Prayer - 14th April 2023
Saar (Essence)
Ananta guides a seeker to surrender all spiritual expectations and self-concern, explaining that even the most pious prayer can harbor a hidden ego if it is rooted in a desire for a specific personal outcome.
Leave all outcomes and expectations of what life should look like along with your prayer.
If self-concern is at the root, there is no real difference between a spiritual prayer and a worldly one.
Look deeply to see if there is a whisper of individuality hiding within your spiritual aspirations.
intimate
Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.
Father, can I speak? I just come forward with a prayer to you, just to empty me of me and just remove everything that is not me and all the attachments, and just imagine me with you. That part that keeps what you were saying before, you know, coming to the Self and then still keeping that bit, you know, yes, but one comes back to, you know... so this is the prayer: that only You remake. Amen.
Is there something that you're hoping should happen as the outcome of the prayer? Maybe yes. Just leave it all along with the prayer. Leave all outcomes—what it should mean for your life, how what that should look like, what should happen or should never happen after this. All that you have to leave.
I guess it's because I have a memory of an experience that this happened where I just... there was nothing. And so therefore there's that little thing keeping there saying, 'Well, it's not like that.' If you go to a dark empty room there'll be nothing, so what with that? Who wants to climb that ladder again?
Of course, it's a beautiful prayer, but somewhere we can hide also in some spiritual expectation, in some spiritual now. Completely empty of all self-concern—and by when I say self-concern, obviously small 's'.
Well okay, I don't mean this for you, but many times it can happen that there may be no real difference between our spiritual prayer and a worldly prayer. Many times it can happen with that, that we pray spiritually so we feel like, 'Oh, that's good.' But if we saw someone who's saying, 'Please give me a better car next year,' we may feel like, 'Oh, that's not... what kind of prayer is that? You're asking God for a better car.' But if at the root of both of those is self-concern, then it's basically the same.
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By the way, please don't take this to mean that I'm saying that we must not pray for anything. If we really believe something, that it's better if it was this way, then there is no other place to take it than to prayer. To put it in the altar of God in our heart is the best place to put it; otherwise, we may just hide it in our minds. If we feel like something is true, we must bring it to prayer. It's very good. I'm just saying that we can look deeply at whether there's a whisper of individuality, something hiding there, just to make sure that it helps us to become even more empty.