The Quickening of its Beat

From the silence grows the words. Observe the silence deeply, let it culture in you what it will. Before the first word there was what? Silence? Or is there just silence about what there was? And after the last word what? Silence? Or just silence about what there might be? The knowing that is deeper will not let us say, cannot be shaped and packaged into words, will not conform into thought, is not of the mind or of conception, is of the heart alone and is no more than the quickening of its beat.

Are Prayer and Meditation the same?

Mostly we are caught in the web of the now, neither looking inwards nor outwards, but only at our everyday, our nexus of survival and coping that we take to be the all that there is. However, there are two vast traditions both of which call us away from our addiction with being us, from being obsessed  with being ourselves, being obsessed with our locus operandi, with the stuff of our day-to-day. 

Prayer looks outwards. It is address to something incomprehensibility greater, stronger and more permanent than the frail, mortal, leaf in the wind that we are.To pray is to submit to that oceanic vastness and its forces that encompasses everything we shall ever know and everything that lies beyond what we can ever know. To pray is to know that you are but the smallest dot on the smallest sheet of paper blown across a dessert of unimaginable vastness. To pray it to yield to the all. 

Prayer is often more easy for those who have been broken by life, who, being full of wishes to open their heart and wounds to that ineffableness, to that vastness, find its all encompassing embrace a powerful source to draw what succour they can from; or who, seeking no remission, abandon themselves within it or, at times, seek no more than to know their insignificance and frailty by contrast to its implacableness. 

Meditation looks inwards. It address nothing. It is the turning down of the volume of the self until a point of no-motion is reached and the self and its cares and worries dissolve. There, in the peace that passes all understanding, refuge is found.