Prayer or Meditation?

Those who were children in a Christian household most likely learned how to pray. As a child in such a household, I was puzzled by the instructions to pray. Like for instance, prayer before meals, prayer before sleep, prayer for wishes to come true, prayer for the wellbeing of others and prayer just for the heck of it, just to put God to work.

Then I read something in the New Testament which I felt made sense. It was an incidence in Jesus’ life when he said that the heavenly father knows what a person needs even before that person would request it. From this I felt that prayer was redundant. Why beg the big guy for something if he already is aware of one’s need?

Meditation is rarely mentioned in the Christian texts but it is described in the Indian books at length. And there are many definitions for it by numerous authors and psychology teachers.

Put simply, especially for people with a Christian background, while prayer is the act of begging God for something, meditation is a passive movement to make the self a receptor of God’s wishes. There are two parts to this, one is where God needs for the person to do something on God’s behalf. The second is where God gives person an energy or commodity which empowers the person to act for God.

While in prayer, I demand and God either complies or ignores the request, in meditation God demands and supplies energy for me to complete his wishes. The feature is that I must be psychologically positioned to complete the act. It may be something physical but it could be purely psychological.

Meditation in this usage is the self-mood which accommodates reception of energy from God. In meditation, the self is a receptor while in prayer, the self is an expressor which targets God. Meditation then, is a receptive state of mind which makes the self absorbent to particular energies which come from God.