"Neither shall they say, Lo here or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Luke 17:21
Meditation is not thinking. It is the deliberate cessation of thinking - the voluntary turning off of the ego/mind. When you learn how to stop those uncontrollable thought processes, you can at last discover the kingdom of God within you. You are not a separate, tiny, crawling, subservient worm who must live in terror of Hell - you are already in fact a part of God and part of the kingdom. You have just forgotten.
But since it became a hierarchical power structure the Christian Church has been terrified of meditation, because people who learn how to practice it have no more need to pay protection money to Earthly intermediaries. Unfortunately, theologians' teachings on the subject have frightened and misled a lot of people. It is a self-evident truth that it isn't meditative Buddhists or Taoists who have a history of flying airplanes into buildings and burning witches.
What you have written is typical for new age thought. There is a difference between the Holy Spirit indwelling us, and us being god. Christians believe that we are separate from God because he is his own “entity.” We do not believe that god is in all and is all. He does not dwell in non-Christians, according to the Bible. And he is not a tree or a rock or the wind or us.
What you say about the hierarchical power structure may be true of some denominations (catholic?) but not most of them. And we believe there is only one mediator between God and man: the Lord Jesus Christ. We don’t need people to mediate for us.
I am not “afraid” of meditation any more than I am “afraid” to join a witch coven or jump off a building. It is not consistent with who I am as a Christian, and it is unbiblical.
You have just forgotten.
“Many lives have we Arjuna,
you know just one,
I remember them all.”
Krishna.
Walk with Krishna on the battlefield......of life.
I appreciate the rest of what you have said but the part I bolded is not correct at least in the school of training I am a student of. There are many kinds of meditation but the type you are referring to does not stop thinking or turn of ego or the mind. It is simply watching thoughts, emotions...the mind... without attachment. That means that no judgment is made about anything that arises even the cessation of thoughts. One observes whatever arises in mind and then lets it go. There is nothing more to do. What one discovers inside, with diligence, is what is. What always has been.
"Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha."
Gone, gone, beyond gone, completely beyond gone, enlightenment, Hail!.
Whatever it takes one to cross the ocean of forgetfulness, this remains the unexcelled, the unequaled, the unsurpassed, the most excellent Mantra. Whatever the raft that takes one across, it will be dismantled.
Nothing is identical with itself.