I implore you to offer yourselves … to God.
… Do not conform yourselves to this age
but be transformed by the renewal
of your minds.
- Romans 12: 1-2
"We should, it seems to me, begin with the doctrine of the Divine Indwelling. This is the doctrine that says that the Trinity, the Divine Trinity: Father Son and Holy Spirit … is present in us all the time – morning, noon and night – and present everywhere else in the universe in virtue of the fact that other things exist. Wherever anything is, God who is 'is-ness' must be present.
"… Everybody needs God. It's not a question of being worthy or not. The issue is ... will you, come in and sit down with the One who joins us? And it's that joint endeavor – that joint sharing of the human condition with its joys and sorrows, its ordinariness, its profane character, its endless waiting, its deprivations – and not just our suffering, if we experience that, but rather the experience of the prayer is gradually educating us in what contemplative prayer really is: an education in undeserved mercy.
"… And so, rather than feeling unworthy of God, the right disposition for the contemplative is to recognize that God is totally joined to us in our difficulties and that the difficulties don't reflect God's displeasure but only the desire … to invite us beyond our own healing process to … the whole human family, because the whole human family is the object of God's desire for transformation and it's into this project that [God] invites us, the farther we go into the spiritual journey and the more intimate the dance becomes. Contemplative prayer, then, is really a profound, and the profoundest, perhaps, participation in Christ's Passion, Death and Resurrection."
-Thomas Keating, Monday's video
Today we turn to Fr. Thomas' latest work and listen to how he relates the Divine Indwelling to contemporary expressions of non-dual consciousness, emptiness and their implications for ordinary life.
Meditation
"Can we understand the New Testament at all unless we understand that it is constantly dealing with a higher level of consciousness possible to man? Is not this the treasure hidden in us, that a man can find if he seeks? 'The highest wisdom consists in this, for man to know himself, because in him God has placed his eternal word.' What is this word (logos)? 'In the beginning is the word.' Is it not this, the interior expression of the universe itself as potentiality, beginning with the highest meaning and existing as a scale of reality within?"
- Maurice Nicoll, Living Time
To Practice
Video Reflections: View the video excerpt "Christian Non-Duality and Unity Consciousness" from the DVD series: That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality. This excerpt is about 10 minutes in length. You will find it and a transcript here. If you would like to stream or Chromecast this video, use this link.
Examen: In today's video, Fr. Thomas states: "We only have to be what we are already, which is the creature and the beloved of God. So, non-duality for the Christian is to be guided by the Spirit, not by one of the false selves or the ego." Can you open to this extraordinary invitation?
An archive of previous emails may be found here.
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