Archana

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Love is prayer. Those who pray without love, their prayers are empty, hollow of meaning. Their prayers are without wings. Their prayers will never reach to God. Only when love throbs at the heart inside the prayer is it alive, significant, and has it the energy to reach to God. It reaches instantly, no time gap is needed; in fact it reaches before you have said it.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[kripakarosai]

Ramesh Ji...I just do not have words to appreciate the beautiful thoughts you have posted.
Such divine and crystal clear state of mind and understanding the self and thee is only possible when one is blessed.
May Baba always continue to shower his blessings on you and you always continue to spread his warmth of love and guide us towards him.

om sai sri sai jay jay sai

rajesh

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Prartho means prayer. The word "prayer" comes from the same root as Prartho -- a blissful prayer. And that is the most incredible thing that can happen in life to a man. Even love is not that far out; even love falls short, even love remains human.

Prayer is a flight into the divine. It is love evaporating into the divine. It is love going beyond the gravitation of the earth. It is the most mysterious experience of life -- indefinable, elusive, but experienceable. One cannot do prayer, it is not an action; one can only be in prayer, it is a state of being. If one is doing prayer one is simply moving through empty gestures, one is following a ritual; and all rituals are dead; and no ritual is capable of containing the aliveness of prayer. It is so alive that it escapes all confinements, all limitations.

Prayer is not intellectual, verbal. It is a silent bowing down of the being, silent gratitude in the heart. But the silent part is the most essential part of it. The moment you say it, you have profaned it; the moment you say it you have gone astray. Bring words in and the prayer goes out: it is a wordless experience -- because with the words comes the mind, the intellect, and prayer has nothing to do with intellect at all; it is utterly non-intellectual.

Prayer is neither intellectual nor emotional. Prayer is a transcendence of all duality. It is a state of witnessing, of becoming aware -- nothing to say, nothing to do, but just to be.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Shammi]

Bhai Jaan- Just beautiful beyond words and explaination !!!



Bow to Sri Sai - Raksha Karo Deva !!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Your love energy is prayer. Religions, organized churches/mandirs, have destroyed it. They have given you readymade prayers. Prayer is a spontaneous feeling.

Let your prayer be a spontaneous phenomenon. If even your prayer cannot be spontaneous, then what will be? If even with God you have to be readymade then where will you be authentic and true and natural?

Say things that you would like to say. Talk to him as you would talk to a wise friend. But don't bring formalities in. A formal relationship is not a relationship at all. And you have become formal with God also. You miss all spontaneousness.

Bring love into prayer. Then you can talk! It is a beautiful thing -- a dialogue with the universe.

Spontaneousness is thought to be madness. Formalities are thought to be sanity. Just the opposite is the reality. When you go into a temple and you simply repeat some crammed prayer you are simply foolish. Have a heart-to-heart talk! And prayer is beautiful. You will start flowering through it. Prayer is to be in love -- to be in love with the whole. And sometimes you get angry with the whole and you don't talk; thats? beautiful. And you say: I will not talk, enough is enough, and you have not been listening to me! A beautiful gesture. Not dead. And sometimes you drop praying completely, because you go on praying and God is not listening.

It is a relationship with deep involvement in it. You get angry. Sometimes you feel very good, feel thankful, grateful; sometimes you feel put off; but let it be a LIVING relationship; then prayer is true.

If you just go on like a gramophone and repeat the same thing every day, you are not doing any prayer, it is not prayer.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

PRAYER IS NOT SOMETHING THAT CAN BE DONE. Prayer is not something that can be thought either. Prayer is a state of silent being, of utter silence. One simply is... then one is in prayer. If you do prayer, you miss the whole point. Doing remains on the circumference; doing cannot enter to the center of your being.

If you are saying your prayer, you again miss -- because in saying it you are thinking of yourself as separate from God, you are relating to God as if he is separate from you. And that is the basic illusion: God is not separate from you.
 
Hence, prayer cannot be a dialogue between I and thou. I is thou -- there is no possibility of any dialogue. The moment you say your prayer, you have accepted a hypothesis which is basically wrong -- that God is there, far away from you, separate. You have reduced God to an object. And God is your very subjectivity, he is your very center.

The Upanishads say, "TAT-TVAM-ASI: thou art that."

The only way to be in prayer is to be in utter silence. In that silence there is an overflowing of gratitude, but it is not verbalized. There is a tremendous thankfulness, but it is not said, it is not spoken. There is great love, but it is a pure presence.

No-mind is the ultimate prayer. And it is the state of no-mind where prayer and meditation meet. Meditation takes you to the no-mind, prayer takes you to the no-mind. No-mind is the peak where the path of the mind and the path of the heart meet.

The path of the lover, the devotee, goes directly through the heart. It simply works on the feelings. Feelings are silent, non-verbal -- you cannot communicate, you can only commune.
 
But from both the ways you reach the shrine of no-mind. It is the ultimate in prayer and it is the ultimate in meditation.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Prayer should be a lived experience, a heart-to-heart dialogue. And soon, if it is hearty, you will feel that not only are you talking, but the response is there. Then prayer has come into its own, come of age. When you feel the response, that not only you are talking -- if it is a monologue it is still not prayer -- it becomes a dialogue, you not only speak, you listen.

And I tell you the whole existence is ready to respond. Once your heart is open the whole responds.

There is nothing like prayer. No love can be as beautiful as prayer.

But then there is the fourth stage which I call meditation. There dialogue also ceases. Then you have a dialogue in silence. Words drop, because when the heart is really full you cannot speak. When the heart is too overflowing only silence can be the medium. Then there is no other. You are one with the universe. You neither say anything nor listen to anything. You ARE with the one, with the universe, with the whole. A oneness. This is meditation.

If love happens, fear will disappear from the mind. You will have a life of freedom, at ease, at-homeness. No fear will come, no nightmares.

If the prayer happens then fear completely disappears, because with prayer you become one -- you start feeling a deep relationship with the whole. From the spirit, fear disappears; the fear of death disappears when you pray -- never before it.

And when you meditate even fearlessness disappears. Fear disappears, fearlessness disappears. Nothing remains. Or. only the nothing remains. A vast purity; virginity; innocence.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Bliss is not a result of prayer, it is not a reward: it is prayer itself. It is not that prayerful people become blissful; just the contrary: blissful people are prayerful.

There is no question of becoming; bliss and prayer are synonymous. And once this is understood then the whole of life can be a prayer. If this is not understood then prayer remains a ritual and never becomes your whole life, and unless prayer becomes your whole life, your totality, it cannot transform you. It remains a duty, a formality, a good ritual -- healthy in itself, but it takes you nowhere.
 
I consider my BABA SAI's whole teaching as that if a person remains blissful in ordinary day-to-day life, doing small things but blissfully, then prayer is spread all over his life. Then eating he is prayerfully eating because he is blissfully eating. Then walking he is prayerfully walking because he is blissfully walking. Then breathing, he is prayerfully breathing because he is blissfully breathing.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

If you really know what prayer is then prayer itself is its own reward. There is nobody else to reward you; the reward is not there in the future, not in the after-life. But praying itself is such a beautiful phenomenon that who cares about the future and who bothers about the reward? That is greed, the idea of reward. Prayer in itself is such a celebration, it brings such great joy and ecstasy, that one prays for the prayer's sake. One does not pray out of fear and one does not pray out of greed; one prays because one enjoys it. One does not even bother whether there is a God or not.

If you enjoy dancing you don't ask whether there is a God or not. If you enjoy dancing, you simply dance! Whether anybody sees the dance from the sky or not is not your concern. Whether the stars and the sun and the moon are going to reward you for your dance, you don't care. The dance is enough of a reward in itself. If you love singing you sing; whether anybody listens or not is not the point.

So is prayer. It is a dance, it is a song, it is music, it is love. You enjoy it, and there it is finished. Prayer is the means and prayer is the end; the ends and the means are not separate. Only then do you know what prayer is. And prayer is far more important than God.

Patanjali says: God is only an excuse to pray. It is like a peg on the wall to hang your coat on.

If the peg is not there you can hang your coat somewhere else. You can hang it on the door, on the window, anywhere. Patanjali has great insight when he says that God is just a peg: God has been invented because otherwise it will be difficult for you to pray.

Ordinarily you think prayer is a means to reach God; Patanjali says God is only a means so that you can pray. But it is only for the beginners -- to help them.

According to Patanjali, one of the greatest masters of the world, God is a device -- a device to help you to pray.

Once you have learned to pray, forget all about God; prayer itself is enough, more than enough.

Prayer means surrender. Prayer means bowing down to existence. Prayer means gratitude.

Prayer means thankfulness. Prayer means silence. Prayer means that "I am happy that I am." Prayer simply means that "This tremendous gift of life is so much for such an unworthy man like me. I don't deserve it, yet the unknown has showered it on me." Seeing it, gratitude arises.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

I will say just start sitting in front of HIM, close your eyes, and just wait for something unknown. If you wait for the known, then the mind functions, because the known means that which is already an experience; the known means the past. The known means that you want to repeat some thrill, some pleasure; it is a repetition. With the unknown, the mind is simply at a loss, because the unknown is simply out of the mind's grasp.

Where the unknown begins, God begins. And once the unknown has become known, it is no more God. It has become the mind.

So one has to go on leaving the mind and moving into the unknown again and again. It is an eternal journey. So simply sit, wait for the unknown, and if something starts happening in your body energy, allow it. After a few days you will see tremendous happenings. You will not be able to believe what is happening. Don't get scared, don't be scared... allow it. You may feel jolts of energy, shocks of energy shaking your very foundation. You will feel a great trembling arising in you, a great shaking. And it will be coming from nowhere. You will see that you are not doing it. You will be able to see absolutely that you are not in your own control. Something has come and possessed you, something has descended upon you -- you are no more yourself. A greater self has come in contact.

So don't get scared at that moment. If you get scared, the contact is again broken.
Not only that, if you get scared the contact will become more and more difficult to make again, because the fear will stand there. When the contact happens, the fear will come and you will be cut off; fear separates, cuts off.

So when this happens, be loving. These are the only two real emotions -- fear and love. If you don't love, you will be in fear. If you are in fear, you cannot love. If you love, fear is impossible. So when this is happening, love it. Pour your energy lovingly. Feel happy that a gift has descended upon you, that there is grace around you, that BABA SAI has listened to you, that your prayer has been heard. You have not said anything, but it has been heard.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[saivenkat_r]

OM SAI RAM

Dear Ramesh Ji,

Your messages are all Good.

OM SAI SRI SAI JAYA JAYA SAI  OM SAI SRI JAYA JAYA SAI

Venkat
(Venkatasubramanian)

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Only those prayers reach to HIM when they are non-demanding. If there is even a hidden demand somewhere, that very demand makes the prayer so heavy that it cannot leave the earth. When there is no demand then it is weightless, then it can rise; then the gravitation has no effect on it, then it can go to the highest, to the deepest core of existence.

Only those prayers are heard which are nothing but jubilations, 'alleluia', for no particular reason. Only those prayers are heard which are nothing but thanks.

And, remember it, a mind which is entangled in thinking never comes to the point where THANKING can happen. Thinking becomes a bar, a hindrance, to thanking. Either you can be thinking or you can be thanking, but you cannot be both together. Thanking arises out of non-thinking, and a demanding mind cannot afford to be non-thinking. He has to think, he has to work out... He has a demand that has to be fulfilled -- he is after it, he is chasing it, he is putting everything at stake.

God is absolutely deaf to the prayers which demand, but God is absolutely open to the prayers which have no demand.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

Nothing happens by too much worship! Too much worship means that you do not know how to worship. Too much worship means that you are repeating dead rituals, otherwise it is sufficient to speak the name of the divine even once. And every day you are sitting with the rosary repeating "Sai Ram, Sai Ram." When will your life be full of Sai Ram? How many times are you going to repeat " Sai Ram"?

There are some people who keep an account of the number of their chants. They say, "I have chanted this mantra ten million times." But if nothing has happened by chanting once, then what is going to happen by chanting ten million times? Try to understand this.

A mantra is not mathematics. A mantra is not quantitative, it is qualitative. If anything is to happen it will happen the very first time. If it is not to happen then, it will not happen even if you go on repeating it ten million times. If you have repeated it wrongly the first time, you will do it more so the second time, the third time even more so, and this will go on. You can repeat it a million times or ten million times, it makes no difference.

It is a question of calling properly; then one call of the heart is enough, then even one call becomes a revolution. The divine is not deaf. He does not want your flattery. Is he going to listen only when you say it repeatedly? He can hear without your saying it but it should be from your heart. He will never hear if you go on repeating it in your mind, because the divine is not related with your thinking, the divine is related only with your prayer of the heart.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

I have heard that it had not rained in a village for many years, so the whole of the village had gathered in the temple to pray.

A small child was also going to the temple to pray. Everyone was laughing at him on the way. Even the priest said, "You stupid! Why are you carrying that umbrella with you? It has not rained for many years, that is why we are going to pray."

That child had brought an umbrella. Thousands of people had gathered to pray but none of them had brought an umbrella. The child said, "I have brought the umbrella because when we pray it will certainly rain and I will need it on my way back."

People just laughed, they said, "He is mad."

Can the prayer of such people be answered? Only this child's prayer could be answered. He had deep trust; he had no doubt in the prayer; his prayer was full of deep trust. But the older people put doubt in the mind of the child.

They said, "Go home and put this umbrella away. It does not rain in this way." They are going to pray, but do not have the confidence that it will rain by praying. Then why pray at all?

It is better to be an atheist and be honest about it. What is the use of being a theist if you are dishonest? You have prayed many times but did you believe that it would be answered? When it is not answered, you say that you knew beforehand that the prayer would not be answered. You have knocked on the doors of the temple many times, but have you done so wholeheartedly? With full trust? Or did you go with doubt?

If you went with doubt then you should not have gone at all -- that would have been honest.

By going, whom did you deceive? By going you have harmed yourself. Your prayer was unanswered. If your prayer is unanswered again and again then you lose your self-confidence; then you pray from your lips and not from your heart.

AND HAS WORSHIPPED GOD EVEN A LITTLE -- yes, a little is enough. You must understand that it is not on quantity -- how much you have worshipped -- but on quality: How you have done it.

People are very calculating in life. Even their prayer is calculating and clever; they cannot be simple even while praying. If we get an opportunity we can pick God's pocket!

Perhaps that is why HE hides himself and is afraid to face us! Innocence in itself is a prayer.

OM SAI RAM!!!

[Ramesh Ramnani]

JAI SAI RAM!!!

When you have looked into existence through one person -- your beloved, your husband, your wife, your friend, your child, your brother, your sister, your Master, if you have looked into one person and you have seen infinity, if you looked into one person's window and the whole sky of infinity opened, now you know that love can move higher -- it can become prayer.

Prayer is meeting of spirit with spirit. Love is vaster, but still limited to a person. Prayer is unlimited. Then you know that you can move from every person to the infinite. Then every person becomes a jumping-board. You look into the eyes of your child -- and God is there. You look into the eyes of your beloved, and suddenly the beloved has disappeared, she is no more there, he is no more there -- God is smiling. You look into the flower and the whole has entered there. This is prayer.

In love the mind disappears but the spirit remains.

In prayer the spirit also disappear but the other, the God, remains but ultimately even God will disappears. Nothing remains -- or only nothing remain.

OM SAI RAM!!!