought improves, functioning improves, probably discipline improves, but more to the point, devotion improves.
Prayer is a battleground, and perhaps the battle is on the Plain of the Kurus, as narrated in Bhagavad Gita. The devil fights to keep your perspective subjective, and your focus on yourself, instead of on the great Being Who is prayed to.
To win this fight it is very helpful to develop concentration. The way that is given here is a concentrative meditation on Un, the Godhead, visualized as a crystal-clear sphere, symbolozed by the image in the water of a stemmed glass drinking vessel.
This is a fifteen-minute daily meditation consisting of holding the mind on Un, visualized as above, in which the personalities of Krishna and Rama abide. You visualize it in one or a variety of ways. You might get a stemmed glass drinking vessel and look at the physical image. You might simply imagine the image. You might even, at times, just think that the image is there, without actually seeing it in your mind’s eye. But you hold the mind there, as unwaveringly as you can, and after a month or two or six, you begin to notice that when you pray, or practice other devotional exercises, your mind remains on the object of devotion much more powerfully. Or you utter your mantra during the day, and the concentration power is there, holding the mind on the form of Deity addressed.
In the beginning, to counter the mind-wandering tendency, maintain the thought in the background, “Holding the mind on Un.” Hold on to that thought, though when you are strong you can let it go. At times of weakness, revert to it. Sometimes you might add, “against all distractions, both internal and external.”
Krishna is beautiful and blue. He is the Lord of the universe and the Knower of the known, yet he plays and has fun. He is very loveable. Rama is the source of all of the mother-love in the universe. Her love is unconditional and unceasing. Either can be evoked within the image of Un, although it is all a unity. Krishna and Rama are modes of Un.
During the meditation it is helpful to give love for a few moments, thinking that you are a small child, not yet waist-high, putting your arms around the leg of a standing parent, resting your cheek upon it, and releasing yourself into sincere love the way children do when they give a loving embrace that way.
Shyam Ghosh stated that the spiritual path is triune, having three intertwining arms. These are devotion to Godhead, attainment of Samadhi, and raising kundalini. Progress in any one of these arms brings progress in the other two as well, he says.
To make this meditation address all three areas, use the way of love described two paragraphs ago, or your own version that you like better, be mindful that a samadhi-oriented meditation passes into trance on its way, as the fucus becomes more complete, and occasionally apply mul bundh.
Mul bundh is actually compressing the base of the spine, while you are upright in meditation posture. This gives you a slight rise of kundalini, greatly conducing to the trance-focus of your meditation.
Abstraction Technique for Prayer
The Godhead has millions of names and forms -- He prefers that you use the name and form most dear to your heart.
This universe is imaginary, and consists of the substance of Brahman -- His very substance. Love is the force of the far-flung imaginings trying to return to their source. So our relationship to the Godhead, the Source, must pass through a condition of love.
It is a sad fact that in this murky world, prayer, our communication with the Source, often draws demons -- the deluded souls who are preoccupied with power, which is the agency of the devil.
And so we must sometimes resort to certain techniques, to ensure that we keep our relationship with the chosen form of Deity as it should be.
There is a principle of the sort of meditation which involves imagined form. For some people it’s difficult to imagine a form (they should relax and be patient and keep on gently trying, with the confident expectation that it will come when they are ready).
But even if you cannot produce a vivid image in your mind, you can still perform a visual meditation. Say the image is a tree. If you think that there is a tree in front of you, and meditate on it as though your were seeing it in your mind’s eye, you will get ninety percent of the benefit of that meditation.
You have encased the image of the tree in an abstract concept, which you are perfectly confident contains the image, and which indeed does contain it.
It is sometimes good to use this technique in prayer. Think of the symbol of Godhead as it would appear in the form that you love the most when you are in the most loving mode of that relationship.
It need not be visual -- you could think of it verbally, as: “The way He appears when He is most lovable, when I am succumbing to the prostrate throes of love.” Think of this abstract concept as hovering in the air before you.
You may find that at times, the image your mind gives you is perfectly good and lovable. But when that condition falters, either the image or how your love seems, back it should go into the abstract concept.
It is your own personal Superdome roof, which you can deploy when the weather threatens.
Sometimes you even need to put your own self into such an abstract concept, when it is your self-image that is attacked, and you seem to be a lower being than you are, one with inferior motivations. Think of the self in the abstraction as how you are when you are at your finest, with the best and noblest motivations.
Use this abstraction technique when it seems relevant and helpful -- it is a mode you can snap into when it is needed.
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