जय सांई राम।।।
Deva means divine, archan means prayer -- a divine prayer. Prayer is not what people are doing in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques. It is something totally different. What they are doing is just an empty gesture of prayer; they are performing a ritual, a formality. It is not prayer -- they are simply acting it. It has not come out of their heart, it is coming out of their conditioned mind.
If a person is born in a Christian family he has been taught the Christian prayer. It has become part of his mind. Whenever he is in fear, he will repeat it. Whenever he is ill, he will remember god.
Whenever he is in danger, he will suddenly become religious. Otherwise he will not bother about it at all.
Or, on Sunday morning he is expected to go to the church -- he will go, because it is a social lubricant.
It keeps a good image of you in the eyes of the people you have to live with: they think you are religious. It keeps you respectable.
This has nothing to do with prayer at all. Prayer is like love. It is not acting. It is an authentic feeling. But people have done the same with love too. You hug a woman because she is your wife -- not that you wanted to hug her, not that there was a passionate desire to hold her close to you, but just because it is expected. You are fulfilling a kind of duty. Then this is a boring experience. So prayer, love, anything that you have to do as a duty, becomes boredom. it loses all beauty. It is dead, it is a corpse: it stinks.
Slowly slowly you will find a deepening relationship happening. Then you are no more a stranger; you belong.
And then you are not just accidental -- you are part of this immense reality and something very essential to it. Without you it will miss something, it will lack something, it will not be perfect. You have something to contribute to it. You are not just a 'useless passion' as Sartre says. You have a destiny to fulfil.
Existence has put some great hopes on you. If those hopes are fulfilled, not only will you be happy: the whole existence will be happy with you. Whenever a man becomes a Buddha, becomes enlightened, the whole existence celebrates, because through that man a part of existence has become illumined. Through that man a part has reached to the highest peak of consciousness.
It is just as your hand reaches to a flower: it is not only the hand that will be happy; you are happy. And we are only hands, thousands and thousands of hands of existence. When one hand reaches the highest peak of consciousness, bliss and truth, the whole existence is thrilled -- one part has become illumined. Existence is more illumined now than before. There is less darkness now than before, and more light.
Start moving in this prayerful way. Prayer has not to be learned -- all learned prayers are false; prayer has to be imbibed. It is a knack. Start feeling life, existence, people. And start having little dialogues. In the beginning you will feel embarrassed; in the beginning you will be looking out of the corner of your eye to see whether somebody is watching or not, but only in the beginning.
Don't be worried about it, it's okay. Soon you will see that all fear of public opinion has disappeared. And then really something great starts happening, something incredible, something which you cannot even imagine, something about which you have never dreamt.
Trees start speaking to you, and the rivers and the mountains. It is no more a monologue -- it really becomes dialogue. It is not only that you speak; you are spoken to, too. Existence responds. But only when all your embarrassment has disappeared does the response start happening. And that response coming from reality is the voice of God.
God is not a person somewhere. God is spread all over existence. If you are deep in love with a tree, he will speak from that tree. If you are deep in love with the earth, the earth will start whispering mysteries in your ears....
ॐ सांई राम।।।