This question is from Leonid Shulk. I am a 21 year old from Ukraine. I read in the
Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna that God is a wish-fulfilling tree. I want to be a good,
sincere devotee who aspires only for noble things from the spiritual point of view,
but my heart is still largely turned towards the world. I want worldly success for myself
and those close to me, as well as peace in my country, Ukraine. Despite knowing that God can
grant me all this if I intensely pray for it, I hesitate to do it because I feel a little immoral
about it. Although for the last couple of days I have started to spend several hours each day
praying for the end of the war. If my passion is turned towards the world and I am
not yet seized by a strong desire for spiritual awakening, is it okay to pray to God to satisfy
my desires, reach my goals, and so on? Will it hurt my progress, or can it be used as a means
to an end, after which I can outgrow this tendency and become wholeheartedly devoted to God?
That's a very good question. At just 21 years old you can see the sincerity in the
writing and in such terrible circumstances in Ukraine. This speaks to the earlier question
also. All these problems in the world, at one level they will go on in one form or the other.
Who would have thought at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century,
we are again faced with war. Around this time the first world war had just ended in the 20th century,
100 years ago. They were just coming out of, the war had ended and they were coming out of also
a pandemic. Sounds familiar. Here the war has not ended and we are not quite out of the pandemic yet.
So you notice the nature of problems, of suffering, it doesn't go away, it changes. Vivekananda said
it's like arthritis, you chase it from the knees, it will go to the elbows.
If you cure poverty, you will have the problems of prosperity.
In some form or the other suffering continues. Now what he has asked for, of course,
one can ask God for an end to the war as he is praying for that, definitely.
I've noticed that people, here you meet Russians and Ukrainians and one interesting thing is that
the one thing both want is an end to the war,
end to the fighting, end to the killing.
Can one ask God for that? Certainly, one can ask God for anything that is for the
welfare of the masses, for large numbers of people, an end to general suffering.
Could you ask for the end of the pandemic, end of the war? Yes, yes we can. Any person with,
like this idealistic young man, has a noble worldview, wants good for everybody.
You can pray and one should pray for the good of the world.
What about personal desires in this world? His question is, I firmly believe if I pray to God,
my desires will be satisfied. So should I pray for that? I know those desires will not make
me permanently happy, only spirituality will. But I really honestly don't desire spirituality
wholeheartedly. Do I desire God wholeheartedly and I have no taste for the world? I can't say
that honestly. So can I pray for fulfillment of my worldly desires and will that eventually take me
beyond worldly desires and I'll become like, you know, wholly spiritual? The answer is yes and no.
No, because satisfaction of worldly desires does not take one beyond worldly desires.
This is an ancient truth we find this theme again and again in Indian literature, spiritual texts,
in literature also. People who, like the famous case of the king, Yayati, there's one case,
stories like that, who wanted to exhaust all desires by enjoying desires. And what happened?
It just kept on increasing, kept on proliferating.
I remember the first thing that we were taught in our economics class.
The economics is the science, you know, which wants to match
unlimited human desires to limited resources.
So can one satisfy these unlimited desires? One cannot. And if one tries to, those desires just
keep on, the horizon of satisfaction keeps on receding. Okay, I just invented that, I'm going
back. That's nice. So the horizon of satisfaction just keeps on receding and that's what we find
in life. So it's best to understand that there is this pursuit of satisfying one's desires is not
a path to either worldly satisfaction, which is not, which is impossible, or it's not even a path
to spirituality. One must step back at some point. Now your question is, but I don't honestly want to
step back from the world. A part of you does. That's why you're interested. That's why we are
all interested. That's why we are all here. We are interested, you know. Do we really really want God?
Honestly, not totally. But do we want to want God? Yes, we do. We, all of us, we do. We want, we want to be
like that. We want to be like them, like the mystics of all religions and all times who were intensely,
completely focused on spirituality and we see how happy, not in a smiley face, happy sense,
you know, how fulfilled they were, how deeply fulfilled they were and we want to be like that.
So we want to be, we want to want God. Yes, that's true.
That and that state is fine. It's fine that because of my past conditionings, I still have worldly desires and cravings
and at the same time, I genuinely, honestly, I want, I want to realize God, I want to love God, I want to become
enlightened, I want self-knowledge in whichever language you put it. I really want that also.
That's the human condition. That's the condition of most spiritual seekers.
Now, what does Leonid do at this stage? You pray to God, you're reading the gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,
you pray to Sri Ramakrishna, pray to God in whatever form you have devotion or faith in and pray for
love of God, devotion, bhakti. Pray for dispassion from worldliness, from worldly desires.
Pray for focus of mind on spiritual, on your meditation, on your study, on your prayer.
Pray for these things which we find ourselves wanting and so we can help some, we can use some divine help there.
Now, another thing he said, I'm convinced that if I pray, my desires will be satisfied.
Something like that he said and the answer there is yes and no. Yes, all sincere prayers will be answered.
I'll repeat that. Prayer is always answered but the answer may not always be what we expect it to be.
We are praying for something and we expect God to fulfill, you know, like Amazon Prime, like that.
God will deliver exactly what I want and one day delivery, one day delivery. I want it immediately
and exactly what I ordered. Even Amazon goofs up sometimes and God is not bound to fulfill our
desires as we want it, want them to be fulfilled. It's like human parents. As kids, kids may ask for
anything from their parents and the parents may be able to grant at least some of it
but it's not necessary that mom or dad will give you exactly what you want.
They have a mind of their own and they are concerned about your welfare. So, they'll give you
what is possible and what's good for you and maybe they won't give you what is not good for you.
Maybe they'll give you something instead of what you wanted and that might be even better for you.
So, yes, God always answers prayers but the answer might not be exactly what we asked for.
So, should I pray? Yes. Pray for fulfillment of my worldly desires as a rule? No. That's why you get
that slight feeling of immorality when you pray for personal things. Sometimes it's impossible
not to pray for personal. You can pray for big things like for everybody's welfare.
Let the war stop. Let the pandemic go away.
I remember when it started. I was at the Harvard Divinity School at that time
and Harvard was one of the first universities where it was taken seriously very quickly.
In United States, that's also the place where it is one of the epicenters. There was a conference
in Boston where it spread. One of the sources where it spread very fast. I still remember this
class on prayer, Christian contemplative prayer by Professor Stephanie Paulsell and
she said a couple of things. We were studying SaintÉ it was the Interior Castle.
It's a Christian mystic work on mystical prayer
and Saint Teresa is writing to the nuns under her care, and the professor pointed out,
notice how often she tells them to take care of their health and you might be a little puzzled.
Why go on and on about, you know, be careful about your health? Well, it's because she explained to
us, you know, in those days, the medieval times, people were often unhealthy. They were sick
a lot of times. There were a lot of these diseases going around. That was just a few days before the
pandemic hit. So it's like in contrast, we are fine. We don't understand what's this unhealthiness,
this sickness and why are they so worried about health and the next week literally the world began
to shut down. It's almost like God heard this discussion and he said, oh really?
And then in the next week's class, the professor, she read out from a text from the Torah where it's
a very interesting text. What does God do all day long? So God has a routine, daily routine.
So there's a time when God reads the scriptures and God prays and God does administration and
answers his emails, stuff like that. And it's like something like that actually.
So part of that is God sits on the chair of judgment for a few hours every day.
And so there are very deep prayers there that we beseech thee, our heavenly father,
to have mercy upon us, to not to sit on the terrible seat of judgment and to sit on your
seat of mercy. So that, you know, this was very evocative for all of us because it was
just at the beginning, we just recognized this is a pandemic. And within 48 hours, the whole
university shut down and the medical school, they were already engaged in trying to find a vaccine.
At that time they started and they were saying it will take, I overheard conversations. For the
first time I heard the term social distancing. All those things came in right at that time.
So can we pray to God that do not, that forgive us, go easy on us, don't sit on the
terrible seat of judgment. We know we deserve this, but let us off easy, let's off the hook.
So yes, you can pray for all of humanity, but for personal desires, it's best that yes,
I acknowledge, I'm honest, I acknowledge I have these desires, but I want to overcome them.
I know they do not lead to any kind of deep satisfaction. So I want to overcome them.
Give me this passion, give me love of God, give me this yearning for God.
This is what one should pray for. OK