🌟 INTRODUCTION

✨ In this insightful teaching, Master Woo Myung reveals that true meditation begins only when one no longer prays for material or personal gain. 🌿
Those who have prayed earnestly but found no fulfillment eventually come to seek repentance and Truth instead of blessings.

Through deep understanding, one realizes that repentance is not about words but about discarding the self-centered mind—the origin of all sin and suffering.
True righteousness cannot be achieved by human effort, but only when God and Truth dwell within. 🌈

📜 ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG

Those Who Meditate Are Ones Who Do Not Pray in Want of Things

No matter their religions,
people have varying degrees of faith.
Those who pray only because they seek to gain things
are not the ones who practice meditation.
The ones who do are the people
who had tried praying whole-heartedly
but have realized that it is to no avail.

In Washington D.C.,
a person once asked me if
the repentance that is spoken of in the Christian church
and the repentance spoken of at this meditation
were the same.
I explained to him that there were two types of sins:
original sin and personal sin.
We were born with original sin
because our ancestors were sinners –
because our ancestors lived with self-centered minds,
in which they had their own standards of
what was good and what was evil.

The Bible says that Adam and Eve
ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
What this means is
Adam and Eve established
the standards of good and evil
inside their minds.
There was no tree of knowledge of good and evil per se.
But when a person has stolen something,
he comes to gain the discernment in his mind
that he has done so.
Good and evil are not material objects,
but because they came to have good and evil in them,
the Bible reads that Adam and Eve “ate the fruit.”
Thus it is from the moment they began
discerning good from evil
that humankind has had sin.
And because humans are sinners,
their children are born with original sin.

Personal sin is the sin one creates in life
according to one’s fixed conceptions and habits.
The life one is living is one’s personal sin.
A person’s existence is
the body he has received from his parents,
along with the life he has lived with it.
Humans are sinners and as such,
discarding the existence that you call your self
is repentance.
Therefore, I told this person in Washington D.C. that
to give all of this up to God was repentance.
He understood this.

Then there was a person who told me that
though he had prayed at Matins for thirty years,
he found he could not do as Jesus taught.
He also said that he was unable to let go of his pride.
I told him that he must,
to which the old man repeatedly asked,
“Who are you? Who are you?”
And then he said,
“Such a thing is one that only Jesus can do!”
He said that he could not act according to God’s Word.
I told him that this is something one is not able to do
by simply wanting to do so,
but by first bringing one’s mind to completion.
Jesus said that we must love our enemies.
He also said that when struck across one cheek
put forth the other as well.
Such are things
that cannot be accomplished by the human mind;
only God can.
And only a person who has God enshrined in his mind
can do this.

All in all, it seems that
those who have truly sought to be righteous and good
from within their respective religions
end up practicing meditation.
It seems they are the ones who have sought to reach Truth.

– Woo Myung

🌠 REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION

At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners go beyond the prayers of desire to the repentance of Truth. 🌱
They discover that true faith is not asking for blessings but discarding the false self—the origin of all sin.
Only when one’s mind becomes complete and enshrined with God can love, humility, and compassion arise naturally.
This is the path of true meditation, where one lives as Truth itself. 🌌