Why is meditation considered right and prayer wrong?

Beloved master, why do you say that it is right to meditate but wrong to pray? In my opinion, meditation gives deep inner calm to a person for his own sake, but to pray deeply and calmly gives you the direct and intense connection to god, and his holy spirit comes down to you.

And sometimes it can happen that certain of your prayers may be fulfilled. That is just coincidence. If you go on praying for thousands of things, once in a while it is bound to happen. One man came to me and he said, "I never believed in God, but now I believe." I said, "What happened?" He said, "I gave an ultimatum to God that if within fifteen days my son does not get employment, I will become a confirmed atheist forever. And the threatening worked: within fifteen days my son got the employment. Now I am a firm believer." I said, "It is perfectly good, but never give the ultimatum again because it may not work always. It was just coincidence." But he did not listen to me. After two years he met me and he said, "You were right. I again gave the ultimatum. My wife was very…

What is the difference between waiting for godot and waiting for god?

It is as if the sun has risen in the morning and you are sitting in your room with closed doors and windows, in darkness. Open the doors, you become available to the sun. The sun was already available -- just the meeting happens. You cannot wait for God. All waiting is for Godot. Godot means the one who never comes, who CANNOT come, whose arrival is impossible. And the only impossible thing is that which has already happened -- how can it happen again? You are alive, and you are waiting for life, Now, this is ridiculous. The real man of religion does not think in terms of God. He thinks in terms of life or, even better, of living -- because life can again become an abstract idea. Living, moment-to-moment living. In that very living, one knows what God is, because one knows who one is. Your idea…

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,…

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.