For God who said,
“Let light shine out of darkness,”
has shone in our hearts
to bring to light
the knowledge of…
God.
– 2 Corinthians 4:6
The next question I want to take up is: how do you get into this marvelous process of ever deepening knowledge of God, ever deepening unity with God, and ever deepening union with other people? It’s a fact and even physics today, quantum mechanics and other sciences, are speaking in religious terms, although they don’t mean to, but someone with religious ears notices these sayings with great interest.
“For instance, some biophysicists are saying that you can’t have a thought – that is, a mental reflection – without affecting everything in creation instantaneously. We know from particle physics that particles are separated by enormous distances, if they’ve ever been joined, react in exactly the same way. When you change the spin of one of them, the other changes without ever being touched, in certain experiments. So, this tells us that at the source of all there is there’s a kind of universal…vibration in which the original Word of God in creation, the Incarnation, the moment in which the Word of God spoke and things came into being.
‘Word’ in the Greek is not just a sound but is any action that manifests the interior disposition of someone. So the ‘Word of God’ as a reality has been present in all creation from the beginning of time, from the Big Bang, or perhaps before… In any case, this presence of the ‘Word’ as the Source of everything that is and that continues to support everything in existence so that it doesn’t go away is now something that science is preaching, so to speak, or is offering empirical evidence to back up.
How, then, are we going to get to this place? How are we going to start this journey? How are we going to access what Paul calls, over and over again in his Epistles, the deep knowledge of God, by which he means not just abstract or intellectual knowledge, but the knowledge of God that is experiential, that alerts us or makes us sensitive to a mystery that we can’t enunciate with our conceptual apparatus, but which is far more real than anything that we can see, feel, think, image, or have any other access to through our ordinary human endowment?
-Thomas Keating, from the Session 88 video
We now turn to one of Fr. Thomas’ most recent works and listen to how he relates the secrets gleaned from the Prayer in Secret into the deep knowledge of God and the implications on human evolutionary development and higher levels of consciousness made accessible through the fruits of contemplative prayer and practice.
To Practice
- View the video excerpt “Human Evolution” from the DVD series: God is Love: The Heart of All Creation which is about 10 minutes in length.
- Today we are called to take in the wondrous cosmic implications of contemplative prayer and practice. This understanding can serve as a motivating factor on days when ordinary life seems to pull us away from any inner motivation towards contemplative practice. Our participation matters to the whole of creation. Is this motivating for you?
