What is the difference between prayer and meditation?

What is the difference between prayer and meditation?

Then the second layer of your being: love, heart. If a man is religious love becomes prayer. If the man is not religious then love becomes poetry, art, painting, music. Then the third layer, the deepest core, beyond which nothing exists, is being. Absolute silence; and absolute aloneness. There;s no difference now between religious and non.religious. At the centre everything becomes one. In that silence one is neither religious nor anti religious, because those are the terms of the reason. In that silence one's love is neither prayer nor art. Everything has become one. That silence IS meditation. When people come to me, if I see that they are in their heads then I help them to be related, to move, to fall in love, to become a little foolish, so that they come down from their heads, so that they get down from the throne of the ego a…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, IF THERE IS NO GOD, WHAT IS PRAYER? Next day he put the palace up for auction. He informed all the nearby kingdoms, whoever was interested. Many kings, queens and rich people came; everybody was interested. They were all puzzled to see that, just in front of the palace, there was a cat chained to a marble pillar of the palace. The rich man came out and he said, "This palace and the cat, both are up for auction together. The price of the cat is one million dinars" -- their dollars, one million dollars -- "the price of the cat one million dollars, and the price of the palace, one dollar: one million and one dollars." The people said, "For this cat one million dollars, and for this palace just one dollar?" The businessman said, "You don't bother about it.

Mediation is the only true prayer. All else that goes on in the name of prayer is mind stuff. It is utterly useless. You can go on talking to God for lives together, but you will never be heard. Real prayer is not verbal. It has to be out of silence. Silence is simply silence, it does not belong to any religion. It certainly belongs to the religious heart. It is the very center of the religious heart but it is not part of any dogma, doctrine, church. A really religious person is free of all Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism. Because "isms" as such are something in the mind. They are ideology, philosophy, thinking. And thinking is never silent, thinking is a always a turmoil. Silence means a thought-less stillness. When there is no thought in you, when nothing stirs, you are in prayer.

Osho, is no-mind the ultimate prayer?

PRAYER IS NOT SOMETHING THAT CAN BE DONE. Prayer is not something that can be thought either. Prayer is a state of silent being, of utter silence. One simply is... then one is in prayer. If you do prayer, you miss the whole point. Doing remains on the circumference; doing cannot enter to the center of your being. If you are saying your prayer, you again miss -- because in saying it you are thinking of yourself as separate from God, you are relating to God as if he is separate from you. And that is the basic illusion: God is not separate from you. Hence, prayer cannot be a dialogue between I and thou. I is thou -- there is no possibility of any dialogue. The moment you say your prayer, you have accepted a hypothesis which is basically wrong -- that God is there, far away from you,…

Meditation is an end and a beginning -- the end of the old and the birth of the new. You cannot even comprehend it because the old cannot comprehend the new, the old can only comprehend something which is old. It has limitations, it can move only within the boundary of the known, and the new is not within its boundary, the new is unknown. Hence only very courageous people can take the jump. Courage is needed because you have to die to the old, and the old is familiar. You are dropping that which is familiar for something which is absolutely unfamiliar. This is what courage is: dropping the known for the unknown. There are two steps to courage: the first is dropping the known for the unknown, and the second is dropping the knowable for the unknowable. By dropping the known for the unknown, meditation happens.