The Heart of Prayer by Rupert Spira

Author:Rupert Spira
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2023-06-09T17:11:28+00:00

Jesus was teaching his disciples self-abidance, the essence of prayer.

This subsidence of the mind into the heart is the surrendering of the separate self to God’s presence. As the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said, ‘One who is steadily established in their being, giving not the slightest room for the arising of any thought, alone is surrendering their self to God’.28

28 Attributed to Ramana Maharshi.

* * *

Exterior prayer is the practice we undertake when we come out of our closet and return to the world. It is the prayer we carry out in the midst of our activities and relationships, as opposed to the interior prayer which we undertake in the privacy of the heart.

When Jesus said, ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father, who is in secret’, he might have continued with another verse: ‘When thou prayest, open thy door, come out of thy closet, and see God’s infinite being, which does not only lie in secret behind the world but manifests itself as the world’.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, ‘If they ask you what is the sign of the Father in you, tell them it is a movement and a rest’.29 This rest is the essence of our inner experience. It is the silence of the heart. The movement is our outer experience, the myriad changing forms that the one changeless being assumes without ever ceasing to be itself.

29 The Gospel of Thomas, 50:3.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.