Gratitude As Prayer

In general, our religious life starts with prayer and ends in gratitude. Many of us learn to pray as part of our daily life, from early childhood, watching our elders.

Prayer has got different dimensions. It matures as we mature. Prayer is the bridge to divinity and our higher consciousness. Prayer is the bridge to take us beyond the sufferings of planet Earth. Prayer is the technique; it is the method to lead us to the superconsciousness state.

Prayer has got different forms. Nothing is higher, nothing is lower. Whichever way we want to start, we can start. We will naturally grow towards the higher level of consciousness. Let us understand the various dimensions of prayer step by step.

First thing, prayer starts at the physical level: going to the temple, praying to God, praying to the idols of gods and goddesses, doing some puja or worship by uttering a mantra, sacred chants, and perhaps going further by doing some havan, sacrificial fire rituals, with the help of priests. Prayer should start in a physical way.

Many people come and ask me, 'Swamiji, why do we have idol worship in Hinduism? Many other religions do not allow this.' I always tell them, 'No, we do not have idol worship. We worship through the idol, not the idol itself.'

There is a big difference. What we do in Hindu worship is to worship through the idol; it is not idol worship. When we stand in front of the idol, do we pray, 'Oh stone, give me a boon, or, Oh copper, please give me a boon. No! You say, 'Oh Siva please give me boon; Oh Rama please give me a boon; Oh Vishnu, please bless me.' We relate to the divine through idols. Idols are bridges to take us beyond the forms that we see with our physical eyes.

There is a beautiful incident in Master Vivekananda's life. Vivekananda was wandering all over Bharat. He went to a king's palace. The king was an intellectual person. The king was educated in the western system of thought. He started questioning Vivekananda, 'Why should idols be worshipped? Why should idols be respected?' Vivekananda said, 'Just give me a few minutes. I will explain it to you,' and he changed the conversation to another topic. Suddenly, Vivekananda called one of the ministers of the king and said, 'Can you get me the photograph of your king which is hanging on the wall?' The minister said, 'Why not.' He, at once, brought the photograph and gave it to Vivekananda.

Vivekananda said, 'Can you spit on it?' The minister was shocked. The minister said, 'What are you saying? It is the photograph of our king. How can you say I should spit on it?' Vivekananda said, 'What is this? It's just a paper and canvas cloth. Why are you taking things so seriously? Just now your king said, 'Why should idols be respected? Why should idols be worshipped? It is just paper, canvas cloth and paint.' The minister said, 'No! It is not just simple canvas cloth and paint. As long as the paint and canvas cloth were separate, it was cloth and paint. The moment it started representing our King's form, it became a picture of our king, a portrait of our king. I can't spit on it. It represents our king. I can't spit on it.'

Vivekananda turned to the king and said, 'Understand, even when your photo can receive so much respect, why not God's photo? Why not God's idol? Why not God's murti (form)?'

The problem is that the moment we read one or two books on philosophical matters, especially Western philosophy, we start thinking we know all the philosophy that there is to be known. We start thinking we have become God. The moment we start thinking we have become God, we start idol worship to ourselves.

There are a few people who always think they are flying but they don't even move. Some people who have read some books think they have achieved everything, just by reading a few books.

Ramana Maharishi says beautifully, 'As long as you feel you have a body, as long as you eat and you take a bath, as long as you think you have to maintain your body, its good to do the vigraha puja, idol worship.'

He says, in a humorous way, 'The sandal that is applied on your body starts smelling within an hour but, when you apply it to God's idol, it never gets any bad smell.'

The food which we eat in three hours, how and what it transforms into, we know but never the food offered to God's idol. So, as long as we have the idea that we have a body, it is good to start doing idol worship. There's nothing wrong in that. It's actually a technique to go beyond the form.

As long as we have body consciousness, we can pray. This is the physical level of worship, the first level. There is one more piece of scientific research which I wanted to mention here. A great scientist went and stayed in the Amazon forest with a small group of tribal villagers. The tribal group is famous for one thing. They have a belief that, by making the idol of a certain person, they can either heal him or kill him. They just make an idol of the person who they want to heal or kill and, if that person needs healing on his hands, they put medicine on the idol's hands and the person gets cured. If they want to kill that person, they just break the hands of the idol and the person dies.

Of course, when you hear it, it sounds like a story but this scientist wanted to know the truth. So he went with his three assistants and stayed with the tribe for ten years. Understand, not for one or two days – ten full years he stayed with them. He learned their language; he learned their way of living; he ate their type of food; he lived in their houses; he related and mingled with them and he almost lost his identity and became a tribal member himself. He video recorded and observed at least a hundred incidences.

He says that he recorded at least a hundred incidences, either by video graphing, audio recording or observing the experiences of the tribe. After doing research over the hundred incidences, he says that more than ninety-six of these recorded incidences proved to be one hundred percent effective. The other four created effect, but not one hundred percent. Ninety-six percent is not a small number. One hundred incidences, and ninety-six proved effective. He says they use a sort of vibration, a chant, a mantra.

First, they make an idol and they use the vibration or mantras to invoke that person into that idol. Then they treat the idol to heal the person or kill him. If he is a criminal, they kill that idol or, if he has to be helped, they treat the idol and heal him. You would be surprised to hear one more thing; they say they are even able to relate to a person who is dead already. Even with a person who is already dead, they are able to relate through the idols. This scientist has proved it. He has clearly observed and recorded how they are doing it.

When I read the research report, I realized that if we can relate with an ordinary man, an ordinary mortal through an idol, can't we relate with existence, with Parashakti in the Brahmanda (Universal Power), the immortal divine through an idol? Of course, we can!

The spiritual people, the great mystics, who dived deep into their inner consciousness, who achieved something at a spiritual level, created wonderful techniques for others also to reach the same level. Idol worship, or the vigraha puja, is one of the techniques created by those great mystics.

There are two kinds of religion. One is just a social religion that provides societal laws as to how many times we can eat, how many hours we can sleep, how many women we can marry, how many kids we can have, a religion that states just the social laws or social rules that we all should abide by.

There is another kind of religion, a spiritual religion, to show us the true nature of our being, to help us reach the ultimate consciousness, to help us taste the ultimate bliss, the spiritual bliss. The second kind of religion works in the inner world, in the mystery of mysteries, in a deeper, conscious level.

The Masters of this second kind of religion created the techniques and gave them to us in the form of idols. The Goddess Kali is the philosophical representation of spiritual wisdom. She says that, when we cut our ego with the Gnana khadga (the sword of knowledge), we shall be protected and taken care of. When we cut our ego with the sword of knowledge, Divine Existence will protect us and existence will take care of us. So, every form of God is a representation of some or the other great spiritual wisdom.

First, prayer starts at the level of physical worship; then next it goes to the level of verbal worship. Next, we go to a higher level. We chant the stotra, the songs, the mantras, the sacred chants, we do the nama japa (chanting the name of gods) and worship the divine and we pray. Stotra or repetition of God's names is verbal prayer. Verbal prayer plays a major role in keeping the mind at a higher level. Remembrance of some sacred syllable and its continuous repetition with awareness is very important. Without awareness, it becomes an unconscious habit. Please don't do that.

There are many people who repeat, 'Rama, Rama, Rama…Krishna, Krishna…hey, did you switch off the oven… what's for lunch today?' Then they start again, 'Rama, Rama, Krishna, Krishna…' No! Chanting should not be done unconsciously but with conscious awareness. Again and again, consciously repeating the Lord's name can lead you to higher consciousness. The more our mind is filled with some sacred syllable, sacred words, the more our inner chattering will be cleansed.

Our inner chattering has so much garbage in it and unnecessary things that we throw into our inner chattering. There is so much repression and suppression. With so much anger and violence we suppress inside our being, where do we think it will all go? It will go and disturb our inner chattering. Our inner chattering is made up of nothing more than suppressed feelings and desires inside us.

If we suppress too much violence, too much sex or too much anger, those things only will come out in our inner chattering unconsciously. All our inner chattering is made up of the same stuff which we put inside. What we put inside, that is what will naturally come out. If we put mantras inside, the sacred syllables inside, the divine inside, the stotra inside, good words inside, we will see we are radiating the same beautiful words, the same beautiful feeling and the same beautiful bliss.

The more we chant the right words, the less we will be chanting the wrong words. People ask me, 'Why should we chant God's name?' I tell them, 'If you don't chant God's name, you will be chanting your wife's name.' That is what we will be doing in our life. If we don't chant God's name, we will be chanting somebody else's name in our mind.

Our mind cannot remain unoccupied; our mind cannot be empty. If we chant the Lord's name, we will be occupied in a positive way; we will reach the higher consciousness. Otherwise, we shall be chanting our boss's name or our wife's name or our friend's name. It's a cleansing process. Our inner chattering will have a new experience; our being will have a new space. It will experience a new consciousness when we use the technique of verbal prayer, by using some divine name or divine prayer.

If you do not like any divine name, you can use words like 'Om Shanti', or just 'Om'. Even these words will help you tremendously. Even these words can create a beautiful vibration in you.

Just the other day one boy was asking, 'What is the meaning of the word Om?' Om is the sound from which the whole world was created. Today, in this modern day, physicists and scientists are agreeing with this concept, that from sound came light, and from light came the whole universe. So the whole thing goes back to sound.

You would be surprised to hear this: in a place called Uttara Meru in Tamil Nadu, they were doing maha mrityunjaya homa (fire ritual for Lord Shiva), with the mantra of Shiva. The homa was going on continuously for three days when a group of westerners, who had come there as tourists, were curious to know what was going on. They asked, 'Why are you throwing such good varieties of food into the fire? Why are you putting all the valuable cloth into the fire? Why are you burning it away? Why are you destroying all these things?'

It seems the priest said, 'No! We are not throwing it away or destroying it. We are offering it to God.' The tourists laughed and said, 'What are you talking about? How will it reach God if you put it in the fire?' The Priest said, 'We invoke God into the fire using mantras, before making the offering to him.'

The curious tourists photographed the whole process using Kirlian photography. Everything on planet Earth emits a particular light. Not only living things, even dead things, emit a particular color ray of light. Using Kirlian photography we can actually photograph that light, the aura body. So the tourists took a few Kirlian photographs.

You will be surprised to hear the results. In all the photographs, one could see the dancing form of Shiva. In all the photographs, the dancing form of Shiva appeared in the same way. Mantras are not as simple as we think. When we do mantras with devotion and consciousness, they create their own effect, their own energy. This is the second level, verbal prayer.

The third level is important. That is mental prayer. When prayer reaches the third dimension, it becomes mental. First, it is physical, second verbal and third mental. At the mental level it is called meditation. At the physical level, it is called worship, or puja; at the verbal level it is called japa. At the mental level it is called dhyana or meditation. When we reach this level, neither our body needs to be involved nor our inner chattering needs to be involved. Just our being will be involved.

In japa, it is a communication; in dhyana it is a communion. In prayer, it is a communication between us and God. In meditation, it is a communion between us and God. We start experiencing the taste of the Divine. We start experiencing a glimpse of the Divine. We start experiencing a glimpse of bliss.

One important thing – as long as we pray or chant, God and we are different. The moment we enter into meditation, we start realizing the Godliness in us. We start experiencing the Divine in us. We start getting a glimpse of what we have been worshipping all these years. A unique communion starts between i and I.

It is not even between us and God because God has become a part of our being and we have become a part of God. The drop merges into the ocean; the ocean merges into the drop. We start experiencing the glimpse; we start feeling we are the part of the whole. The advaitic (non-dualistic) experience, or a feeling of oneness, starts happening inside our being.

It is a different kind of experience. As long as we do the chanting, we are worshipping. The moment we enter into meditation, we merge with the object we worship; we become one with it. We start experiencing the consciousness.

The fourth and final level is where neither we nor God exist. Both disappear into one experience. That is what I call 'gratitude'. In the beginning, at the physical level, we worship; in the verbal level we chant; we repeat the lord's

name; at the mental level we meditate and we experience the Divine in us. At the fourth level, the spiritual level, not only do we experience the oneness; the idea of oneness also disappears. Only one thing remains, gratitude.

You may ask, 'Towards whom?' Towards nobody; just gratitude that is not directed towards anybody. As long as the gratitude is directed to somebody, there are two people: the person who gives and the person who receives but, at the ultimate level, it is not even directed to anybody. It just overflows. Energy expresses itself in the form of gratitude. Energy expresses itself in the form of bliss. A deep feeling of fulfillment happens in us. That is what we call samadhi.

Samadhi is the state where the being, after becoming totally fulfilled, expresses itself in the form of energy, where there is nobody who expresses and there is nobody who receives. Just the experience remains. It is a profound experience which can be described by only one word and that is gratitude.

The experiencer and the experienced both merge into the experience. In that moment, only one thing exists, the experience. Neither the experiencer nor the experienced exists. Both of them merge into one being. That is what one calls experience.

And when this happens, you will feel that life is showering so much on you. You will feel that it is too much. You feel like you can't tolerate it anymore. It is so much joy, so much ecstasy, one starts losing one's identity; one starts losing one's boundary.

We can have an identity as long as we have a trace of suffering. The moment suffering disappears, we lose our boundary. An important thing we need to understand is that we can have ego only if we are suffering. Our ego cannot exist without our suffering. Suffering is the root of our ego. It's an important thing we need to understand. We always think that suffering disturbs the ego. No! Suffering enriches the ego; it feeds the ego.

One more important thing, if our suffering is less, our ego is less. We feel we are too small, so we increase our suffering so that we can feel we are somebody. Ask anybody how his or her life is and they will say, 'Nobody should suffer like me. I am the person who has suffered the most on this planet Earth. Even my enemy should not get this much suffering.'

They know how to write their biography. Ask anybody to write their biography; this will be their first sentence to introduce themselves. The less suffering we have, the weaker the ego. The more the suffering, the stronger our ego becomes, so we always exaggerate suffering. The problem is after some time we forget we exaggerated and we get caught in the magnified suffering that we created ourselves. We might disagree and say, 'No, no, you don't know my life; you don't know my suffering and how much I have struggled' and all those things but, if you deeply look into things, there might be a little suffering but ninety-seven percent of the suffering that you actually feel will be your own magnification. And if you consciously stop magnifying your suffering by repeatedly talking about it, the little suffering that is actually there will also disappear because of your increased awareness.

• -A small story: One tabloid journalist died and went to Hell but he begged to God, 'Please let me enjoy heaven for one day. I am going to be in Hell for eternity anyway. Can't you be a little compassionate towards me, and give me just twenty-four hours in Heaven?'

God said, 'You are a dangerous guy; you can't be allowed in Heaven. You may write something about me! You are a difficult guy. You can't be let in.'

You can believe lawyers, but not tabloid journalists; they are a little difficult! But somehow he convinced God by saying, 'No, no. In twenty-four hours what can I publish? Moreover, your guys are the editors, so I can't write anything without their knowledge. Please let me in only for twenty-four hours.'

God said, 'Alright, come in.'

The moment he jumped in, he started making demands. 'If I can convince at least one of your journalists to go to Hell, will you give me a job here in Heaven?'

God thought to himself, 'My people will never be convinced to go to Hell.' So he agreed and told the journalist, 'Ok, if you can convince at least one of my journalists to go to Hell, yes, then you can stay.'

Now this guy started spreading wild rumors. You know how these guys are capable of spreading rumors! He started spreading rumors that a new Satan, a new devil, had taken over Hell, that Hell had become totally high-tech and that they had centralized air-conditioning, and that the eternal hell concept was all wrong; hell had been completely updated; anybody who wanted to go there could do so and live luxuriously; and the other major news was that they want to start a new newspaper in Hell; if you were experienced in Heaven, there was every chance you could become the editor there in Hell.

He started spreading these rumors. If you want to spread any news, all you have to do is tell the news to somebody and ask him or her to promise not to tell others. Just ask them to promise not to tell anyone. You can be sure that person will tell his or her friend along with the statement, 'Don't tell others; it's a secret.' Ten minutes later, even the neighbor's dog will be barking that news! Anyhow, the news had now spread all over Heaven.

After twenty-four hours, the journalist was about to exit the gates of Heaven. When he reached the gate, God stopped him and said, 'No, no, no-you cannot leave Heaven. You have to stay here.' The journalist was surprised and asked, 'Why?' God said, 'You do not know. We had ten editors and all ten ran away. They are now in Hell. We don't have any journalists. We don't have anybody to do our job. You have to stay here.'

By now, after repeating the same thing again and again and again, this guy himself was slowly convinced that, in Hell, everything was updated and he was going to find himself a good job. He said, 'No, no. I also want to go to Hell. I want to become an editor.'

God said, 'Fool! You are the guy who started that rumor. Why have you started believing your own stories? You are the one who created the rumor.' The journalist said, 'No, no, I may have started the rumor but, when ten people believe it, there must be some truth in it. When so many people believe it, it cannot be a lie. There must be some truth in it. Let me go there and check!'

Just imagine! The rumour that this guy started, he himself started believing! When we repeat the same lie again and again, we start believing it to be the truth. We, also, start falling in the same net that we laid. We, also, start believing.

One religious preacher I know in Bharat who is very aggressive came to me for healing. He told me that he had a personal

Part 5: Don't Worry, Be Happy!

problem that he wanted healing for. After healing him, I was casually speaking to him. I asked him, 'Why are you preaching so aggressively? You are condemning all other religions. Your religion is great, no doubt, but why should you condemn others?'

He said, 'If I am not doing what I am doing, I feel insecure. When I see people believing what I am saying and following my ideas, I feel safe. I am convinced that what I am preaching must be the Truth. I feel people cannot be fools. I may be telling them the wrong things but, when so many people believe, there must be some truth in it. So, when people are converted, I feel stronger in my faith.'

The preacher himself developed a conviction through the response of the people to his teachings! That is how we all are. When many people believe what we say, we fall into the same net that we created. That's what we all do in our lives. We create an idea that our life is full of suffering and misery. By and by, we start believing it.

If we analyze ourselves, we will see, very clearly, that there are thousands of miseries created just by our own mind, our own words. It is simply our own creation but we forget that we are the ones who created it and suffer in what we ourselves have created.

When ego disappears, we merge into bliss. When we are merged with bliss, the ego disappears. When we go really Gratitude as Prayer

deeply into our being, when we become one with Existence, when we experience, only then gratitude flows. A pure joyous feeling overflows from our being. It is just gratitude, nothing else.

There is a beautiful meditation in Sufism. They say the only way to relate with God is through gratitude because only with gratitude can we start experiencing Him. With prayer, we can only relate with Him. However, with gratitude we start experiencing Him. With gratitude, the deeper level of our being, our spiritual layer, starts experiencing.

Let us understand these few concepts. Let us appreciate the things we have been showered with in our life. Let us feel gratitude for all God has showered upon us. Let us not always think about what next, what next and what next.

• • I never forget to tell this small, and very nice, story in this context: One guy was praying to God in the temple, 'O God! Please give me just one hundred dollars to take care of myself for one week. Within the week I will get a new job and soon after I start working, I will start donating money to you. Just for one week, give me one hundred dollars to take care of myself.'

A priest who overheard his prayer felt very compassionate and thought that he should help this guy. However, not being rich himself, he put a fifty-dollar bill in an envelope and went to this person and handed it over to him saying, 'God told me to give you this envelope. Please have it.'

The guy ran to his house, opened the envelope, saw the fifty dollars and started praying again. 'Oh, God! Next time when you send money, please send it to me directly, not through this priest. He's taken half of it as a commission.'

The guy did not bother about the fifty dollars that he received; he was only bothered about the fifty dollars that he did not receive. This is how the mind works.

We bother about the things that have not happened to us but we never appreciate the things that have happened to us. If we are asked to write the things that God has not given us, will that list ever end? It will start with a limousine and it will go on longer than a limousine.

And if you sincerely start writing the things that God has given you, again that list will never end, because every single breath that we inhale and every single breath that we exhale is given to us by the Divine. It is God's own gift to us. Can we say we earned it? No!

The Divine gives every inch and every moment of life to us. Can we say we made it? Can we say we created it? No! Our very life, our existence, is given to us by the Divine. If we honestly make a list of all the things which were given to us by God, again it would never end. So many things, so much has been showered on us. Can we say we created Gratitude as Prayer

our life? Can we say we created one single inhaling or exhaling breath? No!

• -A small story: A big science conference took place, where the entire science community came to the conclusion that, now man could do anything that God could do. 'Why should there be a God at all? We can do everything ourselves. What do you say? God creates man? We can also clone. What do you say? Whatever God can do, we can also do.' They decided that they had become so advanced that now they could tell God to go and take a rest. We didn't need him anymore. 'We are doing everything ourselves. Let him retire'.

God said, 'Alright, let us have a small competition.' First, He created something to fly. Immediately, the scientists created the airplane. Then He created fire. The scientists also created something to destroy the fire. The competition went on and on. Finally, God just took some dust and created a human being. The scientists also took some dust and created a human being by cloning. God said, 'No, no, no stop! Bring your own dust and do it, not my dust!

The scientists were stumped! Do you understand? We cannot create anything that has not already been created by God. The Divine has given us everything but, when we take our life for granted, we live in deep misery. Two lists of

things are there in front of us: one is the list of things that have been given to us, which have been showered on us, and the other is the list of things that we don't have.

Now it is up to us to either look at the things we don't have, and continuously suffer and make our life miserable or look at the things that we have and continuously feel joy, ecstasy and enjoy it. Whether we want to look at this side, or the other side, is our choice.

Bliss is our choice; gratitude is simply our choice. It is we who are supposed to decide what our life should be like; whether it should be hell or heaven. It is simply our choice. When we look at the things that we are showered with, which are given to us, then we will understand how much Existence protects us; Divine takes care of us; God showers on us.

One guy went to a real estate agent and wanted to sell his house. After a week, he ran to the agent and said, 'I don't want to sell my house. Please withdraw the advertisement.' The agent was surprised. He asked, 'Why? Why don't you want to sell?' The guy said, 'Only after seeing your advertisement in the paper, I realized my house is the dream house that I have always wanted. My house is exactly what I wanted it to be. It's really exactly what I always wanted it to be. Only now I realize how beautiful my house is.'

We take things for granted. We take people for granted. We take life for granted. Ultimately, when we take life for granted, we feel bored. When we do things unconsciously, we start feeling bored. If someone comes along and tells us how beautiful things are around us, we wake up to it suddenly. Instead, we should be able to see the beauty in what surrounds us, all the time. It is a shame if someone else has to point it out to us. When people tell us that we are lucky, that we are surrounded by beauty, we should be able to say, 'Yes, I know I am lucky and I am surrounded by endless beauty.' How many people can say this of themselves? The intelligent ones will be able to say this. The ones who have gone deep inside will be able to say this. The foolish ones will deny the statement and remain in suffering.