(God as pure is-ness, beyond all labels)
Thus, the best description of God is “is-ness” without any limit: “I am” without any other pronoun. The Buddhists have done well in establishing an attitude towards the uncreated God as distinct from the God of creation or the creator God. It’s the same God, of course, but God as I will use the term here is simply a label. It is the one I’m used to in my tradition. Maybe someone can invent a better one. God is everything. Call him “Butch” if you’d like!
Theology needs a solid cosmology on which to build a theology that will appeal to people of our time.
isn’t anybody you can think of, that’s for sure. Thus, one of the main breakthroughs of the spiritual journey is to perceive that God is manifesting in us and inviting us to become fully human because that is the way to become as fully divine as humans can be in this evolutionary process. We don’t know the end, but there’s no reason that the process should stop. We’ve been evolving from amoebas for several billions of years and we haven’t stopped. The brain is still evolving, without question. RA: I have a friend who likes to refer to us as sense organs of the Infinite. By that token, and if we consider God to be omnipresent, then not only are we sense organs of the Infinite but dogs and mosquitoes are, and even rocks, we could say. Everything expresses or reflects that to the best of its ability in terms of its physical structure.
(The false self’s tinted glasses and the spiritual life)
The world that we see, and that we are judging all the time, is very prejudiced. We see it through our tinted glasses. In that sense, the world is unreal—not because it is unreal, but because our view of it is. It is built on our desires of what we want it to be and our appetite for control, pleasure, and security. The spiritual life involves recognizing these appetites as illusions of our false self and detaching ourselves from them, without expecting that these problems are going to go away or that suffering is going to disappear. The spiritual life is precisely to lead this divine life in human circumstances that involve both suffering and great joy, and which is continuing to evolve. We don’t know where it’s going. We have to learn to take responsibility for the world that we are in. And this we are reluctant to do because it limits some of our desired freedoms.
The promise is that we are developing our capacity as human beings to do the things that God does with the greatest of ease: to forgive, to show compassion, to respect everyone, and to experience oneness with everyone.
God seems to adjust himself to every creature at its level of consciousness, however primitive. What Jesus has done is to integrate the human condition with all its limitations. He completely identified with us as a human being. He threw away all the divine privileges and showed us how to be human in a divine way, which involves the realization of being called to unity with God and oneness with each other.
I don’t know if that was clear. But if you imagine the Big Bang and the manifestation of the universe, it almost seems that God necessarily has to play a hide-and-seek game with himself, where he creates these parts and appears to get lost in them, even though he essentially is the parts.
(God as playful creator, creation as divine game)
TK: What do you do if you are infinite and enjoy infinite happiness and don’t need anything? What do you do to occupy yourself?
RA: You get bored. You say, “Hey, let’s have some fun.” TK: Then what do you do? RA: “Let’s play. Let’s create something.” TK: You play. In other words, there is a playful character to God. He wants to see what these creatures can do in different circumstances, and this enables him, by his identification with us, to experience what it’s like to be human with our limitations: to love us in our weakness and spiritual poverty, and to enjoy healing and forgiving us. The things we find hard to do are what make God happiest. RA: I came across a quote from Teresa of Avila. She said, “It appears that even God is on the journey.” In other words, this whole process of the universe is one big evolutionary machine, which is God’s spiritual practice.
designed for us to enjoy fun, not to accomplish something. As soon as you want to win, you’ve lost the pleasure of playing. A certain amount of competition is not bad, but the fun is over once you make the game a career. There are lots of games that God plays and another one he seems to like very much is, “Let’s pretend.” Or, “Let’s do it again,” like a child who finds great joy in knocking down a stack of blocks and then cries out, “Oh Daddy, let’s do it again!” God also can play rough. He wants to see if we are willing to join him in the game. The most serious of games is that of healing the wounds of the world and becoming whole, which is the same idea as salvation or redemption. We are aware of having a capacity for boundless happiness. That may be the greatest proof of God’s presence in us. Even in strange ways, people are always looking for happiness. If they are malicious, that’s their idea of happiness.
RA: Like you said earlier, our perception of reality gets filtered through the lenses of our perception and becomes quite distorted in the process, at least at certain stages of our development. We think it is going to make us happy to kill somebody or rob a bank and things like that.
The Father, in the Trinitarian relationships, is infinite possibilities and the Son is the articulation of those possibilities in actuality. The Spirit is the complete surrender of the Father and the Son to each other in total oneness. God is infinitely one and infinitely diverse at the same time. The relationships in the Trinity couldn’t be more different. The Father and the Son can never be made into one on every level. There are relationships in God that are distinct. We’re invited into this dynamic of self-giving love and this is a problem for us. Humans don’t like being creatures. They want to be in control. They want to be in charge of their efforts and draw attention to themselves, which is not what God does. He just is. He doesn’t need any attention and he doesn’t need adulation. We need to remember that we are created out of nothing. As soon as we can fully accept that, and I emphasize fully, we can become everything. We can be God, too.
Some anthropologists think that the evolutionary process is at a critical point in our time, in which a new level of consciousness beyond the rational, the capacity to understand reality intuitively, may be beginning to emerge. The globalization of the world may be an opportunity in which the higher power can reveal to people at the same time insights into ultimate reality that we haven’t been able to reach on the rational level and can’t because of the limitations of that level of consciousness.
TK: Yes. It’s interesting that many people who can reasonably be believed about their spiritual experience are pointing to invisible energy that science hasn’t taken into its reckoning as yet, and which it needs to do because of the increasing evidence that such energy exists. What holds the body together? There are trillions of cells with no apparent head office or center of activity, so that consciousness is a communion of all the possibilities of body, mind, and spirit, a kind of synthesis of all levels of creation. The human as “an icon of God” is worth reflecting upon. If we try to dissolve difficulties on the rational level, we just get into emotional turmoil. To accept them, sit with them, wait them out, and give them to God is the best way to deal with suffering, according to the mystics of the world traditions.
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.
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.
TK: I’m saying it could be possible because of the oneness of human nature. We think past-life experiences are our own, but they might not be. In actual fact, I don’t know, and so I’m happy to respect the fact that so many people believe in reincarnation. Actually, I think both could be possible. RA: It’s just that the vast majority of humanity obviously did not end up at the pinnacle of human spiritual evolution. So what happens to them? Do they get another chance, or what?
We can’t do that without a community; that is, without support from other folks and learning from others. We need the support, the encouragement, the trust, the love of a community to become fully human. There is a lot of interesting information about dying nowadays. Actually, many hospice people are beginning to say that the dying process is a transformative process. As the dying go through the stages that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified, one moves from denial to anger to fear to acceptance to peace to joy.
TK: God isn’t limited by time, so he can transform us in a nanosecond. But it’s a good question. In other words, we are always looking at reality or the biggest events from our limited perspective, with our tinted glasses from what we heard in kindergarten, from our parents, or from important others. We have to graduate from those attitudes or at least re-evaluate them, which most people do in adolescence and early adulthood. We need to provide young people with opportunities to discuss these basic issues of life, more than they seem to have in most universities today. There is a preoccupation with drink and sex. That is the way it was when I was in college and that’s the way it still is. It’s childish, but it’s a way of growing into one’s own decision-making capacities. Young people need to be loved by parents in that state of uncertainty. We’ve all made more or less the same mistakes. And we will not recover by means of advice alone, but only from being loved in our mistakes.
We have to take steps as we grow conscious of the self to protect the life that we have. The false self is a project to build a self out of what we perceive in early childhood to be sources of happiness or gratification. Security symbols, affection and esteem symbols, and the desire for control and power, are normal instincts necessary for survival in infancy. But since there are no standards to judge these attractions, they tend to become not just needs, but demands. Since everybody else has the same needs and demands, we’re in for social conflict. Here is where an appropriate religious instruction could be extremely helpful in preparing the human psyche for maturation and going beyond. The gratification of those three energy centers, when excessive, produces inevitable frustration. Then come the afflictive emotions, like anger and grief, and you are
various negative moods for hours, days, years, or a lifetime. The false self doesn’t exist. It’s all in our heads.
These instincts are impossible to realize because everyone else is trying to do the same foolish thing—that is, squeezing gratification out of sense information that is meant to give pleasure, but can’t give permanent pleasure or true happiness.
(The mechanics of centering prayer)
RA: Let’s say you’re teaching me centering prayer right now, and you’re going to tell me to sit down and to have the attitude of relinquishing control: to consent, to be willing, malleable, receptive. TK: Give yourself to God and put yourself in God’s hands. Fall into the hands of the living God, so to speak. It’s the safest place there is in all creation. RA: It’s not like, “I’m going to sit here and I’m going to do this, by golly!” TK: True. It’s not like that. The second step is to introduce a sacred symbol that expresses one’s basic intention of consenting to God’s presence and action within us. RA: Visual symbol, auditory symbol, thought? TK: It can be a word. It can be noticing the breath. It can be a simple inward glance towards that deeper self that I spoke of earlier. RA: But it’s not an external thing, not like some music you put on, or some image you think will be helpful. TK: Right. It’s totally receptive. It is a chance just to be with God alone and to say, “Here I am, dear Lord, at your disposal. Please heal my faults when you see that I am willing to let go of them.” If you use a word, it’s a single syllable. We call it a sacred word. It can be a name for God, or it can be something that expresses your disposition or attraction, like “love,” or “peace,” or “thanks.”
TK: Yes. It is totally interior. You don’t say it in centering prayer as a mantra that is repeated deliberately. You only use it when you need it—that is to say, when the bombardment of thoughts gets too noisy and you think you can’t put up with it much longer.
TK: The crucial distinction is, are you having thoughts or are you engaged in thoughts? If you are having thoughts, this is normal and impossible to avoid. The brain is a kind of receptor set and you can’t do anything about that. The experience might be compared to a river with boats moving on top of it. You can’t stop the boats, but you can stop yourself from getting on a boat to see what’s in the hold. So you just let the thoughts come and let them go. As time goes on, the capacity to let go of thoughts promptly and easily becomes more and more second nature. But it takes time. It’s not a onetime success story. You have to do it regularly because we have habits of constantly thinking about every blasted thing that happens. Centering prayer is an exercise in not thinking or detachment from thoughts when you can’t stop thinking. It’s not that thinking is wrong. It’s that we’ve abused it to the point where we can’t think as a rule under our own initiative except when we have some special project we want to think about. You may notice you’re engaged with a thought like, “What are we going to have for dinner?” As soon as you get into the contents of the meal, you’re engaged. Then ever so gently you return to your sacred word as a symbol of your basic intention. This practice is not a success story. It’s surrendering to the invitation of God to learn how to be. This is even more important than doing. You keep returning patiently to the sacred word again and again, maybe a hundred times in a single period of centering prayer. You don’t say it like you’re hanging on to a life-preserver, because that would turn it into an egoic project. You don’t look for success and you don’t look for consolation. You are just present to God’s presence and action, and renew that intention over and
over again. You don’t think about the sacred word or whatever your symbol is. You just do it. Sometimes, as you get more proficient, to start to do it is enough. In due time you experience an attraction towards a deeper silence. This is a sign that you’ve connected with this practice. In that silence, which is consciousness without content, presence best describes it rather than thought or desire. It’s a sense of being in God or God in you, or both, and wanting to be there. You continue the practice for about twenty minutes because it takes most people that much time to quiet down. We urge doing it twice a day. To quiet the mind requires a certain length of time and a regular practice because it is so co-opted by habits of thinking and choosing that are related to the three basic instincts of security, power and control, and affection and esteem.
TK: Yes. As your defenses go down, purification begins. That is to say, thoughts that are in the unconscious that we repressed because they were too traumatic to handle in childhood begin to come to our awareness. We need to acknowledge them and give them to God. If you want to…
(Silence as the gateway to purification)
RA: You were saying that as you settle into this deeply restful state, the repressed material buried in the nervous system and psyche begins to bubble up. Silence gives us the opportunity to release the emotional junk of a lifetime, which we can’t do if we are running around like crazy people. Once we habitually settle down, we have the opportunity to start the spiritual journey of purification and inner freedom.
Once we start accepting them, the sense of God’s presence is likely to appear in daily life and events. And we become more sensitive to the divine action. As I said, distracting thoughts are like boats moving down a river. The current will take them away if you just wait a minute. Just don’t get on the boats; let them go by. That’s the purpose of the sacred word. The practice of returning to the sacred word is not magical, nor has it any power of itself. It just gives the true self a chance to have a little breathing space.
All of these capacities buried under the load of our neglect or whatever upset us begin to thrive. I don’t say negative thoughts and afflictive emotions are suddenly all taken away. But they won’t blow you away the way they used to. If you keep doing this practice, you will be attracted to practices for daily life and also perhaps lengthen the time that you give to just sitting, waiting, listening, receptivity, and alert passivity. All these things are not very congenial to contemporary lifestyles. So they have to be learned. But the body and the human organism are completely prepared for this kind of holistic health and will revive, and you’ll discover that you have the capacity for the unfolding of the contemplative journey within you. You don’t have to try hard to do it, because it is basically a gift. Let it happen.
RA: I see what you mean. It’s as though centering prayer opens us up to a realm of experience that provides a foundation of sorts, and that almost spontaneously from that springs a greater sense of God’s presence, of trust, of acceptance, of the inherent wisdom in the universe. TK: And a perception of God’s action in our daily lives. God brings people into our lives—sometimes through a book, phone call, or an event—to see something about ourselves that had been hidden from us or that will help our spiritual growth. In other words, we begin to enter into this psychotherapeutic relationship with God in which he deals with our psychological unconscious, temperamental defects, and personality disorders in a way that is almost incredible. The divine wisdom knows us through and through and still loves us infinitely. We see that God is gradually teaching us with the greatest patience, tenderness, and consideration. He waits for us and chooses just the right moment to give us a special grace, like on a retreat or some event in our lives that opens us to deep places in our emotional life.
Once we accept the fact that we are in God’s care and in a therapeutic relationship with God, the inner room of contemplative prayer begins to expand to the whole of our life and everything we do. We can turn to God and say, “What shall I do about this? What do you want me to do?” In other words, there’s a sense of companionship or even of being lived in. As I say, sometimes God plays his games or he goes away without telling you, just to see what you will do with that, or whether you’ll blame him, and how far you’re willing to go in playing the divine games. One game he likes to play is basketball, with us as the ball. The harder the ball hits the floor, the higher it rises. So we have to learn that the bigger the trial, the greater the transformation that will come from it. We learn the way God works, which is not according to appearances.
view of the world that everything is divinely orchestrated; it’s not arbitrary and capricious. There’s actually a sort of loving intelligence, which we could call God, which is helping to bring about our progress and continuing evolution.
(Job, suffering, and co-creation with God)
Job was battered by every kind of human tragedy: loss of family, reputation, business, illness (he finally found his entire body covered with sores). His friends came to console him and plied him with pious platitudes. His response was, “I didn’t do anything wrong. God is unjust and I want to bring him to judgment.” God finally appears and just his presence answers all Job’s questions. God then restores him to ten times as many blessings as he had before. God opens his conversation with Job by saying, “Where were you when I formed the cosmos, made the stars, and fixed the earth?” (Job 38:4) Was God ironically teasing him, or was God actually trying to lead him to a new understanding of who Job actually was? God may have been trying to evoke from Job the answer: “I was there, too!” As if to say, “You were always co-creating with me, and we will be creating everything together in the future.” In other words, equality with God is quite an invitation! Why do people want to become big shots in this world when we have all received a gilt-edged invitation to become one with God? In other words, we don’t think big enough about God! We judge him by our own limitations and negative feelings, and then project those feelings onto him. RA: Sometimes God wants to play at being president of a company. If someone could be president of a company, and yet aware of their oneness with God, we might have better companies.
Centering prayer is a very humble start consisting of just sitting down, shutting up, and letting God be God.
TK: It’s amazing how God makes use of very defective instruments to bring about amazing results. But we may have to wait. To be united to God is what gives God most glory. He will turn the world upside down to bring someone who is willing to unity-consciousness. Thank you for your interest in the transformative process. It is the most important issue for human beings.