Course XIV - Teaching 7: Prayer

Apparently, Man and God are two different things, but after man removes the veils of illusion, he realizes God, and then those things are like only one. This is happiness and paradise, and that is why, even being unaware of it, the individual being on earth hankers for spiritual perfection and for meeting God.
Prayer is the means to find God, and elements to reach them are: harmony between feelings of the heart and mental forces.
Prayer is then indispensable for realization; it is the lever on which spiritual life and its success are established; Christ said, “Watch you therefore, and pray always” (“Oportet semper orare”, Luke 21:36).
“Oportet”, it is necessary. Prayer is a need and has to be continuous, persevering until the transformation of every daily act, even the most insignificant, into a Prayer, into a Method of life.
“Semper”, always. One has to strive to pray always. Always we have to be self-controlled so that prayer, never detached from the life of man, may become Continuous Effort.
“Orare”, to pray. Prayer must have a quality, namely, its trend must be always to pray in the most perfect way until it becomes Mind Control. The practice of prayer is in three forms:

1. Operative Prayer;
2. Vocal Prayer; and
3. Mental Prayer.
   Operative Prayer: through constant self-discipline at work transforms works into realization by absence of desire and by humble offering to God. The disciple does not hanker for the fruit of the work or for his personal and relative satisfaction, but just tries to please God and achieve His Divine Will.
   Vocal Prayer: helps raise thought and purify affections by means of repeated and long vibrations of words. Beyond any dispute, liturgical chants, holy hymns and well-known prayers are valuable.
   Mental Prayer: you achieve it by continuous observation of external and internal things until you consider them in such a way that you know their essence.
   Mental Prayer is divided into four parts:
4. Meditation;
5. Concentration;
6. Contemplation, and
7. Union.
   Mental Prayer is active or passive.
   It is active by establishing and measuring extremely the will power; and passive by simplifying extremely the state of consciousness.
   In Meditation, emotional forces are transferred from the ordinary plane of activity to the desired plane to achieve the Divine Love, reaching the individual being by constant purification, humility and renunciation, self-discipline and great devotion to God.
   In Concentration, mental forces are controlled by continuous mental fixation, and then one gets: self-control, self-direction, higher knowledge and clear mental illumination.
   Contemplation is the ecstatic state in which the soul of the disciple, which is based only on intuition, finds and joins to the essence of things.
   Union: is the moment when the soul of the disciple joins closely to the Divine Soul, by losing every communication with lower –sensory or rational– planes.