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main differences between meditation and prayer?

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Anybody?

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Meditation, you're trying to quiet your mind.

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And prayer?

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I'm talking about calm abiding meditation.

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And the goal is to quiet your mind, not so much converse.

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Right.

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I had these Christians, evangelists, try to explain to me that in Christianity, Christianity is objective.

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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.

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So God is objective.

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Of course, I turned the tables on them and said, no, he's not.

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They said, you're subjective because you're focusing on yourselves, which is subjective.

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But no, it's not.

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It's interesting how you can totally see reality from different perspectives.

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This evangelist, evangelical, was telling me,

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God is, or focusing on something outside of yourself is objective, and focusing on something inside is subjective.

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And in Buddhism, of course, we believe the opposite, that focusing on your own experience is objective.

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Focusing on a concept outside of yourself that you aren't experiencing is subjective, right?

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And so I said to him, well, you know, your concept of God is totally different from the Hindu concept of God, for example.

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So how objective is that?

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It's actually quite subjective.

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You believe God to be this and this and this, and so on, and other people believe otherwise.

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But experience is what it is.

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You see, I see.

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Seeing is seeing, no matter who sees it.

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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.

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And I guess how you pray.

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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?

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Because I have read accounts of Christians

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reaching states that I would describe as a jhana, the way they described it, just from being quiet.

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Their mind got quiet and they experienced what seems to be like a jhana-type state.

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They would have their mythology behind that.

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But I think it's certainly possible for a Christian to enter some of these

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call them abiding states if they get their mind still enough.

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Indeed.

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So on a deeper level, it's a question of where your mind is.

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Prayer on a superficial level is quite different from meditation because I think the word prayer means to ask for something, no?

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To request something.

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Please this, please that.

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That's, I think, the definition in the dictionary of prayer.

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But...

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what is the purpose of communicating with God?

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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.

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Of course, insight meditation is, I would still say,

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I don't think it could ever be compared to prayer.

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No, because, again, it's not... It's a different level.

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How would you describe the difference between insight meditation and prayer?

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Insight meditation specifically.

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The difference between insight meditation and prayer?

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Why prayer could never be considered insight meditation and vice versa.

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Because insight meditation, you're just looking at the bare experience of what is happening.

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You're not trying to communicate to God.

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You're just getting into bare experience.

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And those are just two different things.

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Yeah.

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Prayer, I think, in its essence, has a concept as its object.

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And by concept, if we don't want to use it in a pejorative sense, something that you're not experiencing.

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You try to connect with something beyond your experience.

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And so from Buddha's point of view, it's essentially conceptual.

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I think that's the essence of the answer.

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In insight meditation, you focus on experience and only experience.

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So, for example, if you see God, it's just seeing.

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It's not really God.

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So there's a good example.

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If you see God, prayer would be to talk to Him.

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Insight meditation would be to say, seeing, seeing, seeing.

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Quite different.

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Right.