PRAYING WITH EXPECTATION & WITHOUT EXPECTATION

          FIRST I HAVE TO GIVE YOU A CLUE ON WHAT IS PRAYER, IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER, BENEFITS OF PRAYER, AND DIFFERENT BETWEEN PRAYER OF EXPECTATION AND PRAYER WITHOUT EXPECTATION.

        What is prayer.......................

The word prayer or prārthanā (in Sanskrit) is derived from two words ‘pra’ and ‘artha’ meaning pleading fervently. In other words, it is asking God for something with intense yearning.

Prayer includes respect, love, pleading and faith. Through a prayer a devotee expresses his helplessness and endows the doer ship of the task to God. Giving the doer ship to God means that we acknowledge that God is helping us and getting the task done. Prayer is an important tool of spiritual practice in the generic spiritual path of Devotion.

               Importance of prayer

One important criteria in determining our spiritual progress is the extent of the dissolution of our mind, intellect and ego. (Refer to footnote 2 below.)

The issue that we all face from birth is that we have had our parents, teachers and friends enhance our five senses, mind and intellect. In the current world a lot of emphasis is given to things related to the five senses, mind and intellect, such as outer beauty, our salary, our circle of friends and the list goes on. For most of us, at no point are we told that the purpose of our lives is to go beyond ourselves to tap into the God within.
So when we start spiritual practice we also have to unlearn years of conditioning that taught us to focus on our five senses, mind and intellect. Prayer is an important tool to reduce our reliance on the five senses, mind and intellect and help us unlearn years of conditioning.
The very act of prayer implies that the person who is praying considers the power to whom one is praying to as superior to oneself. Hence by praying a person expresses his helplessness and surrenders to the higher power and pleads for help. This is a blow to the individual's ego as praying implies that one is looking for help from a higher mind and intellect than one's own. Thus by praying frequently we transcend our limited mind and intellect and access the higher Universal Mind and Intellect. Over a period of time this contributes to the dissolution of our mind and intellect. Thus, frequent and sincere prayers for spiritual growth help in the dissolution of mind, intellect and ego.

                               BENEFITS OF PRAYER

• Improves spiritual practice: Prayer impacts our spiritual practice at three levels, action, thought and attitude:
  
  • Action: All actions that are preceded by prayer for spiritual benefit are performed with spiritual emotion; hence fewer errors are committed. Thus by praying, various actions in one’s spiritual practice.
    
  • Thought: So long as the mind is active, thoughts will continue. They pose an obstacle to the dissolution of the mind. Useless thoughts also cause wastage of energy. Prayer is an extremely useful tool to prevent this waste. Prayer reduces worry and enhances contemplation.
    
  • Attitude: A prayer done with spiritual emotion initiates the process of contemplation within a seeker, and this assists him in becoming introverted.
    
• Enhances the potency of chanting the Name of God: A seeker chants the Name of God with the aim of realizing God. Only if accompanied by intense motivation for God realization and spiritual emotion will the Name repeated (chanted) be truly effective. One Saint would be so engrossed in chanting the Name of God that He would become oblivious to the world. One rarely finds someone who can chant the Name of God with such intense spiritual emotion. However, repeated prayers about being graced with quality chanting, along with chanting the Name of God, helps in generation of spiritual emotion and makes our chanting reach God.
  
• Divine help in spiritual practice: When a seeker sincerely prays to God to get a particular action/thought/attitude pertaining to his spiritual practice, done through him (the seeker), a seemingly impossible task is easily accomplished by the Guru’s grace.
  
• Receiving forgiveness for mistakes: Having committed a mistake, if one makes a prayer and surrenders unto God or the Guru, then God or Guru forgives one for the mistake. However the prayer and surrender have to be commensurate in intensity with the mistake committed.
  
• Reducing the ego: While praying we plead before God; it is therefore the place where pride is abandoned and we humbly admit our need/human frailty as well as our dependence upon God. It therefore helps to reduce the ego faster. Refer to importance of prayer.
  
• Protection from ghosts: Prayer is a powerful tool that helps protect one from ghosts (demons, devils, negative energies, etc.) and creates an Armour around oneself.
  
• Increase in faith: When a prayer gets answered, faith in God or the Guru increases. Faith is the only currency on our spiritual journey.
       
      DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PRAYING WITH EXPECTATION AND WITHOUT     EXPECTATION
  

  1. Prayer with worldly expectation

  This is the commonest variety of prayer. This type of prayer is said with the expectation of fulfillment of some worldly requirement. The prayer may or may not be accompanied by any other spiritual practice.
  Some of the prayers with worldly expectation would include prayers about:
  
• Gross material requirements like job, partner, child, etc.
  
• Subtle material requirement like recovery from illness, happiness, etc.
  

Prayers that are said with expectation of some worldly benefit are generally said by people in the initial stages of their spiritual journey. Even those whose prayers about some worldly benefit are regularly answered, are generally in the initial stages of their spiritual journey. The reason is because people in later stages of spiritual growth make prayers only for their spiritual growth as explained in the next section.
When we pray for the worldly benefit of ourselves or others, the prayer may get answered but we end up using our spiritual energy gained through spiritual practice. This spiritual energy could be either from this birth or an earlier birth.
People who continue praying lifelong with worldly expectations use prayer as a tool to obtain a little something from God rather than striving to increase spiritual practice to attain the all encompassing continual grace of God. The important disadvantage of this type of prayer is that one tends to remain trapped in worldly desires and needs instead of transcending to surrender to God’s will and being able to rely on Him to provide as per our requirement (and not as per our wish).

2. Prayer without worldly expectation (for spiritual growth)

This type of prayer is said by the seekers of God who are serious about their spiritual journey. In such prayers also there is a pleading to God, but it is not about worldly expectations. The expectation is about being able to do better spiritual practice to achieve spiritual progress. Seekers may also pray for removal of obstacles in their spiritual practice, reduction of their ego, etc.

Seekers who pray without worldly expectations have the double benefit of being graced with spiritual progress as well as their material need being taken care of as per the requirement. Here as the person who is praying surrenders much more than the person who prays with worldly expectations, he is able to access much more grace of God. Also the surrender contributes to dissolution of mind, intellect and ego. Both these factors result in rapid spiritual progress.