Meditation and prayer are one and the same when practiced with awareness. Let us see how this is so.
Why do we meditate? Each session of meditation practice need not have a goal or an expectation. In fact we need to drop all expectations and return back to the present moment acceptance to be able to meditate. However we do need a goal or a set of goals for cultivating a habit of meditating. The following article clarifies this.
Selvan Srinivasan · 2y
What is the goal of meditation?
For each session of meditation itself there cannot be any goal. Meditation is a practice of non-doing being when you hold a stance of a disengaged witness to all that is arising or happening in the here and now. Things are constantly happening within us and around us. Things happening within us include thoughts arising in our mind, emotions arising in our emotional mind-body and physical sensations arising in our body. Things happening around us is constantly perceived by our senses of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch. All of these together is called arising phenomena in the moment. It is happening momentarily and changing every moment. We do not just perceive these but constantly react, respond or engage with it. Our engagement is in the form of mental activity which may or may not be followed by physical activity. When we choose to simply sit and witness the arising phenomena without engagement, it is called meditation. To hold a goal for this would necessitate mental activity and therefore it is not possible to meditate while holding a goal. A stance of active acceptance and allowing towards all arising phenomena is necessary to remain in the state of meditation for at least a few minutes. Therefore there is no goal of meditation. However, you can have a set of goals as an outcome of the regular habit of meditation practice. Use these goals to motivate you to continue with the practice regularly and cultivate a habit out of it. When you spare some time for a regular meditation practice you can except a lot of practical benefits arising out of this in your life. These include better sleep, improved memory, lesser stress, lesser anxiety, more confidence, more decisive, clarity of mind, peace of mind, joy, better and deeper relationships, mastery over emotions, physical fitness, higher immunity, relief from chronic disease conditions, etc. If you would like to read more about an effective meditation practice that could throw up the above benefits please read the answers linked below and the articles linked therein.
To summarise : We have a wish or a desire for a particular experience or outcome, we do not have what we desire right now, we accept the present moment as it is without that for which we have a desire and we sit with this acceptance to eventually attain our wish.
Prayer in the true sense is offering thankfulness for ‘what is’ while holding a wish or intention for what we desire. Thankfulness can arise only from a state of acceptance of the present moment as it is.
Both meditation and prayer are spiritual practices. The following article describes what it means to be spiritual.
Everything Magic ·
2y
What does being spiritual mean to you? I would be grateful if you could give a detailed answer.
We have five physical senses and all that is perceived by these five senses seems to be all that exists as far as our life is concerned. All our experiences involving these physical senses are stored in our memory and our mind keeps going back into these memories to help make meaning of all that happens and also to project and plan the future of what is going to happen. We develop our likes and dislikes based on the comfort or pain each experience gives us and from this we also develop our wants and don’t wants. Our life story and out of that our identity is built and we are constantly engaged in defending and furthering this identity. This is material life. It is outward focused and limited to all that can be perceived by our physical senses. Three aspects of our whole mind is engaged with this namely, our limbic mind, our emotional mind and our logical/analytical/rational mind. In addition to the above, our mind also has two more aspects that is completely forgotten and ignored namely, our Intuitive mind and our Aware mind. Acknowledging the existence of these higher aspects of our mind and including time in our routine life to practically and experientially explore these aspects and eventually integrating it with other other three minds is the meaning of spiritual as I see it. It is important to note that spiritual is an inward focusing path. Therefore studying philosophy or following a religion are not spiritual although they can be. Reading this answer is also not a spiritual pursuit but an intellectual pursuit. But using it to sit with yourself and begin some inward practices and experiences and gaining insights is spiritual. The goals for a spiritual pursuit can be entirely materialistic. Humans have been endowed with five aspects to their mind and it doesn’t make sense to completely omit two of these and make do with just the remaining three. Please read my posts about the five aspects of the mind and also three levels of our emotional mind using the links below. To actually begin with your spiritual pursuit however, I would suggest that you sit with a few minutes of FGCB (fixed gazing and conscious breathing as explained in the link below). To explore further please watch and practice some of the energy movements on my YouTube channel and listen to some of the guided meditation audios on my SoundCloud channel to sit with and meditate.
Atheist on the other hand is a description of the other. It could be one of the words used by a group of people holding a particular set of beliefs, to look at someone who doesn’t share the same beliefs.