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Prayer at Bedtime
Offer daily the brief prayer at bed time in the most suppliant
mood with a heart overflowing with divine love. Repeat the prayer in
your mind once or twice and begin to meditate over it for a few moments.
The prayer must be offered in a way as if some most miserable man is
laying down his miseries with a deeply afflicted heart before the Supreme
Master imploring for His mercy and Grace, with tearful eyes. Then alone
can he become a deserving aspirant.
WHAT IS THE FUNCTION OF THE BED-TIME PRAYER? I believe the function
is now of an entirely different order. By meditating on the meaning
we are embedding the spiritual meaning of the prayer in our deeper consciousness,
in the subconscious, to keep it alive there right through the period
of sleep. In the morning, when we repeat the prayer just once, the spiritual
consciousness is brought out into our waking consciousness again, and
thus a 24-hour cycle of permanent, uninterrupted spiritual consciousness
is maintained. It is like covering live burning coals over with ash
at night before we retire to bed. The fire is not allowed to go out.
In the morning all that we have to do is to blow away the ash, and the
fire is there ready to be built up as we want it.
WHAT DOES THE PRAYER REVEAL? It is an important element, because
by practicing that aspect of our Sahaj Marg practice by which we repeat
the prayer a few times mentally, and then meditate on the meaning of
the prayer, we find the prayer assuming, or revealing to us, different
aspects of its meaning. It is not what it seems to say. Very often the
beginners ask the question, "When you say 'O Master!', who is this
person? Who is the Master? Because Babuji writes in Reality at Dawn,
and in Voice Real, 'God alone is the real Master.' Then you say, He
is my Master, Babuji is my Master.' You also say that he had his Master
Lalaji. For heaven's sake, will you clear this confusion?" Now
the easiest way of finding out what and who is the Master is this meditation
on the prayer at night. It is not without purpose that it has been
given to us as one aspect of our practice. That it connects our consciousness
at bedtime with the next morning through the facet of sleep, it's okay.
It's one of the aspects. That we go to bed in a divine consciousness
is another aspect. It helps us to have a relaxed sleep and dream-free
sleep, in fact, real sleep. But is that all?
I used to think so too, until the meditation on the prayer revealed
itself in many ways. If you make the right decision in the beginning
and accept him without judging him, with all his so-called defects,
as happens when a girl bride of four years accepts a boy groom of eight
years - innocently, knowing nothing of what it is all about, but with
faith in the future - then we understand and unfold this miraculous
understanding of nature, where that man with whom we associated, progressively
becomes more and more lovable, more and more adorable, until a day comes
when we cannot exist without him.
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