How to worship?

                   

Is it possible to drain the sea by taking some water from it?

                              The answer is obvious. The ocean cannot be drained. Lord Siva's mercy is like a fathomless ocean. Everyone can dip into this ocean and benefit from His grace. All that is needed is bhakti. The more we worship the Lord, the more we discover His sweetness. The more we enjoy the Lord's kindness, the more we want to drink of the nectar that Siva is. Nectar came from the ocean, but Siva is Himself an ocean of nectar, D. Gnanasundaram said in a discourse.

But how does one worship the Lord?

What are the qualities we must have to please the Lord?

                      Arunagirinatha in his Kandar Anubhuti said mukti is the state of silence and not doing anything. On the face of it, being silent and inactive seems easy. But if one were to try it, one would realise how difficult it is. Once there was a man who sat silently in a temple. While others were busy cleaning the temple or doing other things in the temple, he did nothing. When the time came for the prasad to be distributed, he got a larger portion than the others. The others who had worked all day wondered why a man who had done nothing was given more than those who had toiled all day. The answer they got was that it was extremely difficult to observe a vow of silence and to remain without doing anything. To meditate on God requires us to be silent.

If we talk all the time, how will we be able to think about God?

                 Even when we work in a temple, we keep talking with those around us. Such conversations only tend to distract us and take our thoughts away from God.

God is the embodiment of gnana. He is a light that destroys the darkness of ignorance. The gnana or the knowledge that we seek from Him should not be worldly gnana. We should seek spiritual gnana. We should not pray for selfish ends. We must pray for the welfare of the world. We must begin and end the day with worship. Rituals are performed so that we acquire discipline, which is essential in the pursuit of gnana. Rituals alone do not constitute worship; their purpose is to inculcate discipline in us and turn our thoughts towards God.