What is the difference between praying and meditating?
Prayer is basically thoughts. Meditation is the Gap between the Thoughts.
All thoughts cease when one is truly in Meditation. One has come to the point where the Gap between the thoughts is recognized. When you don’t condemn, criticize, or judge your thoughts, when you become more aware of your thoughts, you can carefully and intently watch your inner world of thinking. You will find that thoughts gradually lose their randomness. You will be able to see your thoughts appearing separately on your mental screen. You will be able to locate the gap between two thoughts. The gap between two thoughts is Silence; and, that Silence is the deepest Silence of the entire Universe.
All spiritual practices, all Meditations are done initially to identify the gap that exists between two thoughts. As you do the practice you will be able to extend the gap. At the beginning, meditation will be one overlapping thought after another. But as you observe your thoughts, deeper and deeper, watching with more and more intense awareness of your emotion, as you open your heart and your whole being, you will find your thoughts will gradually come to make friendship with you.
Meditation will no longer be stressful for you. It will no longer be painful for you because you will realize, for the first time, that you are separate from your thoughts. This is an intense experience in human existence - to know that you are separate from your thoughts.
Truly understanding the purpose of Meditation
Meditation is very important. Once you come to understand what meditation truly is, your resistance to meditating will melt away. When you have run out of energy as the demands on you keep mounting; when you cannot cope with the increasing demands and complexities of today’s world with your shallow supply of energy, you need to decompress and unwind. Meditation is much more renewing, a much more powerful tool for reducing stress, than TV or other things you do to “get away from it all.” The purpose of meditation is not to achieve or attain anything. It is to reach a state of letting go, a deep ease, a profound state of relaxation. Meditation is your willingness to do nothing. You are obsessed with doing too many things. As if that were not enough, you are obsessed with doing them all perfectly! That leads to untold stress.
The Task of Prayer becomes the Art of Meditation
In meditation, your goal is to experience NON-DOING. You do not reach a state of non-doing through effort, the way your ego is accustomed to working. Instead, you set aside the time and space for meditation and open your mind to let non-doing happen. Meditation is first of all your willingness to do nothing. If you take meditation as a break, as the most enjoyable vacation possible from pressure, as a retreat into your own inner world of peace and happiness, it cannot become an additional stress. You will not expect anything out of it. That is its purpose. When you surrender to doing nothing, to not-doing, your mind cannot whirl anymore. It cannot calculate any more. It cannot add to your stress. You allow the stress to melt away. You let your mind fill-up with peace. Your mind and your stress melt into the flow of the universal rhythm of joy. Meditation also empowers your mind to be more disciplined, more focused, more energized, more integrated, more content. True happiness in life flows more spontaneously. Meditation connects you to that spontaneous inner source where the universal dwells.
Please do not make stretching or meditation one more stressful thing of your life. Do these practices as conscious acts of love for yourself. Once you realize the need to connect to your deepest source within, you will come to know what you have been missing throughout your life. Then your practice cannot cause you stress. It becomes your love affair with yourself.
See Baba's website at www.feelinghearts.org
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