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Universal Prayer
At 9 p.m. sharp every abhyasi
wherever he might happen to be at that time, should stop his work and
meditate for 15 minutes, thinking that all brothers and sisters are
being filled up with love and devotion and that real faith is growing
stronger in them.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NINE O'CLOCK PRAYER: The main
difference is that everything else we do, we do for ourselves.
The nine o'clock prayer we do for the universal and spiritual
well-being of all.
Let me amplify it a little. See, there is a wisdom in trying
to have the whole of humanity raised to our level. We all
know well that if there is only one rich man in a place
he is the target of attack by all robbers around him. Similarly
if you have only one healthy man surrounded by sickness,
he is not safe. So we have two aspects to our Sadhana: one
is for personal development - the other is a prayer that
all should develop with me so that nobody is envious of
me, that nobody casts eyes on my progress, that there is
no jealousy and no selfishness. We must all rise like that,
well, that is still a rather self-centered approach to this
universal prayer.
The next approach is: "Lord, if I am to remain here,
at least let them go up, because when they go up, somebody
can lift me up later on." Only a man who has fallen
knows that there must be some people around him who can
raise him up. There is still an element of self-centeredness
there.
The highest approach is of the saint who says: "I am prepared
to be eternally here - so long as I can move people up." He is
able to pray like that because for him the difference between high and
low, between spiritual and non-spiritual, between heaven and hell, have
all disappeared. So when we do our individual Sadhana we develop spiritually
day by day. When we continue with the nine o'clock prayer we bring in
a certain universalism to our approach. And our own spiritual growth
is matched by the change of attitude in the universal prayer from total
self-centeredness to partial self-centeredness and then to complete
other-centeredness.
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