"On Prayer"
The third attribute of prayer is that prayer should rise on a crest of emotion. Mother says, "It is not enough to ask with the mind; there must be an intensity of your emotions involved." And it is that intensity, which rises like a flame, like a heat of the flame, takes the flame upwards. If you have cool flame, well, it does not rise easily. So, that intensity is necessary. And here again, we have traditionally incidents of great bhaktas who, having intensified their seeking for God so much, cannot survive any more without the continuous Darshan of God. And at that point they say: "God, I can't live anywhere without you, and if you don't appear before me I'll cut off my head." And since God doesn't appear, so he takes the sword [that] is ready to cut off the head and, at that point, God stops him, He says: "No! I'm here." We have heard these stories. In practice, if we take a sword and say: "God show me yourself to me or I'll cut off my head", you don't see God. It's not the threat; it is the intensity of the call which is important. And that intensity often rises in us when we are in the most extreme life-threatening difficulties. That is, in fact, the deeper reason why the Divine Grace permits those kinds of difficulties to come in our life. You will find [that] whenever your sadhana is blocked, a problem comes around you with such violence and intensity that you don't know whether you will survive. That's when you pray intensely; somehow, the pressure from outside draws out the greatest intensity from your heart. So, that crest of emotion is the third attribute.
The fourth attribute is a trust, or faith, that the Divine Presence is there and that you will be helped. Again, I will narrate a sweet story of a village in which there was no rain for years. So one day the villagers said: "Let us pray because all else has failed; the government cannot help us." So, they all gather at the village temple, pray intentionally and all of a sudden it begins to rain. Everyone is drained and they say "Wah! Our prayer is answered, God is great'. But then, there is the Aakashvarni which moves from above; and God's voice says: "Your prayers were granted not because all of you prayed, but because [of] that little child with you, who is the only one who brought an umbrella. He is the only one who had the faith that the prayer will be granted." All others were taken by the surprise that their prayers were granted. It is a sweet story because it emphasises this fact that the faith is an important component. Faith, in the yogic sense, is different from belief. It is a knowledge deep within us, something which knows, without the mind or the emotions knowing. And that part which knows, it knows because it is. It is connected; it is a part of a fragment of oneness with the Divine Presence. So, it knows and it has that faith within. But the connection is important, because it is through the connection that the help is most effective. Mother observes that "The response to your prayer comes in any case but your faith makes it effective." So many times she comments that she went to help somebody, but the person was so closed, so lost in himself, that her help could not penetrate his own shell. It is the faith, the opening, the seeking, the call, the intensity with which we call which cuts through these layers and creates a direct link. And here, you will recall that line in Savitri "A prayer, a master act, a king idea links man's strength to a transcendent force". That is how the prayer works, a link is established and transcendent force, not universal. The universal force is the one who maintains the laws of the universe. They can't change. It is only transcendent force which can change the universal forces and change the circumstances. So, that link with the transcendent comes when we pray with the right attitude, clearly formulated, rising in a crest of emotion with the deep conviction and faith within us. In this linkage, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in physical form are the link between the highest transcendental consciousness in the densest matter, because in their bodies they have established the full hierarchy of states of consciousness in continuity. What it means for us, for the earth, for the history of evolution, is something so great that we will be able to understand its full value only in the next few hundred years to come. We are still too close to the event of their physical manifestation to realise the full importance of what has happened. And even today, though Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have left their body, the fact that their body is still here, in the material consciousness in the Samadhi, maintains that link and the Mother herself had told us that Sri Aurobindo is in our midst still, in his subtle physical form – the form closest to matter and so the link is maintained always. Praying to them is the easiest way for us to link ourselves to that transcendent force.
