Srimathe Ramanujaya Namaha Dear All, Though I know I would be accused of mailing this as a purist, I still feel that I should go ahead and share my thoughts. Kindly forgive me if anything is offending(it is not my intent to offend anyone). "Does god listen to our prayers?" - sounds like a good question. But, before even attempting to answer this question, as a prapannan(at least I am trying my best to become one) one should revisit some fundamentals of our sampradayam. Athma-swaroopam(Nature of this self): Athma swaroopam is seshathvam i.e the service mindedness. That is, god has created us only for his merriment expecting that we would serve him(as we create computers to assist us or washing machines to help us). After he created us, he also gave us two choices: a) To serve him all the time b) To do whatever we want. Choice (a) wasn't picked up by most of us, because, as soon as he created us in this materialistic world, we were more attracted towards his other creations than towards him. Some did choose option (a) i.e the azhwars, acharyas and other great bhagavathas. WE, chose option (b) i.e to do whatever we wanted which was our very first failure. He created us for his enjoyment, but all that we did to him was just to ignore him and go and pray to him only when we needed. But, it is actually he, who is waiting for us to change our minds to serve him. He is waiting for us indefinitely with equal kindness and expectation across all the jeevathmas in this entire universe. Kainkaryam: But instead of understanding that he is praying for us to turn to him, WE, the unfortunate ones(due to our desires), go and stand before him and accuse him for anything bad that had happened to us because of our deeds and pray him for better things to happen. He is ready to give himself to us to serve him, while, we the narrow minded, fail to see him. Kaim-karyam(Kainkaryam) is a service that is offered to him by our will. Do we do that? What do we do for him, should have been the question. Rather, we have turned the tables around and are asking him back what he has done to us and why he is not doing something to us. It is just a matter of minutes. Just close your eyes for some time and think why we are here. Did he create us for him, or just created us for the heck of it and let us struggle? When we open our inner eyes, then we could see the truth which is never bitter. It is sweet to the core. And once the inner eyes are open, when you still keep your external eyes closed or not does not really matter:))) Yatheendra Pravanam Vandhe RAMYA Jaamaataram Munim Adiyen Ramanuja Dasan, Lakshmi Narasimhan
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