Prayer is a device

Prayer is a trick to avoid meditation, and the so-called religious mind has developed many types of prayer. Prayer can also become meditation – when it is not only a prayer, it is a deep effort, a deep involvement. Prayer can also become meditation but, ordinarily, prayer is just an escape. To avoid meditation, people go on praying. To avoid doing anything, they pray. Prayer means that God must do something. Someone else must do.

Meditation is not prayer in that sense: meditation is something you do to yourself. And when you are transformed, the whole universe behaves differently to you, because the universe is nothing but a response to you, whatsoever you are.

If you are silent, the whole universe responds to your silence in thousands and thousands of ways. If you are blissful, the whole universe rejects your bliss. If you are in misery, the same happens. The mathematics remains the same; the law remains the same: the universe goes on multiplying your misery.

So, the first thing I would like to say to you is be constantly alert that you are not deceiving yourself. You may be doing something and still deceiving yourself. Methods are devices, I will repeat again….

Abridged from The Book of Secrets, Courtesy: Osho Times International, www.osho.com