I often find myself in agreement with you, but on this point that is simply not the case. What you say makes little sense to me. In fact, the notion that they are all one and the same puts me in mind of something James Dobson once said about prayer.
He wrote of a vice president of his at Focus on the Family who Dobson praised for his devoutness. As an example of that devoutness, Dobson related that his VP would bring donuts to their Monday morning executive meetings and that he (the VP) would pray for a parking space near the donut shop he frequented. According to Dobson, this showed the man's excellence because he trusted in God not merely to deliver on the "big things", but also on the "little things" as well. But to me the same story illustrates how spiritually superficial and shallow praying to get something is. I simply cannot conceive how the man's prayers were in any appreciable way about finding yourself, or finding your own salvation, or release from yourself.
As for your conflation of prayer and meditation, that is not an equivalence I would easily draw. At the very best, I would call some forms of prayer -- and only some forms -- "contemplative meditation", with a very heavy emphasis on "contemplative" and almost no emphasis on meditation. When I meditate it is the very antithesis of prayer, and while there are other forms of meditation than the sort I engage in, even those other forms seem in many ways fundamentally alien to prayer.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
I always hope for someone to open a can of worms. Are you ready to go deep diving?
With you this would be a great pleasure. I trust you know behind what I say there is some considerable thought. It's clear I'll need to flesh this out some. I think you may appreciate it, hopefully.
You touched on a couple forms of prayer in your post. Petitionary prayer, and thanksgiving or gratitude. First, let's look at meditation and those who mediate. Even in meditation you have narcissists such as you described, and genuine seekers who are willing to give everything as the Buddha said you should to seek Enlightenment like one whose hair is on fire seeks a river. The latter is approaching it as a means to overcome the obstacles of the ego. The former is seeking God to help them find one! That's radically different. I'm sure you'd agree.
The narcissists who use various forms of meditation are often referred to as 'Wave jumpers', seeking one peak experience to the next to try to find some sense of self through thrilling experiences of, like of surfer riding one crest of the wave to the next. They are not meditating to discover Truth, they are in search of some sort of meaning they can latch on to. In reality it's a form of avoidance of actual spiritual realization which requires a death to everything you aspire towards.
So to the two types of prayer and the effects they have. With the narcissists who pray or meditate they really are not approaching it the same at all as one who is at the door of overcoming the ego. The narcissist have yet to actually find the ego! That has to come first before you lay it all down at the door of Enlightenment itself. So the way in which the latter approaches prayer and mediation is entirely different. And that type of prayer and mediation is specifically what I am talking about, not those who have yet to have any sense of stable ego to work with who pray for parking spaces and God filling their bank accounts with gold and whatnot. They are not doing the same things.
Why I say prayer is in fact of form of meditation is because in prayer there is a directed intention towards the image of a transcendent Self. The One that lays beyond the ego, that which exists beyond all that we aspire to, hope for, and identify with in the ego-self. "If this is not who I am, than who am I"?, is the true hope to find release from the limits of egoic self-identification. In meditation there are two basic principles which it all hinges on and those are Intention and a lack of expectation, or a specific outcome.
To pray to a deity figure is to focus ones intention "upwards" beyond oneself. That is principle number one. It moves your intention beyond the ego to in the face of the "Holy Other". It is a 2nd person perspective of Spirit, in which there is no place for ego to hide. So you have two things going on in that. One of course is directed focus of intention, which is key to any and all forms of meditation, and the second is seeing your own ego and laying it bare before your own eyes where you then as a result become able to see what you normally inhabit as the "self" as an object of your own awareness, thus transforming the subject of self, into an object of your own awareness. That action in itself leads to self-transformation. It leads to growth. It lead to spiritual development.
In a word, prayer is a form of focused meditation.
Now to thanksgiving. Gratitude is no small thing whatsoever to spiritual growth and development, not to mention a sense of overall general well being! To feel a sense of gratitude is a sense of overflowing love and joy! It connects us with to the world and to ourselves. And through that to all others! In meditation practice there are multiple aspects of it, and not the least of which is
grounding. At the end of meditation it is probably the most important part of it to take what was opened to and bring it into your body, into your life, pulling it down, rooting it and grounding it. And when you release that back, it is Love, Joy, and Gratitude.
The simply action of "Thanksgiving" in the simplest prayers are a direction of that "outward" movement of inward joy. To receive and not to give is to make to break the cycle, it's to make the waters stagnant. What you receive is returned. In my way of putting it, the whole a healthy meditation practice can be summarized as an
exchange.
I want to quote a couple things that may help explain and reinforce what I attempted to explain here. The first has to do with what I call that "exchange". It's from a 9th century Sufi mystic.
“There are lights which ascend and lights which descend. The ascending lights are the lights of the heart; the descending lights are those of the Throne. The false self is the veil between the Throne and the heart. When this veil is torn, and a door opens in the heart, like springs towards like. Light ascends toward light and light descends upon light, and it is ‘light upon light’.
When each time the heart sighs for the throne the throne sighs for the heart, so they come to meet. Each time a light ascends from you, a light descends toward you. If their energies are equal, then they meet halfway. But when the substance of light has grown in you, then this makes up a whole in relation to what is in the same nature in Heaven. Then, it is the substance of light in Heaven that longs for you, and is drawn to your light, and it descends toward you. This is the secret of the mystical journey.”
9th Century Sufi mystic, Najim al-Din Hubra
This exchange of light and life is what I see as Creation itself. And that lives within us. So any means we find to realize that in ourselves symbolically helps us to realize who and what we truly are.
The 2nd part of this is the idea of prayers of supplication, to "worship" as it were. For this I'll pull out a quote from Ken Wilber I found nailed it on the head.
"But this is not God as an ontological other, set apart from the cosmos, from humans, and from creation at large. Rather, it is God as an archetypal summit of one's own Consciousness. ... By visualizing that identification 'we actually do become the deity. The subject is identified with the object of faith. The worship, the worshiper, and the worshiped, those three are not separate'. At its peak, the soul becomes one, literally one, with the deity-form, with the dhyani-buddha, with (choose whatever term one prefers) God. One dissolves into Deity, as Deity - that Deity which, from the beginning, has been one's own Self or highest Archetype."
~Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye, pg. 85
There's a ton of stuff to penetrate in this, and when people reduce the value of symbolic forms, which I could say considerably more about, to the likes of broken individuals like Pat Robertson and other narcissists, they truly are not beginning to understand the true nature of these things.
I keep promising a book... at what point will I write this?
I hope this helps clarify some. It's hard to make it concise.
BTW, please don't every say "we agree to disagree" with me. It's seriously my most hated phrase as it's ultimately meaningless. We're far from disagreement here.
