जय सांई राम।।।
Prayer is blissful when it is an expression of gratitude, with no demands, with no complaints. Whenever one starts asking for something in prayer, it is no longer blissful; it is praying out of misery, out of demand, out of need.
It loses its grandeur, its grace. It is nothing but desire disguised as prayer. And that's what goes on in the churches, temples, mosques, in the name of prayer: people are not praying, people are asking, demanding, people are trying to exploit even God for their own purposes. They pray only when they are in need, they remember God when they are in misery. They completely forget God when they are happy. And the real prayer arises out of happiness, not Out of misery, so it is very rarely that real prayer happens in the world, because people pray when they are in pain and they forget completely when they are in pleasure. When everything is going well who bothers about God and who bothers about prayer? When something is not going right, you start remembering God.
It happened in the life of one of the very rare men of this century, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist. He was also a revolutionary, and he was condemned to death with eleven of his other comrades. All twelve were to be shot early in the morning at exactly six o'clock. They were made to stand in a line and they started looking at the church tower, at the clock, and minute by minute life was disappearing. And Dostoevsky says in his memoirs that in those four, five moments, he remembered his whole past.
It happens: when death approaches and you become aware that death is coming -- when it takes you unawares -- then it doesn't happen; but when you know that at exactly six o'clock you will be shot dead and only five minutes are left, one starts having a review.
The whole film of the past starts moving. And in those five minutes he remembered that he has not lived his life attentively. He had wasted his life, he had lived as a robot, as a machine, unconsciously, almost asleep. He could not remember a single moment of attentiveness, of awareness. He decided, "If another life is given to me, I will devote my whole life to awareness." And by chance it happened that he was forgiven; exactly one minute before, the order from the Czar came that all those twelve had to be forgiven.
Then somebody asked him after a few years: "What happened to your decision?" He said, "I tried, but it didn't work out; I could not live attentively. I still try but... for a moment it is there and then it is gone."
People are living almost in a kind of sleep. But when pain comes, misery comes, they are disturbed in their sleep and they start praying, and they take great decisions that "Now, from now onwards, I will be good, I will be this, I will be that." But that is not true prayer. If it comes out of pain, once the pain is gone the prayer will be gone. The true prayer has to arise out of bliss, it has to arise out of your gratitude to God, it has to arise out of a tremendous sense that you are part of this great, profound mystery, that such an infinitely beautiful universe has been given to you for no reason at all; you have not earned it. It is a sheer gift from God.
Then there is prayer.
And if prayer is there, God is there. Wherever prayer is, God is. People ask, "Where is God?" -- their question is meaningless. They should ask, "What is prayer?" -- because wherever prayer is, God is. Prayer is the way to see God. Prayer gives you the eyes, the perspective to see God. A blissful prayer to God. Let that become your existence too.
ॐ सांई राम।।।