My theory is that both Christianity and Islam exists because of the fact that deep prolonged mediation causes hallucinations and psychotic experiences.
Why? Because God talked to both Jesus and Muhammed while they where meditating in the desert.
Also, in the gospel the story of the temptation in the wilderness comes after, not before, Jesus' recognition of his divine origin and mission. He was already baptized and pronounced to be God's son before ever going there. What's more this recognition has already come to him in childhood. And even if the order of events had been correct, then the nature of the events does not match, because when he was in the wilderness, Jesus was basically put to the test by the devil, who was trying to distract him from his divine commission, rather than being commissioned by God.
book: kenneth s leong the zen teachings of jesus
the silent prayer was also.identified with the "desert fathers" who have shaped much if the foundations of early Christianity.
silent prayer is a "come and see for yourself" approach, shifting the ownership of religious truth from the teacher as nd the church defining it to the individual discovering it through "discernment of the spirits", "in Christo".
silent, contemplative prayer is dismissed by some literalist and evangelical Churches as "satanic", "diabolical", "umbilical", but hey, what isn't :-)
Jesus adhered to the Hebrew religion and comfortably stayed within that tradition. His emphasis on 'silent' prayer, was simply in contradistinction to the hypocritical performative prayer of certain religious leaders that did not come from pure motives. The reason why prayer was silent, was not because it was in any way meant to be a mystical eastern style meditative experience leading to some kind of emotional ecstasy or zen or any other psychological manifestation, but rather because it was meant to emphasise the true goal of prayer i.e. maintaining a personal relationship with God through verbal communication.
Believers were encouraged to approach God like they would a friend or father and speak to him about their lives and not consider their human needs too lowly to concern a deity. Eastern meditation on the other hand is characterised by emptying of the mind, the polar opposite of how Jesus taught his disciples to pray. Jews and Christians throughout history have believed that on the other end of a prayer is a personal God who is responsive to our petitions whereas buddhism has no concept of a personal God but instead concerns itself merely with the human mind. For Jews and Christians the efficacy or power is not in the act of praying, but in the voluntary act of God. For Zen buddhists the efficacy or power is inherent in the act of meditation.
Communal prayer was still considered appropriate and was encouraged, Jesus just didn't want anyone showing off to their religious friends as a means to gain status without truly caring about God, His righteousness, etc.
Prayer by itself was also not considered a method to discover truth. There is a heavy emphasis on seeking truth in the study of the word of God which runs throughout Jesus' teachings, which was already present in Judaism and continues to this day in Christianity. The desert fathers, as well as mystical sects in judaism and islam are outliers, and their religious practices are amalgamations of mystical traditions of other religions with their respective host religion (christianity, islam, judaism). Theirs is a religious phenomenology that draws on the religious verbiage and concepts of a familiar religion, without concerning itself with the authoritative source of said religion, but rather with seeking a mystical experience.
It is not just literalists and evangelicals that consider eastern style meditation and associated religious concepts as foreign to mainstream historical christianity and judaism, it's most reputable scholars in the fields of NT studies, Church History, etc.
* this immersion is not about fancy mystical experiences, but about healing in the presence of what as Christians we call G'd; it often is initially calm, then happy, ecstatic to some, and then that makes room for neither ecstasy nor void but pure presence, a state that can be experienced, but not described appropriately. On that path there lays and lurks inner work on your personal baggage, a liberating cleansing process, which is not only fun while it lasts, and a process which contemplative teachers today could call 'purifications'. The beatifications of the sermon on the mount give a fairly good step by step guidance of this purification process which leads to life "in Christo", as Paul describes it.
* contemplative or silent prayer was and is an outlier, yes, however certainly not in early Christianity, see the sibling comment for a random quick example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26497034
* contemplative / silent prayer, like comparable Jewish and Islamic traditions, and like a number of eastern traditions, puts the experiential personal liberation above authoritative teachings of some church or another. It's a radical shift of authority from rulebooks and logical learning to an inner process, guided and supported by open minded teachers.
* I respectfully doubt you have read the book. It is anything but superficial.
May I ask if you have personal experience with any kind of meditation, secular (like MBSR) or in some religious tradition?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3270411?seq=1
it connects silent prayer to Philo, a contemporary of Jesus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo
and it connects silent prayer to early desert fathers, like Clement of Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_of_Alexandria
Also. For clarity (you may know this, but others may not) I want to distinguish very clearly the difference between a silent prayer and meditation.
A silent prayer is verbalized intention within your head, sometimes mouthed. If you were to look up Judaism's silent prayer, it is repeating a ritual sequence of words - the meanings of which you should know. As traditionally conceived, it is addressing the Eternal as a Person.
The different meditation approaches I've encountered - conventional "Western mindfulness" and a more intense secular Hindu system - are focused on detaching awareness. Sometimes mantras are used/repeated. It is exceptionally variant from the early silent prayer approach, or even the nominal silent prayer approach of today.
Contemplative prayer did start with the desert fathers, I think.
There are many forms of eastern meditation. E.g. Vajrayana deity visualization meditation
I'm not completely sure about this. Certainly it is to do with letting go of ruminations, worries and distracting thoughts. But there is a lot of talk about focus and insight, and this seems similar to the western concept of meditation.
Similarly, the focus that meditation requires is a discipline of not getting distracted by the outside world or by the sea of thoughts and emotions that resides in our mind, but it is not a focus on any particular idea or concept. Rather, it is a focus on (achieving) a certain state of mind or experience.
Meditation in the Biblical sense is deliberative, logical, active and always involves freely thinking about a certain topic or set of ideas. It does not seek to constrain/limit itself beyond the level of focus required for reading a book, for example. Meditation in the eastern sense seeks to 'transcend' logic and emotion and does not require or depend on any logical or emotional processes. Actually, logical and emotional processes hinder meditation.
2. The books probably relevant to this discussion—the Gospels—are generally believed to have been written before the turn of the first century. Some argue that Mark and Luke were written as early as the 50s, 20 years after Jesus died. [0]
[0] https://jimmyakin.com/2018/11/when-was-the-gospel-of-mark-wr...
the books we see today are translations of heavily copyedited and consolidated writeups of oral traditions.
scholars like Bart Ehrmann have been very helpful to see that whatever the word of god was, it's deeply hidden behind the words we hold in our hands, and the.words are by no means a historically accurate, literal "truth", but a consensus on what the author's and editors over centuries hold dear as spirtual and religious "true" foundation.
Few who cast unwarranted doubt upon the New Testament realize how extremely sceptical they would have to be about every other piece of ancient writing, because none of them even comes close to the new testament in terms of: 1) number of copies 2) being written close to the time of the actual events
[1] https://crossexamined.org/is-the-new-testament-reliable-erhm...
This has occurred to me as well. But then, this is good news! It means that at least theoretically it might be possible to understand these important historical figures by inducing these hallucinations and psychotic experiences in ourselves in a deliberate and controlled way. This might be the key to understanding religions thoroughly.
I'd even say that a great deal of human progress depends on carrying out this project.