Course XVII - Teaching 14: Full Prayer

Your prayer cannot be full when contains remnants of self-interest. However spiritual this egotism be, it cannot be an expansive universal feeling.
A man can go beyond his little miseries only through renunciation to his own miseries. So, when he is ready to focus a universal aspect, a transcendental law, or a spiritual state, he fails. He fails because he has a purpose or tries to get something, that is to say, understanding or personal expansion. This concern, this eagerness, makes his contact impossible with a wider sphere of consciousness because reduces his inner elevation to his own field, perception and state of consciousness. So, even though he tries many renunciations, they are not enough to get knowledge or self-transcendence.
All depends upon motivation and from the ruling idea of these efforts. This unique idea must be real Renunciation, not ideal Renunciation.
You only know when you do not wish knowledge; you possess when you have nothing.
Possession is only possible through reversibility.
Detachment, offering, sacrifice and opposite act –opposite to human nature, opposite to his state of consciousness, opposite to instinctive and animal selfishness, and opposite to personal movement of life– destroys the husk, that is to say, the narrow circle of a limited state to open the soul to its new world, and to the universe and life.
Renunciation is possession through participation; it is fullness; it is life. But you reach Renunciation through sacrifice, sorrow and absolute control of your animal nature.
If life is not unity and you do not live what you say, a full prayer cannot exist.
Renunciation does not make any by means of explanations or oratory brilliance, but through authority derived from possessing Renunciation. Words are hollow and rhetorical without a charge of powerful and living faith of the soul, and you can get it only with continuous sacrifice, prayer, offering and holocaust.
Prayer cannot be full if you do not express it in the external life.
You can be like all men of the world, but you cannot be equal to them.
Renunciation puts a seal on the soul, which you see, you feel and you touch; so real it is.
If your renunciation is to all, this attitude necessarily has to be expressed in your relationship with life, beings and things.
Realization is not a word; it is a living, substantial, obvious fact, which is reflected on living, substantial obvious facts.