Immense Gift

"Meditation is so important. It's probably the most direct access to our capacities for consciousness beyond the rational level. One of the great and timeless questions is, “Who are you?” Adolescents are said to take great interest in that question. Who we are is certainly not in our résumé or what you tell a doctor about your medical history. It's not about personality and character as expressed in our behavior and way of looking at the world. Beyond the egoic self, as it's usually called, is a self that we don't normally access except through meditation, prayer, or some special invasion of God's presence in our life.

At the deepest level, there is a self even beyond the true self, and this is the manifestation of God in our spiritual poverty and weakness. Somehow, who God is is expressed in the experience of human weakness. In meditation, by sitting long enough, the dust begins to settle and you begin to see more clearly that the deepest self is God-consciousness manifested in our uniqueness as human beings. We are completely united with everyone else in the human species because God is in everyone else.

To me, this is one of the great gifts of evolutionary cosmology and of science today and why religion has to listen to science. It's giving us up-to-date revelations of who God is and developing a cosmology that can support deep union with God. What is being revealed is that everything is interconnected and interrelated in the material universe and functions in collaboration and communion with other creatures. As you go up the levels of consciousness, the presence and action of God are in everything that happens: not just God's presence, but God's presence and action.

That action is healing the conscious and unconscious wounds of growing up and childhood trauma, and at the same time activating all the capacities of grace—which are, in the Christian scheme of things, the fruits and gifts of the Spirit. In this perspective, death is not the end. It is the completion of the human journey that prepares us to move beyond human support systems and all forms of possessiveness, just to be who we are and to be content and happy with that immense gift."

-- Fr. Thomas Keating,  (born 1923) is a Trappist monk (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) and priest. He is a founder of the Centering Prayer movement and of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.