The Tal-bhajan of Hindus and the Namaz of Muhammadans:
Similarly, the tal-bhajan of the Hindus and the namaz of the Muhammadans are means of concentrating the mind towards the one ideal—and one ideal only—of uniting ourselves with God; these practices were given by the sages with the express purpose of diverting our minds from the worries of the world and focusing them on the one Lord. If the bhajan or namaz be performed with this idea and intention, that is, with the name and remembrance of God in mind and heart, then the prayer is a prayer indeed; otherwise, it’s just a farce, no better than a drill. You can keep on jumping around here and there, shouting “Tukaram, Tukaram!” for a thousand years, but it’s of no uses . You won’t find a shadow or a ghost of an idea of who and what Tukaram was by these means. For it is not high and wide jumping, high and low singing, slow and fast ringing of the tal-bhajan that the devs (or gods or saints) require. It is your bhakti, your prem, your love, your devotion that is needed, not your mischief and play, not your mechanical murmuring while your mind and heart go on running continually in pursuit of worldly ideals.
In short, all this shaking-and-snapping of the kasti every now and then, this singing and ringing of the bhajan and tal, this praying of namaz so many times a thy—under such circumstances as we see in the world today—all of this, we can say, is done merely for the sake of shariat and show, not as duty to God but as duty to shariat, with the mind rambling far from God indeed.
– “Meher Baba’s Tiffin lectures”, p59
31-May-1926; Meherabad