Some of the questions and comments like:
But you were asking about prayer....
Prayer denotes duality and meditation means merger, coalescence, dissolving and disappearing.
Maybe. One ;might also regard prayer as ;a gateway to meditation. Starting with two, ending with one -- or zero?
God is more of a feeling and less of a concept. God is our attempt to give finite configuration to the infinite formlessness. It is an exercise to limit the limitless and an endeavour to explain the abstract.
Am I wrong or do this two assertions imply two different definitions of "God"?
are answered in the article. Therefore, i am quoting the full piece.
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Our prayers are both conditional and conditioned. The viscosity of fear and gravity of grief determine the density of prayer. Prayer is popular, as it is easy to preach and practice. We are comfortable with rituals because others can perform them on our behalf. Affluence is the affordability to maximise sloth.
People prefer deification as it gives consolation and confirmation. It is an escape and not liberation. One who comprehends it as a short cut never reaches the destination. Assumption of suffering as a form of prayer presupposes God as a sadist.
Prayer belongs to the mass and meditation to the individual. Only the individual is indivisible. Meditation is the last leap to reach the celestial. It is prayer without praying. J. Krishnamurti calls it, `silencing the mind'. Words and sounds dominate prayer and in meditation, the medium is serenity.
The purpose of the former is purgation and the latter prophylactic. Prayer denotes duality and meditation means merger, coalescence, dissolving and disappearing.
Prayer has profiles. A few sing hymns for selfish ends; a few kneel for the benevolence of others; a few prostrate for avenging their archrivals and only a handful fawn for global peace and cosmic tranquility. Some pray, as they do not know what to do. Our supplications are effective when they are espoused for the cause of others.
Rooted on trust
Prayer rooted on trust and grafted on bliss is a love affair. Everything in existence is admired as an act of almighty. God is more of a feeling and less of a concept. Genuine prayers are meant not to avoid sufferings but to consolidate our strength to withstand the torrent of torment.
We pray in distress and not in joy. Our miseries are imputed to evil interventions and victories are viewed as fruits of indomitable efforts.
Prayer could be transformed into pursuit of a higher plane of awareness by refining the mind. When our communion becomes gratitude expressed through gestures, we are showered with blessings.
Vote of thanks is not the penultimate agenda in life; the programme often comes to a grinding halt. One who asks alms at the corridor and the other who pleads for boons at the sanctum sanctorum are both mendicants seeking from different sources. From begging and bargaining and from beseeching and petitioning, it can be elevated to a stance of ecstasy.
Singing with celebration and dancing with delight for no reason and with no expectation takes invocation proximate to meditation. When prayer disappears and praying vanishes, something beautiful burgeons. Then one glows like camphor and floats like incense.
The art of bringing the quality of prayer into all actions happens on its own without any enervating effort.
Deliver through deeds
Respecting the responsibility and discharging it with diligence are worship delivered through deeds. Counting the beads for countless times is of no use, if we miss the manifestation of the maker in all the innocent incarnations.
God is our attempt to give finite configuration to the infinite formlessness. It is an exercise to limit the limitless and an endeavour to explain the abstract. We worship both the dead and the God. We place them on par.
It is said that dogs could visualise their God only in the form of a dog, may be with an additional appendage or a straight tail. The devotees debate to decide the power of the deities. The dispute is more about the structure of buildings and not about the nature of supernatural.
Bharathi proclaims, "There is more spirituality outside our temples." By writing the name of God, we feel like scribbling our own name and derive ego satisfaction. God has no name. Attributing a gender would also give a form. God is nameless, formless and even Godless.
All our communal riots erupt when sounds of prayers of different denominations clash and when their timings overlap.
Spirituality is a personal issue and not a public policy. Compassion is prayer lived and devotion demonstrated. The whole world can meditate at the same moment without any single whimper.
A man of meditation sees his own reflection on everything around him. He never plagiarises the pleas of others to trace the tracts of the providence.
R. Buckminster Fuller said, "God is not a noun but a verb." When God becomes a verb, we will have no quarrels over feature or stature.
V. IRAI ANBU
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