Cultivating spiritual awareness to reach level of the true self
"The principal method of Centering Prayer really is to sit down. Now that isn't too hard for most people.
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"Sitting comfortably, and with eyes closed, we settle briefly, like I'm settling in this nice chair, breathing easily, and so on.
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"There are going to be various thoughts, feelings, sense perceptions, noise in the room, people coughing, memories, imaginations, visualizations, sort of dreaming. All of this psychological material, you might say, is going to be flowing down the stream of consciousness as you sit there. And we say that it's inevitable, integral, and normal.
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"It's important not to resist these thoughts. In other words, it's important to have a joyful attitude towards the thoughts, a friendly attitude towards the most dreadful thoughts. Not that you linger over them or act them out, but it's important that we expect them, and they're normal, and they're integral. So we receive them all with a smile, sort of an inward smile, so to speak. A jolly attitude is recommended. 'Here they go again,' that sort of thing.
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"And out of the developing peace or interior silence that is gradually being insinuated through the Holy Spirit, into the spiritual level of your being.
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"This practice is constantly cultivating your spiritual awareness, the spiritual level of your being, the spiritual level of the intellect, which is intuitive, and the spiritual level of the will, which is the will to God, the will to open to infinite truth, infinite love, infinite happiness.
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"We're kind of absorbed, or dominated, in our ordinary psychological life, by the objects of events and people, and our emotional reactions to them. The purpose then, of the Centering Prayer, is to move from this [ordinary awareness] level to this [spiritual] level. And indeed, not to stop there, because the human being has greater depths than that, but to move even deeper, to the level of the true self, which is our participation in the divine life, and the divine presence itself as the source of our being at every level.
"And it's accessing or awakening our awareness to this presence that is the ultimate goal of contemplative prayer or Centering Prayer. But to reach it, we have to pass through the spiritual level, and to awaken the true self, and whatever of God's ultimate divine presence he may want to share with us, which is a whole new life, which is a transformed life."
Fr. Thomas Keating @ 02:51–02:59, 04:09–04:22, 05:30–06:03, 07:07–07:47, 10:33–10:47, 18:31–18:56 & 28:02–29:20 (posted 2017-09-13) https://youtu.be/5FWvxwfN_CE&t=171