What do you pray for?

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Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

The first question to ask is, what is your prayer? “God give me this, give me that, and save me.” What you are seeking in prayer is not God. What you are seeking is security and happiness. Ultimately, what you want with prayer is wellbeing but you are not willing to admit it. The first step is to be straight with yourself, then we can see how to cross the threshold of limitations to true happiness and wellbeing.
It is time we realise that looking to God will not help until we look at our own foolishness. If you sincerely look at your deepest motivation for religion, you will see you have never aspired for the Divine.
Please understand this: Your aspiration was never for the ultimate. Your aspiration is for comfort, for wealth, for power and pleasure. And you think God is a tool to achieve all those things.
When you are seeking protection or materialist things, greed and fear become the basis of your prayer, but this does not work.
Ordinarily, we think prayer is a means to reach God, but what do we really know about God? If we are truthful, we must admit we have no direct experience of God; we are coming from a particular belief system. The danger in using prayer to reach a God, we have no direct experience of, can be illusionary. Thoughts and prayer can open a person but at the same time they can create hallucinations.
Once hallucinations start growing, they take on a big dimension because illusion is always more powerful than reality. An illusion has the freedom of becoming anything it wants.
The cinema is more powerful than real life — given that, you can just exaggerate it the way you want it. When the illusory process gets exaggerated, it becomes more powerful than life. That is why we have always stayed away from prayer. Prayer cannot only be misused but can also be deceptive. Meditation, compared to prayer, is a much more reliable method to reach one’s inner nature and experience the Divine.
Authentic prayer is a deep connection with the Divine inherent in everything and everywhere. It is a quality, a state of being. As we become prayerful it is extremely beautiful, but that state is reached only when we connect with our inner nature. Then the experience is absolutely joyous.
When we are really joyous, we become receptive. Prayer no longer becomes a monologue, but a beautiful phenomenon and a celebration which brings great joy. Then we pray not out of fear or greed, but because prayer itself is the reward. Patanjali, considered the father of yoga, goes as far as to say that when one knows how to be truly prayerful, prayer is not a means to reach God, but God is a means so that we can pray.

— Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet, and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org [2]