110 Quotes by Thomas Keating

I venture to say that it’s not enough to respect and tolerate religions other than our own.

If one completes the journey to one’s own heart, one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else.

In a crisis of choice when you are perplexed and do not know which way to go, it might be good to consult several persons.

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.

We need to develop the intuitive capacities of the brain that some geniuses have manifested over humanity’s lengthy history.

How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them, by feeling them. Feelings that have been repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again in order to be left behind for good. Most of the time, they don’t need psychotherapy; they just need to be evacuated. We might say that we are suffering from acute psychic indigestion, a nausea of a psychological character that is interfering with our mental health and all our relationships.

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It’s a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are.

Einstein believed that science was directed toward discovering God’s thoughts. Quantum physics itself is a kind of spirituality insofar as it is always looking farther into the unknown to see what is beyond the known. It is a search for ultimate reality.

Now we are entertaining the suggestion that the real work of prayer is just to get rid of the very assumption that was the foundation of all these other modes of prayer. It is a matter of shifting the location of the sense of identity. We have to accept the idea that the word I does not have a fixed and clear and obvious referent. This is where the transformation that we undergo becomes more and more radical with each breakthrough or illumination.