meditations

My week-long hiatus is over, and in celebration of end-of-exams my PT class is punctuating our day with brewskies at Hudson's Campus very shortly. In the meantime I figure I'll mention something that struck me last week and I wanted to mention but never got around to it.

Early last week I walked into my mum's room en route to her bathroom where I had left my toothbrush and mouthwash the previous night. My mum was sitting on the floor cross-legged with her eyes closed looking very peaceful, so naturally I asked her, "What are you doing?" My mum opened my eyes and took a second to focus, then she responded that she was meditating.

Now this is a pretty uncommon occurrence. My mum is a fervent Buddhist, my dad probably a lapsed one if he even is concerned by religion at all. Both are pretty liberal people and as such they vote Liberal. Anyways, I think I had just come back from church so I was in the mood to discuss inter-religious practices, so I sat down on her bed and asked her what she does when she meditates.

From what I understand, meditating is much the same as praying, except instead of having a relationship with a higher power, it's demonstrating our frontal lobe functions in evaluating our lives from a metaconscious perspective. She calms herself by monitoring and slowing her breathing and then pretty much just has a cathartic episode, reflecting and evaluating and identifying. She examines emotions, goes over troubles, dreams about future situations - anything you can think of that glosses over your mind and wanders into your conscious domain can be analyzed and dissected. You create and fathom, understand and formulate action.

I thought about this because there are many similarities with prayer. We calm ourselves to talk to Father God, evaluate our lives and what we are thankful for and blessed with, identify what needs help and try to figure out who we are going to pray for and who we are going to help. It's more structured of course, and involves an omnipotent higher power, but the idea is still the same in my opinion.

I think the reason I thought it was important was that even though religions may be different, practices may still be similar. Corollary: Religions may be very similar. Obviously this corollary is a large assumption, because different religions have completely different principles and ideologies and even though we all pray doesn't mean they are the same - I do acknowledge that as a central limitation of this observation. I'm just saying that I think that I've been so focused on learning Christian theology that I've neglected that right in my own home I probably have one of the best teachers of the Buddhist way of life and I haven't even bothered to ask. One of my minor goals I put out at cell group was to learn more about other religions in order to find an answer to that burning question that so often bothers me: If each religion claims that their word is the word of God, whose word is truly the word of God?