Here is a great secret about authentic prayer: When a man or a woman really prays, there must be some trembling behind it. If there is no trembling behind a prayer, then there is no implied sacrifice behind the words in the prayer. The authentic nature of all prayer is to establish a direct communion with conscious forces -- with God's life.
We ought not pray with arrogance or with an attitude of trying to get what we think we deserve. Rather we ought to pray with an understanding that without the intervention in our lives by this higher intelligence, we will be left only with our own "intelligence", which we can clearly see, if we are honest, is not worth having by itself.
The trembling is due to the understanding that a small part of you is sincere in its prayer, and yet at the same time you can see that there is something in you that abhors what may come to you as a result of that prayer. So in that instant you have a whole picture of the relationship between the divine, what the divine illuminates, the resistance to what is illuminated, and the transformation of the whole character through the act of praying with a sincere wish to be a different human being.
