prayer – The Narrow Path

“If you want to be free, if you want to heal your relationship with God, with others, and yourself, enter your Inner Room– The Office, where the Divine Therapy takes place. Close the door so you don’t run away.

Quiet your interior dialogue, so that you can listen to what the Spirit is saying to you.

An enormous intelligence is guiding us through this process with a love that is unconditional and determined to bring about this healing, whatever the cost to Itself. Gregory the Great expressed it as resting in God.

Don’t judge Centering Prayer on the basis of how many thoughts come or how much peace you enjoy.

The deeper one’s awareness of one’s powerlessness and the more desperate, the more willing one is to reach out for help.

This help is offered in the next two steps. You turn yourself over to a Higher Power who you believe can heal you and work with you in the long journey of dismantling the emotional programs for happiness. They are the root causes of all our problems.

How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them. By feeling them.

Feelings that are being repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again, in order to be left behind for good.

The radical healing is the acceptance of the situation. Because in some way, God is present there.

The real work of prayer is just to get rid of the very assumptions that was the foundation of all these other modes of prayer. It is a matter of shifting the location of the sense of identity.

The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment.

For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory.

We have to accept 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.

The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise in letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know.

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Nothing is more helpful to reduce pride than the actual experience of Self-Knowledge. If we are discouraged by it, we have misunderstood its meaning.

Contemplative prayer is a deepening of faith that moves beyond thoughts and concepts. One just listens to God, open and receptive to the divine presence in one’s inmost being as its source.

One listens not with a view to hearing something, but with a view to becoming aware of the obstacles to one’s friendship with God.

God has not promised to take away our trials but to help us change our attitude towards them. That is what holiness really is.

In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward Reality.

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

The Spirit calls us to transformation of our inmost being, and indeed of all of our faculties, into the Divine Way of being and acting.

Divine Love picks us up when we sincerely believe nobody else will. We then begin to experience freedom, peace, calm, equanimity, and liberation from cravings.

A total surrender of ourselves to the Spiritual Journey is required.

When the Presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, Divine Life is pouring into the world.

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

Gifts of the Holy Spirit grow in direct proportion to the depth and sincerity of our love.

To live in the Presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.

Silence is God’s first language, everything else is a poor translation.

Whatever we say about God is more unlike God than saying nothing. If we do say something, it can only be a pointer toward the mystery that can never be articulated in words. All that words can do is point in the direction of the mystery.

Let Love Alone speak.”