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there is a desire to reconciliate prayer and meditation prayer being The Thing to Do for traditional religion, and meditation being The Thing for new "spiritual not religious" religions

this strikes me the same as asking "what piano do i buy to be a good pianist" "what camera do i buy to be a good photographer" "what etf/altcoin do i buy to become rich" "what framework do i learn to get good at coding"

hooking up a piano to act as a keyboard to type into a code editor to manually control a camera to take pictures of astrological movements to buy stocks on does NOT give you the best of all worlds

that being said they are not completely equal. learning to code may be more motivating for someone b/c there's future career prospects. maybe u hate tech so piano might be better. maybe ur deaf so try photography

meditation on the other hand make sense even outside spiritual context as a way to clear the mind, just relax and chill, or w/e both prayer and meditation however suffer the same noise : signal ratio of a history of derivative understandings providing "helpful guides"

meditation, because of its lower barrier to entry requiring no historical text or history, is like javascript in that it has a higher noise : signal ratio *some try to combine the "best of both worlds" by using "meditation" in some specific religious context. cue fancy sanskrit

prayer and meditation then often become similar to the original "solution" of rounding up the blind men and interviewing them it is a desire to avoid "wrongness" by leveraging the minds of others b/c being wrong together w the experts doesn't feel so badhttps://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1411555942777298945 …