When I was a child, my Amma (mother) taught me metta meditation. You say “may X be well, peaceful, and happy,” starting with yourself and radiating outwards. In Columbus, I used to do a circle radiating out towards my family in Colombo. I used to think of my Achchi (grandma) dying and tear up because I really missed her. You could say prayer doesn't do anything, but I remembered those people and came back to them when I grew up. I was able to be with my Achchi as she died, which would have meant the world to little old me. Whatever eyelid advertising my mother programmed in me was effective. Advertisers pay billions for our attention, but the same culture says prayer doesn't work. But if time spent in prayer is worthless, then what are they paying for?

As an omnivorous islander, I'll pray to any God under the sun. Most Sinhala Buddhists pray to Hindu gods for exams and other results (the Buddha is not interested). Every Buddhist temple contains a Hindu shrine for this reason. When European evangelists came the second time around (Christianity came to India first) they (apocryphally) found the Sinhalese easy to convince but hard to convert. Yes, that too, remains the attitude towards new gods. Look above the dashboard of most tuk-tuks. The Buddha is not a god, and certainly not a jealous one. The whole point is that he's gone, which is great, but what's that going to do about my exam results?

These days it's Ramadan and I'm syncretizing Islam, though this is definitely haram. This bears some explaining because modern Islam is not a syncretized religion, and has not really been since the original Sai Baba (though divers Shia sects live on). Today Islam is bitterly opposed by the Hindutva in India, which seems determined to remain divided and conquered, fighting against long-dead Muslim kings instead of their current inequality, which is at colonial levels again. There's no need for the colonizers to own (north) India, which seems determined to self-own. Sri Lanka is not India, but we've had our own politically motivated pogroms, which thankfully went nowhere because people agreed that those politicians were worse than whatever divided us.

I digress but I must because Islam is not traditionally syncretized in Sri Lanka and I am quite culturally unusual in my exploration of it. Islam itself is clearly monotheistic, and polytheism is clearly frowned upon in the Quran. You cannot be Muslim without accepting the oneness of God (reciting the Shahada) which I cannot anymore than I should take communion. The community, however, is very open, my Muslim friends gladly pray with me and take me to mosque, and I have always been given shelter in mosques when travelling without question. These days I follow the Muslim prayers though where they lead I don't quite follow.

This is a long way of saying that I've been praying to Allah, and why I don't find this contradictory even though it is a contradiction. When I pray four (it's supposed to be five) times a day I sometimes ask for things, and as I ask I am reminded of them. I am reminded of the suffering in Palestine, Lebanon and all around, and of our (family) driver whose brother was killed in a tuk accident, and of an old relative who's fading hard. And because I'm reminded I take my own action, so help me God (the English word for Allah).

This reminds me of the effect advertisers are tying to stimulate in our brains at every possible occasion. They try to prey on every human desire, while telling you prayer to anything higher is worthless. But they certainly see value in human attention, just commodified and desacralized. There's an entire industry devoted to getting you to think of something and want it; advertising is the foundational voodoo of the western tech model. Satan is trying to sneak into our eyes all the time, but tells us what's behind our eyelids is meaningless. Advertising is the second-greatest trick the devil ever pulled, Them not existing being the first. They say that praying for God's mercy is useless, while preying on our attention span mercilessly.

If the attention economy is worth so much, however, then how is attention ontologically worthless? Why wouldn't prayer do something, just by virtue of thinking about it? For example, I think about the poor and suffering every day in prayer, instead of the rich and decadent like advertising wants me to. My prayers certainly mean something to me, even if only immaterial value is exchanged. Prayer is, of course, a threat to capitalist exchange (a higher supplier, which is free), which is why I think it's so pooh-poohed. People say God doesn't exist but corporations don't exist either if we stop believing in them. It's all illusion, as the Buddha pointed out. One meaning of ontology is that “the existence of the concept of God entails the existence of God,” and people have conceptualized God long before they conceptualized corporations (djinns, in my opinion). Both believed-in beings compete for our attention, one making us think about grandeur and the other about grandma. And I, personally, like my Achchi more. She died with not much possessions, all I inherited was her worn-out Bible and ratty old dog. But those, to little old me, are worth all the goods in this wicked old world.