Q: Can you say something about the right way to pray for a sick person?
PR: My general advice is that we should not distinguish between who deserves our prayer and who doesn't deserve our prayer. I remember one family, two children were sick. One was very sick, almost dying, and the other was not sick at all, you know, just a little fever and things like that, and everybody was praying for this child which was dying. The funny thing happened on the seventh day. The dying child started to recover and the child which was not at all sick died. That is why it is wise to pray for all. Because I don't think we are really competent to decide who is going, and if this going can be stopped by praying.
The second thing is a little bit more difficult, because we are always concerned with human sympathy, human love, things like that: is it right to pray at all for such persons? Because if we have rightly understood the theory of samskaras, and that a person's life takes a particular course because of the samskaras, then the right understanding would seem to decide that we have no right to interfere in that process. Of course, I'm now only talking about abhyasis, and it is very important to understand this correctly because it has so many implications. People can ask, "What about social welfare, what about this, that and the other?" This brings us to an important division in our attitude: on one side we have the duty as human beings to help other human beings, and that duty is always with us. On the other side, we have to accept the divine will as the ultimate thing and leave it to it to decide what has to be done and not. I think the difficulty in perceiving this division is what raises so many questions in the West.
And I'm referring to questions like people ask, "How can God be kind, if he is allowing so many sufferings to take place?" It shows a very fundamental misunderstanding of the whole situation. And real understanding comes only when we have these Eastern ideas brought to us that a person is undergoing — let us not use the word enjoying or suffering — he is undergoing the effect of his own samskaras. When this is correctly understood, we know that each one of us is responsible for what he is undergoing, not some God somewhere else. He has created his own situations. So, when this spiritual understanding comes, now we realise that there is no God to be either blamed or to be praised. And therefore, what can God do in that situation? All that He can answer, if He wishes to answer, is, "My son, you created the situation in which you are, I had no hand in it."
Now I would like to come to the Sahaj Marg aspect of the whole thing: it is my Master's teaching that God has no mind. The Ultimate, God, you see, has no mind. (The mind is what, you know, relates to consciousness.) So since he has no mind, how can he hear our prayer or answer our prayer? Therefore, Sahaj Marg says, prayer to God is useless. For two reasons: the first reason is, we are responsible for what we are doing; the second reason is, He cannot hear and answer us.
Therefore, the ancient Eastern wisdom says that what God cannot do himself, he sends a master to do for him. It is the belief of spiritual, shall we say, elevated souls that the Master is God in a human form with a mind and heart. Therefore, he is able to respond to our prayer, and he is able to have compassion for us, because he feels as a human being what we are feeling as human beings.
It is almost impossible to feel sympathy or compassion for another life form. That is one of the reasons for the callous way in which the rape of nature, as it is called, is carried out. I know many people who have seen a chicken being cut, for instance — you know, a live chicken being beheaded or a goat being killed — they cannot eat meat afterwards. Incidentally, this is one reason why people at the lowest level of life, villagers, common folk, they are more capable of love and sympathy than the one who is shut up in a penthouse or an apartment house. Because he is isolated from all life, he is therefore isolated from feelings.
It is common knowledge that the one who has suffered has sympathy for others who are suffering. So, when the Divine descends in a human form, it is prepared to help us by suffering with us this life in which we are stuck. So, the Master is a human being who knows all about human life, human suffering and at the same time, he is divine in his qualities, in his powers, in his essence.
Therefore, he can help us to rise out of a human situation and develop into the divine level of existence. Therefore, coming back to the question of prayer, to whom should we pray, it is wiser to pray to the Master than to God, for he is able to — even though he understands that we are responsible for what we are undergoing — yet he is able to sympathize with us, because he is also a human being. And it is that sympathy and compassion which makes him release his divine powers to help us. Therefore, Master has written in Voice Real — he refers to himself and asks the question — he says, "Which God took pity on this miserable being? If anybody took pity on me, it was my Master and my Master alone. And if I ever saw God, it was because of my Master." Then he asks the most important question, "To whom should I therefore be grateful, to God or to my Master?"
So, we have to pray to the Master, and when our prayers are answered, we have to be grateful to the Master, too. And I would just have one more comment: that this is not any disrespect to God. Because it is to God as the Master that we pray. Incidentally, this is an answer to the question I asked last year in Vorauf, why in our prayer we say, "Oh Master!" and not, "Oh God."