Prayer

Mother's organ music
February 27, 1955 – “Prayer”

(Alok Pandey:) “It is Earth aspiring to the Supreme – and we are only intermediaries.”

(Shyam Sundar, 1969:) “For me now the prayer is more a means to open myself than to make me heard.

(Mother:) It is sure that the Supreme Lord knows better than we know what we think, what we want and what we need. One tells this to Him not to make it known to Him but to offer oneself to Him as totally as one can.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that being omniscient his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual’s desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations.”

(Sri Aurobindo:) “It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man’s life with God, the conscious interchange.”

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See also

• Prayers and Meditations
• Aspiration
• =1 "Prayer"