1PRAYER “Prayer is the murmur, in the human heart, of The Great Voice of Divine Love”. (Sevananda) If we meditate on the sentence that serves as epigraph to this article, several conclusions impose themselves on our consciousness: 1st.) The power of prayer resides, then, exclusively in the potency of love each heart possesses.
22nd.) There are as many prayers as there are modalities and intensities of love.
33rd.) Egoism being the opposite of love, only the prayers of the non-egoistic are really powerful.
44th.) The act of praying requiring a special state, commonly called fervour, devotion, unction, such a state is obtained only in the proportion in which the one who seeks it lives, habitually and outside of prayer, more or less egoistically.
55th.) The “mechanism” of prayer, by which, as Masters and Mystics affirm, one can reach the Providential Plane directly, is explained because it is not “something human procuring contact with The Divine” but simply THE ONLY DIVINE THING — Love — WITHIN the human being which, on entering into action, sets in vibration, across “the 7 heavens” — the source of all Love — the Providential aspect of the Divinity with one of the universal forms containing a particle of Divine Love.
66th.) The fact of praying — or believing one prays — with fervour at certain moments and of feeling completely different at others is, in the last analysis, one of the many illusions of form.
7In reality, at each moment of existence we have a determinate power, a determinate capacity for loving.
8Why not distribute it uniformly over the whole of our living? 7th.) The phrase of Zanoni to his wife — “There are beings whose thoughts and feelings are constant prayers” — gives the final key.
9The Initiate thinks and feels lovingly; therefore he is already a ‘little’ Providence in constant action.
10That suffices to explain the effect his mere presence produces.
11From this whole set of conclusions — and many others can be obtained by the reader given to meditation — it is inferred that Prayer has nothing to do with knowledge, nor with mental force, nor with meditation, nor with projections of any kind.
12It is an act of Love.
13It is an act of Adoration.
14And even when Prayer may at times have the aspect of altruistic solicitation — as when we ask for the cure of one in need in body or soul — in reality the mere fact of addressing The Divine with real Love, Faith, Veneration and Humility means that, implicitly, we reverence in the sick one the divine element of his life, the divine element of the life or health we ask for him, the divine and providential element of the possibility of praying, the divine element of the permission granted us to feel ourselves, for one moment at least, IMPERSONAL; and, for all this, Prayer constitutes, in itself and by itself alone, one of the most elevated Acts, if not the most elevated of all, of which a human Spirit is capable.
15And if adorative prayer has come, in so many cases, to produce even levitations, it is not the phenomenon in itself that should fill us with admiration; rather we should feel,
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.