Love Matters are wisdom words from Fr. Thomas Keating spoken during the filming of the new series God is Love: The Heart of All Creation. Some are included in the series; others are from footage published here for the first time. A new word will be posted every Monday throughout the year. May they serve to inspire hope and lift your heart.
English Transcript
The brain is unquestionably the masterpiece of creation up until now. This hasn’t been a straight path up a mountain or a straight development in human powers, but it’s been growth and regression and struggle and a recurrence in times of difficulty to the animal instincts that God created in the lower animals such as violence.
The new powers of the human brain for abstract thinking, for compassion, forgiveness, for relationship to live in this world, has to have the pre-human brain, the animal brain, in order to live in this world. You have to eat; you have to be nourished; you have to grow. The group has to reproduce if evolution is to continue. And the religions have tried to figure out ways to reduce the dominance of the instinctual drives and the archeological evidence seems to be that it was only slowly that humans found their human identity and were able to express it, not just in art, but in relationships.
Surge la Conciencia
El cerebro es sin duda alguna la obra maestra de la Creación hasta el momento. No ha sido un camino recto montaña arriba, o un desarrollo continuado de las capacidades humanas, sino que ha habido crecimiento y retroceso, y ha habido lucha y hemos vuelto a recurrir, en momentos de dificultad, a los instintos animales que Dios creó en los animales inferiores, como la violencia.
Los nuevos poderes del cerebro humano para el pensamiento abstracto, para la compasión, el perdón, las relaciones necesarias para convivir en este mundo, tienen que tener también un cerebro pre-humano, el cerebro animal, para poder sobrevivir en este mundo. Hay que comer, hay que alimentarse, hay que crecer. El grupo debe reproducirse para que la evolución continúe. Las religiones han tratado de buscar diferentes maneras de reducir la dominación de los impulsos instintivos, y la evidencia arqueológica parece indicar que fue solo gradualmente que los humanos encontraron su identidad humana y pudieron expresarla, no solo por medio del arte, sino también en sus relaciones.
