Thomas Keating Quotes
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The whole immigration issue suggests the inevitability of people in our time seeking economic security that they can't find at home, which usually involves bringing their religion with them. One's children are going to be married to people outside their religious traditions as well as inside.
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What I really wanted was to fall in love with God. It's amazing what obstacles there are within us, or at least in me, that seem to slow this process.
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The best way to understand another person's religion is to listen to the story of what particular practices helped them to deepen and to embody their religion, especially its spirituality.
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Union with God is really possible. Unity with God I presume, is what is meant by Heaven, but that too is available in this life for the humble of heart.
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While doing centering prayer, the practice is to let go of any thought or perception. The priority is to be as silent as possible and when that is not possible to let the noise of the thoughts be the sacred symbol for a while, without analyzing them.
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To become who we are as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, we have to be nothing and everything at once, since this is what God is. ... If we accept who we are, we are manifesting God and radiating Christ. The latter unfolding of the divine life within us does not need to go anywhere or do anything special.
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Centering prayer is a training in letting go.
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Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.
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Becoming fully rational is not enough anymore; evidently it can lead to distortions of all the great human possibilities.
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Humility is the forgetfulness of self.
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I venture to say that it's not enough to respect and tolerate religions other than our own.
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The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.
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God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.
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The root of prayer is interior silence.
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One of the great purposes of religion itself is being hindered by an exclusive-ism that doesn't take into account the common elements and values that we actually share.
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If one completes the journey to one's own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.
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God seems willing to act as the most sublime psychologist, psychotherapist, or even psychiatrist if we are willing.
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The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God.
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God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.
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Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.
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Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.
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The divine therapy helps us integrate our animal nature with the new possibilities of rational consciousness.
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We rarely think of the air we breathe, yet it is in us and around us all the time. In similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us.
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Technology isn't fulfilling its promise of unlimited progress and solving every problem through technology. With the Enlightenment and its aftermath, there already was a general loss of confidence in the Western religions.