main differences between meditation and prayer?
Anybody?
Meditation, you're trying to quiet your mind.
And prayer?
I'm talking about calm abiding meditation.
And the goal is to quiet your mind, not so much converse.
Right.
I had these Christians, evangelists, try to explain to me that in Christianity, Christianity is objective.
And I'm assuming the meaning is in terms of prayer, because you're focusing, they said, on something outside of yourself, which is objective.
So God is objective.
Of course, I turned the tables on them and said, no, he's not.
They said, you're subjective because you're focusing on yourselves, which is subjective.
But no, it's not.
It's interesting how you can totally see reality from different perspectives.
This evangelist, evangelical, was telling me,
God is, or focusing on something outside of yourself is objective, and focusing on something inside is subjective.
And in Buddhism, of course, we believe the opposite, that focusing on your own experience is objective.
Focusing on a concept outside of yourself that you aren't experiencing is subjective, right?
And so I said to him, well, you know, your concept of God is totally different from the Hindu concept of God, for example.
So how objective is that?
It's actually quite subjective.
You believe God to be this and this and this, and so on, and other people believe otherwise.
But experience is what it is.
You see, I see.
Seeing is seeing, no matter who sees it.
So maybe that's a good answer to this question, how prayer is subjective or objective depending who you ask, and meditation is the opposite, again depending on who you ask.
And I guess how you pray.
Is your type of prayer one where you're just trying to be quiet and sense God or try to converse with God and ask things of God?
Because I have read accounts of Christians
reaching states that I would describe as a jhana, the way they described it, just from being quiet.
Their mind got quiet and they experienced what seems to be like a jhana-type state.
They would have their mythology behind that.
But I think it's certainly possible for a Christian to enter some of these
call them abiding states if they get their mind still enough.
Indeed.
So on a deeper level, it's a question of where your mind is.
Prayer on a superficial level is quite different from meditation because I think the word prayer means to ask for something, no?
To request something.
Please this, please that.
That's, I think, the definition in the dictionary of prayer.
But...
what is the purpose of communicating with God?
If it's, as you say, in some cases it's best not called prayer, it's better called meditation, because it quiets the mind.
Of course, insight meditation is, I would still say,
I don't think it could ever be compared to prayer.
No, because, again, it's not... It's a different level.
How would you describe the difference between insight meditation and prayer?
Insight meditation specifically.
The difference between insight meditation and prayer?
Why prayer could never be considered insight meditation and vice versa.
Because insight meditation, you're just looking at the bare experience of what is happening.
You're not trying to communicate to God.
You're just getting into bare experience.
And those are just two different things.
Yeah.
Prayer, I think, in its essence, has a concept as its object.
And by concept, if we don't want to use it in a pejorative sense, something that you're not experiencing.
You try to connect with something beyond your experience.
And so from Buddha's point of view, it's essentially conceptual.
I think that's the essence of the answer.
In insight meditation, you focus on experience and only experience.
So, for example, if you see God, it's just seeing.
It's not really God.
So there's a good example.
If you see God, prayer would be to talk to Him.
Insight meditation would be to say, seeing, seeing, seeing.
Quite different.
Right.