Prayer has to be something absolutely individual. It has to be spontaneous, it has not to be learned. A learned prayer is a false prayer. Then you are repeating like a parrot. It is meaningless, senseless, empty words. But when a prayer arises in your heart, when it has something of you in it, then it has tremendous significance. Then it is not “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It has tremendous meaning and music.
One has to learn to communicate with existence. Talk to the stars, talk to the rivers, talk to the trees, talk to the rocks. And don’t feel embarrassed: this is how existence has manifested itself. Everything that is, is a manifestation of existence. Start communicating with the manifest existence and only then will you be able to communicate one day with the unmanifest. Start with the visible and then you can take a quantum leap into the invisible. Talk to the earth, to the grass.
It may not look religious at all in the beginning, but just saying hello to a tree has something beautiful in it, something spiritual, something holy: you recognize the spirit of the tree, you recognize the presence of the tree, you don’t ignore it. And if you can learn just one thing, not to ignore existence in all its manifestations, then ignorance disappears and wisdom arises, arises from your innermost core.
