Page 36 - All India Magazine Jun-2025

There is the purely mechanical, material prayer, with words
which have been learnt and are mechanically repeated. That
does not signify anything much. And that has usually only one
single result, that of quietening the person who prays, for if a
prayer is repeated several times, the words end up by making
you calm.
There is a prayer which is a spontaneous formula for ex-
pressing something precise which one wants to ask for: one
prays for this thing or that, one prays for one thing or another;
one can pray for somebody, for a circumstance, for oneself.
There is a point where aspiration and prayer meet, for there
are prayers which are the spontaneous formulation of a lived
experience: these spring up all ready from within the being, like
something that's the expression of a profound experience, and
which offers thanksgiving for that experience or asks its contin-
uation or asks for its explanation also; and that indeed is quite
close to aspiration. But aspiration is not necessarily formulated
in words; or if it is formulated in words, it is almost a move-
ment of invocation. You aspire for a certain state; for instance,
you have found something in yourself that is not in keeping
with your ideal, a movement of darkness and ignorance, per-
haps even of ill-will, something that's not in harmony with what
you want to realise; then that is not going to be formulated in
words; that will be like a springing flame and like an offering
made of a living experience, asking to grow larger, be magni-
fied and ever more and more clear and precise. All that may be
put into words later, if one tries to remember and note down
one's experience. But aspiration always springs up like a flame
that rises high and carries in itself the thing one desires to be
or what one desires to do or desires to have. I use the word "de-
sire", but truly it is here that the word "aspire" should be used,
for that does not have either the quality or the form of a desire.
CWM 5: 139-41

36 All India Magazine, June 2025