My beloved brothers and sisters,
I definitely do not understand this issue with people that they find praying a chore. What is the end goal then? So that no prayer was needed? Is this suiting best their interest? People just want to do the mandatory prayer and get on with their miserable life as quick a possible. If it feels mandatory to them than maybe they do not have faith in the first place and are just wasting their "precious" time? People look at it just as to another chackbox to tick, as if Heavenly Kingdom is that number of checks away. It does not work that way. The number of ticks to do will never cease this way but only keeps increasing. If people do not come to the conclusion that prostration to God is worthy more than world and anything in it, they will never get in.
The real issue is not the quantity of prayer but the fact that many people experience prayer primarily as interruption. They want the obligation minimized so that “real life” may continue uninterrupted. But this immediately raises a devastating question: if communion with God feels like a burden stealing time from life, then what exactly is understood as life?
The irony is striking. People claim to seek Heaven while simultaneously treating direct orientation toward God as something to finish as quickly as possible. Prayer becomes reduced to a checkbox, a minimum requirement, a transaction to secure future reward while preserving maximum earthly autonomy in the present.
But if Heaven is truly nearness to God, then such an attitude already reveals a contradiction within the soul itself.
In this perspective, the Miʿrāj narrative exposes the contradiction with brutal clarity. Humanity is presented with the possibility of existence centered almost entirely around God, and the immediate reaction becomes negotiation downward:
less prayer,
more room for worldly continuity,
more room for sleep,
labor,
projects,
comfort,
self-maintenance,
earthly identity.
The reduction is celebrated as mercy precisely because humanity still fundamentally prefers Earth.
We need to reframe prayer entirely. Prayer is not supposed to function as a bureaucratic quota system where salvation is unlocked after enough completed rituals. If approached mechanically, the logic never ends. One checkbox always leads to another because the heart itself remains unchanged. External completion cannot substitute for transformed desire.
The deeper issue becomes what a person actually values.
If prostration before God is not experienced as greater than worldly pursuits, then religion inevitably becomes obligation management rather than genuine longing for the divine. A person may technically fulfill requirements while inwardly remaining oriented toward earthly existence as the true object of love.
That is why the question is not:
“How little prayer is required?”
but rather:
“What does the soul truly want?”
If someone sees prayer merely as time taken away from “real living,” then earthly existence has already been chosen as the primary reality. Heaven then becomes imagined not as union with God, but as an improved continuation of worldly desire.
By contrast, the logic underlying the reading of the Miʿrāj suggests that entry into the Kingdom requires a reversal of valuation itself. The soul must come to see nearness to God not as sacrifice of life, but as life in its highest form. Until that reversal occurs, no amount of external religious accounting can bridge the gap, because the heart still measures divine presence against worldly utility.
And in that sense, humanity continues repeating the same descent described in the story: always stepping back from total orientation toward God in order to preserve a little more Earth.