© 2005 Mariano Pérez
© 2005 Urantia Association of Spain
In our current society, due to the lack of truthful information and the tendency to mix different definitions, especially in the lay world, it is easy to confuse the concepts of relaxation, channeling energy with meditation, praying with praying, or prayer itself is easily confused with worship.
For those who seek the Truth, Beauty, and Goodness found in Creation and in the hand that directs it, it is of utmost importance to understand these concepts and techniques in order to apply them in their daily lives and evolve toward the perfection of the soul.
Meditation, prayer, and worship are precious and necessary tools for those who truly want to achieve one day, in this life or later in their future existence, the true goal of our endeavors: union with our inner Being, with the divine spirit that dwells within us.
What is meditation and what does it aim for?
Nowadays, due to the proliferation of various techniques for personal progress, taught by respectable schools, mostly of Eastern origin, one might get the idea that meditation involves sitting in a certain posture, emptying the mind, and waiting to be charged with “cosmic energy,” or in other cases, visualizing various images that can produce similar sensations. This is not a criticism, by any means, of these schools, since visualization for specific objectives, as well as concentration to recharge ourselves with energy, is also important for applying them in our lives.
What I’m trying to do is differentiate these techniques from meditation, although often due to language distortions, we tend to say meditation when we mean relaxation or energy capture, etc.
While it is true that meditation requires a prior period of relaxation, whether through breathing or other techniques, it is also true that relaxation is not the same as meditation.
Meditation is, above all, deep thought. It is concentrating our thoughts on something, primarily to solve a problem or make specific decisions regarding a matter in our lives. The difference with normal reflection is that in meditation, we seek to receive inspiration from our divine spirit or Thought Adjuster to accomplish these goals. Therefore, it is important to achieve a prior state of relaxation and peace.
Our divine spirit always tries to communicate with us, more specifically with our mind, and when it does, we shouldn’t think of it as a voice whispering in our ear; rather, it’s more like our own thought. Human beings don’t discern when a thought is from their own self or from their divine gift. However, what can be affirmed is that all thoughts that lead to a feeling of love for God and others, which provoke selfless altruism, are inspired by it. God is love, and love seeks to inspire us!
Another useful tool for meditation is the exercise of introspection, through which we analyze ourselves, observe our conscience, our behavior toward others, our attitude toward life. In short, we take stock of who we are and, consequently, the virtues we should foster and the mistakes we should avoid.
Prayer has two aspects: group prayer and individual prayer.
Group prayer is effective in its highly socializing impact. Community prayer, accompanied by the necessary sentiment, has the power to help an entire city or nation.
Individual prayer is also a valuable tool for both the person praying and the person asking. However, for it to be effective, the person being prayed for must know that they are being prayed for, and there must be a close social relationship between the two.
Prayer is primarily a plea, a supplication made to the Creator; however, we must not confuse true prayer with the mechanical prayer so common in various religions. The latter has no spiritual value, especially if it is done as a form of penance.
Prayer, to have a direct effect on the physical environment, must be linked to the will of the divine spirit and the heavenly overseers. It is not a tool for the selfish and materialistic petition of the individual, as it is then destined to lead to disappointment and disillusionment. On the other hand, it should not become a substitute for personal action. This means that we should not ask God for the solution of our difficulties for convenience, but rather for spiritual strength and wisdom to guide us in our affairs, to resolve our problems with courage and determination.
The prayer of greatest spiritual value is altruistic prayer, if not to say directly that this is its true nature, and in this practice the individual is strengthened and consoled.
Group prayer should be practiced with concentration on what is being done, with awareness of the act itself, imbued with a feeling of love for the people praying.
According to words attributed to the Master Jesus in The Urantia Book:
“Prayer is entirely a personal and spontaneous expression of the attitude of the soul toward the spirit; prayer should be the communion of sonship and the expression of fellowship. Prayer, when indited by the spirit, leads to co-operative spiritual progress. The ideal prayer is a form of spiritual communion which leads to intelligent worship. True praying is the sincere attitude of reaching heavenward for the attainment of your ideals.” UB 144:2.2
… “But when you pray, you exercise so little faith. Genuine faith will remove mountains of material difficulty which may chance to lie in the path of soul expansion and spiritual progress.” UB 144:2.6
As he himself taught, effective prayer must be:
Just as work should alternate with leisure, the effort to live, that is, the tension to which the personality is subjected in material life, should be mitigated by the repose of worship.
Worship is the contemplation of the spiritual; it is the act of the fragment—the soul—identifying with the Whole, the finite with the infinite, the Son with the Father, time in the process of adjusting to the rhythm of eternity. It is the personal communion of the creature with its Creator and the acceptance of His will.
Prayer is self-remembering, a sublime thought; worship, however, is self-forgetting, a super-thought. It is effortless attention, the true ideal of rest for the soul, a form of peaceful spiritual exercise.
Worship is like a foretaste of the subsequent and higher existential realities, where one feels the entire universal organization and the spiritual hosts in their cooperation in the Great Work; it is feeling the kingdom of heaven on earth, and how we are part of it.
But worship is also creative and must be combined with service. It can be said that it is the technique of seeking inspiration in the One to serve the multitude.
Ultimately, it is the yardstick that measures the degree to which the soul has detached itself from the material universe and has simultaneously and securely adhered to the spiritual realities of all creation.
It is, without a doubt, the most sublime, most beautiful, most intelligent conscious act that a human being can carry out, not only in this temporal reality, but throughout his evolutionary career.
May peace reign in our hearts!