JAI SAI RAM!!!
Prayer means: lost totally, drowned totally, surrendered totally, nothing is being held back, you have gone one hundred percent into it -- ANYTHING, and it becomes prayer. If in your dance you can go one hundred percent into it, it becomes prayer. Making love, if you can go one hundred percent into it, it becomes prayer.
Anything! It doesn't matter what it is.... The quality of prayer comes by being one hundred percent into it; you have forgotten yourself utterly, you are a drunkard.
Prayer is the way of the drunkard, the way of the lover -- one who can abandon himself, one who can cease to be, one who is ready to evaporate.
It is the way of trust. But ninety-nine percent won't do, not even ninety-nine-point-nine percent, no. It has to be one hundred percent.
And the other pole is meditation: one hundred percent remembrance, mindfulness, awareness; you are just pure light. It is the way of being alert, aware, watchful, of being a witness. It is the path of the alone.
In prayer two are implied -- the lover and the beloved. That's why Sufis call God the Beloved. Zen has no idea of God at all. Buddha says there is no God, there is no need.
On the path of meditation God is not needed, because meditation is not a relationship -- prayer is. Prayer is relating. Meditation is total freedom, aloneness, the flight of the alone to the alone.
There is no other, so there is no question of drowning yourself, but one hundred percent mindfulness will be needed -- less than that won't do. And you become transformed. Whenever you are one hundred percent alive, at the optimum, the revolution happens.
But as people are ordinarily, they are never one hundred percent in anything. They are hotchpotch, they are always mixed. And the mixture keeps them in a contradiction: one part going to the south, another part going to the north, and they are constantly in strain and stress. Neither can they resist nor can they yield, and these are the two ways to attain perfection: either resist totally -- that is the way of meditation -- or yield totally -- that is the way of love.
But people remain half-half, divided. And a house divided against itself is bound to fall sooner or later.
OM SAI RAM!!!