CWTVKS Volume 2

Prayer: Correct Attitude

I

The proper form, and spirit as well, of your prayer must be ‘Today I have to do this, I pray, give me the right guidance.' It is the attitude that matters most in all prayer; one need not even utter so many words if the will or the aspiration to be guided by the Divine in all activities be well-shaped by frequent remembrance leading to constant active memory of the Divine.

Therefore, for one who is engaged in activities the attitude must be one which is at once proper and practical. One must have full interest in the work that is undertaken; an absorbing interest with its eventual thoroughness is necessary even in yoga and not only for purposes of worldly life. The English expression, disinterested action, is misleading and even a caricature of the Gita's sublime injunction—‘Do work, yoked to Me (yukta)’.

The attitude then, is not to call upon the Divine and demand ‘Make me pass’, for in making such a demand you lower your status of being yoked to Her and feel a stranger to Her Grace and way of guiding those who have come to Her. Nor is the attitude to be ‘Thy wish will be fulfilled’, as you put it, because such an attitude fits in where resignation reigns supreme and all is passive, and cannot be proper or true when one is called upon to act with full interest in a thorough manner for a particular end in view.

The attitude that actuates the prayer in the formula I have chosen for you in answer to your query will be, I think, clear to you now. It is an attitude in which desires are not hidden and therefore self-deception is not encouraged or allowed; the whole being is exposed to the light of the Mother which purifies and sublimates whatever is to be retained and merits a permanent place in Her Will and view, removing whatever there is of dross and not worthy of retention in us. There is no necessity of calling upon Her to do as She wills, for Her Will compared with the collective willings of all men put together wins by a hundred lengths, and does not require a special prayer from us. Besides, ‘Thy will be done'—this attitude, superb as it is, may prove injurious in some cases as it may lodge a lurking suspicion of a defeatist mentality quite overtly.

In the attitude I urge, you will find that you are called upon to do the task with a happy confidence that you are not alone in your work, that you are to be entrenched in the faith—which is a potent substitute of consciousness until that dawns—that you are yoked to the Influence of the Light, of the Mother whose gracious guidance you can always receive especially in times of need and that what you call your will and work and efforts are but secondary, yet an indispensable instrumentation of Her Will.

You will remember the expression Yogah karmasu kausalam.

P.S.

Srat is a vedic word meaning truth, and dha to hold: sraddha is an untranslatable word. Faith is a feeble English equivalent. Faith is the innate power, sakti, by which truth is held, srat satyam anaya dhiyate. Later Sanskrit grammarians derive it differently. But the derivation I give can be better appreciated in the light of sraddhamayoyam...sah. It is not a mere belief, it is a power of the soul by which the Spirit achieves its ends by using the intelligence and energy in the instrumental nature.

18 October 1940

II

There is an. air of pessimism that your letter breathes. If you want to meet with success in your efforts, this is the first thing that must be driven out. I suspect that the prayer-formula I chose for you has not gone deep into you in all its significance. What I have said is not the same as the Gita’s disinterested action; I want you to be very much interested in action, to be ‘examination- minded ’ as you say. But I add that you must have the faith and feel (though not fully conscious in the beginning) that you are not alone in your work and that there is something else deep within you, as well as close to you and outside you and superior to you in strength and knowledge and effective action to which you can have access for right guidance at the right moment. The Gita, well understood, gives intellectual clarity, so far as the yukta, ‘yoked’—aspect goes, but my appeal to you aims at vital absorption of a dynamic principle; the former can remain a theory with millions of men, the latter has an untold practical importance for the chosen few.

25 October 1940