This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Every condition in your life is the out-picturing of a belief in the subconscious. Every ailment, every difficulty that you have, is but the embodiment of a negative idea somewhere in your subconscious, which is actuated by a charge of fear. Prayer wipes out these negative thoughts and then their embodiment must disappear too. The healing must come.
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
Three of the greatest teachers of the world, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, have left unimpeachable testimony that they found illumination through prayer and could not possibly live without it.
Truth is true because it is true – not because we make it so. Prayer does not change things for us, but it changes them by tuning us in to the eternal Truth. You have nothing to deal with but your own thoughts, and your own beliefs. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
There is no end to prayer. It echoes on forever in your soul. Long after the visible demonstration has been made and forgotten, the prayer that produced it continues to work for your spiritual advancement, for the creative power of a God-thought is unlimited and eternal.
The function of prayer is not to enable us to acquire what we should like to possess, but rather to become what we are capable of being.
Prayer |
In prayer we shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.
Consciousness | Prayer | Self | Surrender |
The most effective kind of prayer is that in which we place ourselves, in our hearts, before God, relinquishing all resistance, letting go of all secret irritation, opening ourselvse to the truth, to God’s holy mystery, saying over and over again, “I desire truth, I am ready to receive it, even this truth which causes me such concern, if it be the truth. Give me the light to know it – and to see how it bears on me.”
In prayer we seek not to make God visible but to make ourselves visible to God.
One of the real perils of growing older is that we tend to think less and less. We feel that we know all the answers… The mind and the soul become wrinkled. The function of prayer is not to enable us to acquire what we should like to possess, but rather to become what we are capable of being.
Friedrich von Hügel, formally Baron Friedrich Maria Aloys Franz Karl Freiherr von Hugel
Now there is no doubt that the prayer of quiet, that a certain formless recollection and loving feeding upon the sense and presence of God, as here and now, is a most legitimate prayer.
He who has no prayer free from his thoughts has no weapon for battle. By prayer I mean the prayer which is constantly active in the innermost secret places of the soul.
Prayer in action; it requires complete mobilization of heart, mind, and soul… For the soul, home is where the prayer is... Prayer calls for self-reflection, for contrition and repentance, examining and readjusting deeds and motivations, for recanting the ugly compulsions we follow, the tyranny of acquisitiveness, hatred, envy, resentment.
Action | Deeds | Envy | Heart | Mind | Prayer | Reflection | Repentance | Resentment | Self | Soul | Tyranny | Ugly | Deeds |
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
A child is born through the rending of the womb; a man is born through the rending of the world. The call to prayer signalizes both kinds of birth, the first is uttered by the lips, the second by the very soul.
Enough of us praying often enough could make everybody in the world look up and listen to God. We could transform the world... Prayer is powerful, but it is not the power of a sledge hammer that crushes with one blow. It is the power of sunrays and raindrops which bless, because there are so many of them... When you fill a swamp with stones, a hundred loads may disappear under water before a stone appears on the surface, but all of them are necessary.