Meditation is never prayer. Prayer, supplication, is born of self-pity. You pray when you are in difficulty, when there is sorrow; but when there is happiness, joy, there is no supplication. This self-pity, so deeply embedded in man, is the root of separation. That which is separate, or thinks itself separate, ever seeking identification with something which is not separate, brings only more division and pain. Out of this confusion one cries to heaven, or to one's husband, or to some deity of the mind. This cry may find an answer, but the answer is the echo of self-pity, in its separation.
     The repetition of words, of prayers, is self-hypnotic, self-enclosing and destructive. The isolation of thought is always within the field of the known, and the answer to prayer is the response of the known.
     Meditation is far from this. In that field, thought cannot enter; there is no separation, and so no identity. Meditation is in the open; secrecy has no place in it. Everything is exposed, clear; then the beauty of love is.
     It was an early spring morning with a few flaky clouds moving gently across the blue sky from the west. A cock began to crow, and it was strange to hear it in a crowded town. It began early, and for nearly two hours it kept announcing the arrival of the day. The trees were still empty, but there were thin, delicate leaves against the clear morning sky.
     If you were very quiet, without any thought flashing across the mind, you could just hear the deep bell of some cathedral. It must have been far away, and in the short silences between the cock's crowing you could hear the waves of this sound coming towards you and going beyond you - you almost rode on them, going far away, disappearing into the immensities. The crowing of the cock and the deep sound of the distant bell had a strange effect. The noises of the town had not yet begun. There was nothing to interrupt the clear sound. You didn't hear it with your ears, you heard it with your heart, not with thought that knows "the bell" and "the cock", and it was pure sound. It came out of silence and your heart picked it up and went with it from everlasting to ever- lasting. It was not an organized sound, like music; it was not the sound of silence between two notes; it was not the sound you hear when you have stopped talking. All such sounds are heard by the mind or by the ear. When you hear with your heart, the world is filled with it and your eyes see clearly.
     She was quite a young lady, well turned out, her hair cut short, highly efficient and capable. From what she said she had no illusions about herself. She had children and a certain quality of seriousness. Perhaps she was somewhat romantic and very young, but for her the Orient had lost its aura of mysticism - which was just as well. She talked simply, without any hesitation.
     "I think I committed suicide a long time ago, when a certain event took place in my life; with that event my life ended. Of course I have carried on outwardly, with the children and all the rest of it, but I have stopped living."
     Don't you think that most people, knowingly or unknowingly, are always committing suicide? The extreme form of it is jumping out of the window. But it begins, probably, when there is the first resistance and frustration. We build a wall around ourselves behind which we lead our own separate lives - though we may have husbands, wives and children. This separative life is the life of suicide, and that is the accepted morality of religion and society. The acts of separation are of a continuous chain and lead to war and to self-destruction. Separation is suicide, whether of the individual or of the community or of the nation. Each one wants to live a Life of self-identity, of self-centred activity, of the self-enclosing sorrow of conformity. It is suicide when belief and dogma hold you by the hand. Before the event, you invested your life and the whole movement of it in the one against the many, and when the one dies, or the god is destroyed, your life goes with it and you have nothing to live for. If you are terribly clever you invent a meaning to life - which the experts have always done - but having committed yourself to that meaning you are already committing suicide. All commitment is self-destruction, whether it be in the name of God or in the name of Socialism, or anything else.
     You, madam - and this is not said in cruelty - ceased to exist because you could not get what you wanted; or it was taken away from you; or you wanted to go through a particular, special door which was tightly shut. As sorrow and pleasure are self-enclosing, so acceptance and insistence bring their own darkness of separation. We do not live, we are always committing suicide. Living begins when the act of suicide ends.
     "I understand What you mean. I see what I have done. But now what am I to do? How am I to come back from the long years of death?"
     You can't come back; if you came back you would follow the old pattern, and sorrow would pursue you as a cloud is driven by the wind. The only thing you can do is to see that to lead one's own life, separately, in secret, demanding the continuity of pleasure - is to invite the separation of death. In separation there is no love. Love has no identity. Pleasure, and the seeking of it, build the enclosing wall of separation. There is no death when all commitment ceases. Self-knowledge is the open door.