Spirituality Issues

Q: What is the importance of prayers?

Answer: You cannot decide and pray. Prayer is a spontaneous happening. When does prayer happen? When you are desperate, when all doors are shut. Then there is a cry from within. That is prayer. And another situation when prayer happens is when after all your effort nothing happens and then suddenly you get what ask for, then you feel so grateful. So prayer happens when you are so grateful or when you are desperate. In these two situations prayer happens to you spontaneously. And the third situation, if you want to say, this is through knowledge, with a with a sense of wow, becoming aware of the whole creation in its magnanimity, its diversity, when these things boggle your mind, when you become aware of the whole creation or any one incident that is mind boggling, at that moment prayer is happening to you. So if you are intelligent you will take every opportunity to feel grateful and when you are grateful you are already in a state of prayer!

Q: Why do we get knowledge only through pain? Why do we have to go through so much trouble to get that which is inside us?

Answer: Tell me, don’t you have to go through trouble to get worldly things? We work so hard. If we have to buy a house we work so hard, if we have to buy a car we work so hard, to get married, my God, we work so hard! When we work so hard for everything in this life we don’t see it as hard work, but when we have to do even little on the spiritual path, then it seems like so much work. You sit still staring at one place for three hours in a movie hall, but if you have to sit in meditation for 20 mins then all sorts of aches and pains come up! You feel like it is work in the beginning but once you get on to the tracks, then you will not be able to stop.