During recent centuries, the nature of prayer has been misunderstood in all sorts of ways by this or that spiritual movement, and to gain a true understanding of it will not be easy.
If, however, we remember that these centuries have been marked especially by the emergence of egotistic spiritual trends which have laid hold of wide circles of people, we shall not find it surprising that prayer has been dragged down to the level of egotistic wishes and desires.
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And it must be said that prayer can hardly be more utterly misunderstood than when it is permeated by some form of egotism.
In this lecture we shall try to study prayer entirely in the light of spiritual science, free from any sectarian or other influence.
As a first approach, we might say that while the mystic assumes that he will find in his soul some kind of little spark which his mystical devotion will cause to shine ever more brightly, prayer is intended to engender the spark.
And prayer, from whatever presuppositions it proceeds, proves its effectiveness precisely by stirring the soul either to discover gradually the little spark, if it is there, gleaming but hidden, or to kindle it.
Anyone who looks deeply into the life of the soul will see that these two streams, one from the past and one from the future, are continually meeting there.
The fact that we are influenced by the past is obvious: who could deny that our energy or idleness of yesterday has some effect on us today?
But we ought not to deny the reality of the future, either, for we can observe in the soul the intrusion of future events, although they have not yet happened.
After all, there is such a thing as fear of something likely to happen tomorrow, or anxiety about it.
Is that not a sort of feeling or perception concerned with the future?
Whenever the soul experiences fear or anxiety, it shows by the reality of its feelings that it is reckoning not only with the past but in a very lively manner with something hastening towards it from the future.
These, of course, are single examples, but they will suffice to suggest that anyone who surveys the soul will find numerous others to contradict the abstract logic which says that since the future does not yet exist, it can have no present influence.
If we compare our present with our past in this way, we shall come to feel that within us there is something far richer and more significant than whatever we have made of ourselves through our individual powers.
If there were not something extending beyond our conscious selves, we should be unable to reproach ourselves or even to know ourselves. We must, then, have within us something that is greater than anything we have employed to form ourselves in the past.
If we transform this realisation into a feeling, we shall be able to look back at everything in our past actions, at experiences that memory can bring clearly before us. We shall be able to compare these memories with something greater, with something in our soul that guides us to stand face to face with ourselves and to judge ourselves from the standpoint of the present.
In short, when we observe the stream flowing into us from the past, we feel that we have within us something that extends beyond ourselves. This intimation is the first awakening of a feeling of God within us - a feeling that something greater than all our will-power dwells within us.
Thus we are led to look beyond our limited ego towards a divine-spiritual ego. That is the outcome of a contemplation of the past, transformed into perceptive feeling.
When the soul, on looking back over the past, becomes aware - whether as a judgment or with regret or shame - of a power from the past which is playing into the present but which is greater than itself, this realisation will evoke in the soul a reverence towards the divine.
This reverence, which we can feel working upon us but which is more than we can consciously grasp, evokes one mode of prayer - for there are two which bring the soul into an intimate relationship with God.
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