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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God seems willing to act as the most sublime psychologist, psychotherapist, or even psychiatrist if we are willing.
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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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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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Centering prayer is a training in letting go.
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God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.
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Divine life is basically the inner freedom to choose the right and the good spontaneously.
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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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Humility is the forgetfulness of self.
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For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
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In human relationships, as mutual love deepens, there comes a time when two friends convey their exchanges without words. They can sit in silence sharing an experience or simply enjoying each other's presence without saying anything.
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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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We're obviously at the edge of something quite new in humanity's experience. That is this globalization process which isn't just economic or social, but involves the interpenetration of cultures, people moving to different places several times in their lifetime, traveling for business or pleasure, and marrying people of very different cultural backgrounds, all of which was almost impossible a hundred years ago.
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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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Religions have a special responsibility to encourage and inspire people to love planet earth, which as far as we know, is the only place in the cosmos that works in such a harmonious way that it can support intelligent life.
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The capacity for emotional sobriety belongs to everybody in the human family and leads to a fully human response to the adventure and goodness of the gift of human life.
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The root of prayer is interior silence.
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It's obvious that humanity continues to be torn by religious violence.
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Over time we are able to undermine habitual modes of thinking formed by our self-made self in early childhood, which tries to squeeze happiness from the gratification of our desires for the symbols in our culture of survival and security, power and control, and affection and esteem.
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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.
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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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In centering prayer, the sacred word is not the object of the attention but rather the expression of the intention of the will.