The Prayer

By Dr Rajagopal Soondron

Prayer. Pic – ibelieve

Each one of us has our own prayer routine. Why do we pray is itself a long story going back to the days when we had perhaps acquired some form of self-consciousness and the vision of an imminent being regulating our life.

However, nowadays the modern generation has a tendency to think more in terms of spiritualism, which is to access that feeling one generates spontaneously on discovering our inner self which seems to be a permanent phenomenon.

Can we recover or rediscover that inner self every day? Some people engage in different forms of religious prayers, elaborate rituals or recitation of sacred verses to access that self or some godly being. Can it be done differently?

The Shower

Every day as we go for our bath or shower, we unconsciously do one of the most pleasant exercises of our day; at least that should have been for all of us, but with time we have come to relegate it as a routine. A pity.

Suppose after our warm shower — after lathering ourselves with our gel or soap and a wonderful wash we don’t move out. Instead give ourselves the luxury of enjoying the flow of crystal-clear water.

Gradually we close our eyes and relax completely. While giving our thoughts of yesterday’s happenings a total miss, let’s not think of things or tasks to attend to in the hours that follow. Just be alone with our selves/self.

Having done away completely with our thoughts and switching our attention to the present, we’ll find ourselves face to face with our feelings.

Our Senses

Paying attention, we could hear the water spurting out from the shower above; hissing out it falls on our head with a higher pitch. We can hear as it rushes down our body and falls with a splashing sound to the floor below and rushes in rivulets to gurgle out into the drain far from us. Looking back, we can appreciate and discover the symphony of all these sounds which we have missed all our life.

With our eyes still closed we go on appreciating the temperature tickling our skin – warmer on our head; and as the water rushes down our body, we could feel the temperature changing and by the time it reaches our feet it is cooler; if we are more sensitive than usual, we can even sense the ticklish feeling as the water courses down our neck, our thorax, our flanks and down our thighs, calves and feet.

Our skin pressure receptors are also of the party; reacting to the water effect on our head, and less as the water falls downwards along our body and legs, they stir new sensations along our epidermis.

Having put our hearing faculty to test, and reactivate the pressure, touch and dermal temperature receptors it’s time to open our sensation to smell the bland odour of liquid water and its vapour – more so as our taste buds will tell us that there are some particular insipid tastes linked to warm water… we could remain there for a long time wallowing in that strange, wonderful world we have just uncovered.

And then comes the ultimate excursion. Opening our eyes we could see the water streaming down; it serpentines down our face dripping in front of our eyes like a cascade into droplets as they coalesce again to form rivulets down our body, our legs and as it twists and zigzags below and rushes down into the drain. Keeping our eyes on the water, we would miss the floor, the walls of the bath room or the curtains. We find ourselves alone with our body and our senses and the water — it’s an interaction and amalgam between these three. We are just the experience; we are seeing and watching — with no reaction.

Having clamped down our thinking process long before and being alone with our senses, we now allow our eyelids to drop and send us into another trance and removing us from this temporal world; effortlessly and gradually we automatically forget and delete every sensation we had been experiencing. Now forgetting everything around us, let the mind wither internally – forgetting the bath, the shower, the room, the water, and all sensations. Simultaneously the sound, the sight, the pressure sensation, the temperature we had been exposed to would together disappear from our consciousness. At that instant we will be totally thoughtless, senseless and unaware of our own body.

And suddenly we would be alone with some part of the self totally new to us — untouched by our thinking and our senses. Then we would experience that feeling of being totally alone with the past and future totally meaning less. It’s more than an experience for it is none of the usual.

Then we would slowly open our eyes and come back to our world ready to see and give a new meaning to our external world

Every day we could go through this renewal of our inner self, of rediscovering that sensation that we are part of the whole; that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings – for we are well above all that.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 2 September 2022