The journey begins in love and ends in light, or in enlightenment. And the bridge is prayer.
The whole pilgrimage from ignorance to wisdom is nothing but a pilgrimage of prayer. Prayer means: “I am so small that nothing is possible through me, unless the whole helps me.” Prayer is a surrender of the ego to the whole; a surrender not in despair, but in deep understanding. How can the small wave go against the ocean? The very effort is absurd. But that’s what the whole of humanity is doing.
We are all small waves in the vast ocean of consciousness. Call that ocean God, truth, enlightenment, nirvana, Tao, dharma – they all mean the same thing, that we are part of an infinite ocean. But we are all very small waves; we cannot have our own will and we cannot have our own destiny. The very desire to have our own will and to achieve something out of our own desires is the whole cause of misery.
Prayer means that, in understanding the futility of human will, one surrenders to the divine will. One says, “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come.” It is possible only if there is great love for existence. Hence I say the journey begins in love and ends in enlightenment. And the middle of the journey consists only of prayer, of a deep let-go.
