Pray to the divine mother
A lady in India told me years ago, “I once asked my pujari why he made so much noise when he worshiped. I mean, all that shouting and clanging of bells-it didn’t seem necessary to me. Well, he may have had other and better reasons for that commotion, but the answer he gave me was, ‘You see, God is deaf. If we don’t make a lot of noise, He won’t be able to hear us.”
The thought that shouting is necessary to get God’s attention is, of course, absurd.
God does not have to hear us at all, to know what we are praying! He is at the center of our very thoughts. Indeed, He is those thoughts! He is everything.
If we make too much outward noise when we pray and chant to Him, however, what we do in effect is drive Him away! That is to say, we shatter our own sensitivity to actual communion with Him.
There is, however, a good reason also for chanting loudly at first. It isn’t to get God’s attention, but to focus our own thoughts and feelings.
It is when we are inwardly focused that we should chant softly, with increasingly inward awareness.
As we chant or pray, then, we should listen inwardly for His answer. True prayer is a whispered call to God. Its effectiveness depends not on the mere repetition of word-formulae, but on focused attention.
Devotion, ultimately, is what wins Him. My Guru wrote in one of his Whispers from Eternity, “Oh, how maddening! I can pray no more with words, but only with whispered yearning of my soul.” This is the secret o f true prayer. The more one goes beyond outwardness, into the inner silence, the more aware one becomes of what my Guru, again, called “His listening presence.”
Prayer and chanting become wordless, finally. It is an upward yearning of the soul for its Creator. We were made not only by God, but from Him-out of His own consciousness. We are a part of His infinite dream.
As Paramhansa Yogananda put it, “The soul realizes that it was God alone who became one’s individual ego, then it woke up and realized that its reality was always God.” W h i s p e r constantly, therefore, your longing for God.
The usual “mantra” going on in people’s minds is, “I must win success in this venture! I want to meet this man, or this woman! I want that job, that opportunity!” In that way, let your constant whisper be, “Lord, Beloved, reveal Thyself to me! Reveal Thyself!” And then, whenever you err in some way, pray whisperingly to the Divine Mother: “Mother, naughty or good, I am Thy child. Thou must release me!”
Swami Kriyananda is a living disciple of Paramhamsa Yogananda. He is also the founder of Ananda Sangha with nine communities around the world.