Thomas Keating QUOTES

21 " The Kingdom is most powerful where we least expect to find it. God does not take away our problems and trials but rather joins us in them. Such is the profound meaning of the incarnation: God becoming a human being. The Kingdom will manifest itself, not because of our efforts to keep trying, even when all effort seems hopeless, but because God loves us so much that God won't be able to stand seeing us struggle and always failing. God will do the impossible. He will give us a new attitude toward suffering. Such is the heart of the Christian ascesis, or self-discipline, and the mystery of transformation. It is the meaning of the Gospel as Therese perceived it. "

― Thomas Keating , St. Thérèse of Lisieux: A Transformation in Christ

23 " If our value system doesn't allow us to enjoy anything without putting a price on it, we miss a great part of the beauty of life. When we bring this value system into the domain of prayer, we can never enjoy God. As soon as we start enjoying Him, we have to reflect, "Oh boy, I'm enjoying God!" And as soon as we do that, we are taking a photograph of the experience. Every reflection is like a photograph of reality. It isn't our original experience; it is a commentary on it. "

― Thomas Keating , Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel

25 " Where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life. "

― Thomas Keating , The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

27 " Now we are entertaining the suggestion that the real work of prayer is just to get rid of the very assumption that was the foundation of all these other modes of prayer. It is a matter of shifting the location of the sense of identity. We have to accept the idea that the word I does not have a fixed and clear and obvious referent. This is where the transformation that we undergo becomes more and more radical with each breakthrough or illumination. "

― Thomas Keating , Spirituality, Contemplation, and Transformation: Writings on Centering Prayer

29 " God is available through many sources besides the religious quest. I don’t mean to imply that psychology replaces the work of religion, but it seems to me that it greatly supports religion and brings a certain clarity to areas of the human condition, especially the discovery of the unconscious. "

― Thomas Keating , The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

31 " All of us have been through the process of being born and entering this world with three essential biological needs: security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem. "

― Thomas Keating , The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

33 " Contemplative prayer is a deepening of faith that moves beyond thoughts and concepts. One just listens to God, open and receptive to the divine presence in one’s inmost being as its source. One listens not with a view to hearing something, but with a view to becoming aware of the obstacles to one’s friendship with God. "

― Thomas Keating , The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

35 " For many people they are the only way that the false values they absorbed as children are ever questioned, reevaluated, and put in the wastebasket. This is not to say that there are no values at all in one’s roles. It is the over-identification with them that makes it difficult or even impossible to fulfill them. Perhaps the only way to become a great parent is to be willing not to be one; for example, to let grownup children become whoever they want to be without regard to oneself. A similar letting go process is needed for every role model. "

― Thomas Keating , On Divine Therapy

37 " We have seen already in the first chapter how one such model—the developmental, pioneered by child psychologist Jean Piaget—helps explain the roots of our unconscious emotional programs for happiness. Each of us needs to be reassured and affirmed in his or her own personhood and self-identity. If this assurance is withheld because of lack of concern or commitment on the part of parents, these painful privations will require defensive or compensatory measures. As a consequence, our emotional life ceases to grow in relation to the unfolding values of human development and becomes fixated at the level of the perceived deprivation. The emotional fixation fossilizes into a program for happiness. When fully formed it develops into a center of gravity, which attracts to itself more and more of our psychological resources: thoughts, feelings, images, reactions, and behavior. Later experiences and events in life are all sucked into its gravitational field and interpreted as helpful or harmful in terms of our basic drive for happiness. These centers, as we shall see, are reinforced by the culture in which we live and the particular group with which we identify, or rather, overidentify. "

― Thomas Keating , Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation

39 " The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality. "

― Thomas Keating , The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation