What's the deal with prayer. Didn't Jesus say prayer should be done in private. So why is prayer so often done in public?
Typically public prayers are ceremonial. That or there is a figure leading others in a group prayer. I don't believe that was what Jesus was criticizing when he said to prayer privately. I believe there is background to exactly who or what practice he was referring to that has be researched somewhere, but I doubt it had to do with criticizing public ritual practices, like the priest saying a prayer of blessing upon the people.
I do like thought what he says about this. He is saying in essence, don't do your religion for ego. Don't let your devotions to God, be about public acknowledgement, or making an impression upon others so that they'll help you boost your own ego. That is in fact a very real problem in a spiritual path. The ego likes to make it about the ego itself, keeping you from actually following that spiritual path - which requires surrendering the ego.
So that's how I hear his injunction, said here in metaphor about "praying in public". It's not just prayer, but anything you do on your spiritual path that gets distorted into being about the ego. It's a good metaphor as an object lesson. These myths speak to aspects of our own personalities we all share. Teachers recognize those traps, and so through myth in this case, they communicate those in these stories, such as "be not as those who stand and pray in public to be seen of them."
What is the point in prayer anyway?
What do you expect from praying? To curry the favor of God? To explain to God your needs? Something I'd think an all-knowing God ought to already know.
There is a lot of complex things in here that could be addressed, but I'd take six posts to cover them all. I'll just try to keep it on the question "What is the point in prayer"?
The point of prayer to me, is not that it is about supplicating for some need. That is part of it for many people at a certain stage of learning about the interior worlds of themselves through myths. Those are powerful lessons in beginning to open us symbolically in the unconscious mind and the spiritual self hiding in there. They are in a real sense, psychological/spiritual (psycho-spiritual) tools.
What prayer has become for me in my later years from what it was in my youth, is more about a connection with Reality, which means the Big Reality, that encomposses everthing altogether, all aspects of existence and beyond. That happens at deeper levels within us. That touches the essential being of our very existence in this reality. Touching into that, has a deeply transformative power in our lives, leading to greater peace and connection with ourselves and our place in this vast universe.
It's reaching out and touching the face of God, and being part of that Light itself on our deepest levels. Our connection with Infinity, which is within every cell of our bodies and everything. Prayer is stepping out of yourself.
I like the way I just said that. Prayer is stepping outside of yourself, into the Unknown, opening that which that Unknown within us.
To praise God? Is God insecure and needs to be constantly reassured how great God is?
People pray to...?
IDK, I never understood any purpose behind praying.
It's not about God's ego. God doesn't have an ego. I have an ego. If you pray to the egoless, you open to egolessness in yourself, or the true Self in Hindu terms. So prayer to God is really a prayer not to a person, but to Divinity, which exists beyond 'persons' where there is only Oneness.
The purpose then for the prayer is to open you to the Divine within. It's the same thing in all religions, under the very masks of language and symbols being used. It's all about Awakening to that true Reality. Prayer is to teach us there is something more than just this apparent world we see and believe in as reality, but it's not.
You could say prayer is a form of breath, teaching us about God.