JAI SAI RAM!!!
The first, and the most important, is prayer. Love is prayer. There is no other prayer, all other prayers are just pseudo, substitutes for' love. The other prayers are invented by people who cannot love, who are incapable of love, who are afraid of love; who have been so badly damaged by the society that they have lost their intrinsic quality of love. Prayer is a substitute for those people. But it is a poor substitute, and it cannot fulfill them because it will never become real.
A prayer is real only when it is not a substitute for love but a flowering of love, when it is the fragrance of your love.
Then it is not Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan. Then it has no form; then it is not a ritual at all. Then it is a way of life. When one lives lovingly, one is prayerful.
And the second meaning of prayer is mercy. One who is prayerful is bound to be compassionate -- naturally; it has not to be cultivated. A cultivated compassion is not true compassion. A cultivated character is only acting, pretension. Basically, anything that you cultivate makes you a hypocrite.
Real things grow; they are not painted from the outside. You don't learn them from the society, you grow them from your innermost core.
They grow in you just as leaves grow on the trees. You can paint a beautiful tree but it will be only a painting. It will not be a tree and it will never grow. No new leaves will come. Spring will come and your painting will remain dead. Spring will come and go. but your painting will not grow a single leaf, a single flower; it will know nothing of the spring. The cultivated character is like a painting -- non-growing, dead.
The real character is a real tree: it knows how to grow. It has sources in the earth, it has roots in existence.
A prayerful heart naturally becomes compassionate, because you are so happy that you start feeling for others. Mercy arises, and now the mercy has a totally different quality from the cultivated mercy. The cultivated mercy always makes you egoistic, as if you are obliging people, doing something great, doing some service to humanity. But the real compassion, the real mercy, knows nothing of all these things; it is simply natural. You don't become egoistic about it, it does not feed your ego; on the contrary, if anything of the ego is still left, it takes it away. The last traces of ego are taken away by compassion.
And the third meaning of prayer is grace. Naturally, when a person is prayerful, compassionate, he will have a new kind of beauty to his individuality: he will have grace. He will have a kind of poetry surrounding him, his vibe will be poetic.
His presence will have a music to it.
But everything starts with love, remember; love is the ultimate law. Then prayer, mercy, grace, follow of their own accord.
OM SAI RAM!!!