All prayers are complaints.

All prayers are saying to God, ”We know better than you do.”

One man came to me – his wife was dying. He was a very religious man. Every day from three o’clock in the morning up to seven – for four hours – he was doing all kinds of crazy things.

He had so many gods.

In India they are not so miserly about gods. About everything else they are poor, but about gods they are the richest people in the world: thirty-three million gods.

So everybody who is really religious has a whole roomful.

Thirty-three million of course you cannot... but a few representatives, the topmost, the bigshots, you can keep around.

This man had at least sixty. Now, sixty gods, and only four hours – you can see, it was not much time.

He was in such a hurry, doing a prayer to this god and rushing to another, then rushing to another, and looking at his watch continuously because in four hours he has to finish.

And the fear that if he leaves any god, and the god becomes angry....
Such a religious man – and his wife was dying, and the doctors were not able to do anything.

They simply said, ”She has lost the will to live. Deep down she does not want to live; hence, no medicine
is effective.” Unless you have a will to live you lose resistance; you really
want to die.

Just medicines cannot do much unless a great support from your will is there.

So he came to me one day and said, ”What should I do? I have done four hours of prayers each day my whole life, and still my wife is dying, and out of those sixty gods not a single one is helping.

And I cry and weep.”
I said, ”Please answer me one question.

Do you think yourself more intelligent than God?”
He said, ”No. How can I think myself more intelligent than God?”

Then I said, ”If God wants your wife to be freed from the body you should be happy, you should be thankful.

But your prayer is against God’s will. Those sixty gods that you have cannot help you in any way.
You are not a religious man at all.”

But he said, ”I have done prayer four hours every day for years.”

I said, ”You can pray twenty-four hours, that too will not make any change, because your whole attitude is wrong.

You are demanding from existence, you are not surrendering to existence.”

Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand.

It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be. 
It is a let-go.

But all the religions have been doing prayers in the name of meditation.

And what kind of stupid prayers!

OshO 
CHAPTER 2. HERE WE CALL WORK, WORSHIP
From the False to the Truth