It seems a very easy correlation to make to me – between the two pillars of mystic life, prayer and meditation – between Christianity and Buddhism respectively. The Western Traditions, including Judaism, have long been known as based around prayer, and any kid who ever attempted to go to Catechism knows that memorizing a ton of different prayers and hymns – which are really just musical prayers – is a huge part of it. But when it comes to meditation, it’s not exaggerating to say that it is pretty much non-existent within the current Christian traditions that have been taught over the last 400 years or so. Which to me, as a modern mystic, is somewhat astonishing, considering just how crucial meditation is to any effective practice. Now that’s not to say that it has always been this way. If you look back to the medieval times or ever further back, you find references to meditation in the works of people like Meister Eckhardt, St. Thomas Aquinas, etc. They may not have explicitly stated it as such, but they definitely alluded to it.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have Buddhism, which one could say is built on the practice of meditation.