The Innate Gift of Prayer and Reverence

There is the living presence of God within ourselves, but our conditioning is so deeply invested in taking ourselves to be a bundle of just flesh and blood. You see, what is that which makes it ring true for us that God's presence lives within us? That is out of this world. So these are all God's lifelines: reverence, faith, to be able to bless, to be able to pray. They're not human inventions. It's not like man said, 'Okay, I'll invent the wheel, I'll invent fire, one day let me invent prayer.' It's not like that. It's something innate in us, you see, which in the world we get more and more distant from when we get more and more involved in Maya. You see, these things are very innately gifted to us. And to find the source of that gift can only be intuitive. Only dive into our heart to see what makes me feel love, what makes me cry when I see compassion or kindness. Where does it come from, all of this? It's not a human invention.

And this much actually should be enough to open the eyes of any atheist, like I was, because I didn't notice all of these things properly. I didn't really—I thought I was very scientific, but I never asked, 'What is all this? Where does it come from?' So much intelligence is here, so much beauty is here, and I am sitting and thinking that all this must have come from nothing. How is that a better explanation than it coming from a greater beauty, from a greater intelligence? Even rationally it doesn't make sense. We have no answers to any real question. What are we doing here? Why is there all of this? What is the nature of death? It is like such a—if you were just to make it scientific odds, it's like immensely low probability of life. But what is life? Who put it there? Just some gases started to collide and create substances and life came? And not just this—I ranted about this the other day also—but not just did life come like single-cellular organisms, then those single cells started to work with each other, that 'You, Mr. Mitochondria, will serve as my energy reserve, and you, I will do this job, I will find the food.' See, who made all that cooperation happen? Is it bacteria sitting around and they just like, 'Okay, now I'm going to think about how to work with that one'?

So from the way I see it, and as foolish as I was before, but atheism seems like the most irrational thing to follow. It just makes no sense. But maybe it is because of the deepening of faith that it seems so apparent. I used to feel like it makes the most sense, that all this talk about God was nonsense. That's what I used to feel, and now it's just the other way around. Somewhere just less care to just feel like this is it, you don't worry about these big, big things. But if you were to really examine our life and how it is functioning, it is impossible to have functioned like this without God. Yeah, at least the way I see it.