Here is a series of  blogs we will be publishing from the book, ‘The Power of Prayer’. We have taken the write-ups by Swami Chinmayananda. Prayer is a very personal thing for most of us. We all pray at different altars and with different techniques. There is no right or wrong. But if we understand the various aspects of prayer and its effects, our relationship with God might become stronger. In this blog we focus on the four main of conditions of prayer.

While thus cultivating the spiritual beauties in one’s personality, unintentionally some people find themselves empty, exhausted, sunk back again into their crude animal urges. Such falls happen to the mind when it loses its firm hold on His feet and consequently gets dragged into the swirl of samsara. 

Hence sage Nanda, the immortal preacher of devotion, advises us in the following verse, giving us the entire essence of all sadhanas as it were: 

Always, free from all mental anxiety, the Lord alone is to be invoked and sought after, with all factors of our personality (VIII:2:79) 

Always, at all times, in all conditions, in all places, with all one’s heart, in perfect devotion, let the Lord be worshipped quietly, serenely, and with a composed mind by those who have given up all worries and anxieties. This is Sri Narada’s advice to seekers

Go to full surrender up to Him. Invoke Him. But there are four conditions of prayer to be scrupulously practised:

1. At all times
2. In all conditions
3. In calmness and serenity
4. As the sole source of your seeking

Even today many of us pray, but it is only a prayer of the ego, “I, I, I” a worship of the perceiver-feeler-thinker “I” – so naturally, instead of becoming calmer in mind, we are ever in agitation, continuously persecuted by our own mind with its endless hungers and demands. 

The seeker who understands this will not say that these conditions of prayer or sadhana are very difficult. He will only have to redirect his present preoccupation which keeps his mind distracted in a thousand channels, agitations, worries and sorrows. From the attitude of constant adoration of the body and the ego, the seeker must take on a spirit of surrender to and worship of the Lord. This capacity to invoke (bhajana) is already in each one of us, but we are misusing it. We unintelligently employ it for achieving the wrong ends in the lower fields of sense pleasures. Rightly used and properly employed, the powers of invocation can lift us to the higher, and we can thereby reach the Infinite Truth, the Lord. 

Prayer or invocation should be from all the levels of our personality. It must be an out pouring of all our faculties in glorifying Him who dwells in us. At the physical, mental and intellectual levels, we must be able to put forth all the best in us as an offering unto Him, in the service of all around us, at all times. Let our actions sing His glory. Let our feelings waft the fragrance of His eternal purity. And let our thoughts gurgle out, expressing His dynamism and divine will. Such total God-centered life itself is a true hymn in praise of the Lord. Let our life be a devotional song, sung in praise of Him who is ever in our heart.