Chapter 14. Verbal Prayer

Do not think that the words of prayer as you say them go up to God. It is not the words themselves that ascend; it is rather the burning desire of your heart that rises like smoke towards heaven.

— Rabbi Zev Wolf of Zotamir (Jewish)

Most seekers throughout history have been bhaktas. In the Bhagavad Gita , Krishna explains why:

Greater is the toil of those whose minds are set on the Transcendent, for the path of the Transcendent is hard for mortals to attain.

But they for whom I [Krishna] am the End Supreme, who surrender all their works to me and who with pure love meditate on me and adore me — these I very soon deliver from the ocean of death and life-in-death, because they have set their hearts on me. 218

As Krishna suggests, a bhakta quite literally falls in love with God, and this is what gives the bhakti path its special power. As we all know from our experience with human love affairs, few passions can animate us as much as that burning desire to be united with our beloved. This makes it a lot easier for bhaktas to practice things like the four principles—attention, commitment, detachment, and surrender. So, for example, if you are madly in love with someone, you have no problem paying attention to them when the two of you are together. And even when you are apart, your mind keeps flying back to memories of moments you shared, or zooming ahead in expectation of future meetings. Well, the same thing happens with God. Once you are smitten, you can’t stop thinking about your Beloved—a fact celebrated (and sometimes bemoaned) in so much of the bhakti literature. Listen, for example, to the author of the Hebrew psalms:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me continually,
“Where is your God?” 219

Nor, if you are a true lover, do you have any trouble keeping commitments you’ve made. Have you ever forgotten to show up for a date with someone you were head-over-heals in love with? So, too, with keeping commitments to your Divine Beloved to engage in various devotional practices. As long as you are motivated by love, undertaking these disciplines will be a joy instead of a burden. Here, for example, is how Rabi’a describes her time spent in evening prayer:

O God, the stars are shining;
All eyes have closed in sleep;
The kings have locked their doors,
Each lover is alone, in secret, with the one he loves.
And I am here too: alone, hidden from all of them –
With You. 220

As for practicing detachment, if you are really in love, you won’t even be tempted to pursue other lovers. The only person you want to be with in all the world is your true love. And again, it’s the same if you are a lover of the Divine. Just listen to what the twelfth-century Hindu bhakta Mahadevi says about her Shiva:

I have fallen in love with the Beautiful
One, who is without any family,
without any country and without any peer;
Chenna Mallikārjuna [Shiva], the Beautiful, is my husband.
Fling into the fire the husbands who are
subject to death and decay. 221

Most important, if you are a true lover, when it comes to surrender you will be more than willing to give up all you possess—even your very life—for the sake of your beloved. How much more so if the One you love is God? Thus, the author of The Book of Privy Counseling writes,

This is the way of all real love. The lover will utterly and completely despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves. 222

There is, however, a catch to being a bhakta. Virtually anyone with sufficient curiosity about the true nature of things can choose to become a jnani. But to be a bhakta taking the path of devotion you must first have an initiation. Now initiation here does not mean undergoing some kind of secret ceremony or becoming a member of a particular religious sect. What it does mean is that you have a personal encounter with the Divine in some form. Until you have had such an encounter, you cannot practice true devotion for the simple reason that if you have never experienced something, you cannot love it with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

How Initiation Happens

Exactly how and when such an initiation occurs, and what form it takes, can vary greatly from individual to individual and culture to culture. In the Hindu tradition seekers often encounter the Divine in the guise of a human guru. Here is an account by an Indian college professor, M.M. Thakore, of the first time he and his wife met Anandamayi Ma. After a long journey, which culminated in a boat ride to an island, they found the famous saint had already retired for a nap. In Professor Thakore’s own words,

We waited in the temple nearby longing for Mother’s darśana [blessing]. Hours passed and the doors did not open. To our surprise the boatman had followed us and requested us to leave the place immediately as it was necessary for us to cross from the island of Vyasji before dark. He also demanded the fare for the return journey as originally fixed, in case we did not like to come away with him forthwith. We decided not to leave the place without Mother’s darśana and paid the boatman his fare. After he had gone away, the doors of the room opened and we were graced with Mother’s darśana . We were so thrilled that we sat near Mother with tears of joy in our eyes. Mother cast Her glance at us full of overwhelming love and said: “So you have come. Do you know why I kept you waiting? You came with a return ticket. This habit of taking a return ticket must be given up.”… We felt positive that Mother was not different from the Mother of the World who is all-knowing. 223

For some seekers, a first encounter with the Divine may come as an interior voice calling them to walk a spiritual path. According to one of his biographers, this is what happened to Ibn al-’Arabi (also known as Muhyi l-Din Muhammed) when he was still just a teenager:

A prince who was one of his father’s friends invited him to dinner along with other sons of princes. When the shaikh Muhyī l-Dīn and the others were all present they ate to repletion, and then the goblets of wine began circulating. When it came to the turn of the shaikh Muhyī l-Dīn, he grabbed the goblet and was just about to drink when he heard a voice call out to him: “Muhammad, it was not for this that you were created.” He threw down the goblet and left in a daze. 224

For others, it may take the form of an overpowering presence suddenly and unexpectedly breaking through the veil of ordinary appearances. Simone Weil, for instance, grew up in a secular Jewish family in France, without any religious training. As a young woman, her main interest had been in leftist politics. Then one day, while she was recuperating from injuries received fighting the Fascists in Spain, she had the following epiphany:

In a moment of intense physical suffering … when I was forcing myself to love, but without desiring to give a name to that love, I felt, without being in any way prepared for it (for I had never read the mystical writers) a presence more personal, more certain, more real, than that of a human being, though inaccessible to the senses and the imagination. 225

For still others, an encounter with the Divine unfolds in a more gradual fashion, as a kind of deepening awareness of some transcendent Wisdom or Force at work in the Universe. This was the case with the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. As a young man, Tolstoy had become convinced that God did not exist and religion was a sham. Later, however, when all his worldly success failed to make him happy, he started to envy the simple faith of the peasants on his estate to whom religion seemed to bring such contentment and joy. “Could there really be a God after all?” he began to wonder. Whenever he asked himself this question, his heart would respond “yes!” but his mind continued to say “no!” For more than a year he see-sawed back and forth between affirmation and negation. Finally, one afternoon his inner conflict was resolved in the following manner:

“What, then, do I seek?” a voice cried out within me. “He is there, the one without whom there would be no life.” To know God and to live come to one and the same thing. God is life.

“Live seeking God, for there can be no life without God.” And more powerfully than ever a light shone within me and all around me, and this light has not abandoned me since. 226

But no matter how or when this kind of initiation occurs, it is not something which you can bring about by an act of your own will alone. It comes spontaneously, as a gift of grace. Still, this does not mean that you are completely powerless, that there is nothing you can do but sit around and wait for the divine lightning to strike.

To begin with, even though you cannot choose to fall in love with God, it helps if you are actively seeking such an experience. Again, this is similar to what happens when we fall in love with a human being. Although love can overtake us at the most unexpected moments, our chances of finding someone to love will be greatly increased if we make some effort. For starters, instead of moping around the house all day watching TV, you might begin frequenting places where you are likely to meet a suitable mate. The same is true of the Divine Beloved. If you want to meet God, you have to go where God is. But then the question arises, where is that? Where can God be found? Here is what Allah tells Muhammad, according to a famous hadith (saying of the Prophet):

Neither My earth nor My heaven can encompass Me, yet the heart of My adorer contains Me. 227

And you will find the same answer given by mystics of all the great traditions. Listen, for instance, to Lalleshwari:

He lives in your heart.
Recognize Him.
Don’t look for Him
here and there,
wondering, “Where is God?” 228

Similarly, the fourth-century Christian mystic St. Ephraim of Syria says,

Here within you are the riches of heaven, if you desire them. … Enter within yourself and remain in your heart, for there is God. 229

Before we go any further, however, it is important to understand what mystics mean when they use the term heart . In fact, depending on the context, heart can have a number of different meanings. So let’s take a look at some of the most common.

Four Meanings of “Heart”

For our purposes, we can identify at least four meanings of heart , each of which pertains to a different level of spiritual experience. First, and most obviously, it can refer to the physical heart. This is usually the case when mystics talk about using the heart as a focal point for some kind of formal practice. Here, for example, is an instruction given by Tibetan master Dilgo Khyentse on how to pray to your teacher as an embodiment of the deity Chenrezi:

When going to sleep, visualize him in your heart, seated upon a four-petaled red lotus, radiating light which fills the whole universe. 230

The second level of meaning is the emotional heart. This refers to that psychological place where we experience various emotions. These can be negative feelings of the kind Jesus warned against:

Out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. 231

Or they can be spiritually positive feelings, such as compassion for others, or that all-consuming yearning for God which mystical poets like Hafiz have sung so much about:

I have cried a hundred streams across my breast
hoping to water the seed of kindness in your heart.

My spilled blood freed me from the pain of love.
I am grateful to the dagger of your glance.

Be kind, grant me an audience, so that with burning heart
my eyes can constantly rain pearls at your feet. 232

As we shall see in a future chapter, if you are walking a bhakti path, one of your primary tasks is to purify your emotional heart by transforming all your negative emotions into love and longing for the Divine. The more you can do this, the more you can enter into the spiritual heart. This refers to a deep space of awareness, which has been emptied of all content except for a sense of the Divine Presence. Hafiz’s contemporary, the Christian mystic Johannes Tauler, describes it this way:

He [God] is far above every outward thing and every thought, and is found only where thou hidest thyself in the secret place of thy heart, in the quiet solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature, nor image, nor fancy. 233

Finally, when the spiritual heart has been completely purified of all forms whatsoever—even forms of the Divine—then there is an opportunity to Realize what Ramana Maharshi calls the Radiant Heart or Heart-Center . This, as Ramana explains, is simply another term for the Ultimate Reality, or Consciousness Itself:

Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart or the Seat of Consciousness, it is all the same. The point to be grasped is this, that Heart means the very core of one’s being, the center, without which there is nothing whatever. 234

To sum up, then, this hierarchy of hearts is really a bhakti version of the same idea we have already come across—namely, that the spiritual journey is a journey which takes place within yourself. By entering into and purifying each of these heart-levels, you can eventually reach that Radiant Heart or Pure Consciousness which constitutes your true Identity.

The Hardened Heart

The first obstacle most bhaktas run up against when they try to enter within is that to one degree or another their hearts have become hardened. This happens as a response to the inevitable disappointments everyone experiences in the process of growing up. Although we’re all born with a primordial longing for happiness, when we try to attain it by pursuing worldly things, we usually end up frustrated and disillusioned. As a result, most of us learn a subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) lesson: the more we give free-reign to our longing for happiness, the more suffering we’re liable to experience. Not realizing that our mistake isn’t that we long for happiness, but that we are looking for it in the wrong places, we conclude the problem lies with the longing itself—that this longing is based on a childish fantasy which we must suppress. Outwardly, then, we abandon the search for true happiness, and settle, instead, for transitory pleasures; while inwardly we bury our real feelings under a facade of cynicism about life and its possibility. This, however, is extremely unfortunate, because, understood rightly, our longing for happiness is actually a call from our True Self to rise from our slumber and begin the long journey Home. Here’s how Rumi expresses it:

In whatever state you may be, seek!
Seek water constantly, oh man of dry lips!
For your dry lips give witness that
in the end you will find a fountain.
The lips’ dryness is a message from the water:
“If you keep on moving about,
without doubt you will find me.” 235

So if you want to be a bhakta, the first thing you have to do is to open your heart to that longing once again. But then the question arises, how can you actually accomplish this—especially if you are one of those people who no longer feels any longing at all?

Well, one way to begin is to pay attention to your physical heart, because the physical heart is where we tend to experience our emotions most concretely. This is reflected in many idioms of our language. For instance, when we feel glad we say, “My heart leapt for joy.” When something makes us sad we say, “It broke my heart.” Hatred “turns our hearts to stone,” while compassion “softens” or “melts” our hearts. In other words, the physical heart serves as a kind of barometer for our emotional states. This is even true of repressed emotions. If your longing for happiness has been completely stifled, you can still experience this as a chronic constriction of the muscles in your heart area—which, of course, is what gave rise to the term hardened heart in the first place.

Once you have identified your hardened heart, the next step is to open your heart and liberate the love and longing locked within it. And the way mystics of virtually all traditions recommend doing this is to take up a practice of mystical prayer. Like meditation, mystical prayer unfolds in successive stages: first there is verbal prayer; next prayer-in-the-heart; then unceasing prayer; and, finally, silent prayer. So let’s start with verbal prayer and see what exactly this entails.

Verbal Prayer

Most people think of verbal prayer as a way of petitioning God for some special favor. From a mystic’s point of view, however, this is not its real purpose. The real purpose of verbal prayer is to give voice to that love and longing for the Divine which is buried deep in your heart. Here is how the eighteenth-century founder of the Hasidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov, expressed it:

The purpose of Creation is only that we pray for God. Material things, this world—such nonsense is not worthy of prayer. 236

But supposing you have never prayed before and don’t know how to go about it. Or perhaps you once knew, but you have become so alienated from God that now you have forgotten. If either is true of you, you might want to take the advice of another Hasidic master of the nineteenth-century, Nahman of Bratslav:

Even if it happens to be the case that he finds himself incapable of opening his mouth to speak to God at all, yet this is good in itself, namely, the very preparation in which he makes himself ready to speak to God although he cannot actually do so, yet since he wishes to do so, this in itself is very good. And he can make up a prayer and carry on a conversation with himself regarding this very thing. Regarding this very thing he should cry out in prayer that he has become so remote from God that he finds himself unable even to speak to Him. And he should entreat God and beg for Him to open his mouth so that he can converse with Him. Know that very many of the great and famous zaddikim [spiritual masters] related that they only attained to the stage they did as a result of this habit. 237

Do not be surprised if your first attempts at verbal prayer make you feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. This will be doubly true if you are someone who has taken pride in being a totally independent and self-reliant person. The thought of asking anyone for help—let alone a God you may not even believe in—will almost certainly cause your ego to rebel. You may hear it say, “This is stupid. There is no God, you’re just wasting your time.” Don’t get sucked into an argument with such thoughts, or try to logically convince yourself that God does, indeed, exist. Like Tolstoy, what you are seeking in prayer is not an intellectual proof of the Divine, but a direct, personal experience. So just ignore whatever doubts your thinking mind raises. Keep your attention focused on your heart and continue to pray, giving vent to whatever emotions arise with as much sincerity as you can muster.

If you persist in this practice, over time chances are your heart will begin to crack a little. The first sign of this is often a sensation of being pierced or wounded in the chest. Some seekers find this experience to be very sweet. For others, it can be quite excruciating. You may even be inundated by a flood of tears, as though a dam somewhere deep inside had burst. But however painful this may be, the important thing is not to hold back. Before a festering wound can be healed, it must be lanced. Although we may dread having to undergo such an operation, once it is over we feel cleansed and relieved. In the same way, verbal prayer can open our hearts and cleanse them of mistrust and false pride, so that our primordial longing for happiness can flow freely once again.

Sometimes, verbal prayer alone will suffice to provoke a full-blown encounter with the Divine. More often, however, all you will be granted is a brief glimpse of your Beloved. It is as though you were walking down a street when suddenly out of the corner of your eye you spied an extraordinarily beautiful woman or man standing in a window. By the time you wheel around to get a better look, however, they’re gone. Still, you have seen enough to make you want to go knock on their door and meet them face-to-face. For most seekers it is the same with their first glimpse of the Divine Beloved. And the way to knock on the Divine Beloved’s door is to take up the practice of prayer-in-the-heart.