Thomas Keating Quotes

God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.

We rarely think of the air we breathe, yet it is in us and around us all the time. In similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us.

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

St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.

We are kept from the experience of Spirit because our inner world is cluttered with past traumas . . . As we begin to clear away this clutter, the energy of divine light and love begins to flow through our being.

The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated from God.

God will bring people and events into our lives, and whatever we may think about them, they are designed for the evolution of His life in us.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.

Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.

The modern world lies under a pervasive sense of anguish, of being abandoned, or at least experiencing God as absent. Yet events that seem to turn our lives upside down and inside out are part of God's redemptive plan, not only for us, but for the world in which we live. God may be preparing a great awakening for the world, if God can find enough people to cooperate in this mysterious plan.

The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go - to give it back to him at a moment's notice - that's true human freedom.

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.

You should not take prayer too seriously. There is something playful about God. You only have to look at a penguin ... to realize that He likes to play little jokes on creatures.

The root of prayer is interior silence.

Just by the very nature of our birth, we are on the spiritual journey.

Centering prayer is a training in letting go.

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.

The spiritual traditions of all the religions have certain similarities that are unmistakable. They share many of the same basic practices like sacred reading, spiritual guidance, moderation in eating, drinking and sexual expression, and above all, trying to be aware of the presence of God in other people and in everyday life.

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.

Divine life is basically the inner freedom to choose the right and the good spontaneously.

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.

Every time you have a major breakthrough in self-knowledge, and see the way the divine works within your own psyche, external events, and interior experiences of the divine, you are transformed in some degree.

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.