The Mystery of Prayer
Chapter 12
"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven"
The fourth thought-concentration in "the Lord's Prayer", "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven", is actually a further intensification of the third. Through experience, we come to understand what "God's will" is. "God's will" is "the transformation of the animal" or terrestrial Man's acquisition of the highest and most beautiful virtues of intellectuality. "Heaven" is precisely a mental state in which all these, the highest and most perfect abilities of consciousness, culminate so that one hundred per cent harmony prevails among living beings. As terrestrial Man is a being who is developing from the primitive, imperfect or animal state to the perfect high intellectual, human existence, he has two mental forms of nature in him, namely the degenerating "animal" qualities and the beginning or budding "human" ones. Sometimes the "animal" qualities may control the individual, while another times the same being's will may be determined by the "purely human" qualities. As the "animal" qualities bring the individual into conflict and strife with life and his "neighbour", while the purely high intellectual or human qualities bring the individual into harmony with life and his neighbour, and as the latter form of manifestation is the same as the one which unfolds itself as "God's will" in "Heaven", the fourth thought-concentration in "the Lord's Prayer" will be equivalent to praying that the high intellectual or purely human qualities will become so strong in one's mentality that they will always constitute the dominating factor in the determination of one's will in one's actions. In other words: that one prays that all selfishness, or any non-vital wish or desire for personal advantage one may have, will be totally ignored by Providence in favour of the granting of any vital or necessary wish which may happen to be of immediate importance to one's "neighbour". The fourth thought-concentration in the "Lord's Prayer" thus creates a wonderful direction of the mentality towards the divine will. No wonder that the world-redeemer prayed, "Father, not my will but thine be done".