PRAISE FOR THOMAS KEATING

“As a close student and friend of Thomas Keating’s for thirty-five years, I was exhilarated reading this lively and profound exploration of his journey into unity consciousness, and grateful the world has the opportunity to glimpse the inner life, struggles, and spiritual evolution of this extraordinary soul. A must-read for Centering Prayer practitioners in navigating the farther, subtler terrain of their path and for anyone seeking a model of embodied Christian nonduality. Cynthia has given Thomas, and the world, a tremendous gift with this masterpiece of modern mysticism.”

—David Frenette, author of The Path of Centering Prayer: Deepening Your Experience of God

“A tour de force graced by a rare blend of intellectual heft and devotional depth.”

—Ted Jones, insight meditation teacher and nephew of Fr. Thomas Keating

“In this multilayered analysis of Father Thomas Keating, we have an inestimable treasure that makes a valuable contribution to contemporary mysticism studies. Cynthia Bourgeault, one of the world’s leading mystical writers, offers a penetrating depth of insight into Keating’s journey from cloistered monk to world-renowned spiritual leader and founder of Contemplative Outreach. Cynthia worked closely with Thomas Keating for nearly thirty years, and her book is both a spiritual cartography as well as a testimony of entangled souls in search of divine reality. The result is a ground-breaking work that will establish Father Thomas Keating among the great mystics of our time.”

—Ilia Delio, OSF, Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology, Villanova University

“Read Meister Eckhart if you want to know what Christian mysticism was like 700 years ago. But if you want to get a sense of the poetry, the beauty, and the promise of the mystical life for today (and tomorrow), then read Cynthia Bourgeault’s luminous study on the mature wisdom of Thomas Keating. Not only does this book chart the course for the spirituality of the future; it’s like learning from two masters simultaneously.”

—Carl McColman, author of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism and Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life

“For over three decades, Father Thomas Keating was my holy-rascal uncle whose self-realization of the God beyond adjectives fed me a Eucharist of pure spirit. For almost as long, my holy-rascal sister Cynthia Bourgeault saw something in him that I could not—until now. Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic is a clear, compelling, and joyously dangerous revelation of Truth. It is the unlocked door that awaits your knock. So, knock!”

—Rabbi Rami Shapiro, author of Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries

“Cynthia Bourgeault, one of Father Keating’s great spiritual heirs, takes us on a beautifully told, wise, and inspiring journey into the expansiveness of his thoughts, leading us to an integrative vision of nonduality.”

—Jonathan F. P. Rose, author of The Well-Tempered City

“Thomas Keating was a spiritual giant of our time. Though deeply rooted in Christianity, his contemplative life and work transcended boundaries, attracting seekers and sages alike. Though he lived a cloistered life, he belonged to the world. His ability to weave various knowledge domains with experiential learning was remarkable. Even when sitting in silence, he echoed. All who wish to explore the contemplative world should get to know Thomas Keating.”

—Tenzin Priyadarshi Rinpoche, President & CEO, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT

“Cynthia Bourgeault was a long-time friend of Trappist Christian mystic Thomas Keating, who taught the meditative method of the Centering Prayer, which might be described as a form of Christian selflessness or emptying of self in order to be filled with God’s holy presence. In this probing work, Bourgeault focuses on the last five years of Keating’s inner spiritual journey and his ‘haiku-like poems’ to deftly relate the full significance of his life and teachings.”

—Jan Willis, PhD, author of Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist and Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra

“One of the most influential Christian spiritual teachers of his era, Thomas Keating had a long life with many phases and contradictions. Cynthia Bourgeault, a powerful influence on her own and close fellow traveler with him, is uniquely suited to be his chronicler. Her overview of his development focuses intently on his last five years when he was passing into what she sees as the unitive state expressed in his late teaching. As she engages vigorously with the challenges this teaching presents, she writes an energetic and provocative book clearly meant for our time.”

—Laurence Freeman, OSB, author of Jesus: The Teacher Within

Photograph by Spiritual Paths Foundation

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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© 2024 by Cynthia Bourgeault

Appendix 2: Phone Conversations with Isabel Castellanos

© 2024 by Isabel Castellanos

this page constitute a continuation of the copyright page.

Cover art: Lui Ferreyra

Cover design: Daniel Urban-Brown

Interior design: Lora Zorian

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bourgeault, Cynthia, author.

Title: Thomas Keating: the making of a modern Christian mystic / Cynthia Bourgeault.

Description: First edition. | Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2024005271 | isbn 9781645471844 (trade paperback)

eISBN 9780834846012

Subjects: lcsh: Keating, Thomas—Last years. | Mysticism—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV5082.3 .B687 2024 | DDC 248.2/2092 [B]—dc23/eng/20240625

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024005271

a_prh_7.1_148844526_c0_r0

To the monks, past and present, of St. Benedict’s Monastery, who for forty years graciously opened their monastic home to a steady stream of contemplative pilgrims whose lives were forever changed by the experience. The cost to your cloistered vocation can only be imagined; your gift to the Christian contemplative renewal stands for all to see.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

I would like to make it clear from the outset that this is not a biography of Thomas Keating, let alone any sort of officially commissioned one. I leave that honor to those far my senior in Contemplative Outreach, the grassroots support network he founded in 1984 to help spread the gospel of Centering Prayer. There are some still active in that network who have been with him from the start and who know him far more fully than I ever will. The account that will eventually emerge from that quarter will be shared according to the fullest and truest meaning of the word “contemplation”: “knowledge impregnated by love.”

My far more modest aim in this book is to offer an initial theological orientation and resource guide to help you break open the remarkable body of work that Thomas created during the final three decades of his life, and particularly during the final three years of his life. Across his final thirty years, he grew well beyond his original niche as chief architect and principal spokesperson for the practice of Centering Prayer and assumed his full stature as a world-renowned spiritual master and intrepid groundbreaker in the still largely unexplored terrain of Christian nonduality. By the end of his long life—he died in October 2018 at the age of ninety-five—his pastorate had become the cosmos itself, and his inner circle was the entire human family. How that transformation came about is the real subject of this book.

By the mid-1980s, Thomas Keating—Trappist abbot, cultural creative, and gifted popular teacher—had already established himself as a formidable presence within the Christian contemplative revival of his day. Between the Centering Prayer method itself (which launched Christians by the thousands into the universal practice of daily sitting meditation), the bold new psychological road map he created to unpack it, and the grassroots lay organization he brought into existence to help spread the message, he was already visibly changing the shape of the Christian contemplative delivery system. But his audience back then was still overwhelmingly Christian, his institutional conditioning was Roman Catholic, and his angle of approach was unabashedly psychological and therapeutic. Over the next three decades, both the scope of his influence and the breadth of his vision would grow in quantum leaps. By the end of his life, he was recognized far beyond the boundaries of his native Christian habitat as a realized spiritual master, an unapologetic disciple of evolutionary consciousness, and a guiding light in the emerging field of interspiritual dialogue. Most surprising of all, he had become a cosmogonic mystic who pondered the meaning of life at a vast scale and peered as deeply as he could into the mystery of Ultimate Reality from the perspective of what he came to call “unity consciousness.” Oneness—experienced both inwardly as a state of consciousness and outwardly as a state of planetary harmony and cooperation—became the watchword for his final spiritual transformation, the transformation we see being played out right before our eyes in that final collection of writings that is the subject of this book.

—

While many Thomas Keating fans are more or less aware of the existence of this substantial body of late work, it has so far proved itself curiously difficult to break open and even more daunting to integrate into the full canon of his teaching. There are many reasons for this difficulty, I believe. Some, who know him only by reputation, have it fixed in their heads that he was simply a popularizer, a spiritual lightweight—an impression all too easily reinforced by his folksy, conversational delivery style. I know many high-minded religious scholars who assume that he taught a New Age or “pop” version of Christian spirituality and that his writing is not to be taken seriously. Among his more devoted students, the problem tends to be the opposite: they find the new material a bit overwhelming and maintain a respectful distance, not through any lack of willingness to engage but because they are not quite sure how to engage.

Some of Thomas’s late material is, quite frankly, challenging. It flies in the face of traditional theological assumptions and sometimes even of Thomas’s own earlier teaching. And not only does it challenge these assumptions directly, it also begins to call into question (ever so gently) the whole level of consciousness at which the Christian theological discourse has traditionally been generated (the mental/rational) and the “self” to which it has inevitably been pitched: the unique, imperishable “soul.” As Thomas arrived with increasing solidity on the threshold of unitive consciousness (at which stage these postulates no longer hold sway), his writing began to take on more and more of the classic character of mystical discourse: paradox, breathtaking intuitive leaps, proclamations of oneness that, when received at the lower level, inevitably wind up sounding like narcissism writ large. And because his writing became so much more compressed and apodictic, and his topics of concern so much more cosmic and unboundaried (a whole different ballpark from those tidier psychological paradigms that dominated his earlier work), it leaves readers second-guessing themselves, wondering if they’ve actually understood what he’s just apparently said. The result is a kind of polite, “you go first” stalemate as everybody waits for somebody else to step out there and get the ball rolling. (If only there were a Thomas Keating to introduce Thomas Keating!)

—

But it is precisely for these reasons—because the material is deep, and is challenging, and is important—that there is a need to begin working with it more proactively. I believe that it is on the basis of his entire integrated teaching that his spiritual legacy will ultimately be judged and preserved.

In those last thirty years, he quietly added a whole new tier to his teaching. Where the first and more familiar tier takes us through the initial phases of spiritual awakening and psychological spadework up to the watershed traditionally known in Christian teaching as the “transforming union,” the material awaiting us in this second tier takes us from that unitive threshold into some of the deeper and more subtle nondual waters. These include the dark night of spirit, objectless awareness, unity consciousness, the transcendence of perceptual dualism, direct perception of the Unmanifest, the evolution of consciousness, and the meaning of no self. Needless to say, this is a rather significant extension of Thomas’s original road map, and to try to assess his full gift to the Christian contemplative heritage without factoring in this later body of teaching is a bit like trying to assess Mozart’s gift to the history of classical music without factoring in the Jupiter Symphony or his Requiem in D Minor.

Longtime students of Centering Prayer will quickly recognize the practical wisdom of these new insights as they themselves begin to arrive on the doorsteps of some of these same transition points that Thomas addresses in his later teachings. But it would be a mistake to think that this Tier II extension belongs only to the Centering Prayer community; it actually impacts the entire Pseudo-Dionysian road map that has framed the Christian contemplative journey for more than a millennium. As we will see later in this book, the traditional road map culminates at the unitive stage, typically understood as an affective union, a union of hearts and wills between God and the individual soul. This is where Thomas’s teaching starts out as well, but in his later body of work he increasingly realizes (in line with many of the non-Western sacred traditions as well as with modern neurological science) that this “union of hearts” actually comes about through a gradual restructuring of consciousness that finally overturns the biologically hardwired illusion of a separate “I,” or autonomous self-center. As he begins to fit the pieces together between traditional moral teaching and modern brain science, he visits the ground usually being covered in terms such as “no self,” “nonduality,” and “objectless awareness”—and in so doing, reveals himself increasingly as a capable phenomenologist with a firm grasp on the nondual terrain. He is not by any means the first Christian to enter these waters, but his portrayal of the nondual state is more graceful, flowing, harmonious, and personal than much of what has been written before, and definitely more connected to the joys and obligations of life in this world. He thus brings an important new perspective to the emerging Integral evolutionary road map and significantly enhances the Christian presence within it. It is a remarkable achievement, which deserves to be much more widely recognized and celebrated.

—

As Thomas’s consciousness expanded into this new sense of spaciousness, his sense of oneness expanded right along with it. More and more powerfully, he took upon himself his emerging responsibilities as one of those planetary “watchers and holy ones” upon whose broad shoulders the hopes and fears of this world are carried. More and more keenly he came to realize that the oneness he first tasted as a state of spiritual consciousness is in fact the necessary new baseline for the restructuring of human affairs if our fragile and bewildered planet is to survive, and he powerfully bent his remaining life force to that task. His final oracle to the world, offered from his hospital bed only days before he died and included in its entirety in the final chapter of this book, leaves no doubt whatsoever where his heart had evolved to in the end. It delivers a powerful message to us all that the fruits of transformation first tasted in contemplation can and must be put to service in a world hovering on the brink of self-destruction. For this reason if for no other, it is high time for these final teachings to be called into active duty, spiritedly studied and powerfully enacted. I take that as his final charge to all of us who are now his arms and legs here below.

In service of that final charge, I offer you this modest offering of a book in the hope of helping you to better appreciate and more confidently navigate the enticing but challenging body of Thomas’s late material, in which the instructions for our further individual and collective spiritual evolution are more fully given. Part 1 is mostly about getting you logistically situated in this new spiritual territory. I will fill in some of the backstory as needed and review the practice of Centering Prayer and the core elements of his signature teaching, created at the height of his illuminative powers during the 1980s. I will then lay out what I consider to be the core source materials for the study of what I’ve come to think of as “late Thomas”—i.e., the material generated during the last five years of his life—and offer a brief thumbnail sketch of my own favorite treasures within this amazing new treasure house.

Part 2 is a deep dive into Thomas’s surprising final dharma teaching, delivered to us even more surprisingly in the form of poetry: the eight haiku-like poems he called The Secret Embrace. These poems, short as they are, are koan-like in their intensity and in the paradoxes they lay before us. They offer a particularly good starting point for a study of “late Thomas” because they essentially encapsulate the whole of his late teaching in eight jewel-like fragments, less than eight hundred words altogether.

Part 3, called “Approaches to Christian Nonduality,” is a theological reflection on key aspects of Thomas’s later teaching from the wider interreligious and evolutionary perspective that increasingly framed his world vision in those final years. I flesh out more fully how his later teaching differs from his earlier teaching, how it extends or alters the traditional Christian spiritual road map, and how it dialogues with the nonduality of other spiritual traditions. Finally, I will attempt to offer you a concise schematic overview of Thomas’s own distinctive brand of Christian nonduality (I call it “flowing oneness”) and its implications for a world in which contemplative practice is no longer a private privilege but a collective evolutionary responsibility.

This third section was particularly challenging to put together because, though he was a brilliant synthesizer, Thomas was no systematic theologian. He liked the big picture, was truly excited when different paradigms could be brought into dialogue, and was sometimes casual about dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s. In addition, nearly all of his teaching was originally delivered orally, before live audiences of widely differing backgrounds and levels of spiritual sophistication (Centering Prayer groups, clergy gatherings both Catholic and Protestant, interspiritual dialogues with renowned enlightened beings, honorary lectures at distinguished universities, younger contemplatives, potential major donors, you get the drift). And if you add to this the further complication that the transcription and publication of these teachings are often way out of sync with the original date of delivery, you can well understand how theological inconsistencies are prone to creep in. I hope I have not bent too far in the opposite direction in trying to impose consistency on what could more legitimately be described as “lawful fluctuation.” I have tried to pay more attention to the deep rhythms of his thought, stable over decades, and to the long arc of his trending thought than to specific examples of theological mismatches. Given the large number of balls he was juggling at any given time, and the moving walkway he was juggling them on, this is only to be expected.

I apologize in advance if this book’s slightly circular structure is frustrating for you. This was initially frustrating to me as well, committed linear thinker that I am. But it didn’t seem to want to be written in my usual arrow-shaft way, and all attempts to shoehorn it into a straight-line argument wound up leaving out critical pieces of the data that, it seemed, could only unfold incrementally. But since this is how spiritual teaching really seems to unfold anyway—in layers, like tree rings, knitted together gradually over time—it worked out best in the end to adopt that plan for my book as well. I have tried to eliminate obvious repetition, but if you hear things being circled back to again, but from a slightly different angle of vision or a slightly wider viewing platform, please accept this as part of the methodology this book wanted to have. I take refuge in one of Thomas’s more memorable one-liners: “Spiritual teaching is not about saying something new. Just say the same thing for thirty years, and finally they’ll get it.”

One final challenge in writing this book, which I hope causes no one difficulty, was the form of address to use when speaking of him. I tried all the obvious: “Father Keating,” “Dom Thomas Keating” (“Dom” being the official monastic title for abbots, short for Dominus, or “My Lord”). No, too churchy, pious, and patriarchal. “Keating”: No, too removed and clinical. “Tom”: no, no, no! Way too intimate and breezy. In the end, “Thomas” was what I knew him as in life, and “Thomas” it would be in the book. (We had agreed early on that I would not call him “Father Thomas” unless he called me “Father Cynthia.” We both had a good chuckle about that and got on with it. That was the kind of relationship we had.)

And so, dear Thomas, you wanted me to write this book. You kept at me until I delivered it. I hope now that you will be pleased with it. Here’s looking at you, kid. Cynthia.

Part One

THE EVOLVING THOMAS KEATING

1

The Signature Teaching: Milestone or Millstone?

Thomas Keating, widely acclaimed as the founding guru of Centering Prayer, was a Trappist monk for seventy-five years, his long years of service almost equally divided between the motherhouse, St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts (where he served as abbot for twenty years), and St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, which he helped establish in the late 1950s and retired to permanently in 1981.

His signature work on Centering Prayer and the spiritual journey was largely created during the 1980s, just past the midpoint of his monastic career. In a prodigious burst of spiritual activity shortly after his arrival back at Snowmass, he put his finishing touches on the method of Centering Prayer and proceeded immediately to create an ambitious formation program to deliver it, a comprehensive teaching to unpack it, and a national organization (Contemplative Outreach) to support and promote it. Far from the gentle winding down he no doubt anticipated in retirement, he found himself instead launching a grassroots contemplative revival movement that would introduce thousands of spiritually parched Christians to the contemplative treasure buried in their own backyard.

Among the highlights of this seminal decade:

1. He pioneered his first Centering Prayer ten-day immersion retreat, modeled on a Zen sesshin, at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico (1983).

2. With minor fine-tuning, he established these immersion retreats as the cornerstone of his formation program and made them available on a monthly basis at the Snowmass monastery, for the first several years under his personal supervision. The program ran at St. Benedict’s for more than forty years, coming to an end only in summer 2023, when St. Benedict’s reluctantly closed the doors of its retreat house. The model is still going strong, replicated in local Centering Prayer retreats offered worldwide.

3. He founded Contemplative Outreach, his grassroots lay organization, to offer continuing teaching and support to a growing network of Centering Prayer practitioners (1984).

4. He completed Open Mind, Open Heart, his comprehensive introduction to the method of Centering Prayer, clearly setting forth his own nuanced version of the practice and establishing him unequivocally as the chief architect and principal spokesman for the Centering Prayer movement (1986).

5. He created an ambitious, boldly contemporary “cognitive framework” to guide aspiring contemplatives along the transformational path inaugurated by the practice of Centering Prayer. Familiarly known as “the Divine Therapy,” this unabashedly psychological reframing of traditional ascetical precepts was originally delivered in the form of two dozen hour-long videos, nearly all of which were viewed at the rate of two per day during the ten-day immersion retreats. (It was transposed into book form in 1991 under the title Invitation to Love.) With periodic minor updates and repackaging, it continues to furnish the backbone of the Centering Prayer teaching curriculum.

By the end of the 1980s, then, the foundations of the Centering Prayer movement had been laid, and the distinctive features of Thomas’s teaching were well established. With regard to Centering Prayer itself, he added his own subtle nuances to the sacred word (used intermittently during the prayer period to break the flow of compulsive thinking). In distinct contrast to the classic tradition (and even to the prayer’s immediate source, the fourteenth-century spiritual masterpiece The Cloud of Unknowing), he stipulated clearly that the sacred word is not a “love word” encapsulating one’s affective yearning for God, but simply “a placeholder for your intention.” He reiterated that Centering Prayer is done “not through attention but through intention” and insisted with increasing firmness that all “thoughts” were to be let go of (a thought being defined as anything that brings one’s attention to a focal point), regardless of content. In one of his most celebrated one-liners he quipped, “If the Blessed Mother herself were to appear before you during the time of prayer offering to remove that thorn from your flesh, the answer is ‘not now, Dearie, I’m doing my Centering Prayer.’”[1] While he never, even at the very end of his life, spoke explicitly of what the Asian traditions call “objectless awareness,” he was already on the track of the core insight that authentic contemplation requires an entirely different configuration of consciousness that is somehow blocked when attention keeps latching onto thoughts, even the most holy.[2]

The Divine Therapy

By far Thomas’s most daring departure from the classic tradition was his radical repositioning of Centering Prayer away from its almost universal position in meditation pedagogy as a tool for calming or stilling the mind or accessing higher spiritual states. Thomas, by contrast, reframed it as a catalyst for the “unloading of the unconscious”—i.e., for the emergence into consciousness of previously repressed psychological material. While the propensity of meditation—any form of meditation—to stir up shadow material in the unconscious had long been noted, Thomas’s great intuitive leap was to recognize that this unloading was not simply a side effect but an intentional purification process, offered by an unseen divine hand in the service of healing and wholeness. On the basis of this insight, he built a powerful bridge between traditional spiritual ascesis and contemporary psychological reference points, and it is this more than anything else that gives his teaching its distinctive stamp. Out of this overarching new synthesis emerge his core metaphor of God as the “divine therapist” and his foundational teachings on “the False Self System” and “the emotional programs for happiness.” With Centering Prayer as his linchpin, he created a comprehensive, unified psychospiritual pathway leading from healing to holiness, from contemporary psychological wellness to classic mystical sanctity and beatitude. In short, a powerful new on-ramp to the Christian contemplative tradition.

It is a remarkable achievement, and all things considered, it has stood the test of time remarkably well. The developmental psychology out of which Thomas created his cognitive framework is elementary and in some places now a bit dated, but it is still basically serviceable, with surprisingly little recourse to pop psychology. It is impressive, in fact, how discreetly he managed to package even hardcore apophatic teachings—such as spiritual nonpossessiveness, apatheia (“passionlessness,” or freedom from domination by emotional reactivity), and preferring equanimity to mere positivity—in homespun teaching stories. Occasionally his psychotherapeutic metaphors run away with him, his patriarchal and privileged conditioning bleeds through, and the lingering imprint of that core monastic ascesis of spiritual warfare makes itself felt in an overly harsh or aggressive approach to the “dismantling” of a smaller part of oneself that has been dismissively branded as “false.” But even here, his self-deprecating humor and genuine pastoral concern soften the hard edge as he encourages practitioners to bear with themselves gently through the messy work of their own transformation. “The fruits of Centering Prayer are found in daily life,” he repeatedly emphasized, and for more than four decades people have watched this prayer bear fruit in their lives.

Centering Prayer: The Oral Tradition

Before leaving these foundational years, it is worth mentioning that the enduring legacy of Thomas’s transmission is conveyed not only in the teaching itself but in the signature mode of delivery that has grown up around it. Thomas Keating was not only a brilliant synthesizer but also a born performer with a shrewd grasp of his audience and a deliberately light touch. His teaching transmits itself not so much in systematic exegesis as in colorful metaphors, aphorisms, and thought bytes, faithfully transmitted from one generation of Centering Prayer presenters to the next. Over the years, the delivery has acquired a burnished, almost incantatory quality, reproducing not only Thomas’s actual words, but often his tone and inflection as well:

“Not with attention but with intention …”

“Return ever so gently to the sacred word.”

“Overidentification with one’s cultural conditioning.”

“The homemade self.”

“Softening the hardpan around the emotional weeds of a lifetime.”

“Change the direction in which you’re looking for happiness!”

These and other colorful analogies and phrases from that first generation of teaching are still the core nuggets through which the teaching is delivered, in what is still palpably an oral transmission, bearing not only the content but also the actual flavor of Thomas’s presence within it. Over the years, it has acquired something of a liturgical quality to it that makes it hard to resist, but also hard to tamper with. The medium and the message are so closely intertwined that the mode of delivery essentially becomes another signature feature of this foundational body of work.

The Final Thirty Years

While his signature teaching tended very quickly to get cast in stone, Thomas himself kept right on growing—for another thirty years. He continued to read voraciously, think deeply, and submit himself faithfully to the path he had laid out. He passed through at least two and perhaps three more stages of the journey he had described theoretically in his midpoint schematic. He experienced the full dark night of spirit, emerged into unitive awakening, and, just toward the end, was bearing down hard on a stage yet more subtle, which he simply called “unity consciousness.” Sailing off his own map, he began to explore a terrain that had been previously hinted at only in the most “out there” of the Christian nondual mystics such as Meister Eckhart and, in our own times, Bernadette Roberts: a cosmogonic mysticism of the Unmanifest. (Don’t worry if that sounds like a mouthful; we will be exploring it thoroughly later in this book.) In short, where Thomas wound up in 2018 is significantly different from where he was in 1988, not only in the depth of his knowledge but also in the luminosity of his being. He was simply not the same Thomas who crafted the masterful intellectual synthesis in the 1980s. The implications of that growth are only now beginning to register on those who thought they had his teaching firmly under their belts.

—

It should perhaps come as no surprise, given human nature, that Thomas’s continuing spiritual evolution has by no means been welcomed entirely with open arms; in fact, it has created something of a conundrum for the movement he founded. I spoke earlier about a certain reticence among his followers to fully engage with this new material, and while overwhelm may be the major driver here, a subtle resistance also seems to be in play. As he grew bolder and more apodictic in his mystical utterances, the perception of a widening gap between “early Thomas” and “late Thomas” was enough to set off nervous tremors within the Contemplative Outreach network, the chief concern being, of course, that some of these revelations might destabilize a teaching that for thirty years had more than proved its reliability. Nor are these fears entirely unfounded. When a 2021 Contemplative Outreach newsletter perhaps incautiously published “Twilight of the Self,” the darkest of Thomas’s dark night poems from his final work, The Secret Embrace, his open admission that “rituals and sacred symbols … are meaningless to me now” and “the God I thought I knew no longer exists” brought a flurry of dismay from the ranks and offers to pray for his soul. And a casual comment during one of his final video interviews, “You can’t see God because when you are God, there is nothing to see,”[3] called down the same firestorm as has rained down on the heads of unitive mystics of all times from Jesus himself (“I and my father are one”) to al-Hallaj to Meister Eckhart. This side of unity consciousness, that statement is flatly incomprehensible. And more and more, toward the end, Thomas was living on the other side.

In a nutshell, these are the areas in which his understanding grew most significantly and diverged most radically from his original teaching:

a The meaning of the term “false self”: In the earlier teachings, the false self is viewed as a willful and intrinsically dysfunctional miscreation, in need of exposure and “dismantling.” In the end, it has become any fixed point of reference whatsoever.

b The dark night of spirit: Thomas radically revised his earlier, largely traditional portrait of it as a more intense affective purification (i.e., a deeper mortification of the “sinful self-will”) and increasingly saw this dark night from a more phenomenological perspective, as a total upending of the illusion of a separate self-structure in the first place.

c Unitive state: Building on an insight first controversially articulated in the West by Bernadette Roberts, Thomas came to concur that “unitive” is not the highest stage of spiritual realization (as has been traditionally taught in the West) but is itself transitional, giving way to a further state in which the separate self is finally permanently transcended not just at the level of will, but in the actual hardwiring of perception. He called this new state “unity” or “unity consciousness,” and hinted that it is accessed through yet a third dark night, “the dark night of self.”

d God: Without ever abandoning his personal, paternal, “divine therapist” imagery of God, he increasingly introduced the notion of the divine source as boundless, unmanifest—a dynamic wellspring from which the created world is continuously pouring.

e Cosmology: Thomas moved beyond his original psychological emphasis into an increasingly cosmological and collective perspective, bearing down from all directions on the theme of oneness, realized both as an individual level of consciousness and as a collective planetary responsibility. He shed all sectarian frameworks and became increasingly an ombudsman for the entire world.

A Time for Integration

Thomas’s midpoint teachings furnished and continue to furnish a very strong foundational curriculum that over the years has more than proved its effectiveness, and to the very end Thomas left this core teaching largely intact. But in the last thirty years, he quietly added a whole new tier to the teaching, far more subtle in its nuancing and spacious in its mode of perception. His teachings from this late period reflect less interest in individual progress along the road from healing to holiness and are more drawn to the great perennial questions underlying that journey: What is unitive attainment? Who or what in us “attains”? And what opens beyond it? It is right here, in his unflinching exploration of these great questions, that he not only completed his own personal road map level but also significantly expanded the body of mature Christian wisdom in this area.

This evolution of Thomas’s thinking deserves far wider recognition than it has yet received either within or beyond his immediate Centering Prayer network. From a scholarly standpoint, these later teachings round out the picture considerably, establishing him as one of the relatively few in the Western Christian tradition to unabashedly explore the nondual terrain. He joins the rarified company of Meister Eckhart, Bernadette Roberts, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Henri Le Saux (Abhishiktananda) as one who came to fully grasp the meaning of unitive attainment not simply as an affective union (“mystical marriage,” as it’s traditionally known) but as a higher level of consciousness, at which stable perception from oneness finally becomes possible. His daring final forays into the Unmanifest and increasingly subtle penetration into the illusory nature of the entire phenomenal self-structure reveal him no longer as merely a brilliant synthesizer but as a mature and original nondual thinker, and they suggest a far more significant evaluation of his place within the lineage of Christian contemplative teaching.

Thomas’s later teaching also contributes significantly to the ongoing interspiritual dialogue (of which he is an honorary founding father)[4] and significantly enhances the Christian presence within it. In a conversation still unduly influenced by the perception that Christianity is “stuck in the personal” and has little or nothing to say about nonduality, it is a sweet satisfaction indeed to find him extensively quoted in a recent scholarly study on spiritual awakening, sandwiched between Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, two of the modern world’s undisputed nondual giants.[5] His skillful melding of Eastern metaphysical categories with the Christian language of self-surrendered love opens up new windows on the deeper meaning of the term “personal” in the Western traditions and moves the whole interspiritual conversation forward. For those who still know Thomas only in his Centering Prayer mode, this later body of teaching comes as something of a revelation. It clearly reveals the depth of his longstanding commitment to interspiritual dialogue and the extent to which he was drawing on this wider resource pool to arrive at his remarkable final synthesis.

—

To my mind, however, the most compelling reason for integrating Thomas’s later teachings more fully into the overall body of his work is that many in the Centering Prayer movement who have been faithful practitioners throughout these four decades are now approaching exactly these same “higher” stages that he explores so intrepidly here. Like he did, they are sailing off the original map and finding themselves experientially beyond what is being conceptually laid out in his signature teaching. Nor is it any mystery how they have arrived here, as it is by exactly the same route that Thomas himself took: through a faithful adherence to the practice of Centering Prayer.

Let me explain this comment a bit further, for it may not be obvious unless you are yourself a practitioner of Centering Prayer and familiar with the nuances of its method. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned how during the 1980s Thomas brought his own distinctive touches to the method of Centering Prayer. Breaking with the traditional monastic teaching (and even with the explicit instructions in The Cloud of Unknowing), he increasingly stripped the sacred word of any affective content whatsoever and repositioned it as simply “a placeholder for your intention.” He insisted on the prompt letting go of all thoughts, regardless of content, and reminded practitioners that what is at stake in this practice is not the content of the message but the configuration of one’s attention. In other words, he steadily fine-tuned the practice in the direction of cultivating objectless awareness, the ability to hold awareness beyond the usual subject-object polarity of the mind.

He never explicitly acknowledged this until the very end.[6] It was always veiled in the language of “consenting to the presence and action of God”—in other words, as an attitude of inner receptivity and self-surrender. But from the standpoint of what’s actually going on in the brain, letting go of a thought means momentarily breaking the automatic flow of attention from subject to object, which is in fact the driveshaft of dualistic thinking and of the self-structure such thinking generates. Under the rubric of “consent,” Thomas was introducing practitioners to a whole new configuration of consciousness—one in which the habitual flow of attention from subject to object is temporarily halted, and there is a momentary taste of an entirely different quality of awareness. The Tibetan Buddhists call it rigpa, objectless awareness. By whatever name, it means that there is full, conscious awareness but no specific object of attention to affix it to or self-reflection to mediate it. It is simple, direct, bare perceptivity.

Until the capacity to sustain objectless awareness is substantially up and running, access to the much-prized nondual (or unitive) level of consciousness is functionally impossible to sustain. There will be unitive experiences, yes, even sublime moments of mystical communion, but as the old subject-object polarity slips back in again, such moments will inevitably revert to a finite self “having” this unitive experience. Only through steady, incremental repatterning does the mind learn to hold itself reliably in this new shape. Then and only then is it finally possible to peel back that last layer in the onion skin of selfhood.

That is the tipping point Thomas himself crossed during his final decades of journeying. And that is the tipping point many of his most faithful students are now converging on. For years now, largely unbeknownst to themselves (their sights set on “purification of the unconscious” and “dismantling the false self”), they have been patiently tilling the inner neurological ground for this next level of their conscious evolution. The spiritual synthesis that Thomas created at midpoint, combined with their faithful daily practice of Centering Prayer, has brought them to this second-tier threshold, and they are ready to step across it into whatever it is that lies beyond the mooring ball of finite (i.e., conceptually generated) selfhood. The instructions for the final leg of the journey await them in Thomas’s final body of teaching.

Milestone or Millstone?

Thomas’s signature teaching was and remains a milestone, launching a whole new generation of practitioners on the pathway from healing to holiness in a remarkably honest and psychologically grounded way. But a milestone can quickly become a millstone if it is not allowed breathing room to grow. I saw this happen with the Christian Science of my childhood, in which both the teaching and its founding teacher were quickly embalmed by overzealous disciples in a frozen sanctity through which no new life could flow. This poses a real risk for Thomas Keating as well, if his earlier teaching finds itself cast in stone for manageable safekeeping and is not infused by the life-giving wisdom that flows into it through these final teachings, the fruit of his full spiritual maturation.

Thomas’s signature teaching is marvelously clean, manageable, and controlled. It is a splendid intellectual synthesis charting a course that yields demonstrable spiritual fruit. His late teaching is more open-ended, spacious, and paradoxical. The grail quest for the true self does not end nearly as tidily in this Tier II extension, and as even mystical union gradually disappears over the horizon, one is left only with a “rising tide of silence”—and an entirely different quality of presence. “If that’s where the journey is headed, I’m not sure I want to go there,” one woman said to me after a weekend retreat on The Secret Embrace. But yes, that’s where the journey is headed if one wants to follow it all the way (there is no compulsion to do so), and all that can be said is that what is received here is infinitely more alive, radiant, generative, and tender than what is apparently lost. Toward the end of his long journey, Thomas was beginning to speak of this more and more directly. But with or without words, he was more importantly modeling it, living it out before our eyes. Transmitting it into the world. And as always, reassuring us that there is nothing to fear.

2

Thomas Keating: The First Sixty Years

We are jumping in midstream, of course. By the time Thomas Keating returned to St. Benedict’s Monastery in the fall of 1981, he was already approaching sixty years old, and with what for most people would have been an entire monastic career already under his belt. While many readers will be familiar with the details of his life from their own practice of Centering Prayer (his autobiography is seeded throughout the whole of his teaching), others will be meeting him for the first time in these pages and may be curious to know more about how he managed to arrive at the place he took off from during the 1980s. So, a proper introduction is indeed in order.

For a fuller picture of Thomas’s earlier years as they laid the groundwork for the person he would ultimately become, I can do no better than to direct you to the film A Rising Tide of Silence, produced in 2013 in collaboration with his nephew, filmmaker Peter Jones. Through an engaging combination of personal conversations and vintage archival photos, it unfolds nearly the entire story of Thomas’s remarkable Christian journey. It is a five-star resource whenever you catch up with it. But for now, this thumbnail sketch will get you started.

—

He was not born Thomas Keating. That was his monastic name, conferred upon him when he entered monastic vows in 1944. At his birth, twenty-one years earlier, he was Joseph Parker Kirlin Keating: Parker for short. His father, Cletus Keating, was a highly successful admiralty lawyer, and the four children—Cletus Jr., Parker, Anne, and Marshall—grew up in privilege on New York’s Upper East Side. He attended Buckley School, then Deerfield Academy, then Yale University. The expectation was that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, if not into maritime law, then at least into some equally successful professional career.

This upscale, socially ambitious family was at best conventionally Catholic. “Nominally” is probably closer to the truth. Cletus considered himself a lapsed (i.e., nonpracticing) Catholic, and while the obligatory religious requirements were observed within the household, the family trajectory was overwhelmingly secular—elite preparatory schools leading to Ivy League universities opening the door to influential secular careers.

From the start, however, a deeper religious spirit seems to have been at work in the lad. He spoke of a crucial turning point when he was struck down with a serious illness at about five years old. As he lay abed, with concerns for his survival being quietly voiced on the other side of a closed door, he prayed to God that if he were permitted to recover, he would dedicate his life to God as a priest. That childhood promise remained alive in him, and whenever possible he would slip out of the house very early on weekday mornings to attend daily Mass on his way to school. But such religiosity was not encouraged in his family, and the conveyer belt of his patrician education dropped him on the doorstep at Yale, a glowing future career in his father’s law firm earnestly envisioned.

God evidently had other plans in store. During his second year at Yale, Thomas found himself swept in such a firestorm of mystical awakening that there was no turning away. You can’t exactly call it a “St. Paul on the road to Damascus” conversion since he was already a practicing Catholic, but it had something of that same sweeping clarity and intensity. Instead of the law and economics texts intended to line his career path, he found himself drinking in the patristics and early Christian mystics like water in the desert. At the end of that academic year, he transferred to the Jesuit-run Fordham University, where he completed his undergraduate studies in a single year as he homed in more and more closely on his heart’s desire. In February 1944, just shy of his twenty-first birthday, and over the implacable opposition of his family, he entered the Our Lady of the Valley Trappist monastery in Valley Falls, Rhode Island.

For readers familiar with Thomas Merton’s celebrated autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, there are striking parallels between their two stories. Merton entered Trappist life about two years before Keating (in December 1941), and at a different Trappist foundation, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky. It was wartime, and both men had a complicated relationship with the military service they thereby avoided. In his own case, Keating relied heavily on the spiritual assurance from his confessor that “this war is not for you,” but the question rested uneasily in him for decades thereafter, perhaps tilling the soil of that deep sense of inner obligation to give his life in service. In a poignant vignette late in A Rising Tide of Silence, when Keating visits Anzio Beach and describes with just a touch of “methinks the lady doth protest too much” how the soldiers whose gravesites he toured “thanked” him for the sacrifices he had made, you can feel in mirror image how heavily the matter was still weighing on his heart.

The Trappist monolith standing before these two young aspirants was in either case the same. In those formidably cloistered years, some twenty years before the walls began to crack open with the Vatican II council, Trappist monasticism was stern, penitential, and silent: long hours of hard physical labor, silence, fasting, elaborate Gregorian liturgies. The Trappists were among the strictest of the orders—and also among the most popular, because their high-stakes recipe for spiritual transformation palpably delivered the goods. Between the Jansenist-laced theology and the uncanny brilliance if brutalism of the methodology, the Trappist houses attracted—as with young Keating—those spirits most on fire for transformation. And the Trappist life did not disappoint them; in its own way, it was military combat of the highest degree, metaphorically the elite forces on the forefront of the world’s spiritual battleground. Parker Keating was given the monastic name Thomas in honor of Thomas Aquinas, one of the church’s most brilliant theologians. It turned out to be a telling choice.

With his brilliance, education, and spiritual zeal, he quickly climbed the ladder of monastic influence. Within a decade of his first vows, he had already become novice master, directly in charge of the initial formation of a large cohort of aspiring younger monks. His reputation for rigorous asceticism went before him, and for this he was both admired and more than a little feared. His superiors tried from time to time to gently soften his rigor. One memorable Lent, his abbot assigned him the penance of gaining ten pounds (the additional poundage obviously intended more for his humility than his physique). As his young monastic charges endured their meager Lenten rations, he endured the embarrassment of having to sit among them in the refectory slurping down his milkshakes and ice-cream sundaes, a lesson long remembered. It would take another decade at least before the balance between zeal and gentleness finally came to rest in him.

—

Throughout the entire Trappist order, the 1950s were a time of inner stability and rapid outer expansion. The Valley Falls foundation entered that decade with a major setback: the old monastery burned to the ground one bitterly cold night, with many of the monks (Thomas included) barely escaping with their lives. But it was soon elegantly rebuilt on a handsome parcel of rolling pasture and woodland about fifty miles to the northwest near Spencer, Massachusetts, and officially reopened as St. Joseph’s Abbey. With postulants beating down the doors (inspired to no small degree by Merton’s bestseller), the order flourished and self-propagated. In 1958, Thomas Keating was dispatched to Snowmass, Colorado, with a small band of monks to become the prior (the superior in charge) of Spencer’s new foundation, St. Benedict’s Monastery. Nestled in a near-perfect bowl valley surrounded by towering peaks and working cattle ranches, St. Benedict’s took off right from the start and soon established itself as an innovative and “can do” young community. Thomas himself was drinking in the draughts of the newfound freedom he found there and was in no particular rush to leave. But once again, God evidently had other plans in store. After three years in Snowmass, he was elected abbot of St. Joseph’s Monastery—an astonishing honor for one not yet forty years old—and returned back east to take up his post.

—

He held that post through twenty tumultuous years in the life of the church. It was a stressful time for monastic communities, the tensions driven from the inside by the sweeping changes mandated by the Vatican II council and from the outside by the increasing pressure of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. Beneath the surface of all this turmoil, however, lay the call to a radical renewal of monastic life, and Thomas Keating, now fully occupying the role of shepherd of his flock, took this call to heart. With a rapidly growing global perspective (and no doubt, some of the East Coast patrician knocked out of him by his three expansive years in the Colorado Rocky Mountains), he rolled up his sleeves and began to focus on ways in which things had gotten stuck.

They obviously had. Beneath the busting-at-the-seams outer success, the inner life had been slowly but steadily ossifying—if truth be told, for a good two centuries or more. Devotional practices that had originally been birthed in mystical fire had long since frozen in scrupulosity and outer observance. Lectio divina, the once-dynamic monastic method of feasting on scripture, had stalled out in “mental prayer,” and its final stage, contemplatio, had become cordoned off as a rarified gift, offered only to a chosen few. The living waters of silence and wordless intimacy with God that had nourished the original Trappist charism increasingly appeared to be running dry, and the fruits of monastic transformation were slowly withering on the vine. While there were still plenty of Trappist bodies occupying those iconic black-and-white habits, the light seemed to have gone out of their eyes.[1]

Thomas Keating may not have grasped the full reasons for this decline, but he clearly saw where the damage was playing out. Keen to reboot those inner transformational fires, and finding little support in his immediate institutional structure, he began reaching out to contemplative masters in other faith traditions, who at that point were arriving in ever-increasing numbers on North American shores, and in fact in his own Central Massachusetts backyard. He enlisted several early devotees of Transcendental Meditation to teach TM to the entire monastery, and for a number of years he brought in a Zen roshi as retreat master to introduce the monks to koan work. It was a jump start, pure and simple: a way of reconnecting his monks to those living embers of their own contemplative heritage that he knew still glowed brightly beneath the surface of the frozen outer form. Then, in 1975, at one fateful monastic chapter meeting in which concern was expressed over the growing defection of young former Catholics to Eastern meditational paths, he issued his clarion challenge: “Is it not possible to put the whole of the Christian contemplative tradition into an updated meditation method suitable for practice by laypeople in daily lives?” One of his monks, Fr. William Meninger, took him up on the challenge. He went back to his old contemplative stalwart, the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, and extracted its core methodology—and Centering Prayer was born.

At first this new form of Christian-based meditation was offered at St. Joseph’s Abbey only to priests and “religious” (Roman Catholic nomenclature for those in religious orders). But interest there was at best lukewarm, while initial offerings to the laity elicited an immediate and enthusiastic “yes!” Carried on the wings of the times (and boosted by a best-selling book by Fr. Basil Pennington, one of Centering Prayer’s other two monastic cofounders), the practice soon leaped the walls of the monastery and took off as a lay movement.

Those post–Vatican II years were not easy for the Trappist order—not at St. Joseph’s, not anywhere. As the gales of change battered the shores of monastic tradition, vocations were lost in droves. Thomas’s bold innovations had all along been controversial within the community, and in a special referendum held in 1981 as to whether he should continue as abbot, the vote was evenly split. Realizing that leadership was impossible under those circumstances, he resigned.

—

It’s a cliché, of course, that what looks like utter defeat is often a new beginning. Thomas’s return to St. Benedict’s Monastery following that upheaval was as close to utter defeat as he had ever experienced. He was initially given no official monastic duties beyond his place in the daily rota of Mass celebrants. His future was as wide open as the empty mountain valley surrounding him.

But the seeds of Centering Prayer had been well planted, and they did not take long to sprout. An invitation to give a talk on Centering Prayer at the local Catholic church in Aspen wound up attracting more than a hundred people, and the clamor for more intensive practice began almost immediately. The pilot intensive retreat at the Lama Foundation took place within a year, and St. Benedict’s Monastery soon found itself offering monthly Centering Prayer retreats, a tradition that held for some forty years. The old homestead that originally served as the monastery’s guest quarters was now crammed to bursting with eager retreatants from all over the valley, and in short order from all over the world. Centering Prayer was off and running—carried easily by the “can do” spirit of this tiny monastic foundation Thomas had helped launch twenty-five years before.

—

And with that, we come full circle: to those tremendous, creative, seat-of-the-pants 1980s that catapulted Thomas Keating in a whole new direction and gave birth to the signature teaching with which this present book opens.

3

My Journey with Thomas

The last thirty years are the part of the journey that I shared with Thomas. If I am particularly drawn to this phase of his emergence, it’s at least in part because I saw it unfolding before my eyes. To some small degree, I even participated in its midwifing.

Thomas and I did not always have an easy relationship. We challenged each other mightily—which, in the end, may have been our greatest gift to one another since there were very few other people in either of our lives who did that for us. Over the three decades of our casually intertwining friendship, we chewed through a lot of shadow material, disappointed each other deeply at times, but worked our way through to a grudging respect and finally to a heartfelt love. Just as this book is not a biography of Thomas Keating, neither is it a personal memoir of my own journey with him. Yet I realize that this is one of those places where I need to fill in a bit of the backstory so that you have a better sense of how I’ve come to know what I know of him and of the perspective from which I’ll be making some of my observations later in this book.

The name Thomas Keating first appeared on my radar screen in the early 1980s through Jacob Needleman’s now iconic book Lost Christianity. Searching for any signs of conscious life still flickering within what he took to be a mostly moribund institution, Needleman had gotten wind of experiments with “the centering prayer” underway at the time among some of the brethren of St. Joseph’s Abbey and had trooped out to Spencer to investigate. While less than fully impressed with the practice itself, he admired the mettle of these brethren, particularly their abbot, Thomas Keating, and called rightful attention to their efforts. I devoured his book and took quiet note.

About five years later, Parabola magazine asked if I could recommend a Christian spiritual master they might interview for their upcoming twenty-fifth anniversary edition. The unspoken subtext was “a Christian spiritual master who could hold his own” in the company of the Dalai Lama and a stellar cast of other spiritual luminaries they were including in this blockbuster edition. Recalling Needleman’s favorable mention, and my own initial impressions from having recently worked my way through Open Mind, Open Heart, I recommended Thomas Keating. Parabola accepted my recommendation and asked me to do the interview.

That’s how I came to be seated face-to-face with him that day—November 19, 1989—in the parlor at Chrysalis House, the contemplative lay community he had recently launched in Walden, New York. The interview went a bit awkwardly, I thought, the two of us never quite getting on the same wavelength, but it all ended in a brilliant final moment when I expressed an interest in taking up the practice, and he invited me on the spot to a ten-day retreat at St. Benedict’s Monastery sometime the following year. I signed up for the May slot, and the rest is history. I returned in December for what was then known as “presenter’s training” and became an officially commissioned presenter of Centering Prayer and not long afterward a member of the National Faculty. I kept on returning whenever I could: to attend his periodic special conferences, to help out on an occasional editorial project, and mostly to drink in the energy of this extraordinary “magic monastery” (as one of the brothers had rightly named it), which was steadily seeping into my bones. I knew I was edging toward a more permanent move, and in fall 1991 the way finally opened. The monks graciously offered me temporary housing at a rundown old ranch house just across the road from the monastery. Thomas cobbled together a part-time editorial job for me. I took a leave of absence from my teaching back in Maine, and a new chapter in my life got underway.

A Season in Hell (1991–1997)

Little did I know when I arrived full-time in Snowmass in late September, the aspens blazing in full fall splendor, that Thomas Keating was just entering the headwaters of what would turn out to be a prolonged sojourn in the dark night of spirit. From the outside, he looked totally on top of his game, on a roll with Centering Prayer and quickly gaining national momentum. But on the inside, the flames were already licking at his interior castle.

I was there with him in the circle, seated at the other end of a saggy old sofa in what was then the monastery guesthouse, when the accident occurred that apparently triggered the full onset of his dark-night plunge. It was early February 1992, toward the end of one of what he was in those days calling his “issues” retreats, where he hunkered down with a group of his experienced students to address topics that were currently engaging his interest. We had been watching a video presentation by Philip St. Romain on kundalini energy, and Thomas, rising a bit too quickly from that low-lying sofa on which he’d been uncomfortably scrunched, lost his balance and came crashing to the floor, briefly losing consciousness. The shock apparently touched off a domino chain of health issues of varying degrees of seriousness that plagued him for pretty much the rest of the decade.[1]

Hard on the heels of that first blow came an even more bitter second one: the unexpected loss of his close friend Mary Mrozowski in October 1993. Mary had had his back every step of the way. One of the participants in that seminal Lama Foundation intensive retreat, she went on to partner with Thomas in the foundation of Chrysalis House, Contemplative Outreach’s pilot venture in residential lay community (which is where I had first met him two years earlier for that Parabola interview). She was also the original creator of the Welcoming Prayer, designed as an “active complement” to the Centering Prayer to regain inner composure in the midst of stressful circumstances in daily life. As her own transformation rapidly accelerated under the influence of this remarkably strong practice, Thomas was increasingly sharing the copilot seat with her in the foundational teaching and formation. Then suddenly, in the proverbial twinkling of an eye, she was gone, her eyes rolled heavenward as she whispered, “Welcome, welcome” in the wake of a fatal stroke. He preached at her funeral, but her loss clearly weighed heavily on him and seemed to usher in a very dark period in his theology. As he plummeted toward rock bottom and his pathology metaphors began to run away with him, I heard him sweetly proclaim to a packed audience at Saint John’s Cathedral in Denver, “The human condition is a disease. You catch it by being born.”

Finally, there were increasing personality conflicts and turf wars within his own Contemplative Outreach network, the conflict often driven by a brilliant but clearly personality-disordered member of Thomas’s closest inner circle, who kept the pot boiling with his constant drama and showdowns. Thomas simply didn’t see it. As Contemplative Outreach struggled through its own collective turmoil, evidently mirroring on the outside what Thomas was personally enduring on the inside, woundings happened, good people were lost, and the atmosphere became increasingly rigid and hierarchical. It took a long time for healing to occur.

I myself was one of the early casualties of that turmoil. Cornered in a power play orchestrated by this disordered individual, with Thomas clearly pitted against me, I knew it was game over. I resigned from Contemplative Outreach, discontinued most of my Centering Prayer teaching, and generally laid low for the next couple of years. Then, in 1998, I moved to British Columbia to become the hermit-in-residence and principal teacher for a newly forming spiritual organization called The Contemplative Society, an invitation for which Thomas had discreetly laid the groundwork four years earlier.

A Time for Healing

The time apart seemed to do us both good. At greater geographic distance, we both had more running room, and we gradually rebuilt our friendship on a whole new basis.

Despite its name, The Contemplative Society was not a Contemplative Outreach franchise. It was an independent coalition of Christian contemplatives, its membership almost equally divided between Centering Prayer folks and followers of John Main’s Christian Meditation. These often rival pathways had elected to throw in their lot together to meet a common need for more retreats and more regular teaching. The decision was made not to align with either national organization but instead to develop their own curriculum, specifically tailored to the local audience and the unique regional demographics, which turned out to be a whole lot different from what I knew back home.

One of my first discoveries as I gradually resumed my Centering Prayer teaching under these new circumstances was that the first talk in the standard six-hour Centering Prayer introductory workshop—“Prayer as Relationship”—was not playing well with this markedly more cosmopolitan, “spiritual but not religious” clientele. People here did not seem particularly interested in whether Centering Prayer was actually prayer (a big issue for Thomas’s more traditional Catholic audiences); they were far more concerned about whether it was actually meditation. I hesitantly reached out to Thomas for permission to develop a new talk tailored specifically to this audience, and he gave me his blessing to do so. The result eventually became the opening chapter in my book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening. More importantly, it was the first step in the rebuilding of our friendship.

The informal “research and development” arrangement that gradually evolved out of that initial gambit seemed to work well for both of us. He would occasionally run things by me—books he’d been reading, program initiatives he was pondering, specific assignments he wanted me to pilot. He was fascinated by my attempts to transpose Centering Prayer to a new cultural milieu and even graced these efforts with his personal presence at one of our Contemplative Society retreats. The open-ended, casual collegiality that we gradually worked our way to during those British Columbia years became our default relational mode for the remaining two decades of his life, and by and large it served its purpose well.

By the time I returned to Aspen seven years later to take up my new post as founding director of the Aspen Wisdom School, our relationship had grown up considerably. The father-daughter projections were mostly gone, the power differential had been substantially equalized, and we were learning how to simply “be” together as compassionate witnesses to one another’s lives. It was a small miracle, actually.

The Harvest Years (2004–2012)

The best thing about being back in Colorado was that I had a grandstand seat for Thomas’s full unitive emergence. As the dark-night years gradually slipped astern, he was rising to the height of his spiritual power. His energy was impressive for a man by now well into his eighties, and the scope of his interests and influence was widening dramatically. Suddenly his name was popping up everywhere—with the Mind and Life Institute to discuss neuro-meditation with topflight scientists; with Episcopal seminary deans to build a comprehensive contemplative formation program into the MDiv curriculum; with his longtime friend Ken Wilber to hash out Integral evolutionary theory; with the Snowmass Conference, his beloved interspiritual think tank, to make the case yet more strongly for the unity of world religions. Filmmakers were starting to show up regularly on his doorstep, and he was increasingly being courted by a number of blue-chip foundations. His growing world stature was reflected in his much-publicized 1997 meeting with the Dalai Lama and in his invitation that same year to deliver the Wit Divinity Lectures at Harvard University. He was reading voraciously in a variety of fields, from neuroscience to nondual realization to organizational management. Like the redtail hawks soaring just beyond his monastery window, he was stretching his full wingspan.

We continued with our periodic visits and occasional teaching collaborations. One day, with that signature twinkle in his eye, he bet me that I couldn’t design a course accessible to “ordinary laypeople” (as he always called them) on Raimon Panikkar’s magnificently challenging book Christophany.[2] I put the course together, and we wound up coteaching it at the Carondolet Retreat Center in upstate New York, certainly one of the high points of my life.

Gradually, his theology emerged from its dark phase, and he was again confidently proclaiming that “God beheld everything he had made and saw that it was good.” During these same years his own practice of Centering Prayer became vastly more spacious, and for the first time I heard him speaking directly of what he would come to call “a rising tide of silence.” Silence was no longer emptiness or nothingness for him—no longer even a catalyst for the unloading of the unconscious. It now took on presence, heft; it flowed toward him and powerfully enveloped him in a more subtle aliveness—“like a fourth dimension in a three-dimensional world,” he would later comment.[3] During the remaining two decades of his life, this direct, kinesthetic relationship with silence would grow steadily more powerful in him and would at last become the chariot that bore him into eternal life.

The Winding Down (2013–2018)

A circle doesn’t change course to come full circle; it just keeps heading in the direction it is heading. So it was with Thomas during these final five years; there was no course shift, no change in direction, and also no watershed moment when one could say definitely, “Thomas is failing.” He never failed, not even in death. He just kept heading where he had been heading all along, only with gradually less and less “Thomas” there and more and more pure light.

Certainly by 2013, his physical vitality was visibly waning. His six-foot-plus frame was becoming an increasing liability as he entered his nineties, and as his aging circulatory system struggled to keep up with the demand, balance became an increasing issue. He ceased traveling altogether and even mostly discontinued attending daily Mass at the abbey chapel. His old nemesis pneumonia made its reappearance, and several times during those last few years he was rushed to the emergency room at the local hospital. But he bore it all as graciously as he could and became quite adept at making the best of a bad situation. When the staircase to his second-floor suite at the monastery became increasingly burdensome, he took up full-time residence in the new infirmary and promptly commandeered its magnificent west parlor as his personal living room and recording studio. For the remaining decade of his life, its panoramic mountain vistas would furnish the backdrop for some stunningly expansive video footage and even more stunningly expansive spiritual conversations.

By “less and less Thomas there,” I definitely don’t mean any mental deterioration. “I have every infirmity known to man except Alzheimer’s,” he quipped to me on one of our visits, and that much was beyond dispute. His mind just kept growing. I can hardly believe the books he was chugging through during those last few years. To name just a few on the reading list he passed on to me: Person and Eros, a highly abstruse Eastern Orthodox treatise on personhood and the Trinity; Paths to Transcendence, a scholarly study of nondual realization across three different spiritual traditions; everything he could get his hands on from neuroscience; and for a little “light” diversion, Vincent Pizzuto’s Contemplating Christ: The Gospels and the Interior Life. And that’s without even mentioning the four manuscripts of his own he was preparing for publication, as well as that remarkable final spurt with The Secret Embrace. No, from the standpoint of mental and spiritual acuity, he was definitely not diminishing.

But in a much more subtle way there was indeed “less and less Thomas there”—not by default but by design. He was taking it on as an intentional spiritual practice—in fact, his capstone project in a lifelong exploration of what “dying to self” actually means. During those last two years, our visits almost always began with a standard opening exchange: “How are you, Thomas?” I would ask, to which he would reply, “I’m dying!” And he meant it—not out of self-pity or resignation, but more in the spirit of “old men ought to be explorers.”[4] He was leaning into this exploration voraciously, like a bloodhound on the scent of the trail, as he actively pushed the “dismantling of the false self” to its outermost limits, to the dissolution of the entire separate self-structure. When his longtime friend Rabbi Rami Shapiro visited him toward the end and inquired of his daily practice, he responded, “When Thomas pops up, I just put him back down again.” More and more, he was learning to live entirely beyond personal story, beyond any fixed point of reference.

Ironically, the less “Thomas” there was, the more powerful his presence became. Somehow, he was learning to convert all the energy previously bound up in personal self-making into pure, luminous being. I think of him when I read these beautiful words from Ladislaus Boros’s The Mystery of Death:

Over time … there emerges the old man, the wise man, the elder, whose whole strength is in spirit, deriving from a composure we can really call saintly. Perhaps such men say little, or at any rate little of importance, but by their simple presence they transform the complex of existence and make it transparent. Their “act” of essential being is in the spiritual transparency of the realized meaning of existence… . These men have transformed all the energy of life into person.[5]

“The only habit a monk should wear at his funeral is a soul wreathed in God,” my beloved Brother Raphael had told me shortly before his own death. And that’s what people were encountering more in those final visits with Thomas: a soul wreathed in God, the pure energy of compassionate attentiveness beaming down upon them like the sun. It’s traditionally known as baraka, a direct energetic transmission of cosmic blessing. That’s what it was like to be in the presence of Thomas those final days in Snowmass. Like standing under a firehose of blessing.

Not long before his death, Contemplative Outreach filmed a final live interview, intentionally designed to be shown at the commemorations following his death. His old friend and Contemplative Outreach stalwart Carl Arico made his way to St. Benedict’s Monastery to conduct that final interview, and the two took their seats, per usual, in the infirmary parlor, Mount Sopris glowing in the backdrop. “Tell us what it’s like for you these days, Father Thomas,” Carl asked as his lead-off question: “Are you ready to go home?”

Thomas looked directly at him with that gently twinkling smile and the love that moves the sun and the stars coursing through him. He quietly answered, “I like to think I’m home already.”

They could have stopped the filming right then and there.

4

The Lay of the Land

Thomas Keating did not write books. He gave talks—to a wide variety of audiences, under a wide variety of conditions, over a long number of years. Many of these talks and conferences were later transcribed and compiled into manuscripts, which Thomas then pored over with a fine-tooth editorial comb. With the exception of his first book (Open Mind, Open Heart) and for the most part his last (The Secret Embrace),[1] he did not sit down and through-compose a single manuscript. His teaching was at heart an oral transmission.

While this makes for an engaging delivery style, it poses a definite challenge for pinning down his actual theology or tracing the evolution of his thinking. This is not because his teaching itself is inconsistent. It is not; it continually orbits around a very firm inner core. But his presentational style itself tended to be fluid, custom-fit to the audience he was dealing with, and his thinking itself was in such rapid evolution during those final five years of his life that trying to corral his teaching is a bit like herding cats.

For better or worse, however, a bit of cat herding is in order before we are ready for our deep dive into this material. My principal area of concern in this book will indeed be with what I have come to call “late Thomas”—i.e., with the work emerging from the last five years of his life, or from about 2013 through 2018. The materials themselves are scattered across a variety of media formats—books, video documentaries, short reflections (shared chiefly in the quarterly Contemplative Outreach newsletter), private correspondence, and transcriptions of private conversations originally captured on cell phone. Except for those last two categories, all of these materials are easily accessible to the public, although most have yet to be systematically cataloged, and there is no doubt a good deal more material still out there waiting to be discovered.

Rounding the materials up is the first step in the process; the far more challenging second step is to arrange them into something resembling an orderly timeline that accurately reflects the progression of Thomas’s thought. The collated talks that form the backbone of his published books are almost never individually dated and may themselves reflect a significant compositional timespan. To further complicate matters, the date of a book’s publication does not necessarily correspond, even remotely, with the actual date of composition. Thomas’s last “officially” published book,[2] Consenting to God as God Is (2016), is actually a transcription of talks delivered nearly a decade earlier, and his “final” last book, God Is All in All, published posthumously by Contemplative Outreach in 2019, is based on talks delivered in 2012, making it technically “earlier” than his That We May Be One, published in 2018 but based on material first aired in 2016. As more and more of Thomas’s works begin to get rolled out for ceremonial republication, it is important to keep a careful watch on the chronology, because by the time we arrive at “late Thomas,” his thought is morphing almost before our eyes, and the random mingling of earlier and later material tends to blunt the sharpness of this transition. The teaching that emerged from him in the final three years is of a fundamentally different character from anything coming before it, clearly announcing (in my opinion) the breakthrough to a higher level of being, the “unity consciousness” he was so powerfully anticipating right there at the end. When and how this breakthrough may have occurred remains a mystery, but the literary evidence points toward a progressively intensifying awakening that began in 2014 and reached its peak by early summer 2016. This cannot be seen, however, until the chronology is straightened out and his final teaching steps into its own.

My goal in this chapter, then, is to try to organize the playing field a bit, so you will know where to locate the materials I will be drawing on, where they fit in the overall progression, and what specific pieces they contribute to the unfolding whole. With these housekeeping details in place, it will be easier to attend to the real business at hand: digesting the banquet that has now been placed on our plates.

Early, Middle, and Late Thomas

If there is a “late Thomas,” is there also an “early Thomas” and a “middle Thomas”? Obviously, spiritual journeys do not submit themselves easily to such crude taxonomies, but in Thomas’s case, the schematic holds up remarkably well. With some confidence I would date “early Thomas” from 1986, beginning with the publication of his foundational book Open Mind, Open Heart and continuing through until about 1997 as he emerged out of the dark night of spirit. As we have seen already, this was the period during which Thomas laid down the foundations of his teaching and created the signature work for which he is still widely known. In addition to Open Mind, Open Heart, this period includes his other core early works: The Mystery of Christ (1991), Invitation to Love (1992), Intimacy with God (1994), his short scriptural commentaries Awakenings (1991) and Reawakenings (1992), and The Kingdom of God is Like … (1993); plus his monumental teaching video series, The Spiritual Journey. This period came to an end as he gradually pulled out of his prolonged dark night and resumed his teaching rounds with renewed energy and a noticeably broader perspective.

“Middle Thomas” comprises the span from early 1998 through roughly 2012. This period is essentially bracketed on the leading edge by The Human Condition (Paulist Press, 1999), a transcription of the Harold M. Wit lectures he delivered at Harvard Divinity School in November 1997, and on the trailing edge by Heartfulness: Transformation in Christ (Contemplative Outreach, 2010), an extended interview with Betty Sue Flowers marking the mature synthesis of his still largely traditional kenotic theology. In this distinctly transitional period in his thinking, Thomas was still strongly wedded to his original road map, its four pillars still being the false-self system, the purification of the unconscious, the Divine Therapy, and the human condition. But by that point, he had clearly become interested in extending this teaching to a broadening circle of practical applications such as AA and the recovery movement (Divine Therapy and Addiction [Contemplative Outreach, 2009]), prison ministry, seminary education, and leadership development models. He was less constrained by Roman Catholic institutional models, and he more boldly explored new panoramas opened by science and the interspiritual dialogue. While he remained staunch in his characterization of the false self as a “disease,” he became bolder in his pronouncement that deification is not only possible but the intended end point of the spiritual journey. The broadening and deepening of perspective is palpable, and the direction he is heading becomes increasingly clear.

“Late Thomas” represents the mature fruition of these seeds, together with some striking new accents. What is perhaps most striking of all is the artless boldness of some of his final assertions as he ceased to temper his theology for the benefit of his audience and simply spoke his own truth with a growing simplicity and inner force. This period corresponds chronologically with his increasing physical confinement to the monastery as a renewed round of health concerns made travel once again impossible for him. Interiorly, these writings mark his full immersion into that mysterious and still essentially virgin territory of a “third” dark night, the dark night of self. You will hear him speaking more and more about “unity consciousness” (a distinct stage beyond the unitive), the “separate self” as distinct from the “false self,” and the direct perception of the Unmanifest. For the first time as well, we hear him speaking of an “ultimate Self” beyond even the true self, which has to do with the “cessation of the separate self-sense.” “Late Thomas” finds him in full cosmogonic mode, pondering the emergence of “somethingness” out of “nothingness” in every nanosecond. This is the material that clearly establishes him as one of Christianity’s most out-of-the-box nondual thinkers, and by which, I believe, his place within the Christian mystical traditional will ultimately be assessed.

Late Thomas: The Source Materials

With all the above disclaimers in place, then, let me list what I consider to be the foundational source materials for the study of “late Thomas”:

Books

1. Reflections on the Unknowable (Lantern, 2014). While this book follows the usual compositional format (originally live teachings delivered on separate occasions, later transcribed and collated), it is significant in that it contains some of Thomas’s boldest theological speculation up to the point of its publication and announces a clear line of demarcation between “middle Thomas” and the emerging “late Thomas.” Here you will find his earliest published reflections on the Unmanifest, the dark night of self, unity consciousness, and the increasingly nuanced distinction between “false self’ and “the separate self.” You will also find his breathtaking reflection on “The Beauty of Chaos.”

2. The Secret Embrace (Temple Rock, 2018). This slender collection of eight haiku-like poems comprises the final gift of Thomas’s mature nondual wisdom. The book grew out of an inspired collaboration between Thomas and his nephew, filmmaker Peter Jones, and took shape in a remarkable creative burst during the early winter of 2017. Elegantly crafted and illustrated with original watercolors created by Peter’s wife, Charlotte Frieze, this book offers itself as a contemplative journey in its own right, subtly leading you deeper into Thomas’s sublime thinking.

3. The “Keating Four Quartets”: The Gift of Life (2014), God Is Love (2017), That We May Be One (2018), God Is All in All (2019)—all originally published by Contemplative Outreach. These are once again transcriptions/collations, but this time primarily of single in-depth interviews or keynote lectures, so the presentation is fuller and less episodic than in many of his earlier works. The work was coordinated by a dedicated Contemplative Outreach editorial team (Mary Anne Best, Betty Sue Flowers, and Carl Arico), with an eye to producing small, elegantly packaged cameos of Thomas’s late teachings, interspersed with scriptural citations and appropriately contemplative illustrations to create a lectio divina ambience to the whole undertaking. The marked growth in Thomas’s nondual perspective, even beyond that 2014 benchmark in Reflections on the Unknowable, is quite striking.

These books are currently in the process of being separately republished. To my mind, the most important in the group is That We May Be One, whose composition date (2016) makes it in fact the “last” in the series and clearly the most unfettered in its nondual proclamations.

4. From the Mind to the Heart (Temple Rock, 2017). This slender volume is a published companion piece to a longer video by the same title, another inspired collaboration between Thomas and Peter Jones. The book is not a full transcription of the interview but a selective contemplative redaction, closely modeled on The Secret Embrace (including original watercolors, full-page call-out quotes, glossy paper, and copious white space) to showcase the pearls of wisdom contained therein in a lectio divina ambience. For a fuller description of the video itself, see the next section.

5. World Without End (Bloomsbury, 2017). This small gem of a book consists of two insightful interviews conducted at Snowmass by Flemish filmmaker and writer Lucette Verboven. She manages to tease out of both Thomas and his abbot, Joseph Boyle, fresh and strikingly profound observations on the contemplative life, transformation, identity, silence, cosmology, and a variety of other topics. The book also contains one the most complete semiannotated bibliographies of Thomas’s published works that I have yet encountered.

Videos

Thomas got an early jump on the video medium, producing his first video teaching series already in the 1980s. Given his penchant for the spoken word, I would say that video was always his most comfortable delivery mode, showcasing his informal and personal teaching style while capturing the nonverbal reinforcements contributed through his gestures, his direct eye contact, and the sheer force of his being. Toward the end, as his spiritual radiance increased palpably, those nonverbal elements really carried the weight of his transmission—and still do. If you can catch any of those late videos, don’t miss them; you will receive far more than you ever could from even his finest words transcribed in a book.

The three foundational videos are:

1. A Rising Tide of Silence (2013). As I described earlier in this book, this film marks the original collaboration between Thomas and his nephew Peter Jones. It was filmed over a five-year period from 2005 to 2010, and while the theology still clearly belongs to the “middle Thomas” era, it is nonetheless a foundational piece for all serious Keating students because it is the closest thing we have to date to an actual Thomas Keating biography. Through an interweaving of archival photos and contemporary conversations, the film traces his journey from privileged schoolboy to Trappist monk; and from there, his slow rise to abbot, the establishment of Centering Prayer, and the unexpected final chapter at Snowmass. You will discover here the core threads and personal material out of which his own journey of transformation was fashioned.

2. From the Mind to the Heart (2017). This second video collaboration between Thomas and Peter Jones is built around an extended conversation between Thomas and fellow meditation teacher John Osborne, recorded at Snowmass on June 17, 2010. This technically puts this teaching in the “middle Thomas” category, but Thomas was in rare spiritual form that day, and the exchange unfolds at such an extraordinarily high level of spiritual clarity that it often feels more like a download from the future than a snapshot from the present. Thomas’s subtle penetration of perceptual dualism reaches a high-water mark here, unsurpassed even in his later teaching. You will find here as well the headwaters of his teaching on silence as a direct mode of divine encounter, including one of his most memorable one-liners: “Perhaps we could say that contemplation occurs when interior silence morphs into Presence.”

As I mentioned earlier, there is also a written companion piece by the same title (Temple Rock, 2017): not a full transcription of the interview, but a selective contemplative redaction. For a fuller description, see under Books, above.

3. A Life Surrendered to Love (2018). This final video was commissioned by Contemplative Outreach in anticipation of Thomas’s death. It wasn’t known at the time exactly what memorial events might happen, only that something needed to be ready to share with the Centering Prayer community. The film was created by that same inimitable “special projects” team—Mary Anne Best, Betty Sue Flowers, Carl Arico—and consists of an extended conversation with Carl Arico followed by scrapbook-style photograph collages and video footage of Thomas’s Contemplative Outreach “family” worldwide. While it rides the edge of sentimentality, particularly toward the end, it also exquisitely captures the energy of Thomas’s final baraka (transmission of blessing) to his beloved community. One cannot fail to be touched by the sheer, luminous force of his presence, as if a life beyond life is already bursting through him, suffusing all with joy.

Once past this gateway, the sky’s the limit. A veritable banquet of Thomas Keating video resources awaits you on the Contemplative Outreach YouTube channel, spanning his entire teaching career and easily searchable by date or for specific topics of interest. I might call attention to Return to the Heart of Christ Consciousness (2015), not only because it represents another milestone partnership with Ken Wilber and his Integral Life organization (which produced this four-video series) but also because it features an hour-long interview between Thomas and myself that reveals a good deal about the flavor of our own spiritual friendship.

Contemplative Outreach Newsletters

Beginning around the turn of the century, Contemplative Outreach published semiannual newsletters, and these always led off with a short (one thousand words or fewer) original reflection by Thomas. Many of these reflections are pure jewels, and the entire chain of them captures perhaps better than anything else his steady spiritual evolution. Stepping-stone by stepping-stone, you can follow the topics claiming his current interest and the new accents in his theology as they begin to weave their way into his teaching.

The first nine years of these reflections have been systematically cataloged, and thirty of the most striking of these early reflections have been published by Lantern Books under the title The Thomas Keating Reader (2012). As of this book’s publication, the reflections from 2009 to 2018 still await collation.

Private Correspondence and Recordings

This represents a powerful and extensive buried treasure, which unfortunately will most likely stay buried for years to come. Thomas had a wide correspondence and some very faithful friends with whom he shared the leading edge of his own spiritual discoveries, as well as personal and pastoral wisdom of a more private nature. In my reflections in this book, I have been blessed to be able to draw on materials entrusted to me by some of these friends, particularly notes from a series of phone conversations between Thomas and Isabel Castellanos during the final months of his life, which I have drawn on heavily to explore (and affirm) the paschal nature of Thomas’s final transfiguration at the very end of his human journey. Through Isabel’s generosity, I am able to share that entire correspondence as an appendix in this book; you will find it on this page.

I consider it a poignant treasure that I also have access to a very few of the final private conversations recorded by Brother Erik Keeney during those last five years of Thomas’s emergence. Erik, at the time a novice at St. Benedict’s Monastery (as well as one of my own Wisdom students), somehow wound up as Thomas’s de facto personal secretary during those final years of his life, accompanying him to Spencer when Thomas’s deteriorating health forced him to return to the motherhouse. With permission, Erik recorded many of Thomas’s private interviews (on his cell phone) during those final five years they spent together.

Shortly after Thomas’s death, Erik renounced his monastic vows and began the slow and painful work of transcribing some of the recorded material. Tragically, that process was interrupted by Erik’s own sudden death in 2021, and most of those original recordings now appear to be lost. I have access to a small part of the transcribed material, however, and where appropriate and not involving a third-party identity (i.e., interviews between anyone other than Thomas and Erik or Thomas and myself), I have drawn on it in some of my reflections to follow.

The Thomas Keating Archive

Not long before his death, Thomas arranged for his entire archive of written and video works to be transferred to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. That material is now under the care of a proactive archival team consisting of representatives from both the academic and Contemplative Outreach communities, and plans are well underway to develop the collection as an active teaching resource, not merely a passive storage facility. On the Contemplative Outreach side, Thomas’s teaching legacy is curated by the Gifts Committee, who oversee all aspects of the continuing circulation of his materials, including republication and permissioning. Contemplative Outreach has held copyright on most of Thomas’s material since 2012, when it was transferred to them from St. Benedict’s Monastery. Not included are the Peter Jones collaborations, for which Jones himself holds the copyright as A Rising Tide of Silence, LLC.

There is still a good deal of work ahead to round up and begin to assimilate this treasure trove of late material that Thomas bequeathed to us, but the foundations are at least sufficiently in place to get us firmly launched. The real assimilation awaiting us is internal more than external, and that is where we will be headed next.

Part Two

THE SECRET EMBRACE A SPIRITUAL COMMENTARY

5

The Secret Embrace

The Secret Embrace, Thomas Keating’s final work, is beautiful, austere, and mysterious. It is mystery enough that someone who’d spent most his life as a left-brained, strongly conceptual thinker delivered his final gift to the world in the form of eight brief, haiku-like poems, each one conveying more in the silence surrounding it than in the sparse words themselves. Thomas labored hard over these poems, revising and re-revising word by word, always in the direction of simplicity. In several key places during his final revision, he replaced a few remaining overly abstract words with concrete, almost tactile images, as if some new way of seeing the world was continuing to open up in him. Artistically as well as spiritually seamless, this final work conveys not only what is seen but how it is seen, a testament to the depth of his nondual integration.

This final creative outpouring took shape rapidly during the early winter of 2017, in about three months of intense collaboration between Thomas and his nephew Peter Jones. The seeds of the project were in fact sown in the title of Jones’s first film, A Rising Tide of Silence. That image obviously captured Thomas’s imagination and continued to work in him beneath the surface. By the time uncle and nephew rejoined forces in 2017 to collaborate on Jones’s second film, From the Mind to the Heart, Thomas had transformed the original metaphor into a full-fledged poem, which he asked to have included in the film. Peter Jones had a better idea: Why not let it become the seed of a standalone book? The idea obviously caught fire in Thomas, and the collaboration began in earnest.

Not all the poems in the collection were newly composed; at least one of them dates from the onset of Thomas’s dark night of the spirit period, and the earliest goes all the way back to his grade school days (can you spot which one it is?). The bulk of the poems, however, are clearly “late Thomas,” dating from those final five years of his life and delivering with enigmatic and often austere beauty the final harvest of a lifetime of spiritual wisdom. Some of the ideas contained here are mirrored in his final prose works—particularly in the “Keating Four Quartets,” as I’ve dubbed them, which emerged from approximately this same time period and are in almost all respects The Secret Embrace’s closest prose companion pieces. The parallel versions in poetry and prose interpret and leverage each other, the poetry offering a lyrical commentary on the increasingly koan-like insights shimmering forth from his prose texts like shooting stars in a night sky.

—

The Secret Embrace was privately published, and it slipped into the world with very little advance fanfare. I had heard rumors in early 2018 that it was in the works (along with the report that it was creating a few raised eyebrows among Thomas’s monastic confreres), but I did not actually hold a copy in my hands until just before Thomas’s death, when the book quietly showed up on the Thomas Keating table in the St. Benedict’s Monastery bookstore. Contemplative Outreach was not directly involved in the publication (although some of Thomas’s inside circle had seen earlier versions of the text). From start to finish, it was intentionally a personal collaboration between Thomas and his nephew. A gifted and highly exacting visual artist, Peter Jones took charge of all aspects of the design and production, realizing as only an artist can that the delivery format—including illustrations, color palette, layout, negative space, fonts, even paper stock—was all a part of the integrated impact of the work. He designed the book to be a contemplative vestibule in its own right, encouraging a lectio divina orientation to the poems. Since there was little advance ownership of the project among Thomas’s core networks, many were caught by surprise, unprepared logistically let alone theologically to assimilate the feast that had just landed on their plates.

—

Poetry is for most people an acquired taste; getting up to speed with it involves a bit of a learning curve. While Thomas had been making some outrageously bold theological statements for at least the preceding five years, the fact that they were delivered mostly during impromptu talks, artfully veiled in Thomas’s twinkling humor, deflected their impact somewhat. In this sparse new poetic container, their impact is now magnified, staring you straight in the face, and it’s hard to say which poses the greater challenges with these poems: deciphering the meaning or actually believing that that’s what he’s just said. Slowly the realization dawns (sometimes with an uneasy vertigo) that one is dealing here not only with mature nondual wisdom but sometimes with radical nondual wisdom, some of it gleaned on the outer edges of consciousness itself. And of course, at the point in his life at which he drafted or revised the poems, Thomas was pulling out all the stops and simply sharing what he had come to know—let the chips fall where they may. Some of the sweeter and more “accessible” poems in the collection have found comfortable entry into the Thomas Keating canon of aphorisms, but some, like the notoriously challenging “Twilight of the Self,” have caused unease and even distress among the ranks. There has not been a unanimously comfortable reception of this late spiritual bouquet.

The poems cannot be ignored, however. They are the capstone achievement of both his literary and spiritual evolution, and however uncomfortable they from time to time make one feel, they are required reading for all serious Thomas Keating students, not only because of what they reveal about him but because of what they reveal about the journey itself. Sooner or later, if you continue along the path he has charted, the obstacles and eyes of the needle he has navigated here will become your own.

—

My own involvement with these poems began in earnest in 2020 when I accepted an invitation from Contemplative Outreach South Africa to lead a weeklong introductory teaching on them. The on-the-ground conference ultimately became impossible amidst the rapidly escalating pandemic, but those plucky South Africans immediately pivoted to an international webinar format, aided by the Contemplative Outreach home team in North America. Some three thousand people worldwide signed on. The following fall, Spirituality & Practice invited me to rework those talks as an e-course, which was once again impressively well enrolled, speaking to the hunger out there for a deeper understanding of these poems. The material you’ll be reading over these next several chapters is essentially a reworking of that original course.

After some experimentation, I decided to retain that course in pretty much its original format here because I believe it still best serves the purpose at hand: to offer an initial guided exploration of each of the eight poems so that the poetic format doesn’t present an impenetrable barrier to understanding. Once it’s clear what is actually being said here, then it becomes easier to reflect on the meaning of the teaching and its wider spiritual implications.

In putting that course together, I drew heavily on my former career as a writing teacher, and particularly on a French form of literary analysis called explication de texte. It features a close analysis (typically line by line and even word by word) of a compact but meaning-rich text—perfect for the task at hand.

These poems also lend themselves beautifully to the contemplative practice of lectio divina—sacred reading—where you read, meditate (i.e., reflect deeply), pray (respond heartfully), and contemplate (sit in stillness with the text). I recommend you follow its traditional four-step method to break open the text:

1. Read the poem slowly twice, aloud if possible.

2. Let yourself be drawn to a phrase or sentence that touches you.

3. Ask yourself what relevance or application this has for you, and open yourself to whatever new insight may arise.

4. Allow yourself to move into silence for several minutes. Don’t think directly about the poem, or about anything else; simply sit in its presence and let the impressions fall more deeply into your being.

The short commentaries I created for that e-course were originally designed to invite people inside these texts and to encourage their own creative and contemplative engagement with them, and I think that is still the primary purpose at this stage in our exploration. I have added a bit more detail but have tried to avoid slipping into an overly scholarly or literary author’s voice. Later in the book, I will draw on this basic working road map to offer my own comments on some of the theological and spiritual implications of Thomas’s teaching in these poems. Others are invited to do the same, and may no doubt take their interpretations in a very different direction. But at least we will all be starting from a level playing field.

1. Out of a Stone

Can the Creator of all lure poetry out of a stone?

Or cause a stirring of Divine Love in a human heart?

All is possible for the Creator of all,

Who loves to manifest the impossible

In endless configurations.

As the false self diminishes,

And the ego becomes a servant,

Everything turns into poetry

And everything becomes a movement of Divine Love.

But, the separate self lingers on.

Once the separate self has been laid to rest,

The Divine Presence alone remains,

And the Creator of all becomes all in all.

The silence of the Creator is thunderous,

Drowning out everything else,

And hiding in endless creativity.

Thomas leads off with his signature sparkle, poking wry fun at himself: “Can the Creator of all lure poetry out of a stone?” If a ninety-five-year-old, left-brained abbot is now writing poetry, truly, all things are possible! And this poem does indeed shimmer with a playful kind of delight. Everything is dancing and shape-shifting: full of joy, empty of self. Whether the Divine is luring poetry from a stone or love from a heart-of-stone, it is all part of the same “endless creativity.”

Beneath the poem’s sparkling surface, however, Thomas is bound straight for some very deep waters, and with that same wry humor he gently puts us on notice. Heads up: we are about to leave the familiar world of Christian theology for a deep dive into cosmogonic mysticism—the name given to a certain branch of mystical inquiry having to do with the question of ultimate beginning. How did “somethingness” emerge out of nothingness? Why this miracle of manifestation in the first place? Why did “the Endless Unity” (as the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme called it) not simply stay locked up in endless unity? These are questions that rarely darken the doorsteps of conventional theology (where it is simply taken for granted that creation exists because “God is love”). But for those more deeply probing mystical spirits such as Boehme, Meister Eckhart, and Jean Gebser—and now Thomas Keating—the stock answer does not suffice, if for no other reason than what happened then, at that primordial point of origin, is recapitulating itself in every nanosecond of now, and somehow the ultimate riddle of our identity is intricately bound up in it. During the last three decades of his life, Thomas seemed to grow increasingly fascinated by this question—and increasingly daring in his response.

It is a Himalayan spiritual terrain, virgin and forbidden, in which the only language spoken—other than silence itself—is paradox. In this final season of his life, Thomas proved himself a master of both.

The entire poem is built on two paradoxes, which are in fact not so much paradoxes at all, but open secrets long known among mystics and mature contemplatives.

The first paradox—and it is foundational to all eight of these poems—is that silence is not absence but presence. It is a “something,” not a nothing. It has substantiality, heft, force. You can lean into it, and it leans back. It meets you; it holds you up. Thomas had made this discovery no later than the early 2000s, and he was leaning into it more and more powerfully during the final years of his life. “One just listens to the sound of sheer silence, which is no sound at all, but just presence,” he comments in Reflections on the Unknowable—“a delightful being with the silence, presence or stillness.”[1] His own Centering Prayer became progressively more formless and spontaneous as he simply closed his eyes and leaned back into that relational field, so vibrantly alive and enfolding.

That’s hardly how it’s understood in our culture, of course, where silence is typically seen as “vacant space,” waiting to be filled up with content. Even in the early stages of contemplative life this preference for content remains, and many people initially approach Centering Prayer as a kind of interior desert or “uncovering zone” that one enters to in order to hear “messages from God.” It’s the messages that most grab us at the start; we’re all ears for whatever new insight emerges out of the silence.

Gradually, as you progress in meditation, you begin to reorient. Centering Prayer’s instruction to let go of all thoughts, regardless of content, directs you back to the silence itself, where the shape of the new terrain gradually reveals itself. Like Thomas, you begin to discover that silence does indeed have depth, presence, shape, even sound. It speaks, eloquently and intimately, but it speaks in sensation, not in thought bytes, and what it brings is not messages but an intuitive, intimate knowingness. As progress along the path unfolds, the perception that the emptiness is in fact the presence becomes more and more palpable. The “sound” of silence keeps right on growing—until at last, at Thomas’s own late stage in the journey, it has become “thunderous.”

“The diffuse shining of God”

In fact, says Thomas, quietly introducing his second paradox, this “thunderous” silence is actually the most intense, concentrated dosage of divine presence we can bear face-to-face. In its own paradoxical way, the dance of creation, beautiful and enchanting as it is, is like a veil over the naked presence of God—like the veil that hides the holy of holies in the temple. These two faces of God—veiled and unveiled—live in symbiotic unity, and out of that unity everything pours into existence in a cascade of sheer delight.

That other great “Thomas” mystic of our times—Thomas Merton—was intuiting along much these same lines when in his beautiful late prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” he spoke of “the diffuse shining of God.” As Merton writes, with mystically searing insight:

God is both Father and Mother: As Father He stands in solitary might surrounded by darkness. As Mother, his shining is diffused, embracing all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light. The diffuse shining of God is Hagia Sophia [Holy Wisdom]. We call her his “glory.” In Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and love.[2]

While Thomas Keating does not describe these complementary modes of divine self-manifestation using gendered imagery (till the end, he preferred either male-gendered or nongendered images for God), the underlying insight is very much the same. For him, creativity is “the diffuse shining of God.” It’s what allows us to know our Creator not only in the “thunderous” silence of his direct presence but in the dance of life itself. Either or both ways are fine, for they spill unceasingly into one another. From this veiled “embrace” between pure silence and joyful creativity at the very heart of all creation flows life in all its beauty, goodness, fluidity, and magical wonder. This is quintessential nondual attainment in its Western mode: dynamic, flowing oneness. And it is this flowing oneness that we feel suffusing this first poem—and the final years of Thomas’s life—as every molecule and quark of the created order quivers in holy stillness, then bursts forth into holy joy.

False Self, Separated Self, Ego Self

If you read this poem alertly (not taking “false,” “separate,” and “ego” simply as synonyms), you’ll notice that Thomas is introducing some subtle new nuances into his evolving understanding of selfhood. “As the false self diminishes and the ego becomes a servant, everything turns into poetry,” he writes in the third stanza, seemingly echoing the old true self/false self dichotomy he had taught for forty years. But heads up! When the false self “diminishes” (notice that he is no longer using the phrase “is dismantled” here), what appears in its stead is not yet the true self (as would have been the case in his earlier teaching) but the “ego/servant”—a transitional zone much more in line with traditional Christian understanding of the “illuminative” stage of the spiritual journey.[3] He has been gradually introducing this new developmental stage through much of his writing in what I’ve called “middle Thomas,” but here he has brought the two of them together sharply. True self still awaits, yet even by the end of the stanza Thomas has pushed the goal posts still further out, well beyond the outer limits of his earlier teaching. The false self is tamed, the ego self is in order, but one has still not arrived at true self. What is this “separate self” that still so penumbrally lurks? Is there yet another false self beyond the false self, which requires a still further diminishing before the true self can finally appear? Thomas does not give the answer. Instead, koan-like, he radically upends the question itself:

Once the separate self has been laid to rest,

The Divine Presence alone remains,

And the Creator of all becomes all in all.

So what just happened to the true self? Did it disappear into the gap between that last sliver of separation and the onrush of allness? Is Thomas saying that after that whole long grail quest there is in fact no true self to arrive at? Difficult, scary questions, and he is certainly not about to settle them here (although he will circle back to them several more times as the poems unfold). For now, it may help to keep in mind that he is raising this question within the context of cosmogonic mysticism, the last line of this stanza deliberately invoking the profound cosmic spaciousness of St. Paul’s celebrated teaching in 1 Corinthians 15:28:

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

Theos ta panta in Greek—“God shall be all in all.” The phrase has haunted cosmogonic mystics throughout the ages, from St. Paul to Teilhard de Chardin. There, in the “fullness” of time, the veil of “endless creativity” is finally ripped away, and the whole thing comes to rest, once again, in the “endless unity.” Full circle.

Not an easy phenomenon to wrap one’s mind around. But as the silence increasingly bears the full force of the Presence itself, does there come a point where the self is no longer needed to mediate it back into a “diffuse shining,” safely cluttered with objects and stories? This is the precipice on which Thomas now bravely stands, the scale at which he is asking the question.

2. The Secret Embrace

Before being born into the world of time,

The silence of pre-existence was all absorbing.

The transition from eternity to time

Is full of sufferings, fears, and little deaths.

But, in the transition from death

To eternal life,

The silence of pre-existence

Bursts into boundless joy.

All that can be manifested emerges

From the endless creativity of

That which is.

But

The Secret Embrace

Of

The source of all creation

With

Infinite transcendence

Can

Never be revealed.

In this second poem Thomas continues to paint the big picture, driving deeper and deeper into the innermost fastnesses of God until he arrives at that hidden wellspring where the manifest world arises out of infinite formlessness. As I mentioned with regard to the first poem, this is not a terrain often traveled by mainstream theology. But mystics and cosmologists know it well, and in the final years of his life, Thomas proved himself to be walking boldly in their company.

Of the eight poems, this one is by far the most cosmic in scope. It also provides the title and master image for the entire collection, and in that sense can be considered its Rosetta stone. Unpacking it is not easy, both because of the scale at which Thomas is working and because of a certain deliberate ambiguity. But once the code is cracked, the rest of the poems begin to fall into place, so time taken here is well spent.

Structurally, this poem is built on a circle within a circle. The smaller circle (the first five stanzas) pictures our own finite existence, nestled within “the endless creativity of that which is.” The larger circle (the last stanza) pictures “the source of all creation” (i.e., the God of classic Western theology) nestled within the fathomless depths of the Eternal Unmanifest.

By “our own finite existence,” do I mean our personal human journey from birth to death? The poem lends itself to this interpretation, and since it is the easier of the two options, let’s begin there.

As it is pictured in this first circle, then, our human journey into form falls into three phases: (1) preexistence, (2) existence, and (3) postexistence. The “pre-” and “post-” phases that bookend our brief sojourn here have a decidedly different feeling to them. Where we come from is not where we ultimately wind up, Thomas intriguingly implies.

In preexistence, we are still “absorbed” (a word well loved by mystics and contemplatives). From a cosmic standpoint, this means we still exist as a latency, an undifferentiated drop in an ocean of silence. Self-reflexive consciousness is no more than a latent possibility within us.

The tiny pixel of “sufferings, fears, and little deaths” that we call our life is over in the blink of an eye. But when we return, it is no longer to “the silence of pre-existence” but to “eternal life.” We return bearing something that evidently impacts the eternal ocean of silence itself: now it “bursts into boundless joy”!

Is that simply in our perception of things, or does something actually change at the heart of divine reality? Thomas does not say for sure, but in the cumulative teaching of these eight poems, you can pretty well read between the lines. As we work and struggle and gradually individuate, as we willingly “die our little deaths,” incrementally the ocean enters the drop and comes to know itself not only in infinite oneness but in infinite particularity. Each pixel of consciousness, each sentient life, adds to the fullness of manifest love. The Eternal Unmanifest is also gradually individuating![4] Our wee human journey has not been for naught. Nothing is forgotten or lost.

This is an encouraging message, certainly consistent with the pastoral nature of the rest of Thomas’s teaching and the steady encouragement to grow, risk the pain, trust in the ultimate goodness, that he had been offering up for the past seventy-five years, not only in his teaching but also in the faithful service of his life. The only fly in the ointment here is that initial dangling participle, “Before being born into the world of time …” Who or what is being born into the world of time? In the relaxed-fit grammar of our own era, a dangling participle is no big deal; the meaning of the phrase is clearly “before we were born into the world of time,” and the implied “we” jumps out so powerfully that we don’t even notice its literal absence. But as a Buckley-educated schoolboy of four generations ago, trained to the far more rigorous grammatical standards of the times, it’s hard to believe that Thomas would ever have dropped a participle accidentally, and if one sticks rigorously to the grammatical requirements, the subject of this sentence is not “we” but “the silence.”

What happens when one plays it that way? It is then the silence that is entering time, enduring the “sufferings, fears, and little deaths” that are part of the burden of finitude, and then returning to the Unmanifest bearing the transformed fruits of its temporary incarceration in time. Ultimately, there is no real conflict between these two interpretations; they are simply the same motion played out at two different scales. Something enters the confines of finitude, struggles within it but is at the same time touched and changed by it, and returns to the whole in some sense fuller, making the whole itself mysteriously “wholer.”

The paradox is ultimately sustainable because these two modes of divine beingness—“infinite transcendence” and infinite fecundity—are not separated from each other but live in symbiotic unity. They are joined forever in a secret embrace, which in turn becomes the driveshaft of everything that exists while remaining itself forever beyond the realm of manifestation. In this second part of the poem—gesturing allusively toward that larger circle—Thomas deliberately stretches the word structure on the page, leaving each of those four short connectives (“But,” “Of,” “With,” “Can”) on a line by itself, where they leap out to grab the eye almost like a poem within a poem. And who is to say that “but … of … with … can” is not the actual message of this poem, pointing like a finger toward the moon of the divine scientia (as Jacob Boehme called it): that inscrutable inner imperative within the divine abyss that brought the entire manifest world tumbling into existence? The secret cannot be revealed because it is beyond revelation, forever inviolate on the dark side of that moon.

God

Whatever else you may say about these first two “cosmogonic” poems, it is clear that Thomas has departed radically from the presentation of God we meet in his earlier teaching. In the 1980s, when Thomas’s first books and videos were beginning to appear, God was still very much framed within the classic Western model. God was always “he,” a father figure, and Thomas’s initial focus during the earlier years of his teaching was to shift that image away from a fearsome father—the wrathful God who has caused so much misery and woundedness for Western seekers—to a “divine therapist”: supportive, trustworthy, and a hundred percent behind us in our journey of transformation.

Now, at the end of the journey, Thomas is in a very different place. God coinheres, interpenetrates everything, the ocean-in-drop and drop-in-ocean constantly exchanging in a dance of endless fecundity. God is not the “author” of creation, removed and overarching; the whole thing is God. There is not a single place in all creation where God is not, because God is creation itself, endlessly outpouring, endlessly receiving itself back.

It is tempting to say that Thomas’s understanding of God evolved dramatically over the last thirty years of his life, and while I think that is largely true, it is not unqualifiedly so. Even in his earliest writings there are already passages that fully anticipate the sense of flowing oneness emerging from these late texts. And to the very end of his life—as I will be exploring later in this book—his fondness for that benevolent father figure did not desert him, and even remained part of both the anguish and the sweetness of his final transformation. So, while there is indeed a steady evolution toward a more unitive and nontheistic presentation of God, it may come closer to the truth of the situation to say that Thomas had become theistically bilingual: he could speak of God in either language, or in none. We will watch this spiritual shape-shifting playing out with particular intensity when we arrive at the sixth poem, “Out of Nothing.”

On the whole, however, it can be said that the poems in The Secret Embrace are situated solidly at the unitive, nontheistic end of the spectrum. With two singular exceptions, Thomas does not actually use the word “God” anywhere in this entire collection. It is always “the Divine,” “I AM,” or “the source.” He clearly did not want the cosmogonic spaciousness of what he was trying to unfold here co-opted back into conceptions of a distant, male-gendered being sitting up there in the heavens. His eyes were on the bigger picture—the maximum bigger picture—not simply “the source of all creation” but the “infinite transcendence” enveloping it.

3. Loneliness in the Night

In my loneliness and longing

I dream of him in all his glory

How straight he stands, how handsome.

I am drifting, drifting.

I do not hear him speak.

I only see him, see him.

His silence is a kiss,

His presence an embrace.

But now he is fading, fading.

And I am alone …

With this poem we officially enter the second section of this collection, where Thomas will navigate us through his extended dark-night passage. Having set the context in the first two poems, each sparkling with cosmic unity attained, he now makes it clear that this unitive attainment doesn’t just happen. For most of us—himself included—it comes at the end of a season of painful stripping and purification that has classically been called “the dark night of the spirit.”

The name itself comes from the sixteenth-century Carmelite mystic St. John of the Cross, who until very recently had been the unquestioned authority on this excruciating passage. In the mid-1980s, the extraordinary Bernadette Roberts may have exceeded his high-water mark with her unflinching explorations in her books The Experience of No-Self and The Path to No-Self.[5] With The Secret Embrace, Thomas clearly joins their company and in some areas takes their insights even a step further.

John’s classic spiritual road map actually specifies two dark nights. The first, called “the dark night of sense,” typically comes fairly early in the journey. John saw its purpose chiefly as strengthening our capacity to endure temptation and weaning us from our dependency on spiritual consolations (the sweetness and even sensuous pleasure that often accompanies those early days of conversion). In Thomas’s contemporary psychological rendition, this first dark night relentlessly exposes our “emotional programs for happiness”—the hidden agendas and compensatory needs that drive our “false self system.” It thus accomplishes the first stage in the dismantling of the false self.

The second dark night comes much later in the journey and entails a much more radical stripping that cuts to the very roots of the false self system, overturning the fundamental psychological and neurological hardwiring that drives the illusion of a separate selfhood. Its painful cost is that everything goes dark—“for the duration”—as we become increasingly unable to steer by the old binary operating system in our brains, which always wound up turning God into an object (albeit a holy object) and in fact prioritized our experience of God over direct, unmediated perception. Until the new operating system fills in, we are like chickens in molt, unable either to fly or lay eggs. Thomas had already introduced this dark night conceptually in his original Spiritual Journey videos. But since he had not yet at that point in his life actually undergone the passage himself, his presentation remained a bit heady and stylized. With the dark night of spirit, advance conceptualization is well-nigh useless; what you expect is never what you get.

His dark-night journey plays out across poems three, four, five, and possibly into six (depending on whether you count six as the ending of the dark-night sequence or the beginning of what follows). It is not easy reading either cognitively or emotionally, and Thomas makes no effort to cushion the fall. But, as always, his wry humor and deeply surrendered heart carry him through. And as we will see shortly, he had in a way been preparing for this passage for most of his life.

I mentioned earlier that there is one poem in this collection that comes from a considerably earlier period in Thomas’s life. This is the one. “Loneliness in the Night” was in fact written when he was an eighth grader, during his final year at Buckley School. It is remarkable, actually, how well it camouflages itself in the sequence, suggesting that certain fundamental themes are born early in our lives and remain there almost like a master image guiding the entire unfolding. This poem has something of that “master image” feeling to it, as we stand in the presence of some fundamental leitmotifs in Thomas’s own spiritual journey. In that sense, it serves as both a prelude and a thematic overview to the dark-night passage we will shortly be accompanying him on.

Who is this “he” in the poem? God? Christ? An adolescent crush? But the “who” is not important; what’s important is the configuration. Notice how something at first so concretely, robustly present—“how straight he stands, how handsome”—is suddenly “drifting, drifting … fading, fading.” The substantial becomes unsubstantial, presence fades to absence, and loneliness and longing dominate the emotional color palette. In his final revisions of this poem for its new home in The Secret Embrace, Thomas deliberately heightened this effect with the repetition of certain keywords (“drifting, drifting … fading, fading”), a touch not found in the schoolboy original.

Note, too, that Thomas, even as a young teenager, is already playing with that mysterious presence-absence dialectic he will develop so excruciatingly in the dark night poems shortly to be considered. He is already intuiting that release from the loneliness and longing will not come from fulfillment of the original desire, but rather through a mysterious inner alchemy that draws apparent opposites into an inner symbiotic unity. These are indeed the classic dark night waypoints, and as we follow Thomas on his own mature passage through this ordeal, it is fascinating to watch how he returns again and again to these fundamental insights first glimpsed when still hardly more than a child.

4. Twilight of the Self

My heart is solitary now.

It finds no companionship anywhere

And no wish to find any.

My sole desire is You,

And You are always absent.

Can one love absence so intensely

That even Your presence

Seems like an intrusion?

I move around in aimless circles.

Rituals and sacred symbols,

Once treasured sources of relating to You,

Are meaningless to me now.

They communicate nothing of You,

Who are everything to me

But for whom and from whom I feel no love,

Nor hope of fulfillment.

I am as one turned inside out,

And there is nothing there—not You, not me.

If this is union, there is neither two in One,

Nor One without another.

I long to relate to everyone,

Yet lack the capacity to relate to anyone.

There is only Your boundless presence

That treats me like a thing without a heart,

Except perhaps a broken heart.

For the God I thought I knew

No longer exists.

This poem, the longest and in many ways most heart-rending in the collection, launches us fully into Thomas’s dark-night passage. It, too, predates the rest of the poems here, though to a far lesser degree than the preceding poem; “Twilight of the Self” was written in 1991, just as he headed into what would indeed become those six very difficult years, marked by physical illness, the death of his closest spiritual friend, and much inner tribulation and shadow work.

To read the poem even now is not easy. It’s hard to reconcile it with the joyful, saintly old man sparkling out from the final videos and book covers. When I first shared this poem during that Contemplative Outreach international webinar in May 2020, many in the audience were distressed that Thomas had “lost his faith” or “given up on God.” (If you recall, much the same comments were also made about Mother Teresa of Calcutta when journalists first revealed the depths of her inner struggle in the final years of her life.) That’s how it always looks when one who has not yet personally experienced the uniquely excruciating features of this particular dark night attempts to assess it from the outside. From the inside, the ordeal has nothing to do with loss of faith. Rather, it calls on every scrap of faith, courage, and trust you have managed to amass in your earthly journey to date.

We generally hear the word “disillusionment” in a negative way—implying cynicism and even depression. But the word actually means “to be freed from illusions,” and this is a good thing, indeed, if one has the courage to take it. The veils are slowly coming off; what remains is a bare and unflappable presence.

For much of one’s religious life, rituals and sacred symbols are indeed “treasured sources of relating to You”—i.e., God. They provide stability, consistency, beauty, a focal point for adoration. But there comes a time in many maturing spiritual lives when symbols are no longer the finger pointing to the moon but the finger blocking the camera lens. They get in the way of the bare presence, which is increasingly perceptible as a substantiality in its own right. This process is radically intensified in the dark night of spirit, which gnaws away at the very roots of “perception through separation.” When the mind is no longer processing the world through subjects and objects, symbols lose much of their force as connective links. They’re still a bridge, but you are already standing on the other side.

If there is a faint lining of hope in this relentless stripping, it comes in the very last line of the poem, in Thomas’s quiet recognition that it is not God who no longer exists—only “the God I thought I knew.” There is a quiet, visceral conviction that, like the earlier privation in the dark night of sense, this is merely about removing another layer of veils. Beneath the veils, the substance still holds. His disillusionment is not of the kind where one picks up one’s marbles and walks away. In the very intensity of the paradox he is living, he is aware that his spiritual attention is deepening, and that his concept of love is also shifting from emotional reciprocity to something far more unconditioned, closer to what St. Paul once called living “by faith alone.”

In the challenging sixth stanza, Thomas also admits that book-learned concepts of nonduality are beginning to unravel as well. “If this is union, there is neither two in One, nor One without another.” It is not the simple monism favored in many Eastern models: a permanent dropping away of the subject-object polarity to reveal undifferentiated oneness, but neither is it the bliss-suffused union of wills typically portrayed in Western nuptial oneness models. This is a whole new territory, which neither his heart nor his mind can yet fathom, but which has his full attention.

The Personal

It’s a contemporary spiritual truism that unitive consciousness is “impersonal,” and that nondual attainment requires a transcendence of the personal realms. Christianity is sometimes chided by interspiritual enthusiasts for being “stuck in the personal.” In his own passage through the dark night, Thomas gives us a unique window into nondual attainment from a Western perspective. Here we see, emphatically, that the personal is not left behind. Rather, it is transfigured, and as it implodes into unity, it emerges with an entirely different fragrance of heart.

This poem gives us a grandstand seat at that implosion. We see the mounting heartbreak, and glimpse—but still ever so dimly—the direction in which the transfiguration will lie.

This poem is a love song to God. Like all good love songs, it is written in second person, addressed directly to “You,” the beloved who has now gone missing. In its anguished longing, this poem reminds me strongly of the book of Job. In that Old Testament wisdom fable, as the desolation mounts and blame falls away like broken shackles, Job’s sole yearning is once again to see face-to-face the God he has loved so well.

So it is for Thomas Keating in this poem. The “God I thought I knew”—he has loved that God long and dearly. The two of them have carried each other well through many decades, and the longing and loneliness are intense. Some of the most heart-wrenching lines in the poem come as Thomas speaks of this deep emotional bond, now gone dark:

“My sole desire is You, and You are always absent …”

“You, who are everything to me, but for whom and from whom I feel no love …”

“[You] treat me like a thing without a heart, except perhaps a broken heart.”

Thomas is clearly not disidentifying from his emotions; he is leaning deeply into them. His vulnerability and tenderness sear your heart.

Beneath the bleak landscape of pain, however, you can also sense that something is starting to fill in. Barely, but yes. It peeks out from behind that presence-absence dialectic, particularly in the third stanza:

Can one love absence so intensely

That even Your presence

Seems like an intrusion?

“You have to endure the tedium until something emerges in it,” my hermit teacher Brother Rafe once told me. You can’t take it back to known reference points or fill it with content from another season in your life. It’s about abiding in the desolation until your eyes adjust to the dark and your spiritual night vision kicks in.

Here we see Thomas doing exactly this. He is already beginning to realize that what he formerly called “absence” is indeed a new and more subtle form of presence; with sturdy trust he commits himself to that unfolding. There is no turning one’s eyes away from the emptiness—no relieving the tension by “relating to everyone.” There is only a lover’s faithfulness: standing by in that “boundless presence” until what for now still registers as heartbreak begins to reveal itself—in the powerful words of poet T. S. Eliot—as “a further union, a deeper communion.”[6]

Centering Prayer as a Dark-Night Passage

If I may offer a few closing words for those of you who are fellow practitioners of Centering Prayer, I would say that it is in this particular dark night that all the years logged in Centering Prayer come to their fruition. You have learned repeatedly, ever since that first introductory workshop, that Centering Prayer is all about releasing your attention from its subject-object configuration. That’s what it means, from a practical standpoint, to “consent to the presence and action of God.” Anything that attracts your attention to a focal point qualifies as a “thought,” and the instructions are to let all thoughts go. So the gradual fading of the subject-object dichotomy in favor of a different mode of spiritual attentiveness is already familiar territory, and you have begun to learn how to make your way within it.

Meanwhile, the repeated discipline of letting go of all thoughts during the prayer time (truly, “a thousand opportunities to return to God,” as Thomas has described it) has gradually patterned into you the intuitive recognition that whatever you are clinging to is what is getting in the way. You have learned that the journey of transformation goes hands-free into the dark, trusting that what is truly needed will be provided, and that what is provided is indeed truly needed. You relax and let go into it. In the dark night of spirit, those two crucial pieces of training are what will guide you through. As they did Thomas.

5. The Last Laugh

I watch the seductive dance of every day life,

But the desire to join has ceased.

Two crucial questions arise:

Where are you?

Who are you?

Nowhere is my destination.

And no one is my identity.

My daily bread is powerlessness.

Temptations can be overwhelming.

Gone is every hope of help.

An abyss opens up within me.

I am falling, falling,

Plunging into non-existence.

Is this annihilation?

Or, is it the path to the Silent Love

That we are?

As the false self disappears,

The true self is born.

Then the dance of human nature with

That Which Is

Takes on a wholly new perspective,

And those who take part in it

Are overwhelmed with laughter

Too deep to be heard.

This fifth poem in the sequence is definitely “later.” It belongs among the final gems created during that inspired outpouring just at the end of Thomas’s life. In both its poetic and spiritual subtlety, it clearly marks a later stage in his journey—literally more than a quarter century beyond “Twilight of the Self.” In that earlier (1991) poem, Thomas was just entering his dark-night passage. Here you see him emerging triumphantly out of it. The whole poem is built around the eye of the needle of that emergence.

Was he in the dark night for a quarter of a century? I think not. What we’re witnessing here, I believe, is a living exemplar of that precocious insight from Bernadette Roberts that the unitive stage of the journey is itself a passage. It is not a permanent state, a permanent spiritual rank acquired; it, too, has a beginning and an end. In “Twilight of the Self” we watched the painful beginning of the unitive journey deep in the belly of the dark night of spirit. In “The Last Laugh” we are witnessing its end point, as the final veil of separate selfhood—“self” consciousness itself—is drawn back to reveal at last the riddle of the true self.

Many people are curious about the relationship between dark night and depression. Was Thomas merely depressed? they ask. To be sure, in protracted dark nights such as he endured, there is often an admixture of the two: inner malaise and outer misfortune can and do intensify each other. But there is a distinctly different flavor to them, and seasoned spiritual directors can tell the difference. As Bruno Barnhart once told me during his long tenure as prior of New Camaldoli Hermitage in California, depression is self-referential, heavy. It’s all about “me.” In the dark night of spirit, you still function. Your spiritual habits are well formed and mostly carry you through. It isn’t “all about me”—because there is less and less “me” there for it to be all about.

During those twenty-five years, Thomas functioned—for the greater part of it brilliantly. Once he emerged from the acute onset of his dark night (around 1998), he quickly regained full stride. He wrote several more books, including two of his most compelling: Reflections on the Unknowable and That We May Be One. He hosted dignitaries from a variety of spiritual traditions, gave interviews, gave transmissions, sparkled with the unitive joy and strength flowing through him. He became perhaps one of the most beloved and trusted spokesmen for the Christian contemplative vision. But even as he went about his rounds, there was less and less “Thomas” there. He was clearly not depressed, from a psychological standpoint—simply, like a caterpillar in chrysalis, metamorphosing into an entirely different kind of self.

Again, these paradoxes can be readily explained if one accepts Bernadette Roberts’s intriguing hypothesis that the unitive stage is itself a passage, not a permanent state of “self-realization.” It is bookended by two dark nights, the first accomplishing the death of the ego self and the onset of the unitive life as we have traditionally understood it, and the second accomplishing a yet more subtle and pervasive death, the death of the self as an independent unit of self-reflexive consciousness. Roberts was the first to call attention to this deeper “dark night of self,” previously unknown in Christianity. But Thomas lived it out before our eyes—and this challenging fifth poem essentially presents a highly telescoped version of that entire twenty-five-year walk.

As the poem opens, we find Thomas somewhere around midpoint—clearly, in a much more settled stage in his journey. The anguish is mostly behind him, and what has emerged in its place is a simple presence to what is: not yet joy, but no longer resistance.

His eyes have adjusted to the dark—quite literally. “Dark night” and “unitive” are no longer qualitatively different; like my teacher Rafe, he has “endured the tedium until something emerges in it,” and what has emerged is that hallmark unitive capacity to see from oneness—i.e., from beyond polarity. As in that haunting verse in Psalm 139, he has come to realize that

Darkness is not dark to You;

the night is as bright as the day.

Darkness and light to you are both alike.

Emotional drama has mostly dropped out, since there is no longer a fixed point of selfhood to be “happy” or “unhappy” about a situation. “Nowhere is my destination. And no one is my identity,” Thomas remarks simply, and while this may sound awful to our egoic minds, there is also a dark freedom here: no longer any buttons to be pushed, no dog in the fight. Time no longer rushes on into the future but rests comfortably in the now.

In this phase, Thomas also rests comfortably in what the nondual traditions would call his Witnessing selfhood. “I watch the seductive dance of every day life, but the desire to join has ceased.” True, the temptation remains—to get hooked back in, to lose the spaciousness in order to accomplish some more proximate goal. And Thomas admits candidly that the temptation remains, and as those who knew him most closely will confirm, it did remain up to the very end. But the very thing that in former days would have seemed most distasteful (particularly to an abbot and one born to privilege)—powerlessness—has now become “his daily bread.” The nutrition comes not from the satisfaction of the temptation but from the transformation of it.

Over the Waterfall

Up till now in this poem, everything feels stable, steady-state. There is a kind of timelessness to the inner place at which Thomas has arrived. But beneath the placid surface waters, the river is actually flowing. There is a waterfall up ahead, and this poem is headed straight toward it.

It begins softly in the fourth stanza—so softly that at first you barely notice. With each of the three lines—“my daily bread is powerlessness,” “temptations can be overwhelming,” “gone is every hope of help”—the agitation increases. Suddenly you realize that he’s no longer making steady-state statements. Something is about to happen. Then suddenly it is happening, right before your eyes. “An abyss opens up” and now he is “falling, falling,” “plunging into non-existence.”

As a reader, you naturally try to orient yourself by asking the logistical questions: What just happened? Is he speaking literally here or metaphorically? Try not to do that if you can. This episode has an intentionally dreamlike quality to it; it happens in the limbo between the worlds, and if you try to pin it down, it will elude you. Whatever literal antecedent it may correspond to in Thomas’s life, its truth lies in the psychic reality it so vividly portrays, conveyed in the dynamism of the words themselves. As he tumbles toward the abyss that has suddenly opened up within him, notice how he again draws upon the repetition formula he used so effectively in the third poem (“drifting, drifting,” “fading, fading”) to heighten the poetic effect and create a subtle flashback to that seminal experience of his early adolescence. The psychic constant is still the same: what had once seemed substantial, tangible, is now fading irretrievably into loss.

Is this annihilation? he wonders. “Annihilation” is a very strong word in the Christian spiritual vocabulary. You don’t find it used often, even in classic descriptions of the dark night of the spirit. Its closest resonances are with the Sufi tradition, where fana—total annihilation—means something far beyond simply the death of the ego self, or even of the Witnessing self. It is more like the extinguishing of our most primordial sense of selfhood or “I-ness,” sustained through the self-reflexive mechanism of consciousness itself. This is the third and final dark-night stripping that Bernadette Roberts refers to as “the experience of no-self,” and toward that abyss Thomas finds himself now rapidly plunging.

“The Silent Love that we are …”

And then, out of nowhere, the turn.

It begins with that tiny word “or” at the start of the sixth stanza. If you can read the poem out loud, do so, and linger on that word. It is as sacred and subtle as that moment when outbreath turns back into inbreath and the cycle miraculously begins again.

Or, is it the path to the Silent Love

That we are?

One other Christian commentator who speaks of annihilation with a similar directness is Olga Louchakova. In a brilliant 2004 essay, she explores the Eastern Orthodox prayer of the heart not simply as a devotional practice but as a rigorous path of self-inquiry whose real purpose is to ruthlessly expose layers upon layers of our illusory sense of selfhood. As this prayer systematically works through the layers, she states, “it collects the self, transcends the self, annihilates the self and annihilates the annihilation.”[7]

That statement alone would be enough to prick your ears up, since the false self has also clearly been preoccupying Thomas throughout these poems. Nor is it hard to detect a close correspondence between their two schematics. “Collects the self” describes that first transition: from false self to servant ego. “Transcends the self” names the transition from servant ego to Witnessing self, for whom “the seductive dance of every day life” no longer holds attraction. “Annihilates the self’” is where Thomas finds himself right now as he plunges toward the waterfall.

But what “annihilates the annihilation”? Both Olga Louchakova and Thomas Keating give the same surprising answer, pointing to the Secret Embrace that is at the heart of cosmogonic mystery. In this poem, Thomas refers to it in the next-to-last stanza as “the dance of human nature with That Which Is.” Louchakova describes it much more technically: “the innermost essence of the mystery of the ontopoetic (self-manifesting) process”—or, in other words, how somethingness emerges out of nothingness. If you don’t let the technical language throw you off, you’ll see that they are both pointing in exactly the same direction. It is that same yin-yang dance between the manifest and the Unmanifest that seems to be the driveshaft of all that is. Formlessness into form, transcendence into immanence, inbreath into outbreath—and back again. Giving rise, in every cosmic instant, to all that is.

Thomas labored hard over the phrase “the Silent Love that we are.” It was among his final revisions to the manuscript, as he black-inked it again and again, always revising in the directness of concreteness. Like all good poetic language, it reverberates with both connotative and denotative meaning. It suggests on the one hand emptiness, spaciousness—silence where the talking head used to be. On the other hand, it exudes belonging and the quiet sense of having at last found one’s way. What if there is no “thing” called “I” at all—simply the love itself, endlessly flowing and shape-shifting in the temporary confines of your human form? What if “false”—as in “false self”—is not a character defect to be fixed but a fixity to be released?

The riddle of the true self ends here, on the doorstep of this Mystery. And as the final veil of selfhood parts, you realize that it was all along only a bridal veil, but you are now standing in the nuptial chamber. With a joyful laugh, you toss it aside.

6. Out of Nothing

To be nothing

Is to consent to being a simple creature.

This is the place of encounter with

“I AM that I Am.”

When there is no more “me, myself, or mine,”

Only “I AM” remains.

Then the “I” may fall away,

Leaving just the AM.

God empowers our powerlessness

So that we never despair

Of unconditional forgiveness and infinite mercy.

Such is the grace of inner resurrection,

And the reward for seeking no reward.

This sixth poem is among the most challenging in the collection, partly because of the “outermost limits” nature of the subject matter itself and partly because of an abrupt tonal shift just past midstream that leaves you wondering whether you’ve just been dropped down an elevator shaft into a completely different poem. Thomas’s cosmogonic mysticism returns with full force in this poem, but only to turn on a dime into what appears to be a much more conventionally pious teaching on powerlessness and spiritual humility. The interpretive key lies in finding the connecting rod between them.

It turns out to be hidden in plain sight in the title. “Out of nothing” literally translates the Latin ex nihilo, the traditional way in which Christian theologians have spoken of God’s creation of the world. But it also alludes to a spiritual state of complete inner poverty or emptiness, attained through the grace of humility. Thomas will play off both meanings to parallel the “nothingness” of the cosmogonic Unmanifest with the “nothingness” of a creaturely life no longer tied to a fixed point of selfhood.

In the opening three stanzas of this poem, Thomas consolidates the insights shared in the last poem and builds on them still further. By the third stanza there can be no remaining doubt that he is indeed talking here about that elusive third dark night, the dark night of self. Its radical stripping is far deeper than that dismantling of the “emotional programs for happiness” that occurs in the dark night of sense. It is far deeper than the dissolution of the separate self as it has been traditionally understood in contemplative theology (i.e., as the separated will), which is the fruit of the dark night of spirit. Thomas is here alluding (like Bernadette Roberts before him) to a third and yet more fundamental dissolution: the collapse of the self-reflective[8] mechanism itself, that unique property of human consciousness that makes me realize “It is I who am experiencing this.” Oneness is attained not through an even more intense experience of union but through a simple suspension of the subject-object polarity that created the perception of twoness in the first place.

If that idea is blowing your mind a bit, rest assured that we are standing on ground here that few Christian mystics (even cosmogonic mystics) have trod. The Christian cosmovision is still fiercely tied to the premise of an individual soul—a unique and permanent pixel of selfhood created and redeemed by God—such that forays too far into the nondual terrain (which might instantly dissolve that premise) are intuitively perceived as threatening. Yet there are voices—even Christian voices—who can speak simply and accessibly about what life beyond self-reflective consciousness might look like. I have personally received tremendous help from a comment made by that great sage Huston Smith not long before his own death:

After I shed my body, I will continue to be conscious of the life I have lived and the people who remain on the earth. Sooner or later, however, there will come a time when no one alive will have heard of Huston Smith, let alone have known him, whereupon there ceases to be any point in my hanging around… . I will then turn my back on planet earth and attend to what is more interesting, the beatific vision. As long as I continue to be involved with my individuality, I will retain the awareness that it is I, Huston Smith, who is enjoying that vision, and as long as I want to continue in that awareness, I will be able to do so. For me, though—mystic by temperament though not here below by attainment—after oscillating back and forth between enjoying the sunset and enjoying-Huston-Smith-enjoying-the-sunset, I expect to find the uncompromised sunset more absorbing. The string will have been cut. The bird will be free.[9]

In his signature gentle way, Smith nails that hair’s breadth of difference between primordial self-reflection (“Huston-Smith-enjoying-the-sunset”) and direct perception (“the uncompromised sunset”). That, I believe, is exactly what Thomas is also driving at when he writes:

When there is no more “me, myself, or mine,”

Only “I AM” remains.

When there is no fixed point of reference to “take it home to,” to make it about my experience of “I AM,” then there is only that bare, Himalayan “I AM.” Pure, unmediated presence. A rising tide of silence.

And he has made clear already from the very first stanza that the fundamental requirement for encountering it is “to be nothing.”

“Leaving just the AM …”

So far, this is mature but still-conventional nondual wisdom. Thomas Merton said much the same in his well-loved comment, “In the midst of nothingness, one meets the infinitely real.”[10] And this is clearly also where Thomas is eventually headed—but not without one rather precipitous detour. Suddenly in the next line, he introduces a completely unexpected twist:

Then the “I” may fall away,
leaving just the AM.

If you were raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that statement may well leave you gasping for breath. You will already, of course, have caught the double meaning in all these “I AM” references in the first three stanzas: “I AM” is not merely the expression of my own most primordial self-reflexive awareness; it is also the name by which God reveals himself to Moses in the wilderness. “Who shall I tell them has sent me?” asks Moses. To which God replies, “I AM THAT I AM”—in Hebrew, Yahweh, the sacred, unutterably holy name of God (Exodus 3:13–14). To make sure that this allusion is not missed, Thomas quotes this phrase directly in his fourth line.[11]

Certainly the idea of the I AM shedding its skin would never have occurred within its original prophetic matrix, or any of the spiritual traditions flowing from it. Yahweh is considered to be indivisible and, of course, the inviolate holies of holies—one does not mess with these syllables, prying them apart like some sort of nuclear fission. Richard Rohr has suggested that they are actually a phoneticism depicting the cosmic inbreath (Yah) and outbreath (Weh) that “breathes” the manifest world into existence in a continuous, rhythmic nurturance. To suggest that the “Yah” might at some point fall away would be difficult to fathom. (“Unthinkable!!” I can almost hear Tevye thundering down at him from Fiddler on the Roof.) In raising this possibility, Thomas has metaphysically just walked off the end of the diving board.

So what can he possibly be pointing to here? As far as his own personal consciousness is concerned, it would certainly seem to mean that the final shred of self-reflective awareness passes away, leaving only the bare presence. The “I” pole, the subjective pole (“Huston-Smith-enjoying-the-sunset”), has dropped out, leaving only the “AM” pole (“the uncompromised sunset”).[12]

But since throughout this entire set of poems Thomas has been drawing a deliberate parallel between the microcosm of our human consciousness and the macrocosm of the Secret Embrace, might it be too wild to imagine that within the immeasurably unfathomable abyss of the Divine the same possibility exists? That the “I”—“the source of all creation,” as Thomas pictures it his second poem—might at some point fall away, leaving only the AM, the “infinite transcendence”? Both Bernadette Roberts and Jacob Boehme point allusively in this direction. But here Thomas has baldly stated it. There may come a time, the end of the end of time, when even the Secret Embrace is dissolved, and the manifest is absorbed back into the Eternal Unmanifest.

I do not want to dwell on that speculation but merely acknowledge the vast scale at which Thomas’s mind was working in those final years of his life. Cutting-edge astrophysicists might grasp what he is saying here; probably no one else. He has taken Christian mysticism to the very edge of the known universe. The fact that he titles this poem “Out of Nothing,” a clear allusion to the theological concept of ex nihilo I mentioned earlier, suggests he is indeed deliberately playing with the idea. Only about fourteen billion years farther out.

A Simple Creature

But Thomas himself is not about to hang out indefinitely in speculative mode. His real concern in this poem is much more immediate: not with the eternal cosmic latency but with the practical daily business of navigating the world with a hole in the place where your “I” used to be. At this sublime stage in his unfolding, this is what it means “to consent to being a simple creature,” and it will be his principal concern throughout the final three poems in the collection. And so, having just flung this poem to the outermost limits of the known metaphysical universe, he now abruptly reels it back in. If you’re paying careful attention (not letting yourself be lulled asleep by the reassuringly familiar phrases that follow), the effect is indeed something like being dropped down an elevator shaft.

For a long time I wondered whether the last two stanzas of this poem were a cut-and-paste job, and I have still not entirely dismissed the possibility, even despite the firm assurance of Peter Jones that nothing—absolutely nothing—in these poems is unintended. There is such a striking shift in tone, language, and theology that they seem almost like an accidental caboose, tacked on at the end from another season in Thomas’s life. As a standalone teaching, he could have written these lines thirty years earlier, even fifty years earlier. They reflect a much more traditional theology and a jarringly more anthropomorphic presentation of God. In fact, with the exception of that one stricken outcry in “Twilight of the Self,” this is the only time in the entire collection where the word “God” actually appears. The kenosis is of the familiar Christian surrender-of-the-will variety, not the utter dissolution of our phenomenal selfhood that he has been serving up in poem five and the first part of poem six. He seems to have retreated from that radical edge he was standing on only a moment ago. What is going on here? If the apparent bungee jump he has just orchestrated is fully intentional, what is his intention?

I am more and more coming to see The Secret Embrace as Thomas Keating’s own late-in-life version of the Zen Oxherding Pictures. Perhaps you’re familiar with them. This celebrated wisdom parable in ten pictures depicts the journey of self-realization through the metaphor of an oxherder in pursuit of a wild ox. The oxherder stalks the ox, captures the ox, tames the ox, rides the ox, vanishes into nothingness together with the ox. Then in the very last picture we see the oxherder back in his village, walking barefoot, a sack full of goodies slung over his shoulder. He is there simply to help as he can, sharing the fruit of his attained wisdom.

I like to think of the last two stanzas of this poem (plus the two remaining poems in the collection) as the tenth oxherding picture in Thomas Keating’s own rendition of the teaching. His particular wild ox has been the ever-elusive true self, and he has pursued the chase superbly, for decades. He has sought the ox, tamed the ox, mastered the ox, ridden the ox, then vanished, together with the ox, into the mystical stratosphere. “When there is no more ‘me, myself, or mine,’ only I AM remains. Then the ‘I’ may fall away, leaving just the AM.” You can’t get much more vanished than that. Now suddenly, in this next-to-last stanza, here he is back in his village, much as he always was, speaking in the same way he always has—as if none of this oxherding business had so much as rippled the surface.

But the Mystery of the final transformation lies exactly here, both for that Zen oxherder and for Thomas Keating. In the same moment you realize that “all form is emptiness,” you also instantly realize that “all emptiness is form.” Because these two modes of divine being—manifest and unmanifest—are in continuous creative interplay, there can be no hierarchy between them, no ultimate place to arrive at. All positions are equally valid within the unfathomable vastness of divine love, and nothing can possibly fall out of God. So you are free to be anywhere, to be anyone. You can speak in any language, or none. Speak in the language of the village you come from, speak in whatever way gives comfort and hope.

“You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there,” said Thomas Merton shortly before his own death. “Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.”[13]

That, I believe, is the real teaching awaiting us in this sixth poem. Those last two stanzas are not incongruous; they simply convey the gist of Thomas’s oxherding journey in traditional Christian language. He has indeed, by grace, managed to come through his long dark-night passage “empowered in his powerlessness,” “never despairing of God’s infinite forgiveness and mercy.” All true. The same story from a different theological perspective. And now he has returned to his village (whether you consider that to be his monastery or the entire world) to live out his final years under the grace of inner resurrection. No matter how you tell the story, it is the same unitive presence shining through it.

—

… And yet for all that, there remains for me something slightly jarring and unresolved about that jagged seam. I wonder whether, in the end, it may have wound up eluding even Thomas’s final mastery since it would in fact prove to belong to a chapter still to be lived out. In those last, difficult months of his life, with an inner unanimity perhaps still unsuspected by him as he put the final brushstrokes on these poems, he would find himself returning strongly to some of the fundamental pieties and practices of his earliest monastic formation as “the God he thought he knew” returned in force to take charge of Thomas’s final transition to eternity. I will speak more about this mysterious and in some ways confounding development in the last chapter of this book. But as I continue to sit with the paradox, I am more and more inclined to let the jagged transition in this poem be as it is—open-ended and ever so slightly disturbing, not a sublime closing but the mysterious inbreaking of a future road as yet unknown.

7. Stillness

Our true nature is stillness,

The Source from which we come.

It manifests itself within us

As a rising tide of silence,

A flowing stream of peacefulness,

A limitless ocean of calm,

Or just sheer stillness.

The deep listening of pure contemplation

Is the path to stillness.

All words disappear into It,

And all creation awakens to the delight of

Just Being.

Everybody just loves this poem. It seems to meet people wherever they are. It plays equally well with beginning meditators and with folks who’ve been on the path for decades. At an interspiritual memorial service in Aspen the summer after Thomas’s death, the Buddhists all clamored to read this poem; they said Thomas was revealing his “Buddha nature.”

What “Buddha nature” is for a Buddhist, a Christian might call theosis, or “divinization.” It’s a term many Christians are still a bit wary of; it sounds like a human being claiming divine status. In reality, the unfolding is in the opposite direction. A human being has not been transformed into God; rather, God has descended fully into a human heart, transforming it into a radiant hologram of the divine wisdom and compassion. As the early church father Irenaeus of Lyons famously taught, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” The glorious, flowing aliveness is what speaks to us so deeply in this poem.

Surprisingly, this glorious, flowing aliveness is also what Thomas means by “stillness.”

Many people use the words “silence” and “stillness” interchangeably, both designating an absence of external noise and a state of inner emptiness. For Thomas, they are subtly different from one another—and distinctly different from our usual perception of emptiness. He returns once again to his opening theme that silence is not “vacant space” but a very intense form of presence. It is “a rising tide” full of energy and aliveness. Silence is not something you occupy but something you encounter. It is personal, intimate, filled with aliveness and subtle relationality.

Nor is stillness even remotely a void. We may think of it as motionless, but in a quantum universe in constant motion, it is in fact dynamic equilibrium. It is T. S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world,”[14] the Sufi dervish’s fierce inner repose as the outer world goes flying by, the Buddhist’s “effortless action.” It implies not a lack of motion but the harmonious balance of opposites. You are neither imposing nor resisting but are simply present, flowing in oneness with whatever is. You are the dancer at one with the dance. In one of his very last teachings, Thomas comments: “The contemplative state is established when contemplative prayer moves from being an experience or series of experiences to an abiding state of consciousness. The contemplative state enables one to rest and act at the same time because one is rooted in the source of both rest and action.”[15]

Even from this enlightened state, Thomas is not above poking a little wry fun at some of the expectations we typically lay on enlightened states. Yes, stillness can manifest in us as “a flowing stream of peacefulness,” “a limitless ocean of calm”—i.e., as a “something,” a quality of experience. But it can also simply be itself—“just sheer stillness.” Toward the end of his life Thomas frequently reiterated that “the deepest experience of God is no experience.” It is no experience because the experiencer has finally dropped out (“Huston-Smith-enjoying-the-sunset”), leaving in its stead only the direct, unmediated presence itself. Thomas came to call this mode of perception “unity consciousness.” It’s what the term “nonduality” actually means, once one strips away the “paradox-tolerance” fluff that has recently grown up around it and focuses instead on the hardwiring of consciousness itself.

Continuing in this subtly playful vein, Thomas once again catches us slightly by surprise when he remarks in the fourth stanza that “the deep listening of pure contemplation is the path to stillness.” Normally one might think of it as the other way around: the purpose of stillness is to lead to “pure contemplation,” long regarded in the Christian mystical tradition as a highly exalted state. But here again he turns the table on traditional contemplative theology; in his dynamically interactive universe, contemplation has now become the handmaiden of stillness! Its purpose is to lead us beyond all stages, states, and road maps—beyond empty silence and reified stillness—into that great, flowing oneness that is our own true nature and the true nature of all that is.

What is this flowing stillness rooted in? More flowing stillness, of course. In late Thomas, all roads eventually lead back to the Secret Embrace, that mysterious wormhole between the manifest and Unmanifest, the one flowing eternally into the other. “The presence of God should become a kind of fourth dimension to all of life,” he writes. “Our three-dimensional world is not the real world because the most important dimension is missing: namely, that from which everything that exists is emerging and returning in each micro-cosmic moment of time.”[16]

Because that is the true nature of the cosmos, it is our own true nature as well. And in those final years of his life, Thomas was living almost entirely in that fourth dimension, perceiving the cosmic wellspring in each moment of ordinary life. That is the river of stillness that flowed from him in those grace-filled final teachings.

I have been quoting here from When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening, a recent commentary from a nondual perspective by Bonnie L. Greenwell. This is the book I was referring to in chapter 1 when I described my pleasant surprise at finding Thomas’s words juxtaposed here with comparable teachings from Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, two of the greatest nondual masters of our times. While some Christians still hesitate about whether Thomas’s sweepingly unitive vision is doctrinally “orthodox,” among his interspiritual colleagues he is fully recognized for who he had become by the end of his life’s journey: an enlightened being and the most renowned Christian nondual teacher of our times. Call it “Buddha nature” or call it “divinization,” if it’s the destination of the journey, it is where he arrived.

8. What Matters

Only the Divine matters,

And because the Divine matters,

Everything matters.

If Thomas had stuck with what was most likely his original inspiration—

Only God matters,

And because God matters,

Everything matters.

—it would truly have been a T-shirt- and coffee-mug-worthy pith saying. As it is, a few mugs and memes have appeared, but in this case his commitment to using only the most spacious, transpersonal, gender-neutral languaging for the divine source fights with the natural flow of poetic language toward the concrete and personal, and the overall effect comes off slightly more cerebral than it really is.

Underneath that slightly detached surface, however, burns all the fire and holy passion of a Sufi dervish’s La ilaha illallah—“there is nothing but God,” or there is nothing that is not God. Everything in this world—every quark, atom, dust speck, heartbeat—quivers with the presence of God and is the presence of God. That is the “fourth dimension” Thomas was speaking of when I quoted him in the last section saying, “The presence of God should become a kind of fourth dimension to all of life.” Three dimensions comprise the world as it appears to us on the surface, all the individual, random bits and pieces floating down the river of time. The fourth dimension kicks in when one suddenly grasps the whole thing as alive and vibrantly “one,” a single living sacrament reemerging in every nanosecond from the ever engendering wellspring of God.

It is far too easy to dualize, even polarize, this flowing oneness. People often hear that great Islamic hymn to divine oneness as meaning “my God is better than your God.”[17] Christian ascetics throughout the ages have heard the words “nothing but God” as a siren call to turn their backs on this sin-ridden world and direct their gazes only heavenward. To dualistic consciousness (which we all basically start out with), these either-or modes of thinking come readily, and we do not easily move beyond them.

When the eye of the heart starts to open, however, a different vision of reality becomes possible. Seeing from oneness doesn’t mean “It’s all one”—no particularity, no differentiation. Rather, it means that all those individual bits and pieces are now suffused and harmonized within a greater whole, like light pouring through the individual shards of glass in a stained glass window. God isn’t simply the light but the entire stained glass window illuminated by the light, radiant in this dance of the formless with form.

In a memorable passage in her book The Luminous Web, Episcopal priest and writer Barbara Brown Taylor describes this heart-awakening epiphany in her own life. Speaking of the radical shift in her image of God brought about by her exposure to quantum physics, she writes:

Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of these concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationships that animates everything there is.[18]

Or in other words, La illaha ilallah. There is nothing that is not God. She goes on to add, even more remarkably,

At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that makes it all go.

Throughout this entire collection of poems, Thomas has been intuiting along much the same lines and has dealt with that age-old theological stand-off between divine immanence and divine transcendence in an interesting new way. By picturing “the source of all creation” (the immanent pole) and “infinite transcendence” (the transcendent pole) locked in an eternal embrace, he immediately brings them into a spiritually generative relationship, out of which our manifest universe is always flowing. As long as we are here in the manifest, our job is to flow with it, to truly be in it and of it, and to live it fearlessly and guilelessly to the fullness that it truly is. God in transcendent mode is not “higher,” as apophatic mysticism has tended to picture it, but simply another place within the vast dynamism of the divine yearning itself, and all places within that dynamism are connected to one another and bear each other’s imprint. Thus, there is nothing that can possibly fall out of God, because God is the fullness itself.

And thus, to the timeless unitive wisdom of “there is nothing that is not God,” Thomas gives his full blessing while adding a heartful final nuance: that this matters. It’s a question not simply of seeing it but of feeling it, out of the unknown depths of your own divine longing. Perhaps he is taking a leaf here from the book of his old friend Sister Mary Margaret Funk with her series of “matters” books (Thoughts Matter, Tools Matter, Discernment Matters, Humility Matters, Lectio Matters), but the notion that something matters—that it makes a difference in how you feel and act—is at the heart of his message in this short final poem, perhaps more benediction than poem. Call it God or call it the Divine: the important thing is that it matters. It changes your life.

With this final benediction, The Secret Embrace comes full circle, and Thomas Keating lays down his pen for the last time.

Part Three

Approaches to Christian Nonduality

Introduction to Part Three

In this final section of the book, my intention is to return to some of those treasures we unearthed during our exploration of The Secret Embrace as the springboard into a more wide-ranging theological reflection on Thomas Keating’s maturing nondual teaching. I am particularly interested in the ways this later teaching both builds on and diverges from his earlier teaching—or in other words, how Tier II interfaces with Tier I so that the entire teaching becomes a single integrated whole. I am also interested in the particular fragrance of nonduality that Thomas seems to be bringing forth in his teaching, which in many ways is representative of the Christian mystical tradition he is rooted in but in other ways departs from it quite strikingly, particularly in its humor, pastoral concern, and unabashed affirmation of the reality and goodness of the manifest world. In these final seven chapters we will be looking in turn at how his increasingly subtle nondual perspective plays out in his final teaching on the dark night of self; the Unmanifest; true self/false self; God; unity consciousness; and oneness. We will also give some consideration to the rather awkward question of whether one can actually see the world as he came to see it in his final years and still be called a Christian.

6

The Dark-Night Journey: An Overview

Thomas Keating’s lengthy sojourn in the dark night of the spirit was the great watershed in his life, separating “early Thomas” from “late Thomas” by a chasm of lived experience. While this experience was predictably painful, its permanent fruits were not exactly what one would expect—not the triumphant emergence into unitive beatitude that the classic scenarios tend to imply, but the addition of a new depth of perception that would be with him for the rest of his days. It is as if he saw the world from a new dimension—a “fourth dimension,” as he himself would refer to it—which is elusive to grasp for those of us still operating mostly in a three-dimensional reality, but which would set the new perceptual baseline for the remaining decades of his life.

Because Thomas’s dark-night passage is such a clear watershed in his spiritual awakening, and because the terrain is not easy to comprehend piecemeal and the interpretive maps are themselves in rapid transition (with Thomas’s own teachings playing a significant role in that transition), it seems wise to begin by exploring the overall terrain in a more orderly fashion. Many of the key pieces are already in place from our initial pass through The Secret Embrace: John of the Cross, dark night of sense, dark night of spirit, transforming union. But in order to address the question of a potential third dark night, we will need to take more time with Bernadette Roberts, and in order to understand how Thomas’s lived experience in the dark night of spirit winds up in tension with the classical theological interpretations that framed his expectations, I will need to introduce you to Constance FitzGerald’s radical revisioning of the dark night of spirit as a total overhaul of the egoic structure of consciousness that undergirds our familiar autonomous selfhood. Traditional affective models (the dark night viewed as a moral purification) are rapidly giving way to consciousness-based models (the dark night viewed as the threshold to a new level of consciousness). This major paradigm shift (which, by the way, mainstream Christian theology has not yet even begun to wake up to) is emerging through combined insights of contemporary neuroscience and reference points from the Asian nondual traditions formerly inaccessible to Western seekers of Thomas’s generation. Thomas became a leading interpreter and model builder for this new movement, at least in part because his own dark-night experience was so painfully caught in the tectonic plates of this radical revisioning. To more fully appreciate the transformation he wrought, we have to start with the original maps he was working with.

The Foundational Road Map

The classic Christian mystical road map, in use ever since Pseudo-Dionysius established it in the sixth century, depicts the spiritual journey as a three-level progression. At the initial purgative stage the emphasis is on “cleaning up one’s act” (“purgative” means purification). Once the honeymoon period of initial conversion begins to fade, purification sets in in earnest as old habits of being are gradually brought into conformity with one’s new inner center of gravity. This first stage successfully weathered, the seeker now enters into the illuminative stage, a time of fruitful, graced partnership doing God’s work in the world. This stage can occupy decades; for many sincere and good-hearted Christians, it is enough to fill a lifetime. But for a blessed and hardy few—typically after years or even decades of continued spiritual maturation—partnership may give way to an even deeper and more intimate union. This is the unitive stage, the culmination of the journey. This is traditionally understood to be a deeper affective union. The prevailing metaphors are nuptial; like bride and bridegroom, the seeker and God become “one flesh,” joined at the heart in a single, mutual indwelling.

Because, according to traditional Christian understanding, Creator and creature always maintain their distinct natures (Atman does not become Brahmin!), this three-tiered path necessarily plays out in the domain of will—i.e., in the progressive transformation of the relational field between them. In the purgative stage, “God’s will” and “my will” can be experienced as sharply oppositional, and progression to the illuminative stage is bought at the price of thoroughly mastering “not my will but thine be done, O Lord.” Gradually one learns to surrender personal preferences and agendas to the wiser and ultimately more compassionate directives of the divine will. As one moves toward the unitive stage, this surrender becomes even more pervasive, reaching well beyond the personal will into those primordial instincts of self-preservation, including even the vital energy and personal being-force generated by the independent exercise of one’s autonomous selfhood. “God is my copilot” (the mantra par excellence of the illuminative stage) gives way to “It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Personal Agency and Self-Structure

In the illuminative stage, a strong sense of personal agency remains, together with a strong self-reflexive consciousness that takes pleasure in the experience of being in right relationship with God. The “God” pole and the “I” pole remain discrete, allowing a person at this stage to have one’s cake and eat it too—i.e., to enjoy both intimacy with God and the experience of enjoying it (“basking like a pious tabby in the rays of uncreated light,” as Evelyn Underhill waggishly remarked in her classic book on mysticism). At the unitive stage, this self-reflective propensity steadily recedes, together with the dependence on those traditional “faculties” of the soul—memory, reason, intellect, emotion, will—that support and inform our finite sense of selfhood. “Unity attained” comes with its own built-in catch-22: the progressive silencing of the experiencer-self who might benefit or gain pleasure from this attainment.

John of the Cross and the Dark-Night Passages

From our own contemporary perspective, it is hard not to see the Pseudo-Dionysian map as a developmental model. To our way of thinking, levels are stages, and stages imply linear progression, right? But this distinctly Western and post-Renaissance interpretation emerged fully into its own only toward the end of the sixteenth century, largely at the hands of the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. Through their combined handiwork, the original tripartite schematic was refashioned into a much more highly nuanced developmental model and assumed the definitive shape it would hold for the next four hundred years.

John added the valleys. From the raw intensity of his own spiritual questing, he quickly realized that progress along the path was not a single, unbroken ascent from purification to sanctification, but rather that periods of ascent were interwoven with intermittent periods of tribulation and spiritual “lostness” to which he gave the evocative name “dark night.” He delineated two of these—the dark night of sense and dark night of spirit—and linked them to their respective plateaus. In so doing, he set the map in motion and created the “peaks and valleys” model that most contemporary seekers intuitively project as the backdrop for their own spiritual evolution.

The first and milder of these dark nights, the dark night of sense, can be seen as either the capstone purgation of the purgative stage of the journey or the threshold of the illuminative stage. From whichever perspective, it entails a progressive weaning away from the “spiritual consolations” (as John called them) that have heretofore been the major confirming signs of the divine presence. These can include sweetness, sensory phenomena, visions, “illuminations,” and the emotional reassurances that typically accompany the initial conversion experience but can so quickly become crutches and ultimately roadblocks to the deeper journey of faith. The withdrawal of these signs and wonders, together with a sudden aridity and the crushing sense that God has suddenly gone missing, play out in emotional upheavals that John describes as the spirit of “blasphemy” (the urge to rebel, blame, and lash out), “fornication” (the sudden unleashing of pent-up sexual energy), and vertigo or “dizziness” (the sudden loss of one’s inner spiritual compass, resulting in painful self-doubt and inner scrupulosity). The turmoil—for however long it lasts—is endured by hunkering down in what one knows to be true, outwardly “staying the course” while inwardly surrendering to the process itself. Mercifully, dark night of sense trials tend to be relatively short-lived (typically measured in months rather than years), although they can and do recur, even well into the illuminative stage of the journey. Thomas Keating’s psychologically astute evaluation of this phase of the journey (which I will review in the next chapter) offers some helpful insights as to why this may be so.

The dark night of spirit, marking the threshold of the unitive stage, is a far more pervasive and painful scourging, similar in basic configuration to the earlier dark night (God suddenly “goes dark”), but at a quantum leap in intensity. There is the familiar aridity, the familiar dullness and lassitude (“acedia,” as it’s known in the tradition), and the familiar yearning for the mysteriously absent beloved. But now these symptoms are exacerbated by a sudden scrambling of the faculties—memory, emotion, reason, intellect, will—that in earlier days would have allowed the shattered soul to pull itself back together and sadly walk away. Now there is no walking away, for the entire autonomous self-structure that would formerly have executed this rescue operation seems itself to be permanently hobbled. This purgation is characterized by a pervasive sense of impasse, which affects not only the will but also even the basic life energies.

By virtually unanimous attestation, the dark night of spirit is unremittingly painful. The traditional interpretation given to this ordeal is that it is a yet more intense moral purification, the requisite final ablution before consummating the mystical marriage. Like a brutally efficacious spiritual chemotherapy, it seems directly aimed at rooting out the last vestiges of “sinful self-will” so that the completely surrendered soul, emerging from its fires, can safely enter into full union with its divine source.

Self-Abandonment Revisited

But is it really, fundamentally about moral purification? In recent years, a growing number of contemplative commentators, drawing on discoveries in transpersonal psychology and cognitive science as well as perennial insights from the Asian traditions, have come to suspect that this traditional interpretation in fact puts the cart before the horse. Is “sinful self-will” really the cause of human estrangement from God, or is it in fact the primary consequence of it, the first fruit of a syndrome whose real roots lie far deeper, embedded in the nature of human consciousness itself? As this insight gains traction, the old moral purification model is slowly giving way to a more phenomenological approach.

As human beings, we are blessed with the gift of self-reflexive consciousness. This means that we are able to abstract ourselves, to place ourselves at a certain distance from the outer events swirling around us and even from our own selves. From our interior “command post,” we gaze out upon the world, arranging the bits and pieces and manipulating them strategically in the direction of our own choosing. Turned inward like a magnifying glass, this same self-reflexive property allows us to explore our responses, reflect on our own subjectivity, and out of this reflection construct the metanarrative of our own conscious selfhood.

Self-reflexive consciousness is a powerful tool, but it is also a double-edged sword—intrinsically dualistic. There is no value judgment intended here; I am simply describing how the operating system works. As long as we wield this kind of consciousness, we will experience the world through a subject-object bipolarity: “I” on the “inside,” “the world” somewhere “out there.” Phenomenologically speaking, we perceive the world egoically—from an “I am” at the center (ego is the Latin word for “I am”), with the outer world orbiting around it. The system is inherently centripetal, or in other words, self-centered. It revolves around itself.

In and of itself, there is nothing amiss here; this is simply the way the operating system is wired. C. G. Jung, for one, could not imagine conscious selfhood without an egoic vehicle to mediate it. But you can hear how the wordplay is already beginning to set in: “self-centered,” “egoic”—words that in the spiritual lexicon come heavily laden with connotations of moral reproach. And there is indeed but a hair’s breadth separating these two meaning streams, for the operational hazard of this otherwise marvelous operating system is that it does tend to trap us within the squirrel cage of our own subjectivity, separated from the whole by the very perceptual tool that allows us to perceive it in the first place. Everything we touch with our minds instantly turns into an object (try to say “I love God” without tripping that subject-object dualism), and our quantumly increased personal agency comes at the cost of losing our direct experience of belonging to the whole. Out of this unremitting perceptual dualism emerges a chronic, low-level anxiety that is the inevitable shadow side of our much-vaunted egoic selfhood. It does not require much of a leap of imagination to see how “sinful self-will” does indeed find a ready home in this fertile matrix of underlying loss and anxiety.

To be clear, then, what is really under deconstruction during this dark night is not merely the personal self-will (itself but a function of the operating system creating it) but the entire structure of egoic (self-reflexive) consciousness upon which our core perception of selfhood, God, and the journey itself has heretofore depended.

This disorientation is obviously devastating, and I believe that it is this disorientation that adds the uniquely painful intensity to this scourging.

Memory “Delinked”

Among the first contemplative theologians to systematically apply this newer phenomenological paradigm to the dark night of spirit was the Carmelite scholar and abbess Constance FitzGerald. In 2009, she became the first woman to address the prestigious Catholic Theological Society of America, reading her essay “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory,” the cumulative fruit of more than two decades of academic and personal exploration on the nature of spiritual impasse.[1] In this groundbreaking presentation, she bores in on one of John of the Cross’s major markers of the dark night of spirit, the purification of memory, demonstrating that what is at stake here is not simply a deeper moral purification but the systematic disabling of one of the major drivers of our usual sense of conscious, autonomous selfhood.

Together with those other foundational faculties of the soul (reason, will, and emotion), memory contributes heavily to our impression of having a unique personal self with a stable identity and duration over time. As FitzGerald sees it, memory is literally “the abililty to ‘re-member’; that is, to ‘member’ again, bringing past elements together, forward to the present, reconstructed into a newly relevant whole.”[2] When memory becomes “delinked” during the dark night of the spirit (i.e, still intact but now dislocated from any core sense of identity), the plug is suddenly pulled on this whole self-retrieval system, and the person is plunged into a no-man’s-land. In the earlier dark night of sense, the privations were often fierce, but there was still a strong sense of “me” at the helm, and the passage could be weathered by simply hunkering down in that deep inner core. In this second dark night, there is no such stable point, for it is precisely the illusion of a stable, autonomous self that is now under active deconstruction.

The interior freefall that ensues is likened in some ways to clinical depression and in fact often overlaps with it—but with one significant difference, FitzGerald explains: “The final outcome the depressed person hopes for in therapy is the restoration of the self that has been lost, albeit a more mature one. But the dark nights, on the other hand, are entered into as a loss of that same self, and in that consists its pain.” The only light at the end of the tunnel lies in the realization that “what is lost in the passive nights was never the self, but only an illusion all along.”[3]

The feeling tone of this dark night, then, is fundamentally grief—and properly so, for in this dark-night purification we are indeed undergoing a profound bereavement: “We are being dispossessed of our autonomous self, our achieved selfhood put together over a lifetime.”[4] The traditional interpretative paradigm (dark night as a further mortification of a still-intact self) misses the heart of the grief: that it is precisely this “self,” the subject pole we depended on for our deepest experience of “union” with God, that is being slowly but irrevocably melted away.

FitzGerald does ultimately hold out hope. If we are indeed being dispossessed of an “achieved selfhood put together over a lifetime,” it is not because this self is “bad” or “sinful” but because it has been outgrown. Beyond the egoic operating system there are far more spiritually generative ways of doing business. “When the faculties are finally sprung loose from the captivity to this lower order selfhood,” she writes, we are at last ready for “being possessed by the infinite”[5]—i.e., ready to bear the direct perception of unitive reality. Liberated from the cumbersome translator mechanism of our earlier self-reflexive consciousness, we are finally free to live completely open to what she calls “the future” (many nondual teachers would call it “the present”; both Thomas and Bernadette Roberts will name it “the Unmanifest”)—i.e., in a state of open-ended, nonjudgmental awareness, warmly receptive to whatever the Divine might be unfolding in the moment. That said, in this state, powerful creative energy can flow, and such transformed people can and do find themselves suddenly thrust into the role of “prophets of hope”—unassuming but profoundly generative vessels for the “continuing evolution of spirit or consciousness.”[6]

The New Unitive

For FitzGerald, then, the dark night of spirit is not primarily a moral purification but a fundamental overhaul of a legitimate but limited structure of consciousness that keeps us tied to an illusory autonomous selfhood and limits our full spiritual generativity. The emergence from this perceptual squirrel cage comprises for her what has traditionally been called the transforming union, the initiation into the full unitive state. But notice the marked difference in feeling tone. The experience is indeed of “oneness”—intimate reunion with the Divine. But that is not because mystical marriage has specially “oned” the soul to God like bride and bridegroom (that would be the old way of looking at things), but because the mechanism that created the illusion of separation in the first place has finally been laid to rest. While she never explicitly uses the word, her phenomenologically based interpretation would be instantly recognized by many modern commentators as a form of “nondual awakening,” and her teaching offers a natural bridge to the work of Beatrice Bruteau, Ken Wilber, Adyashanti, Jon Kabat-Zinn, John Teasdale, and much of contemporary Buddhist-inspired mindfulness training.

And of course, through all these channels, plus his own sharp cultural antennae, this gathering sea change in the way of understanding the dark night of spirit left its profound imprint on Thomas Keating as he wrestled with both interpretive lenses and came to his own distinctive synthesis.

Thomas Keating in the Dark Night of Spirit

If there is a weak spot in Thomas Keating’s otherwise masterful presentation of the two dark nights in his original teaching videos, it lies rather obviously in the fact that when he first created this series in 1988, the dark night of spirit still lay ahead for him. He covers the bases with his usual cognitive brilliance, but the alert listener may still detect a stylized and occasionally forced quality to his delivery, as if he is still steering more by what he has learned from the books than by what he knows from his own lived experience. The contrast will become obvious the moment he crosses the watershed and begins to speak in his own voice.

I would date that moment from his poem “Twilight of the Self.” While the poem itself, as we have seen, would not be publicly unveiled until 2018, its actual date of composition was November 1991, which places it at the headwaters of Thomas’s full immersion into the dark night of spirit. It is his first and most raw outspeaking of this new dimension that has suddenly come painfully online for him, and true to form, it differs from his 1988 account in exactly the same way that a sphere differs from a circle.

Judging from that earlier account,[7] he enters the abyss forearmed with the expectation that this will be a deeper and more intimate purification, intended “to free us from the residue of the false self in the unconsciousness and thus to prepare us for divine union.” Still operating squarely within the traditional affective domain, he is quite certain that what is at stake in this particular dark night is the final eradication of a pervasive moral self-centeredness. Out of the corner of his eye he is quietly noticing a subtle self-reflexive tendency stubbornly entrenched in his consciousness that manifests itself in “the secret satisfaction that we find in ourselves as the recipients of God’s favors or of a special vocation.”[8] But he computes it as a character failure (albeit a universal one) rather than as an inevitable side effect of the operating system of conscious perception itself. He is intellectually prepared to have “all felt mystical experiences of God subside and disappear,” but he interprets this primarily as a more extreme withdrawal of spiritual consolations, enacted in order to derail the otherwise powerful temptation to spiritual pride, through which the false self can immediately climb back into the driver’s seat. “The night of the spirit reduces such temptations to zero,” he reiterates, following the classic line of argument, “because through its purifying action we experience ourselves as capable of every evil.”[9]

As the actual ordeal gets underway, however, it becomes rapidly apparent that this dark night is going to play out a lot closer to the Constance FitzGerald playbook than to Thomas’s prior hypothetical expectations and projections. Instead of the further mortification of a still-intact personal selfhood, he finds himself—just as she would predict—suddenly facing the systematic upending of that entire self-making system. “I feel like one turned inside out,” he appropriately laments. His experience quintessentially exemplifies the systemic numbing or delinking of the faculties that FitzGerald has identified as the essence of this particular dark-night passage. His intellectual faculty can no longer make sense of the terrain: “The God I thought I knew no longer exists.” His affective emotions no longer serve him; if anything, they only intensify the experience of abandonment and loss as he stands by helplessly and watches himself being treated “like a thing without a heart, except perhaps a broken heart.” Standard prompts for the memory—“rituals and sacred symbols, once treasured symbols of relating to You”—are pervaded by that same characteristic sense of dislocation; they are still there, but they no longer connect to anything. The whole meaning-making system is in suspended animation.

The old ways of righting himself all wind up in the same anguishing impasse: “My sole desire is You, and You are always absent.” And yet in the depths of this anguish can also be heard that other signature quality of the dark-night experience, according to FitzGerald: the realization that beneath all the emotional upheaval, some deeper mode of presence is still there waiting to reveal itself. “The God I thought I knew” may be gone forever, but God himself has not gone off—“there is only Your boundless presence”—perceived dimly by a new kind of selfhood that Thomas does not yet know how to be. He hangs on for dear life and steers by the scent of that presence.

Singularly absent from this poem are any of those markers anticipated in his earlier teaching: no indication of a further purification of the will, mortification of pride, withdrawal of spiritual gifts, or confrontation with false-self programs still lingering in the unconscious. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever that he is experiencing himself as “capable of every evil.” Evil itself does not seem to figure in this purification—only a Job-like yearning for reconnection. To be sure, those moral/affective dimensions have not been permanently suspended and will return again in force in some of his final teaching (particularly in his last published book, Consenting to God as God Is). But for now, in the heat of the experience itself, they are not his central concern. His on-the-ground experience plays out much more fully as FitzGerald calls it—as a radical overhaul of the former structure of conscious selfhood—than as the traditional deepening moral purification. I believe this shift is significant, for it lays the foundation for his progressively more consciousness-based interpretation of human spiritual evolution during the final decades of his life. It also contains the seeds of some of his most profound and mature final spiritual teaching on the Unmanifest nature of God, which we will be exploring in due course.

7

Bernadette Roberts and the Road to No Self

For nearly four hundred years following John of the Cross’s authoritative exegesis of the unitive state, he was universally considered to be the final authority on the subject—and the unitive, of course, was universally regarded to be the crowning achievement of the Christian spiritual journey. It was taken as the highest degree of sanctification that could still be borne in human flesh. Then, in the mid-1980s, an American ex-nun named Bernadette Roberts threw a monkey wrench into the works. Roberts was a member of John of the Cross’s own Carmelite lineage and clearly his equal in both intensity and spiritual mettle. Mystically precocious from birth and gifted with a rare capacity for inner self-observation, she entered the Carmelite order young, quickly cleared the required spiritual hurdles along John’s “peaks and valleys” road map, and by young adulthood had arrived at transforming union, the traditional Carmelite designation for the full unitive state. But as her mystical journey mysteriously intensified, she soon found herself sailing well beyond any landmarks known to John of the Cross, and eventually she left the convent to bushwhack on her own.

In two closely sequential books, The Experience of No-Self (1984) and The Path to No-Self (1985),[1] Roberts advanced her claim—initially outrageous to her fellow contemplatives—that the unitive state was not in fact the end point of the earthly Christian journey. Beyond it lay yet another state, which she called “no-self,” accessed through a yet more intense plunge down the rabbit hole of self-reflexive consciousness to a place where personal selfhood vanished altogether—not just the egoic operating system but selfhood itself: that fundamental, subjective pole of “I-ness.”

Down the long halls of Christian mystical theology, this set off the predictable shock waves. “No, no, dear,” a number of theologians paternally chastised. “You are simply speaking about ego transcendence.” No way! Roberts tenaciously held her ground, asserting that she knew what ego transcendence was—which belonged in her take to early unitive—and that what she was describing was a horse of an entirely different color: not the deepening transfiguration of a surrendered unitive self, but an empty hole where that “self” used to be. Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, in the words of the ancient Buddhist Heart Sutra: “gone, gone, totally gone.”

The unitive state, she insisted, is neither permanent nor the apex of the contemplative journey; it, too, has its own progression. It begins, to be sure, in the full realization of one’s divine unitive center, the soul “oned” to God. But over the course of the journey, this “glowing coal” (as she pictures the unitive center) will gradually dwindle and finally disappear altogether—“and God shall be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15: 28), finally reunited with His own undivided subjectivity, beyond the slightly annoying contrivance of manifestation.

For Roberts, this plays out as a six-phase progression, laid out in detail in The Path to No-Self. The first three phases might roughly be called “consolidation,” the last three “dissolution.”

Phase I: Following John of the Cross, Roberts sees the dark night of spirit as in fact the dawning of the unitive, and her description of this initial stage substantially concurs with Constance FitzGerald’s description of the dark-night delinking process we explored in chapter 6. For both of these Carmelite contemplatives, the phase culminates in the collapse of the ego-constructed self and the experiential realization that “my deepest unitive center is God.” Ego self as an operational convention is still there, fully functional for navigation in this world. But it is no longer experienced as a “me,” over and against a God who is “not me.” It is simply the subjective pole in the continuous intercirculation of the divine dynamism, the whole thing of which is God.

Phase II: The task at hand here is learning how to self-stabilize in that unitive center, not allowing oneself to be drawn out of it by the vestigial motions of the now deconstructed ego self with its habitual pull back to the surface, where it can still all too quickly reconstruct itself.

Phase III: This learning curve mastered, one enters fully into what Roberts describes as the “peak” of unitive life, the phase generally being referred to in mystical descriptions of the “permanent” unitive state. Once the new pattern of circulation between subjective pole (“unitive self”) and objective pole (God) has been fully stabilized, the experience is of a single flowing energy stream, characterized by that signature inner clarity and outer productivity so rhapsodically described in the mystical literature. There is a felt sense of a flame of love burning powerfully in that unitive center (perceived at this stage as equally shared between God and unitive center) which drives the Phase III mystic to manifest outwardly in the world, pouring forth from an apparently inexhaustible fountainhead of energy and blessing. This is the inner configuration of the great saints at their unitive peak. The sheer force of that inner flame catapults them out into the world, clearly in search of its own full cosmogonic expressiveness.

Phase III is the end of the journey on the traditional unitive road map.

Phases IV and V: It is here that Roberts really begins to break new ground. In her presentation, these two phases essentially comprise a single progression, and she herself does not delineate clearly where the transition between them occurs. But the beginning and end points are clear. For the keenly perceptive and unflinchingly honest, Phase IV (at first so subtle that one hardly notices it) brings the first intimations of an unsettling distance still to be traveled. If they are not immediately squelched, two realizations become increasingly insistent. The first is that despite the easy, rhythmic synchrony of “subjective” and “objective” poles, there are still two poles. “Self” still has a hand in this perception; the field of exchange is still con-sciousness (literally, “with-knowing”), an exchange between two partners. Increasingly, this becomes for Roberts an irritating penumbral shadow, yet another veil over the face of God. She realizes that as long as this shadow remains, she can only “encounter God as he is in me,” not “God as he is in himself.” She yearns for the pure, unfiltered God.

Along with that discovery comes the second realization, which is that that flame, originally understood as a shared torch intended for external expression in the world, cannot in fact be consummated there. The flame has no outward expression; all along it has had only one goal: “to consume its unitive partner”[2]—i.e., that vestigial “I” or subjective pole still perceiving it. (As Thomas Keating would later put it, “Then the ‘I’ may fall away, leaving just the AM.”) The end of the road will come with the final dissolution of that pole, which marks the completion of Phase V.

Phase VI: This final phase brings a reintegration of sorts. It is all about learning to navigate while still in bodily form with a permanent hole where one’s self—the subjective pole of self-reflexive consciousness—used to be. Surprisingly, this seems to be actually doable.

—

“Consciousness itself is responsible for man’s experience of duality,” Roberts writes[3]—a statement that will surely raise some hackles among those who hold “pure” consciousness as sacrosanct, a synonym for the Divine itself. For Roberts, consciousness always implies self-reflexive consciousness (“with-knowing”); beyond it, as her functional equivalent for “sciousness” or nonparticipated knowing, lies the pure subjectivity of God. “We discover that the unitive self or center was entirely dependent for its existence upon the reflexive mechanism of the mind; in the final transformation both will go down together.”[4]

If this sounds more than a little like the “void”—a terrain implicitly alien to Christian incarnational ways of thinking, it is worth noting that Roberts came upon this insight not by delving into Asian mysticism (which she vigorously eschewed for at least a decade beyond the publication of The Path to No-Self) but through a rigorous application of her own traditional Carmelite formation. Intent on rooting out the last vestiges of self-centeredness in herself by practicing total self-abandonment to God, she kept bumping up against that place (meticulously detailed in The Path to No-Self), where she discovered that what remained, seemingly as an inherent property of consciousness itself, was a residual Planck’s constant of self-referentiality that kept “self-righting” her back into finite selfhood. She increasingly came to understand the self as a fundamental defense against falling naked into God. In her adamant wish to remove all the veils, she crashed through the outer limits of the known Christian world, straight into the lap of the eternal abyss with its one great, perennial question: “Why does anything exist in the first place?” Not by abandoning her Christian path, but by pushing it to its very limits, did she come upon a place where the hidden mainspring of manifestation becomes dimly visible, caught in the act of emerging from the darkness in which it is primordially shrouded.

Obviously, this is very strong stuff, incomprehensible within the terms of traditional Christian metaphysics and inaccessible until you accept her challenging premise that “consciousness” is not in fact the primordial oneness but the mother of all dualism. No one—herself included—would claim this as a “normal” end point of the contemplative journey, a destination to be striven for or even welcomed. But her unique, fearless journey did succeed in moving the ball considerably farther down the field in terms of the traditional Christian understanding of the higher unitive states, drawing it much more closely in line with analogues in the Asian traditions and further clarifying our understanding of nonduality as a structure of consciousness, not an affective state of beatitude or an ethical pathway.

—

And of course, Thomas Keating was well aware of this material—not simply because this was a subject area that continuously engaged his interest, but through personal acquaintance with both the manuscript and its author. Roberts completed the final revisions to The Path to No-Self during a long sojourn among the monks of St. Benedict’s Monastery (to whom the book is dedicated), and since Thomas was among her close circle of monastic mentors (and highly engaged with the topic in his own right), we can only imagine that they had at least a few significant exchanges during her time at Snowmass.

As we turn in the next chapter to Thomas’s own late dark-night journey, the hand of Bernadette Roberts so often seems to be dimly visible in the background, subtly shaping his intimations of the road still to be traveled. For that if for no other reason, it is important to have her no-self material under one’s belt in order to fully grasp some of the ways in which Thomas was processing his own transformation during those remarkable final five years of his life. Did he pass that alleged Phase III midpoint and follow Roberts into the no-self terrain? There is little question in my mind that he did. But he did it in own signature way: with a twinkle in his eye, with greater suppleness, and with far sweeter fruits.

8

Thomas Keating on the Road to No Self

But is there still a third dark night possibly lying in wait behind that unitive threshold? Is there still a road to be traveled on the other side of transforming union? That is the claim boldly advanced by Bernadette Roberts: that the unitive state is itself a continuing journey of stripping and self-diminishment ending in the collapse of the entire self-reflexive mechanism on which our subjective experience of selfhood depends. If her assertion is correct, she has added a significant extension to the traditional Pseudo-Dionysian road map. And since she and her colleague and fellow spiritual traveler Thomas Keating were traversing substantially the same inner terrain during those final years of Thomas’s life, both of them scouting out a whole new frontier of Christian contemplative self-understanding, it is more than a little telling to compare their respective field reports. Does Thomas’s own experience of the final leg of the journey bear her out?

The answer, I believe, is that it both does and doesn’t. His pathway through this unfamiliar terrain offers ample confirmation that the unitive state is indeed a progressive unfolding and that the progression does indeed lead in the direction of what she calls “no self”—i.e., the gradual attenuation of the subjective pole of selfhood. He clearly experiences this diminution personally and speaks about it vividly in a number of his final writings.[1] But in the end, I believe that he and Roberts view this unitive progression through very different interpretive lenses (for her, the ontology of selfhood; for him, the evolution of consciousness). Thus, they arrive at significantly different understandings of what this state of no self is all about (if indeed it is a state at all), what it exists for, and most importantly, how, once attained, it is to be integrated back into the rest of one’s human life.

The Night of Self

Thomas first explicitly introduces the term “night of self” in a remarkable chapter in his 2014 book Reflections on the Unknowable—titled, to no surprise, “Is There a Night of Self?” Reflecting on St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose excruciating sufferings during the dark night of spirit are sufficient to put the fear of the Lord into even the most intrepid spiritual seekers, he comments that these sufferings strike him not simply as different in degree but also as different in kind. “Her long trial sounds more intense than the night of spirit as described by John of the Cross,” he writes. “Perhaps it might be called the night of self.”[2]

He returns to this idea full force in his poem “The Last Laugh,” whose initially challenging nonlinear structure begins to come more clearly into focus when you approach it as his poetic evocation of some form of “night of self” threshold. After the opening three stanzas, in which we find him patiently plying his way through what amounts to Phase II in Roberts’s six-phase schematic (assimilation; learning to stay put in one’s unitive center), he suddenly finds himself being drawn inexorably toward some kind of inner abyss. Both the internal movement of the poem itself and the starkness of the language used to describe the experience (“abyss,” “non-existence,” “annihilation”) heighten the impression of plummeting toward some sort of existential void; in my earlier discussion of this poem I likened it to going over a waterfall. Whether or not this plunge can be symbolically construed as his formal announcement of a third dark night, Thomas clearly intends for us to see this as more than just another in a long series of temptations. This is a state change, the drop to a whole new level of unraveling that he has not encountered before and that registers on him as “annihilation.” His description is reminiscent of Roberts’s experiential freefall in The Experience of No-Self:

Though the center of self was gone, I was sure the remaining emptiness, the silence and joy, was God Himself. Thus on one occasion, with full hedonistic deliberation, I settled myself down and turned my gaze inward. Almost immediately the empty space began to expand, and expanded so rapidly it seemed to explode; then, in the pit of my stomach I had the feeling of falling a hundred floors in a nonstop elevator, and in this fall every sense of life was drained from me.[3]

But it is just here, at the bottom of their respective freefalls, that I would ask you to pay careful attention to what happens next. Bernadette Roberts hits the bottom of the elevator shaft, picks herself up, and keeps right on walking in the direction of pure transcendence, “God as he knows himself in himself.” She will endure several more successive peelings of the onion skin of herself until the last embers of self-reflexive consciousness have finally been extinguished altogether and God is at last “all in all.”

Thomas Keating rides the waterfall as it plunges toward nonexistence, only to find himself as he hits bottom firmly caught in the hydraulic of the Secret Embrace. Flung back toward the manifest by the cosmogonic force of that embrace, he turns and willingly heads in the direction it has pointed him, following his newfound “path to the Silent Love that we are.”

It is a small thing, perhaps, a symbolic gesture enacted in the realm of poetry. But you will see this moment writ large across the entire body of his final teaching and in the decisions he ultimately made about where to place his priorities as he lived out his final years.

Unity Consciousness and the Unmanifest

As one reads wider afield in late Thomas, it becomes abundantly clear that by the final five years of his life he had come to know plenty about transpersonal states beyond finite selfhood and was substantially living out of those states. Those who knew him could watch this process unfolding before their very eyes.

During these same years, he begins to speak more and more freely about something he calls “unity consciousness,” which he describes as “a further development of consciousness beyond the transforming union.” Broadly speaking, it equates closely to what most of the interspiritual world would call “nondual consciousness” or “nonduality.” But it includes an additional feature not commonly accentuated in standard definitions of nonduality: when fully activated, it confers the capacity to be directly in relationship with “that aspect of God that is un-manifest.”[4]

The Unmanifest is not a household term in Christian parlance, not even in contemplative circles. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Unmanifest is, metaphorically speaking, the dark side of the moon of God. It parallels the void of Advaitic Hinduism, the sunyata or pure emptiness of Buddhism, or in our own Christian mystical tradition, “the Godhead,” or “uncreated light.” It is often spoken of theologically as the Transcendent (Bernadette Roberts’s preferred term, which Thomas himself uses almost interchangeably). It is not a subjective feeling of absence or even of metaphysical nothingness, but an objective aspect of the eternal divine nature. And it is this aspect, Thomas now suggests, that is supremely in play in the night of self.

He first broaches this rather striking idea in that same chapter 27 in his Reflections on the Unknowable. Still taking as his point of departure St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose dark-night suffering was intensified even further by the total absence of any felt consolation from God, he opens his reflection with a breathtaking one-liner:

To be without consolation, especially spiritual, is to expose oneself to a relationship with a God who is un-manifest.[5]

Where did he ever come up with that? With the flick of a hand, he completely flips the picture. What had formerly felt like the “manifest absence” of God is now seen as “the absence of the manifest God”—which is simultaneously, of course (since there can be no vacuum in God), the presence of the unmanifest God. He has instantly reframed the entire situation; it is no longer about the subjective experience of loss but about the objective revelation of that more mysterious and hidden side of God.[6]

“It is a state of consciousness beyond transforming union,” Thomas reasons, because transforming union is “union with created grace and the revelation of God as Creator.”[7] By contrast, a direct relationship with this more hidden side of divine reality entails “learning to love beyond all the created graces of the spiritual journey”[8]—in the realm of the pure Unmanifest.

If this seems more than a little mind-bending (and it certainly is within the traditional Christian cosmovision), you will once again find the core reference points readily available in The Secret Embrace, where Thomas has already introduced the basic schematic that God exists in two modes: in manifest mode, as “the source of all creation,” and in unmanifest mode, as “infinite transcendence.”[9] The two are held together in a mysterious cosmogonic union, but they are nonetheless distinct modes of divine beingness and are accessed at different levels of consciousness. Virtually everything up to and including the transforming union, he daringly suggests, pertains to God in manifest mode—“union with created grace and the revelation of God as Creator.” Further progression beyond transforming union requires the activation of a new level of consciousness that is capable of gazing on pure transcendence and entering directly into relationship with it. That is the essential hallmark of Thomas’s unity consciousness. It is not simply about divine oneness sparkling through everything; it is that which sustains and undergirds the direct contemplative gaze into the Unmanifest. In this cardinal insight, Thomas Keating and Bernadette Roberts are on virtually the same page, just as they are in their understanding that this capacity is activated only in tandem with the suspension of the self-reflexive property of consciousness. Both affirm that full initiation into this new mode of perception is the supreme work of the night of self.

So, it would seem that indeed their insights are increasingly convergent, and in large part this is so, particularly in their respective last five years. In hers, she grew more accepting of an interspiritual perspective; in his, he increasingly took to heart her trenchant criticism of consciousness as the mother of all dualism. By his final book, That We May Be One (2018), he is ready to concur that “being aware of ourselves and of God is a kind of duality” and that “even in the transforming union we are still two.” He, too, will affirm here that “the ultimate consciousness is the total oneness in which God is all in all.”[10]

But what does it mean to say that God is all in all? I believe it is just here, on this seemingly minor theological quibble, that their two versions of no self prove themselves to be finally irreconcilable.

“Me, Myself, and Mine”

If the final measure of an attained state of no self is (as Bernadette Roberts stipulates) the permanent suspension of the self-reflexive property of consciousness and the permanent collapse of the bipolar selfhood it mechanically generates, then there is little choice but to conclude that Thomas Keating never fully arrived there. To the very end, both kinds of selfhood were alive and well in him and he migrated fluidly between them, at one moment radiating pure cosmic spaciousness, at the next fretting over some minor crisis in Contemplative Outreach. If the bottom line was the permanent cessation of “small Thomas,” he never quite got there. This was not, however, because he somehow failed to go the distance. I believe it was because he had come to understand that both modes of himself were somehow required for the expression of the dynamic fullness that is in fact the “all in all of God.”

How he came to understand this, I believe, is the underlying hidden teaching of The Secret Embrace.

You will find it there, implicitly or explicitly, in every one of his eight poems, and once you recognize it as the unifying principle, you will see how it draws these poems into a flowing “before and after” pattern. The first two poems offer a general overview of the terrain and introduce his foundational image of the Secret Embrace, the next three trace his dark-night passage, and the final three celebrate the view from his new and more spacious perspective. The eye of the needle comes in his fifth poem, “The Last Laugh,” in which I believe he symbolically reenacts for us his moment of spiritual awakening.

We have already noted in our preliminary exploration of this poem that it revolves structurally around a turn. It clearly depicts some sort of state change, some profound inner shift. In Thomas’s own language, it captures a moment of true metanoia—“Change the direction in which you are looking for happiness!” On the “before” side of the divide, he is hunkered down inside his small self, terrified of imminent annihilation. On the “after” side, his selfhood has grown vast and luminous as he serenely prepares to assume his place in “the dance of human nature with That Which Is.” His view has shifted from the personal to the transpersonal, from the self-referential to the cosmic.

All in all, his experience follows the pattern of a classic nondual awakening: the dramatic breakthrough to a higher level of consciousness. While such inner shifts do not necessarily entail cognitive content, I would venture to suggest that in this case it most likely does. The fact that he ties it so powerfully to such a strong (and strikingly unusual) visual metaphor points for me toward a revelation, a sudden, game-changing insight that was actually imparted to him during a time of deep existential despair. Whether that revelation came to him in the telescoped fashion depicted in the poem or grew gradually in him over the course of many months or even many years, the image of the Secret Embrace remained vividly with him and became the unifying metaphor not only for his final collection of poetry but also for the final years of his human life.

What did he come to know in that “waterfall” experience that he may not have known before? What is the essence of the revelation captured for him within that powerful cosmogonic metaphor of the Secret Embrace?

Something prompts me to invoke Thomas Merton at this point. Poised on a similar inner precipice as he prepared to embark on his final journey to the Far East in 1968, he offered a spontaneous farewell teaching to the nuns of Our Lady of the Redwoods Monastery in California:

You have to experience duality for a long time before you see it’s not there… . Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises, Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.[11]

It may have been something along those lines for Thomas Keating as well. Somehow, in that breakthrough revelation (whether occurring in a nanosecond or over the course of many years), he came to know that there are indeed no levels. The Unmanifest is not higher, truer, more intrinsically holy than the manifest; they are interwoven aspects of the same oneness. The hidden path of love does not just lead to God; it emerges from God, its water flowing forth from that cosmogonic wellspring at the heart of the abyss. He came to know the great cosmogonic secret (Jacob Boehme called it the scientia) shrouded in that primordial uncreated light: that love requires both realms—manifest and unmanifest, “the source of all creation” and “infinite transcendence”—in order to fully realize its own fullness. This is the “hidden purpose” (Ephesians 1:9) for which the created order exists and toward which all its currents set.

To the end of his days, Thomas never took to my penchant for Gurdjieffian metaphysics. He never saw the point in the Law of Three. Yet without realizing it, he arrived at a near-perfect Law of Three resolution to the cosmogonic riddle, in which affirming force is carried by that “hidden purpose” intent on self-actualization, denying force by the eternal formless Unmanifest, and reconciling force by the manifest realm, in and through which they find their meeting ground. The progeny of their “secret embrace”—in Gurdjieffian terms, the “new arising” out of their dynamic interweaving—is Love. Love is not an a priori quality of the Eternal Unmanifest nature of God, because love can exist only in motion; it must dance its way into being.

Whether or not Thomas accepted the metaphysics, he certainly caught the drift. I have already, several times now, invoked one of Thomas’s most beautiful final teachings: “The presence of God should become a kind of fourth dimension to all of life. Our three-dimensional world is not the real world because the most important dimension is missing from it: namely, that from which everything that exists is emerging and returning in each micro-second of time.”[12] By those final years of his life, Thomas had come to actually see this new dimension: the manifest world emerging from the wellspring in every micro-second, its continuous regeneration the direct result of the unmanifest God willingly embracing form in order to actualize the mystery otherwise locked forever within the divine abyss.

For Bernadette Roberts, the All in All resides only in the pure Unmanifest, beyond that primordial point of bifurcation that wrested “consciousness” out of eternal “sciousness” and brought the whole created order jangling into existence.

For Thomas, the All in All is the entire dance: manifest and unmanifest, each in its own proper mode of being, dynamically joined in an eternal embrace, whose “secret can never be revealed” because it is the cosmogonic wellspring itself.

Thus, it comes as no real surprise that the place he will ultimately wind up (as he joyfully foreshadows in “The Last Laugh”) is not in no self but in true self, finally recognized in its true scale and cosmic function as the flowing oneness it has always been.

9

False Self, True Self, Red Self, Blue Self

In the beginning, back in that original signature teaching, there were just the two of them, the true self and the false self. The true self, Thomas taught, is the person you were created by God to be. The false self is the wary and defensive “homemade self” you constructed early in life to help protect you from a hostile and confusing world you didn’t yet know how to navigate. The distance between them is the spiritual journey. As the false self is gradually “dismantled” (under the benevolent guidance of the “Divine Therapist” and with the help of Centering Prayer), the true self shines more and more brightly—until one day, the false self is gone, and you wake up in the transforming union.

No wonder the Centering Prayer movement took off like a rocket. With such a simple, strong message and workable program, it was a sure bet. And even in its most naively oversimplified version (which I’ve just given you here), the program was still solid enough to get people pointed in the right direction and equip them with core spiritual skills needed for their ongoing journey. By the time they reached the next step, they would be ready for further instructions.

The greatest strength in Thomas Keating’s innovative new road map, as well as its greatest inherent weakness, lay in exactly the same place: in his unusual and highly psychologized placement of the false self.

The term “false self” does not originate with Thomas Keating. You will find it extensively in Thomas Merton and a number of other spiritual writers. But it is always used in a generic sense, essentially synonymous with ego functioning itself. For Merton, the ego self is per se the false self: the part that mistakes itself for the whole and creates its own reality in ignorance of or defiance of its connection to divine being.

In adapting the term to his own teaching, Thomas Keating added a very significant nuance. In his “psychologically updated” version, the false self is always wounded and virtually always neurotic. It comes into being specifically as a defense mechanism against wounds perceived before we reached the age of reason. Drawing heavily on modern developmental psychology, he traces how this “false self system” arises out of what he calls “the energy centers”: woundings in the three core areas of security/survival, esteem/affection, and power/control. These woundings in turn set in motion a vortex of attractions and aversions (attractions being those things we feel we need to have to survive, aversions being those things that push our buttons). Thomas’s version of the false self is not simply generic egoic functioning but a particularly maladapted version of egoic functioning in need of proper diagnosis and therapy.

This more restricted use of the term dovetails nicely with classic developmental psychology and has proved over the years to be a highly effective bridge between Centering Prayer and the contemporary recovery movement. But it inadvertently introduces a new possibility, not foreseen on the traditional spiritual road maps. If the false self is defined as a distorted version of egoic being, then it is all too easy to draw the conclusion that the true self would be the ego healed of its neurotic maladaptations—or in other words, the healthy ego.

This is, of course, a serious spiritual mistake. Whether healthy or unhealthy, the egoic operating system is still running the same program of perception, which is driven by the faculties and dependent on the self-reflexive mechanism of consciousness for its core sense of identity. It is exactly this operating system, and the sense of self generated by it, that will have to give way before the journey can progress beyond the illuminative stage, the highest stage that can be navigated with an autonomous egoic selfhood still as the center of identity. From there, all spiritual progress requires moving into a new and more spacious form of selfhood still largely unrecognized within the mainstream psychotherapeutic professions.

Thomas would surely have been well aware that he was introducing a potentially problematic shortcut when he created his original teaching. As a seasoned apophatic mystic himself, he was thoroughly conversant with the traditional spiritual teachings on ego transcendence. Whether he was briefly carried away with the possibilities of the new psychological road map, or whether he took a calculated risk (engaging “skillful means,” as the Buddhists would say) to get people out of their spiritual armchairs and onto the road toward healing and holiness, he took the risk, presented the false self as he did—and his signature teaching was born.

But there would come a time, and I believe he knew it from the start, when his followers would begin to bump their heads on these artificially lowered psychological ceilings, and his presentation of the false self would need to be steered back closer to the traditional understanding. Meanwhile, as his own journey carried him steadily deeper into those unitive waters and the psychological paradigm began to lose a bit of its earlier glitter, you can watch him moving the true self–false self goalposts steadily further down the playing field. The two original terms—true self and false self—are still retained in his later teaching, and he never disavows the original meanings he gave them. But with each new iteration, the true self becomes increasingly more spacious, fluid, and diaphanous, and the false self gradually morphs from being a psychologically maladapted defense mechanism to being any fixed point of reference whatsoever. Meanwhile, along the way, a few more selves have joined the pack.

“The Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit”

Thomas’s first gambit toward widening the definitions of both true self and false self begins during that “middle Thomas” phase as we watch him begin to identify true self not with one’s own unique set of personal characteristics but with those more transpersonal spiritual qualities traditionally known as the “fruits of the spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23)—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. He adds to these the “gifts of the spirit” enumerated by Paul (1 Corinthians 12:4–11)—wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues—to come up with his master list of transpersonal qualities collectively packaged in his 2011 book Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit. From a theological perspective, fruits and gifts are distinctly different, but for Thomas’s purposes it works well enough to bundle them together because they both point in the same direction. True self lies in the exercise of these transpersonal qualities as they manifest through one’s own unique particularity. Ultimately, they are the aspects of the One True Self, who is Christ—not a badge of personal identification but our particular mode of participation in the one mystical body of Christ.

He may have borrowed this idea from Bernadette Roberts, who developed it strongly in her own work, but it is also a very well-trodden path in Christian spirituality—“It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20)—so there is no need to assign direct attribution to Roberts. Thomas invokes that celebrated Pauline phrase frequently in his writings, and the way he works with the idea is distinctly different from Roberts, so the resemblance may be no more than coincidental. It is in any case the natural next step in his own progression. With this small shift he lifts true self free and clear of the danger zone of being mistaken for “the healthy ego” and places it increasingly in the collective and dynamic, shared symbiotically as one participates more and more fully in that mystical whole. As the waves of false-self agitation increasingly subside and our inner seas become more calm and ordered, what is reflected in this mirror is not our own face but that of Christ, manifesting in us, through us, and as us. Our true self, so to speak, is not our personal set of delimiting characteristics but an emergent property of the greater whole to which we belong. While Thomas does not explicitly use the term “emergent property,” he is clearly intuiting along these lines as the idea of “you are what you dance” steadily gains force in him.

Egoic Selfhood

By the beginning of “late Thomas,” he has quietly reinserted the category “ego self” as an intermediary between “false self” and “true self,” using the term in its traditional sense (as, for instance, both Merton and Constance FitzGerald use it) to designate the core structure of autonomous selfhood, driven by the faculties and dependent on the self-reflexive consciousness. In a single, brief sentence in his book God Is All in All (as you recall, published in 2019 but dating from a series of talks given in 2012), he announces the new dispensation: “The false self has to go, and the dark night of sense takes care of that. The ego must go, and the dark night of spirit takes care of that.”[1] From here till the end, the ego is officially back in the schematic.

In his ever-remarkable Reflections on the Unknowable, Thomas unpacks this development still further. “We are not our false selves or egos,” he writes. “Kiss them goodbye. They have no future.”[2] Here he is clearly using “false self” in his familiar way, to designate that neurotic “homemade self” who was the sole bad actor in his original presentation. But the ego is now subtly differentiated from that bad actor; in this new context, it seems to correspond more closely to what I earlier termed “the healthy ego.” He even here acknowledges (for the first time ever as far as I am aware) that “we have to have an ego in some degree to function in this life.” There will clearly be no official Contemplative Outreach program forthcoming for “dismantling the ego.”

And yet the ego (along with the false self) will eventually have to go, because “they have no future.” And they have no future, spiritually speaking—and on this point I believe he and Constance FitzGerald would heartily concur—because both are tied to an autonomous self-structure generated within a basically dualistic operating system of perception, which is still tied to the causality of this world and hence ends at the grave. As we have seen already, all further progression beyond the illuminative requires the shift to a different mode of perception (or “higher level of consciousness,” as Thomas increasingly prefers to call it), and this will be the real business initiated in the dark night of spirit (and completed, he intimates, in the night of self). On the other side of this watershed lies the capacity to gaze directly upon the Unmanifest, which is the future poised on the cusp of its own actualization.

The Separate Self

Perhaps more telling, however, is that at about this same time, and often in conjunction with the mention of the ego, Thomas also begins to allude more and more frequently to something he calls a “separate self.” In Reflections on the Unknowable, he bundles these three “lower selfhoods” together and explains again why they collectively have no future:

There is no death except for the false self, the ego, and the separate-self sense, all of which create and sustain the illusion of separateness.[3]

In and of itself, this “illusion of separateness” is a core theme underlying all of Thomas’s teaching. “The notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition,” he repeatedly told me.[4] But as his own understanding of levels of consciousness (and degrees of separation) become increasingly nuanced, is this “separate self” or “separate-self sense” intended as simply another synonym for the ego, or does it have a more specific and limited meaning? The telling clue is revealed in stanzas 3 and 4 of his opening poem of The Secret Embrace, “Out of a Stone:”

As the false self diminishes,

And the ego becomes a servant,

Everything turns into poetry

And everything becomes a movement of Divine Love.

But, the separate self lingers on.

Once the separate self has been laid to rest,

The Divine Presence alone remains,

And the Creator of all becomes all in all.

If we factor this equation using the terms we’ve been learning, the situation described in stanza four would necessarily define the illuminative stage of the journey. This is the stage at which the ego self is still firmly in the driver’s seat of personal identity, but with its will now reliably conformed to the divine will. And so of course “the separate self still lingers on,” because the separate self is still the autonomous self, continuously regenerating its core sense of identity through the egoic operating system, still firmly in the grip of self-reflexive consciousness.

But at what point is the separate self laid to rest? Does that come at the beginning of the unitive stage, with the upending of the faculties in the dark night of spirit? Or does it come much later, with the final collapse of self-reflexive consciousness that inaugurates the night of self? Thomas leaves the answer a bit ambiguous; you can really play it either way. But for me what finally tips his hand in the direction of this second option is his phrase

The Divine Presence alone remains,

And the Creator of all becomes all in all.

Notice how he says, with meticulous precision, “The Creator of all becomes all in all.” It is a small detail unless it isn’t. Throughout this first poem he consistently refers to what Christians would traditionally call God as “the Creator.” But in his second poem he will introduce his all-important nuance: that this Creator God is in fact joined at the hip with “infinite transcendence,” so that “the Creator of all becomes all in all” only in the Secret Embrace, where those two modes of divine beingness are fully reunited in an eternal symbiotic unity. For Thomas, this point of reunion is accessed through the Unmanifest[5]—and the Unmanifest, in turn, is directly perceived as divine presence only as the self-reflexive mode of consciousness is transcended. So, my own preference is to take the interpretation to its more literal extreme and say that the separate self is finally laid to rest only with the full establishment of what Thomas calls “unity consciousness.” Thomas himself seems to concur with this interpretation when he writes in Reflections on the Unknowable: “The movement toward Unity Consciousness is experiencing the divine as our ultimate self, in which case the false self, ego, and separate self are laid to rest.”[6]

The separate self, I believe, represents Thomas’s growing awareness of that annoyingly bipolar nature of dualistic consciousness as it incessantly divides the field into “subjective” and “objective” poles, experience and experiencer. The separate self is the penumbral by-product of that lower level of consciousness, and it will be left behind when one arrives at nonduality. Then indeed, the divine presence alone remains, and the two modes of God (Creator and Eternal Unmanifest) rejoin as a single field of silent, boundless presence. As we explored in the last chapter, this corresponds for Roberts to the attainment of no self. For Thomas, it corresponds to the full realization of unity consciousness.

True Self and Ultimate Self

In his final book, That We May Be One, Thomas introduces yet another term to his growing taxonomy of selfhoods: the ultimate Self. He does so coyly, deliberately not capitalizing the u in “ultimate” so that it can still pass muster as an adjective and not a whole new species of Selfhood (or No Selfhood, as the case may be). But he does say point-blank that “the ultimate Self is beyond the True Self. It is the Word of God manifesting in our own particular human uniqueness.”[7] He does not here specify whether this is the Word of God manifesting in our own particular human uniqueness as perceived through our own particular human uniqueness, but judging from what has just gone before, I would venture to say that the ultimate Self implicitly transcends this self-reflexive perceptual lens; it simply is what is.

True Self?

What, then, remains of the True Self? If there is a greater self still lying beyond it, it is obviously no longer the end of the road. But what is it then? Was it all along only another mirage of self-reflexive consciousness, or does it still have its own unique and valid place in the greater “all in all” of God?

In the more limited and quantifiable sense, it would seem that the pendulum of True Self finally comes to rest in the early unitive, and specifically in the transforming union. In a way, this is like coming full circle, because this is exactly where Thomas originally placed the True Self—but now with an additional thirty years of lived wisdom under his belt. It is indeed the highest and truest form of “the Word of God manifesting in our own particular human uniqueness” as perceived through our own deepest inner subjectivity—in other words, through the “I” pole of self-reflexive consciousness. All sense of fixity has now dropped out—“nowhere is my destination and no one is my identity”—but the self-reflexive mechanism itself is still fully functional, resulting in a very strong felt sense of “I AM,” reverberating at both poles of consciousness in full sympathetic resonance:

When there is no more “me, myself, or mine,”

Only “I AM” remains.

But that configuration, as we have seen, corresponds to the early stage of unitive, before Roberts’s Phase IV extension, at which point,

Then the “I” may fall away,

[the subjective pole of self-reflexive consciousness]

Leaving just the AM.

[the objective pole, or what Thomas calls “Isness itself”[8]]

The True Self is and remains the end of the road for finite selfhood as viewed through the pixel of separated consciousness that we mostly are in this life. Once that viewing platform is permanently transcended, the term is no longer relevant. Even if this form of selfhood is true and valid in a limited sort of way, it moves too slowly for the new speed of consciousness. In Thomas’s unity consciousness, there are no longer any fixed points of reference; it is all pure motion.

The Taxonomy of Selfhood

In the beginning, it was all very simple. There were just the two of them, the true self and the false self. By the end of the journey thirty years later, Thomas’s taxonomy of selfhood has grown considerably. In addition to his original twosome, there are now three new categories: ego, separated self, and ultimate Self. Each of these new additions turns out to have a specific and quantifiable meaning and an identifiable place on the traditional Dionysian spiritual road map.

Here is what the fully fleshed-out true self–false self schematic now looks like:

♦ False self: Finite, “homemade” self, essentially pathological. Dismantled in dark night of sense. On the other side lies the illuminative stage.

♦ Ego: Necessary but limited autonomous selfhood driven by faculties. Disarmed in dark night of spirit. On the other side lies the unitive stage.

♦ Separate self: Lingering dualistic perception dividing subject from object, experiencer from experience. Transcended in night of self. On the other side lies unity consciousness.

♦ True self: “The Word of God manifesting in our own particular human uniqueness” as perceived through our own deepest inner subjectivity. “I AM” as perceived through the lens of self-reflexive consciousness. Transcended in night of self. On the other side lies unity consciousness.

♦ Ultimate Self: Unmediated (i.e., nonreflexive) participation in the Unmanifest, experienced as pure presence; divine reality cosmogonically reunited as one.

But for all this necessary and helpful refinement, true self and false self still remain the metaphorical bookends, and Thomas does, in fact, use these terms metaphorically at least as frequently as he does empirically. The false self, in its more restricted analytical usage, continues to mean that pathological “homemade self” that must be exposed and dismantled before any genuine spiritual progress is made. In a broader sense, however, it is whatever comprises the rung just beneath it on the ladder of consciousness; whatever it was that was once perceived as real and solid “I” but now is recognized as idolatry and constriction. In the same way, true self is whatever points in the direction of greater interior freedom and spaciousness.

Thus, for the egoic level of consciousness, the false self is indeed that defended “homemade self.” For unitive consciousness, the “false self” is the entire conscious structure of autonomous selfhood. For unity consciousness, the false self is any or all perception generated through self-reflexive consciousness resulting in a bipolar (subjective-objective) perceptual field and its accompanying “illusion of separateness.” True self is always what points in the opposite direction, ever toward that greater flowing oneness.

In the end, very simply, the false self winds up being any fixed reference point at all. And the true self is increasingly the capacity to simply be with the Isness, to become that perpetually flowing “pointless point” that can somehow navigate the torrents of even that thunderous cosmogonic reunion when in heaven, as on earth, the “I” drops away, leaving just the “AM”—and there is finally only stillness.

10

God

Thomas Keating Loved God. This is probably the most patent obviosity in my entire book, but it is worth stating anyway because, well, it is and remains the center of everything he did. He was not pious—at least not by the time I had come to know him. He wore his relationship with God as comfortably and loosely as the oversize flannel shirt jackets that were pretty much his monastic habit for the final decade of his life. But it was a real relationship: lifelong, committed, dynamic, open-ended. And like all real relationships, it changed them both.

When Thomas made his public debut as a Christian contemplative teacher during the early 1980s, his immediate goal was to help people improve their relationship with God. He was well aware that many Christians had been deeply wounded by harsh and punitive stereotypes of God inflicted upon them in early childhood and were now justifiably wary of reengaging, particularly on a pathway that promised a growing “intimacy with God.” There can be no intimacy where there is no trust, and when you are still harboring a childhood fear that God is going to send you to hell or explode in a violent outburst of shaming and retribution, trust is hard to come by. A new, kinder and gentler image of God was clearly the first priority before the contemplative journey could even get out of the gate.

The master metaphor that Thomas would come up with to carry this reframing effort was of course the Divine Therapist. It was the centerpiece of his signature teaching, and given the psychological climate of the era, it was a stroke of genius. A therapist is wise, impartial, knows you better than you know yourself, and always has your well-being at heart. (Of course, a therapist also expects to be paid for services rendered, but there comes a point at which every metaphor breaks down.) “He” remains the authority figure during the therapy session (it’s a gender-inclusive metaphor, although Thomas always and only personally applied it in male gender), but can be counted on to share power in a helpful and respectful way. The metaphor did not bypass the psychological work that Thomas had come to believe was the backbone of the spiritual journey, but it was pointed toward a deeper, “divine” integration that lay ahead.

While we’re mentioning the obvious, it’s probably worth noting as well that the whole concept of prayer as “relationship with God,” foundational to Thomas’s teaching, is itself still a bit unusual in Roman Catholic religious circles—and was quantumly more so in the pre–Vatican II Catholicism in which Thomas and many of his earliest followers grew up. There, prayer tended to be rigidly transactional—petitions, penances—in which one addressed one’s requests and paid one’s debts. But from Thomas’s very first lecture in his first introductory workshops on Centering Prayer, he led off strongly with the concept of “prayer as relationship,” moving gracefully from there to picturing contemplative prayer simply as “relationship without words.” His touching metaphor for this was an elderly, long-married couple sitting together silently on a porch, simply enjoying each other’s company. That was for Thomas the essence of the God he himself had come to know and wished to reintroduce people to—because on that deeper, silent, relational ground, everything else in their spiritual journey ultimately depended.

Broadening the Image of God

While God in Thomas’s first attempt at reframing certainly became a kinder and gentler version of Himself, it was still very much “Himself.” The gender was still explicitly male. Thomas had swapped out a fierce and scary father figure for a gentler and more encouraging one, but the father figure remained—and would do so till the very end. In the “relationship with God” that he personally knew and cherished, God was always “he,” and that seemed to be OK with him. Unlike some of his more liberated spiritual contemporaries—Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Teilhard de Chardin, Andrew Harvey—he never bit on the divine feminine. He never seriously explored female-gendered images for God, and he dabbled in inclusive language more as a matter of courtesy than as a personal growing edge. He wasn’t insincere, exactly; it’s just not where the juice was flowing for him.

Where was the juice flowing for him, then? For, as the years progressed and his public stature continued to grow, it was clear that both his language for and imaging of God were broadening. This is in fact one of the most marked changes between the Thomas Keating of that signature teaching and the Thomas we meet in the final years of his life. His portrait of God has expanded from the individual and therapeutic to the collective and cosmic, and his frame of reference is no longer simply the Western Christendom of his own cultural conditioning but the entire human family in an era of unprecedented evolutionary change. In so many respects, “late Thomas” talks and behaves like a poster child for the Integral evolutionary movement of our times (for which he is, in fact, one of the honorary founding fathers), and it is in this wider, more expansive mode that many outside traditional Christianity have come to know and admire him. It’s easy to observe this transformation at arm’s length and draw the usual conclusions: that he left behind the small, male, paternal God of his Catholic Christian upbringing and moved into a permanently more transpersonal and spacious place, outgrowing the antiquated language tied to an antiquated theology tied to an antiquated cosmology.

Except that it didn’t quite play out that way. The full story is somewhat more nuanced—and way more human.

Cosmology and Evolutionary Consciousness

As I see it, the primary drivers of Thomas’s rapidly expanding concept of God clearly were his growing involvement in the interspiritual dialogue and his deepening fascination with the new models of cosmology and conscious evolution emerging from contemporary science. He was hot on the trail of what many today call “cosmic consciousness,” the next tier on the evolutionary road map. As his gravitation toward these higher echelons of consciousness increased, his new images for divinity reflected this shift. His use of gender-neutral, transpersonal terms expanded markedly: “the Absolute,” “the Source of All That Is,” “the Creator of All,” “Ultimate Reality,” “the Source,” “the Divine,” “Presence,” “Isness.” And as his own interior life grew steadily more spacious and unboundaried, he delved even more deeply into the new cosmological models, whose sheer vastness and dynamism offered congenial new ways of imaging what he had already tasted inside. Increasingly, he found himself bumping up against the walls of the old “flat earth” cosmologies on which so much of traditional Christian theology is based.

In his clarion keynote address to the 2012 Contemplative Outreach annual conference (which eventually became his 2019 book God Is All in All), he stated daringly that any attempt to build a living faith on a cosmology that is out-of-date is doomed for disaster: “People cannot be expected to be impressed with belief systems that rely on a cosmology that everybody knows does not exist.”[1] Like so many contemporary Christian mystics—Teilhard de Chardin, Beatrice Bruteau, Ilia Delio—he walked boldly into these new scientific waters in search of a cosmology that would match the size and the scale of what he had already intuited in his own cosmic heart. Science became more and more for him an authentic revelation of God.[2] Step by step, he was drawn deeper into cosmology and directly toward the threshold of cosmogonic mysticism, the question of “Why does anything exist in the first place?” And it is here, standing on that threshold, that he will offer his original and profound solution to the cosmic riddle that has undergirded his entire life’s journey: “Who is God for you?”

A Rising Tide of Silence

It begins not in theory but in practice. One of the most significant transitions during the final decade of Thomas’s life is his increasing capacity to perceive silence not as an emptiness but as direct presence. It meets him, exchanges with him, and has its own mode of aliveness that he can now directly engage. I do not know exactly when this transition began, but certainly by 2011 he was speaking to me about it quite animatedly nearly every time we met. He describes it succinctly in his 2017 book From the Mind to the Heart: “Perhaps we could say that contemplation occurs when interior silence morphs into presence.”[3] Describing this transition more fully, he adds:

This presence, once established in our inmost being, might be called spaciousness. There is nothing in it but a certain vibrancy and aliveness. You’re awake. But awake to what, you don’t know. You’re awake to something that you can’t describe and which is absolutely marvelous, totally generous, and which manifests itself with increasing tenderness, sweetness, and intimacy.[4]

As this capacity opens in Thomas, he finds himself increasingly able to gaze directly into this formless spaciousness, and his teachings on the Unmanifest begin to take off. (This is the ground we initially covered in my earlier chapter on Thomas Keating in the night of self.) In his early attempts to help people visualize this unfamiliar new terrain, he initially introduces parallels from other sacred traditions, such as the “pure emptiness” of Buddhism or the void of Advaitic Hinduism. He explains, “To relate to God as uncreated—the void of absolute nothingness [italics mine]—if shared by a growing number of people would contribute immensely to the transformation of the human race.”[5] But he abandons this analogy fairly quickly, possibly because he realizes that “the void of absolute nothingness” still registers as unfathomably scary to many Christians, but more likely because his own epicenter has begun to shift.

Thomas does not remain long in the pure Unmanifest. From whatever point in his life that revelation of the Secret Embrace came to him, his center of attention is no longer on the void but on the wellspring, that point of primordial emergence of “somethingness out of nothing.” The Unmanifest morphs in his understanding from absolute emptiness to infinite potential. As he comments tellingly in From the Mind to the Heart: “In this context, if we speak of emptiness, we are not speaking of just emptiness, but of emptiness that is beginning to be filled with Presence.”[6] It is this growing realization that undergirds his most lyrical and mature late teachings on the nature of God.

Why does anything exist at all? It is not a question you will find occupying the pages of early Thomas. But in the final decade of his life, as “the God I thought I knew” increasingly recedes on the horizon, what emerges in its stead is simply the sheer, “thunderous” energy of that divine presence, nondirectional and yet fulsome, spilling out from that wellspring like the river of life itself. In one of his most beautiful essays in Reflections on the Unknowable, he writes:

Nothing really matters because everything matters and is happening at the same time. Nothing is remembered or forgotten; it is all here at once. Everything is in movement, going nowhere but enjoying everywhere and everything. This is creation: endless, delightful, unpredictable, unbelievable; just is-ness and is-ing playing with goodness, beauty, and truth; without purpose, without plan, without judgment; in perfect peace in the midst of activity and no activity.[7]

This is Thomas at his peak—fully mature, cosmically expansive—and this is who God is for Thomas when he is in that place (which toward the end of his life is more and more of the time). With the eye of his heart wide open, he not only sees but directly feels this cosmogonic divine presence flowing through life as a “kind of fourth dimension”—creating, weaving, and harmonizing in an eternally self-generating, flowing oneness. You might call it nonduality-in-motion: Thomas’s unique and profound answer to the great cosmogonic riddle.

The Secret Embrace and the Law of Three

I take it as one of life’s great missed opportunities that because of his resistance to Gurdjieff and the Law of Three, Thomas failed to connect the dots between what he intuitively grasped in this seeing and the Mystery of the Trinity, which has long needed precisely this missing cosmogonic dimension to reveal itself as the quintessential mandala of Christian nonduality that it actually is.

Thomas’s Trinitarian theology, per se, remains curiously undeveloped throughout his theological career. He made several passes at it across four decades’ worth of books but always got stuck at exactly the same place, at what the theologian Raimon Panikkar calls the amor curvus (or “closed curve of love”), the traditional stipulation of Christian Trinitarian theology.[8] This is the assumption that the love between the Father and the Son is fully contained within the Trinity itself, the Holy Spirit functioning as a “carrier pigeon,” so to speak, delivering the Father’s love to the Son and the Son’s back to the Father. The love remains fluid and expressive within the Godhead, but there is no internal imperative toward its outward expression in a manifest world.

This is exactly the missing piece Thomas would have found in the Law of Three had he been willing to look. Also known as “the Law of World Creation,” this ostensibly universal metaphysical principle demonstrates why the presence of three strands of dynamically interwoven lines of action necessarily catalyzes an outward manifestation in a new dimension of being. Essentially, in the mandala of the Trinity, the three divine persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are the symbolic personifications of these three lines of action or “forces.” The first line, called affirming, is the pushing force: it inaugurates the action and carries the forward motion. Denying is the resisting force: it can be either actively or passively oppositional, but the net effect is to hinder or retard the forward motion. Reconciling (or “third force”) is initially a product of both these forces, but once engendered, it functions as a third and independent line of action through which these other two inherently oppositional forces can enter a new relational ground. This in turn gives rise to a resolution that is not simply a compromise or synthesis but a whole new playing field with spiritual generativity of its own. The classic example typically offered in Gurdjieffian circles is plaintiff (affirming), defendant (denying), judge (reconciling), and verdict (new arising). The basic shorthand is that the dynamic interweaving of the three produces a fourth in a new dimension, which is beholden to all three but identical to none. It is genuinely its own new arising.

Gurdjieff did not invent this “Law” (which is being regularly rediscovered nowadays across a broad spectrum of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities), but he was the first to articulate it as a universal metaphysical principle and to link it explicitly to the Trinity. It is a wheel that seems to keep getting reinvented—most recently, and I would daresay in spite of himself, by Thomas Keating.

Without any conscious intent to do so, Thomas intuitively replicated a perfect Law of Three configuration in his mandala of the Secret Embrace. Affirming or first force is carried by God in manifesting mode: what Thomas variously calls the Creator of all, the Source, or sometimes simply God. Denying force is God in Unmanifest mode, “the void of absolute nothingness,” “infinite transcendence,” that which is beyond all naming, grasping, or understanding. Reconciling force begins in the Secret Embrace, that mysterious divine knowingness that somehow understands both modes are necessary and initiates their blending in order to activate the manifest world, which will bear forth the All in All. It can be borne forth in no other way.[9]

The imagery here is implicitly conjugal. It is perhaps yet another obviosity to point out that the immediate, literal context of the word “embrace” (from the Latin in bracchio, “arms around”) is in the domain of sexuality: of lovemaking, procreation, and generativity. While subtly evoked, it is also clearly intentional. The Secret Embrace is generative. It brings worlds into existence. It is not simply an approving hug; this is the cosmos regenerating itself in each microcosmic moment through the continuous reenactment of that primordial Trinitarian embrace.

The Alchemy of Love

“I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.” In this beautiful saying from the Islamic mystical tradition, God also speaks of a secret treasure, hidden deep within the divine abyss, that yearns to be known and requires the entire gamut of manifestation—“worlds both visible and invisible”—in order to do so. Implicitly, God must “love” the world into existence in order for this ultimate act of divine self-disclosure to play out.

Is love itself the “hidden treasure”? Thomas never explicitly says so. But fascinatingly, whenever he speaks of the God in Creator mode—as in his first poem, “Out of a Stone”—virtually every reference to this aspect of God also pairs it with the word “love” (emphasis mine):

Can the Creator of all …

cause a stirring of Divine Love in a human heart?

All is possible for the Creator of all,

Who loves to manifest the impossible

In endless configurations.

… And everything becomes a movement of Divine Love.

Remember as well that at the moment of Thomas’s recreated epiphany in “The Last Laugh,” what opens in the center of that embrace is “the path to the Silent Love that we are.” The embrace is evidently the path to the Silent Love that GOD is as well—a stunning statement when you come to think of it.

Trinitarian Nonduality

As his mental pictures collapse beneath him during the dark night of spirit, Thomas comments in his poem “Twilight of the Self,” “If this is union, there is neither two in One, nor one without another.” These lines are clearly an allusion to models of nonduality as he has previously understood them cognitively. “Two in One” is the classic Christian unitive—“My deepest me is God.” This is God and God’s creature joined in a union of hearts, but with the abyss between creature and Creator still somehow intact, betraying the dualistic level of consciousness that is still subtly lurking in it. “One without the other” is the solution of classic monism, the dropping away of the illusion of form so that perfect oneness is regained within the primordial Unmanifest. (This, as we saw, was the route Bernadette Roberts ultimately took and the point at which she and Thomas finally part company.) Threeness offers yet another option: the path of dynamic integration and equilibrium. Thomas’s intuitive and spiritually precocious solution preserves both form and the formless, both the Creator of all and the Infinite Transcendence, by linking them in an eternal cosmogonic union of hearts (before anything began to be), so that both modes of divine beingness not only can be but must be for the final, full expression of the All in All. Union is attained not in the collapse of two into one but in the expansion of two into three—into a whole new dimension that holds the two opposing forces together and brings them together in a new and spiritually generative resolution.

This may in fact be what the Trinity has been trying to tell us all along, once it is more penetratingly understood as an esoteric mandala. The concept of a “Trinitarian nonduality” has not as yet been formally articulated in any study I am aware of, largely because the interpretive models for nonduality are still overwhelmingly derived from the Asian spiritual traditions. But the notion is there, implicitly, in some of Christianity’s most subtle nondual thinkers: in Jacob Boehme, Raimon Panikkar, Beatrice Bruteau—and of course, in G. I. Gurdjieff. And now in Thomas Keating. I believe that this is what he has essentially bequeathed us in his final volume of poetry. Intuitively, he has grasped the whole “Law of Three” dynamic and evoked in poetry what he could not as yet articulate theologically. It is now there for a future generation to unpack, and I suspect that may well prove to be his most mature and enduring gift to Christian nonduality as it emerges into its own authentic form.

The Nondual Personal

The other important thing to know about the Secret Embrace is that it resolves most of those sticky issues around Thomas’s continuing personal relationship with God.

If you’ve been on a spiritual path for any length of time, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that sooner or later everything in the Western spiritual tradition seems to wind up hierarchical. It’s all about levels, stages, development, progress. That was true from the start, way back with Pseudo-Dionysius, it was true right through the Middle Ages,[10] and it emerged with redoubled force in our own times when contemporary developmental psychology met up with traditional ladders of spiritual consciousness to create the new Integral evolutionary road maps.[11] In the common understanding emerging from these maps, the personal belongs to a lower level of evolutionary consciousness, the upper limit of which is the mental-rational stage. The nondual realms are “impersonal” (or at the very least, transpersonal), and continued attachment to a personal God and the devotional structure supporting this perception are evidence of still being “stuck in dualism.” When one “becomes a man,” spiritually speaking, one “puts away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11).

Thomas knew that well, never challenged it directly, and yet never completely walked it. At his most mystically expansive, he was totally at home in that most far-flung, formless cosmogonic presence that he came to call “Ultimate Reality” or “Isness itself.”[12] We have just seen abundant evidence of that. He was as comfortable in the Unmanifest as in the manifest and could effortlessly pivot in either direction. But for him, it was never actually a ladder of spiritual evolution, although he always talked that way. He was also equally at home in the personal, and sometimes, touchingly, would intercede in the midst of his cosmic meanderings to reanthropomorphize them. In one breath he speaks about God being pure “Isness”; in the next breath he adds, “So we might just call him ‘Izzy’ …”

As I said at the outset of this chapter, Thomas loved God. That love never faded. It was a real relationship, and that relationship naturally and easily settled in for Thomas in that familiar zone of the personal: God as loving father. Although, as a woman, I still wince a bit, I completely understand why he never seriously engaged with the divine feminine or alternative feminine representations of God: it would have felt to him like an intellectual manipulation, and his heart simply was not in it. God was never a “what” to Thomas but always and only a “who,” and when he was in that personal mode with God, the proper form of address was always and only “He.” He simply could not do otherwise; he was an old-school patriarch, and God was the abiding love of his life.

With his intuitive discovery of the Law of Three, however, Thomas could at last seize on the reassurance that the personal does indeed have its rightful place. It is not an immature developmental stage to be “transcended and included” but an enduring and expressive mode of relationship within the All in All. In an extraordinary final synthesis in That We May Be One, as succinct as it is stunning, he announces seamlessly: “God is infinitely diverse and infinitely One at the same time. The God of creation is totally available and the un-manifest God is totally transcendent.”[13] In “available” mode, God can be anybody or nobody—anything or “no-thing”—whatever works best to support the immediacy of the connection. That is the breakthrough Thomas so beautifully celebrates in his poem “Out of Nothing.” Having just taken us to the outer limits of divine formlessness (“Then the ‘I’ may fall away, leaving just the AM”), he then ropes us right back into the familiar theological language that one could hear from any traditional Christian pulpit (“God empowers our powerlessness so that we never despair of unconditional forgiveness and infinite mercy”).

What does it matter what language you use, who you are, where you are? Nothing can fall out of God. Every level of consciousness, every path of relationship is its own unique mode of divine presence, and divine reality gladly makes use of them all to get the job done. Whatever best serves the needs of love in that moment is where the divine current will be flowing, even if it looks to our compulsively hierarchizing and judging minds like a step backward. For Thomas Keating, the streambed of the personal never ran dry, and he and “Daddy God” apparently still had a few things to say to each other that could be spoken in that language only before the subject-object polarity on which it depended was ready to be permanently relinquished. And in the end, the currents would suddenly flow hard and strong again through that well-worn channel as Thomas prepared to take his final leave of earthly life.

—

In the last nine months of his life, and despite his earlier proclamation that “religious rituals and symbols … are meaningless to me now,” Thomas returned faithfully to his old monastic breviary, reading and digesting the psalms as he had from his earliest years of monastic formation. In July of that year, Fr. Carl Arico paid him a bedside visit in the infirmary back in Spencer and asked Thomas’s permission to pray with him the Abandonment Prayer of Charles de Foucauld.[14] Thomas eagerly accepted the invitation and seized upon the prayer like a long-lost friend. He prayed it frequently from then on, and when that became too much for him to manage, he asked for it to be prayed over him by his monastic brethren:

Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.

Whatever you may do, I thank you.

I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures.

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;

I offer it to you

With all the love of my heart,

For I love you, Lord,

And so I need to give myself,

To surrender myself into your hands

Without reserve

And with boundless confidence,

For you are my Father.

Amen.[15]

When I shared this vignette at a recent Centering Prayer conference, one participant asked a telling question: “Why do you think he regressed in this way?” Because of course that’s what the contemporary road maps have taught us: when you’ve been at the transpersonal level of consciousness and drop “back” to the personal, you’ve regressed. In his heart of hearts, Thomas knew otherwise. This was not a regression, only the return of a mode of relationship that had carried him all his life. The personal, far better than the impersonal, is the vehicle of choice for tenderness, intimacy, and selfless devotion; for making one’s final, warm-blooded surrender.

—

What Thomas never knew, since he got his evolutionary road map entirely from Ken Wilber, is that in the original prototype that Wilber largely developed his own model from—Jean Gebser’s magisterial The Ever-Present Origin[16]—these “levels of consciousness” as we now know them were called structures of consciousness, not levels of consciousness, and certainly not stages of consciousness. Gebser vehemently rejected the developmental model. For him, those four primordial structures of consciousness—archaic, magic, mythic, and mental, plus the fifth, now dawning on the horizon, the integral—are not stages to be passed through en route to the next developmental milestone, but permanent relational channels between divine consciousness and its human receiving stations, collectively recapitulated in the evolution of the human race. Like rooms in a museum, they exist with their own ambience and integrity. They do not blend or supplant one another but are always available, each with its own mode of numinous expressiveness, each adding a new layer of depth and dimensionality to our deepening capacity to bear the whole. The personal was a cherished room in Thomas’s museum, not a developmental level. “There are no levels,” as Thomas Merton wisely reminded—only precious pathways of love. And in the end, that pathway of love that Thomas Keating and God had walked together for nearly ten decades is what would finally lead him home.

11

Becoming God

In the final years of his life, Thomas began to talk more and more openly about “becoming God.” Sometimes he cushioned the invitation ever so slightly—“becoming one with God”[1]—but sometimes it was right there in your face, bold and unabashed. The very boldness of that invitation, combined with a few incautious or perhaps insufficiently contextualized comments (such as his infamous “You can’t see God because when you are God, there is nothing to see”) have left more than a few of his more theologically traditional followers with the feeling that the rug has just been pulled completely out from under them.

The most problematic texts come, predictably, in his final works, particularly in God Is All in All and From the Mind to the Heart, the latter of these two based on a live conversation with Thomas’s longtime friend and interspiritual colleague John Osborne. In that conversation, surrounded by a spiritually prepared and sophisticated audience, he pulled out all the stops and spoke his truth about nonduality as he had come to know it. When transposed to book form and circulated among a more general audience, it left more than a few people with their heads spinning. Had Thomas gone round the bend, into total spiritual megalomania?

For the record, we might note that almost every nondual mystic in almost every Western tradition (where similar protocols pertain) has wound up hoisting themselves on this same petard. This holds true from Meister Eckart to al-Hallaj to Jesus himself, who sealed his crucifixion with his categorical proclamation “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Phenomenologically speaking, it is essentially a level confusion, in which dualistic language is being used to convey a nondual experience of oneness. Nondual experience, when replayed on a dualistic soundtrack, always winds up sounding like narcissism writ large, as it appears that one is arrogating to “self” (i.e., one’s autonomous egoic “I”) what can only be had by God (i.e., the eternally transcendent Other). Thomas often skates onto thin ice here—exacerbated, of course, by his penchant for mingling personal and transpersonal images of God, so one never knows exactly what level he is speaking from. A systematic theologian he never claimed to be. Still, if you look carefully and follow the progression of his thinking as it developed over the last decade of his life, you will see that he for the most part covered his bases carefully and still colored well within the lines of Christian orthodoxy, though of course, as filtered through a decidedly nondual lens. Since these misunderstood comments have posed an unnecessary stumbling block for more than a few of his followers, it is worth circling back to unpack them a bit more thoroughly.

“… so that man might become God …”

Believe it or not, “becoming God” is a completely legitimate and time-honored Christian spiritual aspiration. The technical name for this process in the Christian West is theosis, or “divinization.” St. Athanasius provided its quintessential mantra in the fourth century: “God became man so that man might become God.” Divinization fell into eclipse in Western Christendom in the fifth century with the articulation of the doctrine of original sin, but it carried on as an underground stream, quietly suffusing the Rule of St. Benedict and flowing from there into the greater Western mystical tradition. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it never fell out of fashion and has always been seen as the customary and expected response to Christ’s gospel invitation, “If you would be perfect … come follow me” (Matthew 19:21). When Thomas speaks of “becoming God,” then, he is not introducing anything new or heretical; this is simply his reinstatement of the once-royal road to doxa—radiance or “glory”—far too long obscured in our cynical and heartbroken modern world.

Second—and this is crucially important—Thomas’s notion of “becoming God” rests squarely on his understanding of levels of consciousness, not on the traditional Pseudo-Dionysian road map with its unitive capstone. “Even in transforming union we are still two,”[2] we have seen him daringly comment—because our mode of perception is still subject-object: God and me as two distinct poles. In nonduality—or as Thomas more confidently comes to call it, “unity consciousness”—this bipolar mechanism finally collapses. Without exception, every one of his challenging comments along the lines of “You can’t see God when you are God,” or “You can’t see Christ when you’ve become Christ,”[3] have to do with the transcendence of dualistic perception, not with the attainment of the traditional unitive state.

Thomas makes this clear as he lays out his careful approach route in God Is All in All. Here he envisions a three-step progression toward unity consciousness: “There is an Other; you become that Other; there is no Other.”[4] The first of these steps covers the traditional cataphatic turf of Christian spiritual formation, up to and including the illuminative stage. There is still a solid sense of God as the Other, directing and guiding “your” life. The second stage encompasses the stripping of egoically generated selfhood during the dark night of spirit and the emergence into the early unitive stage. “There is no Other” takes us directly into the terrain of no self, pretty much as Bernadette Roberts lays it out: the gradual collapse of the self-reflexive mechanism of consciousness on which these two poles, God and Self (I and Other), are based. As Roberts trenchantly points out, once this happens, both you and God “go down” together, because once there is no more self-reflexive consciousness, both poles become equally irrelevant.

This is the level from which Thomas is invariably making these “You can’t see God when you are God” statements. Unlike Roberts, he never claims that this is a permanent state. But it definitely becomes a stable viewing platform for him, and he is nearly always solidly occupying it when he makes his most sweeping nondual statements.

—

Let’s look more closely, then, at that problematic exchange between Thomas and interviewer John Osborne in From the Mind to the Heart, section 1:

TK: … God is relationship: a relationship that ultimately has no end and unlimited possibilities.

JO: … Doesn’t the relationship eventually become ultimate identification? Meister Eckhart said, “The love with which I love God is the same love with which God loves Himself. Awareness of this deifies me.”

TK: Yes, that’s a marvelous way of saying it.

JO: But isn’t the relationship ultimately with oneself?

TK: No, because there is no self. The self we know is an illusion. Who is the self? What is the self? Only by entering into union with God can we learn who or what this self is.

JO: But someone once wrote, “You can never see God because God is not an object; God is a subject.”

TK: You can’t see God because when you are God, there’s nothing to see.

There are two exceedingly important and subtle undercurrents going on here. First, note that when John Osborne asks, “But isn’t the relationship ultimately with oneself?,” Thomas immediately shifts the domain to no self. He powerfully insinuates that as long as one believes in a self, a “subject” pole in relationship to the “object” pole of God, one has not yet arrived at the unity consciousness he is presuming in making this statement. The teaching will always be misinterpreted by the lower level trying to have its cake and eat it too.

In the same way, and even more powerfully, in his challenging comment about “When you are God, there’s nothing to see,” he is responding specifically to Osborne’s second attempt to steer the conversation back to a subject-object duality. Osborne has simply tried to swap out the poles, making God the subjective rather than the objective pole. Thomas overturns the whole paradigm. His answer reverberates profoundly with Roberts’s blunt pronouncement, “You and God go down together.” It’s not just a matter of discovering yourself as the “Thou of an I,” as Raimon Panikkar sweetly put it in his book Christophany;[5] the two poles are instantly, simultaneously obliterated, and now where do you find yourself?

—

I would hope that this brief postscript will be sufficient to allay fears that Thomas capitulated to cosmic grandiosity. Far to the contrary. He spoke from that “farthest out,” no-self point of realization, and his comments will not be fully intelligible at anything less than that level of consciousness.

As we have seen already, he had his own way of reconciling the level confusion, in his realization that both perspectives are completely valid and necessary partners in the ongoing unveiling of divine reality. But since he was not always consistent or careful in his mode of speaking (particularly when playing to an audience), it is important for continuing students of his teaching to do their own homework and to establish as clearly as possible the level of consciousness he was speaking from, as well as the original audience he was speaking with, in order to navigate the unique and often idiosyncratic blending of levels that became one of his most frustrating and yet endearing hallmarks.

12

Did Thomas Keating Outgrow Christianity?

Thomas Keating once quipped to one of his interspiritual friends, “Contemplative Outreach is my day job; the Snowmass Conference is my night job.” He knew full well—and accepted fully—that his major vocational task in this life was to assist in the contemplative renewal of Christianity, awakening his fellow Christians to the contemplative treasures hidden in their own backyard. He held the post faithfully for more than forty years, inviting a whole new generation of seekers to awaken to what he called “the contemplative dimension of the gospel.”

Almost from the beginning of his monastic career, however, he had also experienced a strong attraction to the unitive teachings of other faith traditions—not so much in order to make up for something he felt missing in his own, but to find his deepest unitive openings affirmed and mirrored in the less dualistic and less propositional languages of most of the non-Christian spiritual traditions. Even in his early days as abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey, he came to see the contemplative path as a common treasury of all the great religions, and he was already drawing upon resources from these other traditions to deepen contemplative practice within his own Trappist community. In 1984, the same year he founded Contemplative Outreach, he also hosted the first Snowmass Conference: a small invitational gathering of contemplatives from a number of different spiritual traditions (Buddhist, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Hindu), the only agenda being to meditate together and share conversation from the heart. These two outreaches—Contemplative Outreach and the Snowmass Conference—nurtured him, fed him, sustained and cross-pollinated his own spiritual life. He came alive in each circle, though in different ways.

For most of his long career, he kept his “day job” and “night job” carefully differentiated, addressing his Christian audience in the more traditional theological language that he knew would open doors rather than close them.[1] In his “night job,” he continued to forage voraciously within the unitive traditions of the world. Particularly after his retirement from active teaching, he returned to his old wellsprings: the Christian nondual mystics and contemporary Hindu or Hindu Christian masters such as Ramana Maharshi and Bede Griffiths. He remained deeply engaged with the work on the evolution of consciousness emerging from his longtime friend Ken Wilber and augmented this with a growing interest in the findings of contemporary neuroscience and the groundbreaking work of the Mind and Life Institute, established by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, also a personal friend. “By night” he was actively seeking new frameworks of understanding and new pathways of unity.

Thomas kept the streams carefully separated … until he didn’t. In the final five years of his life, his “day job” and “night job” began to flow powerfully together. And out of that confluence came the unique “fusion nonduality” that I believe will prove to be among his most mature and enduring contributions to the spiritual unfolding of our own times.

—

Did Thomas Keating outgrow Christianity? Is Centering Prayer really Christian? These are questions that have swirled around his teachings almost from the start—certainly more so among more conservative and fundamentalist Christians, who are by and large unaware of Christianity’s own rich contemplative heritage and have a propensity to assume that meditation is itself generically non-Christian. You will often hear it said in these circles that Centering Prayer is nothing but “TM (Transcendental Meditation) in disguise,” and that Thomas basically abandoned his Christian roots to replace them with some sort of Eastern navel-gazing. A short tour of the standard conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant social media sites will give you the gist of this old saw of an argument; it has been around since the start.

But in recent years, there has been growing unsettlement within the ranks of his own faithful in the wake of his near-total spiritual makeover in the dark night of spirit, in which he essentially outgrew his own road map and seemed to sail off the deep end into increasingly formidable nondual waters. I have already mentioned the tempest in a teacup stirred when Contemplative Outreach included Thomas’s admittedly disturbing dark-night poem, “Twilight of the Self,” in its regular quarterly newsletter. The distress among the faithful was palpable. Had he lost his faith? Was he clinically depressed? Meanwhile, his increasingly bold challenge to “become God,” intertwined with those occasionally jaw-dropping one-liners (“You can’t see God because when you are God, there is nothing to see”) have led more than a few serious and thoughtful Christians to wonder if he had at last trespassed the most fundamental boundary of Christian spirituality, that unbridgeable difference between Creator and creature. Can you do that and still be called a Christian?

—

Admittedly, there were a few years in which it looked like the die could roll in either direction. For a good stretch of time there toward the end (I would say 2013–2017), Thomas was clearly drawing more heavily on his wider spiritual network than on his immediate Christian support circle as he homed in more and more intently on what would be quickly recognized from that broader spiritual perspective as “full nondual awakening.” But even without the surprising final plot twist (which I will tell you about at the end of the chapter), I believe that Thomas’s Christian orthodoxy was never seriously in question. Despite its increasingly untraditional language and “in your face” nondual koans, it still bears the essentials of Christianity in both form and substance; at its theological core it remains unshakably kenotic, subtly paschal, and implicitly Trinitarian. When you look beneath the surface, it becomes quickly apparent that the synthesis he finally arrived at could only, really, have been created by a mature and deeply rooted Christian. It is from the quantum leap in his level of consciousness rather than from any breach of orthodoxy that the apparent difficulties arise.

The Line-Level Fallacy

One of the most useful clarifications introduced by Ken Wilber into contemporary interspiritual hermeneutics is his distinction between the line a teaching belongs to and the level at which it is being presented. The former refers to the spiritual tradition through which a particular teaching is being transmitted (Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, etc.); the latter designates the stage of consciousness at which this teaching is being represented (magic, mythic, mental, integral, Christic, nondual, etc.). All sacred traditions contain the full spectrum of levels; any teaching can be presented at any level.

There are two all-important takeaways from this distinction, both of which are crucially important in understanding what Thomas was up to during those final years of his life. The first is this: The same teaching transmitted at a significantly different level of consciousness will look like a completely different teaching. Compare, for example, the Christian concept of atonement theology as understood at a magic or tribal level, where it plays as retributive justice, versus that same concept played in the Christic and nondual bandwidths, where it becomes a sublime expression of substituted love.

The second is this: There is more affinity between teachings (and seekers) at the same level of consciousness on different lines than at different levels of consciousness on the same line. In other words, a Christian converging on “unity consciousness” is going to find a lot more natural congruence with a Buddhist converging on sunyata or a Hindu converging on samadhi than with a Christian fundamentalist defending biblical literalism.

I believe this basically tells us a lot about Thomas’s “night job” and the crucial role it played in his final spiritual synthesis. It was not that he switched lines; it was that he so enjoyed and benefitted from the company of others from different lines who were working at the same levels he was. And so, as we begin to weigh in the balance the whole question of Thomas’s ultimate Christian orthodoxy, we might want to circle back for a closer look at the Snowmass Conference, that more hidden but no less important parallel track of his overall visionary mission. Over the years, the deep and richly supportive interspiritual network he gradually wove around him would prove to be the key that unlocked his growing commitments to unity consciousness and to human oneness—the commitments that, in the long run, may prove to be his most enduring gifts to the reawakening of spiritual conscience in our own times.

The Long Road toward Oneness

It’s hard to pinpoint when Thomas’s interest in interspiritual sharing first arose. The seeds of it were most likely there from the beginning, already embedded in that watershed conversion experience during his second year at Yale. Lost in the mystical splendor of the early patristic Christian writings, Thomas experienced an overpowering sense of the mystical presence of God. The experience itself was not new for him; that awareness had been mildly with him since childhood—but never before with such intensity. He was overwhelmed by a direct infusion of oneness that broke down any illusion of separation. The powerful realization emerging from that experience—“The notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition”—would become the enduring leitmotif of his teaching, and of his life.

Oneness is a generic mystical experience; it occurs on all lines as a mystical foretaste of what will finally be accomplished once and for all at the level of nondual awakening. The direct experience of oneness is also what fundamentally parts the waters between mystical consciousness and the more dogmatically oriented theological mainstream. The mystics will walk directly into the arms of that underlying oneness; the nonmystics will be offended and horrified. Thomas entered active faith through the route of oneness, which essentially guaranteed that he would outgrow the traditional theological forms of his Christian home base and find his deepest spiritual allies among those doing the same thing on other lines as they collectively tilled the nondual soil.

Spiritual Resource Sharing

When he assumed the reins as abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey in 1961, Thomas found himself thrust into a whole new level of spiritual responsibility. In Benedictine monasticism, the abbot is literally the “shepherd of souls,” and the spiritual well-being of each monk in his flock is in his hands. Thomas took this charge fully seriously as the scope of his vision steadily broadened to match the scope of his responsibility. From the basis of his own already finely honed sense of mystical presence, he was only too aware that something had gotten stuck somewhere in the program; the infrastructure was all in place, but there was no life flowing through it. The pre–Vatican II Catholicism his era had been formed in was intensely formalistic, all about navigating the daily steeple chase of practices and observances. Through his own keen sense of living presence, Thomas could sense the spiritual sclerosis and felt called upon to address it.

Who knows what first prompted him to reach out and seek the assistance of other spiritual traditions in his rebooting project? He and I never discussed this directly, and I have yet to hear the full story. But clearly, the signs of the times were working in his favor. The watershed Vatican II council convened in 1962, the very next year after Thomas’s abbatial election, and by the time it adjourned three years later, it had given not only its blessing but its mandate to radical reshaping of the monastic charism. Interreligious dialogue was suddenly in the air. In another Trappist monastery, a few hundred miles to the southwest, Thomas Keating’s de facto soul twin, Thomas Merton, had recently undergone his own profound unitive awakening[2] and was now hot on the trail of the new spirit of monastic interreligious dialogue. Merton had in fact set out on an interreligious conference tour when he met his untimely death in Bangkok in December 1968. Only a few weeks earlier, he had offered a special closing prayer at the Spiritual Summit in Calcutta, an invitational gathering of Pan-Asian monastic leaders. Its sentiments essentially comprise the charter for Thomas Keating’s own deepening interspiritual journey:

I will ask you to stand and all join hands in a little while. But first, we realize that we are going to have to create a new language of prayer. And this new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction… . The things that are on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the real… .

Oh God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is in Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world.[3]

In Your Own Backyard

Closer to home, the Asian traditions were already beginning to arrive in sizable numbers on American shores, and Transcendental Meditation and both Tibetan and Zen Buddhism quickly established substantial teaching presences in Thomas’s immediate New England backyard. Thomas closely monitored this trend and was not at all reticent to cast his net more widely as he sought to rekindle those fires of oneness among his own monastic brethren. As mentioned already, he invited teachers from the Transcendental Meditation movement to introduce the entire community to the practice of TM. For many years, a Zen master came regularly to guide the monks in koan work, those celebrated spiritual “riddles” whose goal is to fry the sockets of conceptual thinking and plunge the practitioner into a direct experience of presence. Another master, a Hindu, endeavored (with mixed results) to introduce the monks to the actual hardcore practice of brahmacharya, the ancient technology for raising the unexpended sexual energy through the chakras.[4] It was the sixties in full swing—wildly experimental, energetic, in your face. Some of the monks loved it. Others hated it. For one and all, it was stressful. On top of all the other Vatican-mandated radical innovations already underway (the reinstitution of talking, the vernacularization of the liturgy, the shelving of Gregorian chant), this foray into interspiritual resource sharing may just have been the final straw, and it soon became apparent that the community was showing signs of traumatic overload—hardly surprising within a monastic system whose charism for a thousand years had been geared to “slow and steady wins the race.”

Across the entire Trappist order, the roller-coaster ride into freedom came at a huge institutional cost and may yet prove to have struck a fatal blow to the heart of the Trappist monastic system. Sixty years later, as new vocations continue to dwindle and the old monks gradually die off, many of the once-thriving houses have already closed their doors or are in deep retrenchment, including, incredible as it may seem, St. Benedict’s Monastery, that once brightly shining star in the Trappist galaxy.[5]

Growing beyond the Monastery

Whether or not Thomas consciously knew that an entire thousand-year tradition of spiritual transmission was about to change wineskins, he intuitively had his eye on what was stirring beyond the walls of the monastery. He particularly had his eye on the younger laypeople who seemed to be bushwhacking their own paths to salvation, in many cases far more swiftly and effectively than their cloistered counterparts. A well-loved story around the Centering Prayer network recounts how the seeds of Centering Prayer were planted in 1975 when a former Catholic novitiate just up the road from St. Joseph’s Abbey was bought by a group of Buddhist meditators and opened its doors in 1976 as the Insight Meditation Society. Almost immediately, the monks noticed an increase in visitor traffic at St. Joseph’s Abbey guesthouse—consisting, alas, almost exclusively of short stopovers by younger seekers asking directions to the Insight Meditation Society. Intrigued, Thomas began to engage some of these young seekers in conversation and soon discovered that nearly all of them were cradle Catholics in search of a spiritual path. He popped the inevitable question—“Why not look for a path in your own tradition?”—to which he received the inevitable answer: “What?? Christianity has a path??” By the late sixties, pretty much everyone knew that a path was a meditation-based practice that actually changes something in your life. The existence of such a path at the heart of the Christian spiritual tradition had become, in Thomas’s words, “Christianity’s best-kept secret.”

At a monastic chapter meeting not long afterward, Thomas issued his famous challenge: “Is it not possible to put the essence of the Christian contemplative tradition in a meditation format suitable for busy people working in the world?” One of the monks, Fr. William Meninger, took him up on the challenge. Returning to that well-loved medieval classic The Cloud of Unknowing, he found in chapter 7 the instructions that would become the essence of the method, and Centering Prayer was born.[6]

And of course, this is where my own book now comes full circle. As word of these experiments with “the centering prayer” began to percolate, one who caught wind of them was Jacob Needleman, who was definitely not merely stopping by asking for directions to the Insight Meditation Society. His thoughtful appraisal of Centering Prayer and of its monastic cofounders in his Lost Christianity is what set my own journey on its present course, and his intuition that this was not merely some newfangled form of Christian piety but a serious path of conscious awakening is what kept me going. I owe him a profound debt of gratitude.

Is Centering Prayer Really and Truly Christian?

Whatever Centering Prayer may be (meditation, prayer, therapy, theosis), it is important to keep emphasizing that it is drawn entirely from the Christian contemplative tradition. Its major source is, of course, The Cloud of Unknowing, with additional refinements provided by the Carmelite mystics Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. In creating the new practice, its founders admittedly borrowed some of the external trappings from the Asian traditions since group meditation is not a traditional liturgical format within Christianity, but the theological heart of the practice is entirely Christian-sourced. This is true in letter but even more so in spirit. I would say unhesitatingly that the living core of the practice resides in the theological principle of kenosis, or “self-emptying,” as it is explicitly laid out in St. Paul’s celebrated teaching in Philippians 2:6–11. I quote here the first three stanzas from a liturgical version in active use at New Camaldoli Hermitage:

Though his state was that of God,

he did not deem equality with God

something he should cling to.

Rather, he emptied himself,

and assuming the state of a slave,

he was born in human likeness.

He, being known as one of us,

Humbled himself, obedient unto death,

Even to death on a cross.

In the original Greek, the verb for “emptying” is kenosein, from which the term kenosis derives. Centering Prayer is essentially kenosis in meditation form. The practice is entirely about self-emptying, which has always meant, both for St. Paul and for Thomas Keating, not simply “emptying the mind,” but a radical self-donation of one’s entire will and spirit. Centering Prayer is in service of that total self-donation; step by step it creates the inner conditions through which one eventually becomes capable of it. The intrinsic connection between self-emptying as played out in the microsurrender of one’s thoughts during a Centering Prayer period and in the macrosurrender of Christ on the cross is what gives Centering Prayer its core Christian identity. It is quintessentially paschal and Christic. While I’m not saying that it can’t be done by practitioners of other traditions, or of none, it shines particularly brightly within a Christian theological milieu.

In his signature teaching, Thomas was not yet—in my opinion—sufficiently emphasizing this kenotic aspect of the practice. Early explications, trying to focus on “When is it OK to let go of the sacred word?,” tended to get tied up in solipsism (how can you be aware that you’re no longer being attracted by thoughts without that being a thought?), resulting in a good deal of initial confusion and a good deal of unnecessary flak around “sinking mind” or “navel-gazing.” He corrected that strongly in his later teaching, wherein the kenotic aspect of the practice takes on an increasingly significant role. More important, this is where Thomas’s own intense, intuitive sense of a living connection with Christ came to reside, even as, in later years, he seemed to de-emphasize many of the conventional elements of Christic piety. I will return to this point more fully at the end of this chapter, as I believe it is really the hidden key that decisively settles the question of Thomas’s ultimate relationship to Christianity.

Mama Lama

It was a tumultuous two decades that Thomas rode out as abbot of Spencer, and probably no one would have ultimately escaped being thrown off that bucking bronco. Three years into reinventing himself back at St. Benedict’s Monastery, Thomas set both his “day job” and his “night job” in motion in that same momentous year, 1984.

It is really no coincidence that Contemplative Outreach and the Snowmass Conference came into existence as spiritual twins, because they were conceived essentially simultaneously at the legendary pilot Centering Prayer retreat that Thomas offered at the Lama Foundation in late fall 1983. Probably no one consciously knew it at the time, and it would take a few decades for the separated twins to rediscover one another, but Lama was in fact the seminal inspiration for both of them.

By the time Thomas arrived back in Snowmass in 1981, the Lama Foundation had already established itself as a groundbreaking interspiritual community. Located in Taos, New Mexico, just a few hours south of St. Benedict’s Monastery, the foundation had strong ties to Indigenous, Sufi, Jewish, and Christian traditions and already a cast of internationally renowned spiritual teachers, which over the years came to include Ram Dass, Murshid Samuel Lewis, Stephen Levine, Jack Kornfield, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, Mirabai Starr, and of course, Thomas Keating. At Lama, Thomas had his first real taste of interspiritual community, and through it he formed a set of friendships that would sustain him for the rest of his life. From the community at Lama he picked up his two essential staff people, Pat Johnson and Mary Ann Matheson, who would launch and manage the Snowmass retreats for the next three decades. His pilot group of Lama retreatants bonded deeply and became the founders’ circle of Contemplative Outreach. And some of those interspiritual connections initially forged at Lama would shortly become the working backbone of Thomas’s Snowmass Conference.

The Birth of the Snowmass Conference

The idea behind the Snowmass Conference was artfully simple: invite a small group of seasoned contemplatives from a number of different spiritual traditions to share silent meditation together, then engage in contemplative dialogue and sharing. Thomas kept it fiercely simple and loyal. It was strictly by invitation, and he vetted potential candidates carefully to make sure they would be good team players, not overly doctrinaire or polemicizing, and people who could listen deeply from the heart. There were never more than a half dozen or so participants at a time, and the same ones would return year after year until they relinquished their place to another in their line. For more than a quarter of a century (with a few years missed when Thomas’s health was precarious), this small, close group of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Native Americans, and Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christians returned to Snowmass year after year, and in the course of their work created a touching list of eight agreements with which they could all concur. You will see Thomas’s hand clearly at work in them, particularly in his description of Ultimate Reality as “the ground of infinite possibility and actualization.”

1. The world’s religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names.

2. Ultimate Reality cannot be limited by any name or concept.

3. Ultimate Reality is the ground of infinite possibility and actualization.

4. Faith is opening, accepting, and responding to Ultimate Reality. Faith in this sense precedes every belief system.

5. The potential for human wholeness—or, in other frames of reference: enlightenment, salvation, transcendence, transformation, blessedness—is present in every human being.

6. Ultimate Reality may be experienced not only through religious practices but also through nature, art, human relationships, and service to others.

7. As long as the human condition is experienced as separate from Ultimate Reality, it is subject to ignorance and illusion, weakness and suffering.

8. Disciplined spiritual practice is essential to spiritual life; yet spiritual attainment is not the result of one’s own efforts but the result of the experience of oneness with Ultimate Reality.[7]

This group became the spiritual lifeline for Thomas as he worked his way through to his own final spiritual synthesis. There was really no other option. At this point, he was well off the map of the known Christian universe, and well beyond his own signature teaching of the 1980s. He was actively, deeply exploring levels of consciousness (such as unity consciousness) and spiritual states (such as objectless awareness) for which there is very little published material in the Christian tradition. Given his natural gravitation toward oneness and presence, it is hardly surprising that he found his experiences more fully mirrored in Advaitic and Buddhist models, since their phenomenological slant matched up far more closely with his growing interest in the neurology of meditation and the underlying science of consciousness. And of course, he was deliciously out of the teacher’s role in which devotees and critics hung on his every word. Within the conference, he felt such a freedom to process and connect, to fit the pieces together in whole new ways, that for a while that wide-open freedom seemed to eclipse his loyalty to Christian theological models. Steadily he shed his persona as a Trappist monk and grew toward something much more universal, something closer to a Christian version of the Dalai Lama—a monk who is also a citizen of and ombudsman for the entire world. These were extraordinary streams welling up in him, as oneness morphed from a mystical state to a planetary responsibility.

The Final Confluence

In the summer of 2016, Thomas invited a few friends in his interspiritual circle to St. Benedict’s Monastery for an intimate and wide-ranging conversation on nonduality from a Christian perspective. The fruit of that conversation became his book That We May Be One, which I personally consider to be his final final work. He had a hand in its editing, and so it still bears his direct touch (unlike a couple of other works which appeared later but date earlier), and his presence—direct, strong, and sparse—is the companion piece in prose to what The Secret Embrace is in poetry. In this slender volume he seems to pull out all the stops, sidestepping most traditional Christian starting points in order to speak directly from what he has come to know from an evolutionary perspective about nonduality, levels of consciousness, the shortcomings of traditional Western spiritual models, presentmoment awareness, and the journey from rational consciousness and ego selfhood into unity consciousness, experienced both as an interior state and as an exterior manner of living in this world. All told, it is a remarkable synthesis.

The synthesis had been in the making for some years already, of course. As I said earlier, he kept his day job and night job separated—until he didn’t, and that gradual confluence is the chief hallmark of “late Thomas,” delineating it more and more clearly from the earlier, more pastorally focused and conventionally languaged work of “middle Thomas.” We saw a powerful foretaste of it in his Reflections on the Unknowable, and glimmers of it as well in his daring “breakaway” 2012 talks at the Annual Conference of Contemplative Outreach, which eventually became his book God Is All in All. But the difference in quality between even these and his final two works is palpable. In his final duo, he seems to have moved beyond even the last vestiges of a sectarian model. His interest, unabashedly, is with the evolution of consciousness and the attainment of the next rung on the evolutionary ladder, in service of our collective survival as a human species. The Secret Embrace contains not a single explicit invocation of Christ, and as we have noted already, even the word “God” appears only twice, in both cases for strategic purposes we have already explored. He is making a concerted effort to keep the language as universal and inclusive as possible. In That We May Be One, this shift to an unabashedly consciousness-based model seems to release him to put the pieces together in the way they have actually come together for him, and you will hear some breathtakingly beautiful insights, such as:

“The universe becomes conscious of the Creator through human beings.”[8]

“The ultimate consciousness is the total Oneness in which God is all in all.”[9]

“Love is a form of non-duality that has a personal quality.”[10]

“Sacrifice is the total giving away of whatever self you have.”[11]

“Once you are baptized and in grace, you are a living cell in the Body of Christ that has the Holy Spirit as its life blood. The Spirit fills the whole, every cell, and indeed, every particle of every cell. Since we are made up of trillions of them, we are truly immersed in Christ at all times. In other words, we are saturated with God.”[12]

Supported by his interspiritual friends, he is able to step beyond the well-worn associative chains that embroider even the best of sectarian thinking and speak directly out of his boldest and most mature integral realization.

Based on this material, one might indeed justifiably conclude that Thomas did, in the end, outgrow his Christian container. His unity consciousness stretches so far beyond the reaches of the personal selfhood and personal salvation that comprise the traditional Christian gravitational field that one might say he simply attained escape velocity and blasted into celestial orbit. And if the story had ended in 2017, there would have been strong evidence to make this case. But it seems that Thomas’s old buddy God had other plans in mind, and in the end, there would be one more surprising plot twist in store before Thomas finally wound up wherever he wound up.

Christ Reclaims His Own

In his early years of religious awakening, Thomas’s sense of divine presence was strongly centered on Christ. As a Trappist novice, he was particularly devoted to the Blessed Sacrament, where the presence of Christ is mystically palpable for those so attuned, and he would spend hours on his knees in the monastery chapel in adoration before it.[13] This emphasis tended to become less and less prominent as his teaching matured. He did not force Christ down anyone’s throat and was always careful to create alternative on-ramps for those who might be harboring injury from overtly aggressive efforts to use the cross as a battering ram. His commitment to interspiritual dialogue clearly heightened his sensitivities here, so much so that at times it looked like he might be drifting toward the usual tepid New Age resolution: replacing the human Jesus in all his incarnational messiness with a harmless and inoffensive “Christ consciousness,” equally available and innocuous in all sacred traditions that prefer to run their transformational programs on warm breezes rather than consuming fire.

But Thomas never actually went there. Christ always remained Christ, the second person of the Trinity, umbilically connected to the human Jesus and to the Mystery of the Cross. To be sure, as his own consciousness expanded, his understanding of the scope of that Mystery expanded right along with it. In a private phone conversation with his longtime friend Isabel Castellanos in September 2016, he made it abundantly clear that Christ was still the center of his devotional life, only now at a cosmic scope:

You know that Christ is the center of my life. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving the body of Christ. But I believe that all of humanity is the body of Christ. Therefore, when I receive the Eucharist, it is not just the union between two persons (myself and Christ) but a union with all of creation, which is the body of Christ. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving in me all of creation.[14]

The main current of Thomas’s Christic connection continued, however, to run principally through the channel of kenosis, or self-surrender. As we saw earlier, this was essentially linked for him to the paschal mystery, and particularly to Christ’s own moment of total self-surrender in the garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will but thine be done, O Lord” (Luke 22:42). In his book Consenting to God as God Is, Thomas describes his core understanding of this kenotic motion as it plays out in Christ:

The key to understanding the heart of Christ is his consent to be emptied of his divine privileges and to be identified with the full consequences of deliberate sin, even to the point of feeling abandoned by his father.

Kenosis is the Greek word for emptying. In applying it to ourselves, it means the emptying of our false selves so that the divine activity may enter into us just as we are. Christ emptied himself of his divinity so that he could become totally vulnerable as a human being like we are. This is the “admirable exchange” that the Christmas liturgy celebrates: that is, the exchange of human weakness for the strength and power of God. Christ has emptied himself of the divine privilege in order to share the human condition, even to becoming the last and least of all humanity.[15]

Applied practically, kenosis translates to “powerlessness,” which became a favorite watchword for Thomas (indeed, his virtual mantra) during the final two years as he struggled mightily to lay aside the remaining vestiges of entitlement and privilege within himself. “My daily bread is powerlessness,” he remarked without a trace of irony in his “Last Laugh” poem—for where there was powerlessness, there also, for him, was Christ. That is how and where Christ journeyed with him, even more so in the final anguishing nine months of his life.

In a beautiful and prophetic teaching in Reflections on the Unknowable (chapter 30), he again specifically calls out this aspect of kenosis. “Powerlessness is our greatest treasure. Don’t try to get rid of it.” The spiritual journey, he feels, is “the commitment to allow everything we possess to be taken away before the dying presence begins.”[16]

Little would he know how prophetic those words would turn out to be.

The Final Ordeal

In January 2018, Thomas began to be racked with mysterious, agonizing pain that not only ended his mobility but also shattered the silence of his interior prayer. He immediately pivoted to processing this ordeal as “sharing in the suffering of Christ,” a well-worn path that has been followed by many other Christian mystics, but in his case a surprising return to a more traditional form of Christian piety. By this time Isabel Castellanos was keeping careful written summaries of their periodic phone calls and noted in her entry for January 13, 2018:

He thinks his vocation now is probably to become “a bundle of pain to be joined to Christ’s pain on the cross for whatever purposes God may have.” To his surprise, he finds himself recovering many of his earliest devotions, and they are helping him a good deal. Trust in the Blessed Mother and thinking of Jesus falling under the weight of the cross allow him to get up from bed.

On February 21 she reconfirmed this impression almost verbatim: “He knows his vocation now is to suffer identified with the passion of Christ and he is happy to live that vocation.” She commented, in a separate email to me, “I find it especially moving that the apophatic-in-chief was given the unexpected grace of recovering and integrating his earliest childhood devotions.”

But the worst was yet to come, and Holy Week (beginning that year on March 25) would offer him a particularly brutal test of his commitment to sharing in the suffering of Christ. Thomas’s mobility was clearly deteriorating. On top of this, the physical and psychic resources of the already fragile monastic community at St. Benedict’s were being additionally drained by the diagnosis of their beloved abbot, Joseph Boyle, with aggressive intestinal cancer. Under these conditions, it was decided that Thomas would be relocated back to Spencer, where the infirmary was far better equipped to deal with his needs.

It was clearly one of the most anguishing decisions of his life. He had made it clear to all that he wished to end his days in Snowmass, surrounded by the beauty of the mountains and the depth of the silence he experienced there. Some close to him feel that he was overruled and went unwillingly, but I do not think this is so. “Sacrifice,” as he had so touchingly written only a few months earlier, “is to give up whatever self you are.” The self that was Thomas Keating, mountain mystic and beloved guru of Snowmass, went sadly but willingly, realizing after his own hours of inner turmoil that this was the eye of the needle for him, the acid test of that “powerlessness” that had become for him the chief sacrament of the real presence of Christ. On March 26, 2018, Monday of Holy Week, he gazed for one last time on his beloved mountain bowl valley, then boarded the private jet that would deliver him back to Spencer.

He would remain there for seven more months, almost all of them overshadowed by that same strongly paschal quality. He prayed the Abandonment Prayer that Carl Arico had rekindled for him, worked through some remaining shadow material, chiefly around Contemplative Outreach, and received a few friends and visitors and occasionally the Eucharist. It was an unremitting, deepening journey into powerlessness, stretching endlessly toward his death.

By the end of September, it appeared that that hour had finally arrived. His systems were shutting down, and the infirmarian at St. Joseph’s informed his monastic confreres that Thomas was not expected to live for more than a few more days. Family members were summoned to his bedside, and the vigil began.

—

Despite all the odds, however, he lived for almost another month, sustained—literally—by sips of water, a few boiled eggs, and an occasional Ensure milkshake. It was a hard, laborious death in which he drifted in and out of consciousness, clearly spending time in bardo realms far beyond our ken. I have mentioned elsewhere that it seemed as if he burned through two realms at once;[17] it was in any case a death too laborious to match a soul as saintly and surrendered as his own had by then become—once again, a paschal resonance. Isabel Castellanos perceptively noted, “He did not die the death he deserved; he died the death he was given, for whatever purposes, by God.”[18] In the more traditional imagery of Christian devotion, one might immediately think of the harrowing of hell, those three days following Christ’s death on the cross that he allegedly spent at the heart of the earth, taking upon himself the collective and cosmic roots of human sinfulness. For whatever reason, Thomas’s death had this same logoic quality about it, and he emerged through it into a whole new level of cosmic stewardship and responsibility. Remarkably, this all seems to have happened while he was still—just barely—in human life.

On October 12, 2018, two weeks before his physical death, Thomas emerged briefly from four days in what appeared to be a deep coma, requested assistance to sit upright in his bed, and proceeded to deliver an extraordinary final message beamed straight to the heart of the world. His ever-faithful monastic secretary, Brother Erik Keeney, grabbed for his cell phone and pressed “record” as, for eleven riveting minutes, Thomas spoke, strongly, but as if from a vast cosmic distance. A bit later, Erik and I jointly parsed out a transcription, which Erik read at the Thomas Keating Interspiritual Celebration held at the Aspen Chapel on July 13–14, 2019. Still later, Thomas’s nephew Ted Jones painstakingly worked over every detail of that original recording and came up with probably the closest raw version to what was literally spoken in that extraordinary final transmission. I am grateful to Ted to be able to include it in the appendix section of this book.

Here are Thomas Keating’s final words to the world:

Dear friends, in the universe an extraordinary moment of civilization seems to be overtaking us. Through the great discoveries of science and spirituality, we find ourselves in essentially a new and different place than ever before in history. It’s a time of enormous expectancy and possibility. We are called to start not with the old-world contracts, now that we know that they are all lies, but with what we know is the truth, as proved by silence and science. So I call upon the nations to consider this as a possibility, that we should begin a new world, with one that actually exists. This is the moment to manifest this world, by showing loving concern for poverty, loving appreciation for the needs of the world, and opportunities for accelerated development. We need to find ways to make these really happen. I make this humble suggestion that now arms making is of no significance in the world. It hinders its progress. This will allow and offer the world the marvelous gift of beginning, creating, of trusting each other, of forgiving each other, and of showing compassion, care for the poor, and putting all our trust in the God of heaven and earth. I leave this hope in your hands and hearts, coming as a real inspiration from the heart of God. What does He care about who has this or other lands, when the power to begin, with the truest history, is coming from religion, as an expression of the source that has been realized for centuries? Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Indigenous, and Christianity, ALL religions: oneness is their nature. Amen.[19]

His voice trailed off, and he fell back in his bed. The oracle had been delivered. Two weeks later he was dead. Erik, whose forty-first birthday happened to be that day, caught the Elijah’s mantle as it floated down to him and cherished it for the rest of what turned out to be his own tragically short life. It was Thomas’s final gift to a true spiritual son.

—

What is remarkable about this final oracle is not so much the words themselves (aside from the astonishing tour de force of being able to speak them at all) but the fact that they seemed to be coming from worlds far beyond our own, redolent with that energy of what a bit earlier I referred to as the logoic realm, from which highly attained souls watch over the four corners of this round earth from a place of first-order planetary stewardship. It is also variously known as the causal realm and the bodhisattva realm, and both are correct because its head is logoic clarity and its heart is universal compassion. From that causal place, Thomas offered his final dharma talk, a herald of the cosmic responsibility he seemed bound for from a long ways off.

So, did he outgrow Christianity? From that same causal perspective, yes, he ultimately outgrew Christianity, right there at the end. But not in the sense of rejecting it for a better form of religion, simply in the sense of having outgrown all need for form whatsoever. While he remained in earthly servanthood, those two intersecting lines, presence and kenosis, were what defined the field of Thomas’s mystical and nondual Christianity and what made it, to the end, a Christ-infused path. There at the very end, he rode that Christ-Mystery all the way down, until it finally fell through its own event horizon and catapulted him into total freedom. My best guess is that he now fully occupies that cosmogonic “fourth dimension” he alluded to in some of his last writings, from which the threads of our own fragile and contingent world are being continuously rewoven.

But still, when you look for him, you will find him most naturally in a Christian vessel, and it is within that vessel that the particular tincture of attained nonduality he brings to evolutionary consciousness is most luminously revealed. So, in the end, I believe it is both/and; he both outgrew Christianity and he carried it right along with him, to new places where its presence has lately been conspicuously absent and its fragrance deeply missed. He did not abandon Christianity but steadily universalized it, expanded its nondual fluency, and prepared it to assume a more mature and spiritually enlivened role in the quantum leap of consciousness that our one human family must now somehow make together or else shatter into jagged, bitter fragments of “me, myself, and mine.”

My deepest hope in writing this book is that those who have long been Thomas’s admirers, devotees, or critics will be better able to see where he himself was so powerfully headed during the final thirty years of his life and be prepared if needs be to let go of even the precious spiritual legacy he so carefully entrusted to our safekeeping to follow the scent of his flowing oneness straight into the heart of the world—and the heart of God.

CONCLUSION

Christian Nonduality, Thomas Keating–Style

Nonduality comes in many flavors, and Christian nonduality is still a relative newcomer to a field where the dominant paradigm is very different from the one by which Christianity has traditionally defined its highest levels of spiritual attainment. In an evolving interspiritual conversation now overwhelmingly dominated by models based on levels of consciousness rather than degrees of sanctity, Thomas’s work represents a unique blend of “fusion nonduality.” It is firmly rooted in the Western and Christian lineage from which it springs, yet skillfully transposed to the new consciousness-based paradigm. The foundations of this transposition had been well laid in his signature teaching, in which he had already shelved Pseudo-Dionysius in favor of Ken Wilber for his working spiritual road map. But they reach their full fruition in his later teaching as he unabashedly explores those higher levels of consciousness—and then, remarkably, integrates them right back into his native Christian spiritual ground. It’s not so much that his insights themselves are new—they mostly aren’t—but that he fleshes them out more accessibly and with more psychological integration than most of his fellow mystical travelers in this still highly rarified bandwidth of Christian experience. This is where his Tier I and Tier II teaching come brilliantly together, as his earlier psychological emphasis now lays the groundwork for a healthy and balanced entry into those deeper nondual waters.

If I were to attempt to capture in a few words the essence of Thomas Keating’s version of Christian nonduality, I would list the following seven distinguishing earmarks:

1. It is a level of consciousness, not a stage of selfhood.

2. It is intrinsically dynamic: not the “eternal changelessness” of traditional metaphysics but continuous movement—everything in constant play, interplay, and replay in a ceaselessly self-regenerating divine cosmogenesis. Not a static oneness, but a flowing oneness.

3. It is implicitly Trinitarian, resolving the “problem of duality” not by the subtraction of twoness but by the introduction of threeness, that third or “reconciling” term that enables the opposites to come to a creative equilibrium. It accommodates nonhierarchically both the Unmanifest and the manifest, the transcendent and the immanent, the formless and the particular. In this respect, his teaching both reflects and reaffirms Christianity’s own basic incarnational stance and strengthens the case that there is indeed such a thing as an authentic Christian nonduality, but that it speaks the language of three (integration and dynamism), not the language of two (dialectic and polarity) or of one (monism and stasis).

4. It is explicitly cosmogonic. “Ultimate Reality” encompasses the full spectrum of divine presence and action, not merely its Unmanifest pole; the Unmanifest is itself “the ground of infinite possibility and actualization.” This divine generativity can be directly experienced in every moment as a kind of fourth dimension: “that from which everything is emerging and returning in each micro-cosmic moment of time.”

5. It is unshakably relational. Even our most profound experiences of the absence of God reveal themselves, when correctly perceived, to be simply the presence of God in Unmanifest mode. Maturing contemplation becomes a direct encounter with this ever-present relational field. It is what happens “when silence morphs into presence.”

6. It is quintessentially kenotic and paschal, grounded in surrender (aka “consent to the presence and action of God”) and the active embrace of powerlessness as the sacramental meeting ground with the crucified Christ.

7. It is personal. While not confined to the personal realm, it makes room, warmly, for the personal and does not demonize it as a lower level of consciousness or an a priori impediment to spiritual evolution.

There are no doubt many other important aspects of Thomas Keating’s distinctive brand of Christian nonduality still waiting to be discovered. For this initial exploration, it is probably enough to note that he indeed made a distinct contribution, markedly different in both character and fragrance from the as-yet-few-and-far-between Christian mystics who have fully explored the nondual terrain. Among those of his Christian tribe who can speak competently about the nondual (i.e., not simply as an experience of oneness, whether fleeting or prolonged, but as the total transcendence of the self-reflexive mechanism of consciousness), his own teaching is sweeter and more forgiving. This is ultimately, I suspect, because it is founded no longer on the traditional ascetical metaphor of “spiritual warfare” but on his own revelation of the Secret Embrace.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is fundamentally a collective undertaking. I stand on the shoulders of those who have paved the way: monks, members of Contemplative Outreach, Thomas’s interspiritual colleagues, retreatants, and students, and of course, Thomas Keating himself. If I were to list each one of you by name, the acknowledgments would be longer than the book itself. But I pause—in contemplative reverence—to single out a few whose spirit will forever breathe through the pages of this book: Abbot Joseph Boyle, Fr. Theophane Boyd, Gail Fitzpatrick, Carl Arico, Pat Johnson, Cathy McCarthy, Bill Sheehan, Barbara and Bill Howell, Joanne Warner, Nic Cole, Jill Benet. You have all been my true spiritual midwives, and I am deeply grateful.

To Peter and Ted Jones, Thomas Keating’s nephews, who in every way have been my wingmen throughout this project. Thank you for your generosity in granting permissions, sharing precious family archives, and supporting me at every step of the way with your imagination, spiritual insight, and thoughtful critique. But above all, for your trust in me to put this record of Thomas Keating’s final spiritual metamorphosis before the world.

To Thomas’s longtime friends who have shared precious material from their private Thomas Keating collections, including personal correspondence and audio transcriptions. I am particularly grateful to Isabel Castellanos for her permission to include in its entirety her journal of a series of key phone conversations with Thomas Keating that shed crucial light on the state of his Christian rootedness at the end of his life. And to Erik Keeney, who gifted me with a precious portion of his cell phone recordings and initial transcriptions of conversations with Thomas during the final three years of Thomas’s life.

For those who have graciously helped with fact-checking or reviewed early drafts of my manuscript and offered helpful clarifications: Mary Anne Best, Pamela Begeman, Carl Arico, Isabel Castellanos, Abbot Damian Carr, Ted Jones, Joan Fothergill.

To Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat, longtime supporters and friends, who published the original version of my The Secret Embrace teaching as a 2021 e-course on their Spirituality & Practice website and have graciously made it available for my reworking here.

To Matt Zepelin, Peter Schumacher, and Breanna Locke, my editors at Shambhala, who shepherded the manuscript faithfully through the editorial process, and to the entire Shambhala production team for their usual gold standard of excellence and tastefulness.

Thomas would want me to call out in particular the emerging younger generation of Centering Prayer teachers in whom he invested himself so heavily during that final season of his life: Adam Bucko, Rory McEntee, Colleen Thomas, Keith Kristich, Stuart Higginbotham, Justin Lanier—and others among you whose acquaintance I have not yet had the pleasure of making. Y’all are the third generation now; innovate boldly!!!

Finally, but no less heartfully, to all of us whose lives have been touched by Thomas Keating. We each carry a piece of his legacy.

APPENDIX 1

Thomas Keating’s Final Oracle

The Literal Transcription

This is the raw version of the “final oracle” that Thomas Keating delivered from his bedside on October 12, 2018, less than two weeks before his death, carefully transcribed by Ted Jones from the original cell phone recording preserved by Erik Keeney. As you will see, the raw text is substantially more “stream of consciousness” in its flow, but the message nonetheless comes through loud and clear. In a few places the text was inaudible, and a few key final consonants were indecipherable and admit of different interpretations. These places have been noted in the transcription, together with the several-minute pause toward the end, in which Thomas is apparently regrouping for one final thought.

Dear friend: In the universe, an extraordinary moment of civilization seems to be overtaking us. So the great discoveries of astronomy and psychology, all kinds of other sciences, we find ourselves placed in geologically, essentially different place than ever before in history. It is the moment of enormous expectancy and possibility. Here we start making world contracts[1] now that we know that they’re all lies, and are called now to start with what we know is the truth, as proved by silence, science. And so we need time to find out and take that information to ordinary folks, as well as extraordinary folks, so to speak. Why begin at a point that is so foolish from all rational points of view? I myself had the experience a couple of days ago of receiving this in a deep way when I got stuck in New York City. I had no place to go, no proof of anything, no fundamental [faith].[2] So I call upon the nations to consider that as a possibility and that we should begin a new world with the one that actually exists. This is the moment to manifest that world by showing loving appreciation for poverty, for the needs of the world. The opportunities that could be easily developed, and find ways of waiting, time with these things to really happen.

I make this humble suggestion that now arms making is of no significance in the world, hinders its progress and is full of lies. And to offer the world the marvelous gift of beginning, of creating, of trusting each other, of forgiving each other, of showing compassion, care for the poor, and put all of our trust in the God of heaven and earth. I leave this hope in the hand and hearts of the possibilities we’ve referred to and coming as real inspiration from the heart of God. What does he care about who has this or other lands, with the power to begin where truth in history is just beginning. Amen.

[A six-minute hiatus follows. Then Thomas speaks again:]

It has been pointed out that certain Masses celebrating the Divine Assumption or gone the [unintelligible],[3] which is another figure coming from religions as an expression of the source of their realizing that this has been understood for centuries. Buddhism, Native Americanism, oneness of nature, all the Asian religions. OK.

[Recording ends shortly thereafter.]

APPENDIX 2

Phone Conversations between Thomas Keating and Isabel Castellanos

(April 7, 2015–October 31, 2018)

Isabel Castellanos

Member of the Contemplative Outreach Governing Board, Pastoral Council, and Gift Committee, and guiding member of its Spanish-language extension, Contemplativa Internacional
Shared by permission of the author.

The following is a collection of some of the notes I took after speaking with Thomas on the phone during the last three years of his life. They do not represent the totality of our many conversations, but I believe these few entries shed light on important aspects of his final spiritual evolution. Thomas remained the very essence of what it means to be a Christian to the very end; not in the superficial sense of belonging to a particular religion or adhering to a set of rituals, but in the true sense of being someone capable of consenting courageously, lovingly, and radically to be transformed into Christ, with all the painful and glorious consequences that this way entails. Thomas also gradually discovered, at the end of his life, that he was being called to an even deeper vocation reserved to only a few: to participate fully in the passion of Christ for “whatever purpose God may have.” He embraced wholeheartedly this extraordinary invitation, and these brief notes simply try to document this process as I witnessed it.

April 7, 2015

Extraordinary phone conversation with TK regarding [Meister] Eckhart. I pointed out their similarities and he said he is studying Eckhart a great deal these days, since he answers some of his own questions and paradoxes. Institutional religions—he says—always reject their mystics, since they are afraid of the freedom brought about by the mystical way. He recommended the book Paths to Transcendence by Reza Shah-Kazemi. Reminded me that the graces of Easter are not limited to Easter Sunday, but also fill us in the days that follow.

September 10, 2016

(A bit of context for this entry. Thomas and I had been working on a project—I forget which one—and we used to speak on the phone several times a week. Trying to schedule our next call, I suggested the following Thursday afternoon. His answer was to say that he preferred to keep Thursday afternoons free, because the monastery celebrated Mass in the evening on Thursdays. He always liked to prepare in silence for several hours before receiving the Eucharist. These are the words that followed:)

“You know that Christ is the center of my life. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving the body of Christ. But I believe that all of humanity is the body of Christ. Therefore, when I receive the Eucharist, it is not just the union between two persons (myself and Christ) but a union with all of creation, which is the body of Christ. When I receive the Eucharist, I am receiving in me all of creation, and I need time to be ready for that.”

(After this exchange, Thomas would sometimes say to me in farewell: “I will see you in the Eucharist.”)

December 20, 2017

Great conversation last night with TK. He wants to start a small group (five people max) to share about unity consciousness over the phone. I guess I’ll be there on a theoretical basis, since I have no claims to the state. We had a good laugh because he mailed back to me his “examination of conscience.”

(This group never came to be, since almost immediately after this phone call, Thomas began to experience a period of intense physical suffering that accompanied him, on and off, for the rest of his life.)

January 13, 2018

Significant conversation with TK. He is in excruciating pain in his legs, especially his right ankle. The pain becomes worse when he lies down, so he cannot rest. When it is intense, “all you can think about is the pain, so there is no possibility of resting in prayer.” The doctors don’t know what is causing it.

He thinks his vocation now is probably to become “a bundle of pain” to be joined to Christ’s pain on the cross for whatever purpose God may have. To his surprise, he finds himself recovering many of his earliest devotions, and they are helping him a great deal. Trust in the Blessed Mother and thinking of Jesus falling under the weight of the cross on his way to Calvary allow him to get up from bed.

He also said how much he would love to see me and thanked me profusely. Given the state of health of both, seeing each other in this world is almost certainly not going to happen, but I did mention that we would always be together, since that is our faith. This was almost like a farewell conversation. Speaking too much tires him. As always, he said goodbye with his usual “much love” and “dear heart.” I was extremely moved by this grace, for it was a grace, and the first thing that came to my lips was: “Lord, I am not worthy.” He feels that the end may be near.

On the question of appointing a person or a pastoral council to assume the spiritual leadership of Contemplative Outreach, we both agreed that we didn’t resonate with the idea. His charism, he said, is now passed on to the organism as such. It will be a new way of doing things, without separating the material (administrative) from the spiritual. The GB [Governing Board] will know when and if it needs help. It is urgent to change the name of the board to something different, more integral, like Trustees Council perhaps.

January 20, 2018

Still in a lot of pain, but a little more relieved. Acupuncture made him relax, but it is not easy to get an acupuncturist to the monastery. He sounds weak.

February 5, 2018

Voicemail from TK. “I’m about the same, which is up and down. At night the pain is not as bad as it was, but it is enough to keep me awake except for a half hour here and there… . I am very tired, exhausted today because I had a bad night and can’t eat much because I don’t have much of an appetite, so I would say I’m in a very rough place, a tough time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other parts begin to fall apart because I can’t keep this up forever… . My nurses are looking into some ways of relieving the pain through some other means, but they haven’t got far… . So, I can say that I am coming to the end of my strength and cannot keep this up much longer. I appreciate so much the prayers from everyone. I will ask Bonnie [Shimizu, his longtime editorial assistant] to send out a message saying how I am as the weeks, if there are weeks, unfold. As I said, I am sending you the eight poems to see if you think they would be suitable in a book like the one Peter and I previously did. Peter thinks they’re very good, I am not sure… . I would like your general opinion, or if you see anything special that should come out or go in, we can talk about it. You just call this number, leave a message, and I will call you back. Much love and thanks for your concern. It’s hard to describe symptoms that we don’t know where they are coming from …”

February 21, 2018

Long conversation with TK. He is still in pain, but it is less constant than before. All the medications for pain make him very sick. He knows his vocation now is to suffer identified with the passion of Christ and he is “happy” (his word) to live that vocation. His voice was strong.

March 1, 2018

TK’s request to me (and he was totally serious): “Pray for my conversion.” At that I laughed and replied that his conversion had taken place a long time ago. His answer: “Pray for my conversion that I may grow into deeper levels of faith and union.”

March 9, 2018

Talk with TK last night. The pain still keeps him awake and he is very wobbly on his feet… . He advises to cultivate prayer of the heart to open it more and more widely to God’s love.

March 24, 2018, Saturday

Devastated by TK’s call yesterday. He was very weak and couldn’t talk long. He was in the hospital again, has a “number of maladies,” needs 24/7 care now, and is being transferred on Monday, March 26, to Spencer. He doesn’t know whether they have phones there. He’s being asked to let go of everything, including his beloved valley. He told Maru and Marie [longtime Contemplative Outreach board members] that the mission is now in our hands, and that he is ready for his “last walk,” after experiencing fully the passion of Christ in himself. Holy Week begins tomorrow. If he is suffering (and he is), I pray that his last walk does not last long.

March 25, 2018, Palm Sunday

Today is Thomas’s last day in Snowmass. Tomorrow he will fly to Spencer. What a challenge! The monks also have to deal with Abbot Joseph starting chemo on Easter Monday.

March 26, 2018, Monday of Holy Week

Preparations for Thomas’s trip to Spencer must have begun. I am with him on his journey! Received beautiful message from Cecile B. yesterday and it gave me great comfort: “It is as it should be. Grace will overflow.”

Read this from Thomas Merton: “But the true teachers preach the sanctity of Christ, and He shines through them. He it is Whose Truth has made them holy.” This is a true description of Thomas.

TK moved to Spencer on Monday, March 26, 2018. Monday of Holy Week.

March 30, 2018, Good Friday

Beautiful message from Bonnie [Shimizu]. She spoke with Thomas on Tuesday and he is resting. She asks for prayers for Abbot Joseph and the monks of St. Benedict’s. Yesterday, extraordinary communion with Thomas all day long, but especially during Holy Thursday Mass. I am working on (almost finished) subtitling Thomas’s memorial video. So poignant to work on this while he is still alive. It is a beautiful video!

From his The Mystery of Christ, pages 85–86: “A meal together is a symbol of belonging. Before (for the disciples) it had always meant conversation, laughter, and singing. This was a new level of belonging. Their former relationship with Jesus was coming to an end and a new relationship was being communicated to them at a far deeper level. This sharing was not by word of mouth, nor by ideas or feelings, but by the Spirit dwelling in their inmost being, a far better form of communication than the one they had before …”

This describes so well the communion I am experiencing with Thomas now. It’s at a far deeper level. Sharing by the Spirit dwelling in the inmost being of both. Sensitivity to the inspirations of the Spirit. Thank you!

March 31, 2018, Holy Saturday

Strange dream about Thomas last night. A group of us had a meeting in a place where he was. (Marie H. was one of them.) We could see him sitting in the hallway alone but could not approach him. We were supposed to wait.

April 4, 2018

“Austere,” “sober,” “plain” are adjectives that may describe TK’s poems. Great experience sharing one in Lectio last night. “The silence of the Creator of all is thunderous.” Maybe “lean” and “sober” are the best adjectives.

April 5, 2018, Thursday

Joyful conversation with Thomas yesterday. After thinking I might never hear his voice “live” again, the phone rang … and voilà! there he was. He says he will call on Thursday evenings. He is not able to eat anything solid.

April 10, 2018, Tuesday

Yesterday, conference call of the Gift Committee [responsible for the stewardship of Thomas’s teaching archive]. Thomas participated throughout the 1 hour and 20 minutes meeting! Weak but stable, I would say.

April 13, 2018, Friday

Thomas called last evening, and I found him extremely weak. He says that in the newfound spirit and consciousness of Contemplative Outreach (openness, etc.) he senses the hand of Pat Johnson [longtime board member and beloved matriarch of the Snowmass Centering Prayer retreats]. Two more monks from St. Benedict’s are disabled. He does not feel like reading or writing and is trying to get used to the lack of complete silence. He finds himself slipping off the chair. He would need back support to meditate on his recliner. He will call again next Thursday, depending on how he feels.

April 19, 2018, Thursday

Thomas called. It was a sad call. He is in bad shape and feeling “terrible” (his word). He still has not adjusted to a new environment where there is NO silence. He will not be able to call every Thursday. However, he will try to call once a month (in four weeks, maybe). Heartbroken.

May 2, 2018, Wednesday

I had a crummy day yesterday, health-wise. Weak and tired, and then TK called. He sounded so weak himself! Loving as always. He said I should stop praying for him and then maybe I would feel better myself. Told him I could not do that. He is praying for my discernment on whether I should let go of some things.

May 18, 2018, Friday

Had a wonderful experience yesterday with the online Meditation Chapel and was sad because I could not share my joy with TK. But at 7 p.m., he called!! He is very weak but alert, and I was able to share this with him. What a gift! Speaking too much tires him.

June 17, 2018, Sunday, Father’s Day

TK’s voice on the phone again tonight. Unexpected call. He sounds weak but stable. Coughing less, so he is less exhausted. He wanted to let me know that he gave my phone number to a Trappist monk from Venezuela who visited him today and who wants to know more about Centering Prayer. Forever the pastor! I relayed news about our joint meditation program with people from WCCM [World Community of Christian Meditation]. He is very happy about this, and I told him it was his work. He stays in bed for the most part because he needs help to get up. He knows that he is being asked to participate in Christ’s passion and he is more than willing to consent to it, but it is not easy. He can no longer meditate. I said that he is now where meditation is supposed to take him, so his life IS constant meditation. Wished him a happy Father’s Day and he responded: “Yes, I have such a large family, given to me by the Spirit.” He knows that the Spirit is doing more through him now than when he was active, and then added: “It is all in your hands now. Just be attentive to the voice of the Spirit and follow the inspirations of the Spirit and this work will grow.” He will call when he can.

June 26, 2018

Maru saw Thomas last Saturday and spent one and a half hours with him. His body is dissolving, but his spirit is intact. I will write to him today. It’s hard to imagine him this feeble… . He has lost a lot of weight and is becoming love more and more each day. As he says in the video on fruits and gifts of the Spirit: “Anything that is not unconditional love is not really you.” I am sure that he is waiting with open arms for “Come, sweet death.”

August 9, 2018, Thursday. Last conversation with TK.

Call around 4:30 p.m. from TK. Lovely talk. He sounded weak and short of breath. He wanted to know all about meditation groups online. He sends “blessings upon blessings” on them. Says that he is living the passion of Christ, including the loss of the Father’s presence. He is brought Communion every day. He is constantly fatigued. As always, he showed great interest in my health and mentioned the importance of saying yes to limitations. “You just have to listen to the Holy Spirit, but this takes time to develop.” On the issue of different methods of Christian meditation: “John Main and I have the same outlook, but different methods. That is fine. Buddhists have some sixty different methods of meditation, so it’s OK for Christians to also have a few, including hesychasm, etc. They all point in the same direction.” He says he thinks of me all the time and that we support each other in our exhaustion. This might be our last conversation, who knows? How much love in a human being! He’s reading a little but spending most of his time in Lectio.

August 17, 2018, Friday

Gilberto is back from Snowmass and saw Pat Johnson there. TK said to Pat when she visited him: “If I hadn’t left Snowmass, my heart would not have cracked wide open.”

September 22, 2018, Saturday

Thomas apparently does not have much time left. Bonnie does not think he will make it to November 3, which is when Marie was planning to visit him. Maru is not so sure that the end is imminent. May God’s will be done. We are with him.

September 27, 2018, Feast of St. Vincent de Paul

It seems that Thomas is close to death. He is, apparently, in renal failure. It’s just a matter of waiting, waiting in presence. For me today, two great loves become one: Thomas and St. Vincent de Paul.

September 28, 2018

Still waiting with Thomas. He is apparently a bit “better” today. There is a time to be born and a time to die: today’s first reading from Ecclesiastes. There is an appointed time for everything.

October 1, 2018

Thomas still with us, despite renal failure.

October 18, 2018, Thursday, Feast of St. Luke

Father Meninger is being transferred to Spencer and Abbot Joseph is dying. What does this all mean, personally and for Contemplative Outreach? How does it interact with this new global ministry via Zoom? What is it telling me about radical letting go?

October 24, 2018, Wednesday

Quite an experience tonight. I prayed to Thomas for discernment on whether I should move to Colombia or stay here, an issue I have been prayerfully considering for several months. I had an incredible sense that he was guiding me, and the message was clear: “Stay where you are, doing what you do, and don’t leave the USA; I need you here.” Clear as a bell. It is interesting also that it was so firm, which is not Thomas’s style. I guess he didn’t want me to harbor any doubts. I was filled with a great sense of peace. I have clarity now that letting go simply means not being concerned about the future. Keep giving and all will be well. What a sense of gratitude. Uncertainty about motivation (Am I attached to this or that?) is all but gone. Give up security. That’s what I am being asked to do.

October 25, 2018

Thomas is dying. Night-long vigil with Maru, in silence and over the phone, in total communion of spirits. All three of us: Thomas, Maru, and myself, in different geographical locations, but united in one heart.

Thomas passed away at 10:07 p.m. and we were informed a few moments later by Brother Erik. So much peace!

October 31, 2018

A very strange thing happened last night. I was in the kitchen washing dishes in silence when I heard a voice in the living room that I recognized as Thomas’s. It was coming from my phone. I thought at first that it could be that one of his old voicemails had somehow been triggered, but when I approached it I could see that it was a YouTube video from a project called the Legacy of Wisdom. It is not a Contemplative Outreach video and I had not seen it before. A bit overwhelmed, I pressed the phone to my ear and heard Thomas saying, “You only need a few contemplatives to change society,” and then it stopped. I looked for the video on YouTube and these are his exact words: “Retired people and those who are aging are the ideal reservoir for contemplatives, and you only need a certain number of contemplatives to begin to change society and to begin to find creative ways of bringing the Divine Manifestation into the marketplace …” (“Legacy of Wisdom – Thomas Keating – Aging Lifestyles,” 2:44ff.).

Biographical Note

Isabel Castellanos describes herself as follows: “As far as my relationship with Thomas goes, I was fundamentally his student. Beyond that, we met frequently because I served for many years as a board member of Contemplative Outreach, its Pastoral Council, and the Contemplative Outreach Gift Committee, which oversees Thomas’s writings and media legacy. Our relationship deepened through my membership in Extension Contemplativa Internacional’s Circle of Service for almost twenty years. For three straight years Thomas would come to Miami and would live, eat, and pray with us in the home of one of our fellow members. Those meetings were totally life-changing. In addition, during the last ten years of his life I assisted him in editing and reviewing some of his manuscripts, such as the book Consenting to God as God Is, which is based on the lectures at the Miami gatherings. Thus, we spoke on the phone very often and became close personal friends.”

NOTES

1. The Signature Teaching

These short quotes and aphorisms are culled from the teaching videos themselves, from the “Guidelines for Centering Prayer” published by Contemplative Outreach, and from the oral formation imparted during the Centering Prayer presenter’s training workshops.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

It should be noted that the fourteenth-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Centering Prayer’s immediate source, was also onto this insight and insisted adamantly that all thoughts were to be let go because “any thought is between you and God”—i.e., it poses a separation between yourself and the unmediated divine presence.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

From the Mind to the Heart, a video conversation with John Osborne later transcribed to book form by Thomas Keating and Peter C. Jones (Temple Rock, 2017). The pages are not numbered, but you will find this quotation on the second page of section 1.

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The term “interspiritual,” which I will be using consistently throughout this book since it was Thomas’s own preferred term, was coined in the early 1980s by the contemporary mystic Wayne Teasdale, himself a student of Thomas Keating. In contrast to the more common term “interreligious dialogue,” which emphasizes verbal discussion and debate, “interspiritual” emphasizes shared spiritual practice, particularly silent meditation. Out of the common silence, participants share spiritual commonality rather than theological divergences.

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Bonnie L. Greenwell, When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2018).

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In the teaching captured in his very late book That We May Be One (2018), Thomas admits flat out that “being aware of ourselves and of God is a kind of duality. Even in the transforming union we are still two” (54). And in his challenging poem “Out of Nothing” in The Secret Embrace, he raises the possibility of a state beyond even the fundamental divine “I AM” in which “the ‘I’ may fall away, leaving just the AM.” We will be exploring this insight much more thoroughly later in my book.

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2. Thomas Keating: The First Sixty Years

The reasons for this are complex, of course, and far beyond the purview of this short introductory biography. My own somewhat unusual take is that it was a combination of events: the growing theological rigidity and imperialism of post–World War II Catholicism combined with the sudden sweeping away of its mystagogical elements in Vatican II, which left the Trappist order particularly exposed. The old Trappist formula—silence, hard labor, and the remarkable inner yoga unsuspectingly lurking within those long hours of Gregorian chanting—amounted to a cumbersome but curiously precise system of subtle body transformation. Suddenly deprived of its two main driveshafts—silence and Gregorian chant—the Trappist charism wandered into a kind of spiritual limbo, no longer intense enough to deliver the transformation desired by its most ardent aspirants, but too rigid, formalistic—and now chatty—to bear the weight of the sacrifices it demanded. The malaise rapidly devolved into a smokescreen battle between “progressive” and “conservative” elements, and in this configuration the dramatic expansion of the 1950s quickly ground to a halt.

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3. My Journey with Thomas

It was never to my knowledge officially diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, but it certainly impacted him that way, with a general drain of energy, compounded by occasional issues with heart palpitations and balance and a heightened susceptibility to bronchial infections. Thus began the era when events with Thomas were programmed and then canceled at the last minute due to health issues—a nerve-wracking way to try to build a burgeoning new contemplative network. It was not until the winter of 1996–97 when upon doctor’s orders he spent the winter in Grand Junction, Colorado, two thousand feet lower than Snowmass, that his health issues gradually began to resolve.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Raimon Panikkar, Christoph any: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004). Scholar and mystic Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) was a pioneer in the field of interspiritual dialogue and one of its most brilliant luminaries.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Bonnie L. Greenwell, When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2018), 190.

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T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” from Four Quartets, in T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 129:

Old men ought to be explorers.

Here and there does not matter.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.

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Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020), 53.

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4. The Lay of the Land

A few of the poems in this eight-poem collection predate the manuscript itself, sometimes by decades. But Thomas carefully arranged their order and worked over each poem, sometimes adding deft touch, to create an overall unity that actually makes this short work the most carefully crafted of all his writings.

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By “officially” I mean books published by an established external publishing house, in this case Thomas’s longtime publishing partner, Lantern Books. His final works—The Secret Embrace and the four short works I informally refer to as the “Keating Four Quartets”—were privately published, the former by Peter C. Jones (Temple Rock), the latter by Contemplative Outreach.

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5. The Secret Embrace

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern, 2014), 113.

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Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” in Thomas P. McDonnell, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Image / Doubleday, 1989), 509.

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I will have more to say about this classic road map of the Christian spiritual journey in more detail in chapter 6, where I explore Thomas’s dark-night passage.

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In fact, Thomas confirms as much in his astonishing final book, That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), when he writes that “the universe become conscious of the Creator through human beings who can respond to God with gratitude” (50).

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Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993); The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991). I will be exploring Bernadette Roberts in much greater detail in chapter 7 of this book.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” from Four Quartets, in T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 129.

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Olga Louchakova, “The Essence of the Prayer of the Heart,” https://www.academia.edu/22830966/The_Essence_of_the_Prayer_of_the_Heart. Published as a book chapter in Lee Lozowick, Gasping for Air in a Vacuum: Poems and Prayers to Yogi Ramsuratkumar (Chino Valley, AZ: Hohm, 2004).

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You will also frequently find this mechanism described as self-reflexive consciousness. The variant spellings suggest subtly different shades of meaning, “self-reflective” evoking more strongly the mental process and “self-reflexive” evoking the actual neurological hardwiring. Following Bernadette Roberts and Thomas Keating, I prefer the latter spelling and will favor it throughout the manuscript, but functionally, they are synonymous.

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Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 270–71.

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Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (New York: Image / Doubleday, 1973), 299.

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In the Christian tradition this “I AM” formula continued to gain spiritual force as it was both echoed and then appropriated through Christ’s famous “I AM” statements in the gospel of John. (“I am the door … the vine … the good shepherd … the bread of life … the resurrection and the life.”)

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He is not without antecedents, however, or at least a few curious parallels. In the Gurdjieff Work, where I cut my own spiritual teeth, the “I AM” has come to acquire a similarly holiest-of-holies aura (albeit for a very different reason, as the most sacred felt sense of one’s own conscious beingness), and is frequently uttered quasi-liturgically on the breath. The I, paired with the inbreath and the feeling center, evokes the subjective pole of my being (my unique finite aliveness); the AM, paired with the outbreath and sensation, evokes the objective pole, the “isness.” This is the identical pairing that Thomas Keating uses here—and it is curious that in the final few years of his life, as he comes to dwell more and more in this state, Thomas’s whimsical final name for God becomes “Izzy”—short for “isness,” that same objective pole.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Quoted in Patrick Hart, ed., Thomas Merton, Monk: A Monastic Tribute (New York: Image / Doubleday, 1976), 90.

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T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” from Four Quartets, in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 119.

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Quoted in Bonnie L. Greenwell, When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2018), 165.

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Quoted in Greenwell, 165.

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Not realizing, of course, that “Allah” is the Arabic name for God, not the name of a particular deity worshipped in the Islamic faith.

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Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2000), 74.

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6. The Dark-Night Journey, Then and Now

Constance FitzGerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory,” CTSA Proceedings 64 (2009): 21–42.

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FitzGerald, 23.

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FitzGerald, 31.

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FitzGerald, 31.

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FitzGerald, 31.

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FitzGerald, 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

As I mentioned earlier, this video series was transcribed into book form as Invitation to Love (originally published by Element, 1992, republished by Bloomsbury, 2011). I will draw my subsequent citations from this later edition.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love: The Way of Christian Contemplation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 110.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Keating, 111.

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7. Bernadette Roberts and the Road to No Self

These books have both subsequently been republished by the State University of New York Press, The Experience of No-Self in 1993 and The Path to No-Self in 1991.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 166.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Roberts, 144.

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Roberts, 162–63.

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8. Thomas Keating on the Road to No Self

The most succinct example is again in his poem “Out of Nothing,” where he essentially recapitulates Roberts’s entire six-phase schematic in just four lines:

When there is no more “me, myself, or mine,”

Only “I AM” remains.

Then the “I” may fall away,

Leaving just the AM.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern, 2014), 147. With that statement he actually pushes the envelope further than Roberts, who herself never explicitly delineates a formal third dark night (her whole six-phase progression can be viewed in fact as a single continuous dark night).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 25.

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Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable, 148.

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Keating, 146.

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He has also, incidentally, just solved the riddle that has bedeviled him throughout his spiritual search, at every successive stage of its unfolding: how absence at one level is simultaneously presence at another. The problem vanishes as one begins to discover that the Unmanifest has its own mode of speaking.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable, 146.

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Keating, 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Thomas Keating, “The Secret Embrace,” poem 2 from The Secret Embrace (n.p.: Temple Rock, 2018).

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Thomas Keating, That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), 54, 43.

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Quoted in Patrick Hart, ed., Thomas Merton, Monk: A Monastic Tribute (New York: Image / Doubleday, 1976), 90.

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Quoted in Bonnie L. Greenwell, When Spirit Leaps: Navigating the Process of Spiritual Awakening (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2018), 190.

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9. False Self, True Self, Red Self, Blue Self

Thomas Keating, God Is All in All: The Evolution of the Contemplative Spiritual Journey (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2019), 87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern, 2014), 87.

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Keating, 123.

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This was the wording with which Thomas conveyed this teaching to me orally. But you will find it echoed and corroborated in parallel versions throughout his teaching. Mary Anne Best, Thomas’s senior editor for the Contemplative Outreach special projects team, comments: “As you know, the idea that God is present always is woven throughout all Father Thomas’s works, from the earliest to his last works, such as:

‘What makes us think God has gone away? The divine presence can’t go away. God is existence and fills everything that exists (S. Thomas Aquinas). The Gospel teaches that Christ is present in the storm, not just emerging from the storm.’” [The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999), 40]

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Notice an all-important nuance here: accessed through the Unmanifest but not identical with it. It is accessed through the Unmanifest because it cannot be activated until one has accessed the capacity to perceive the Unmanifest directly—or in other words, until “silence morphs into presence.” See my earlier discussion of Thomas Keating’s and Bernadette Roberts’s respective takes on the Unmanifest in chapter 8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable, 123.

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Thomas Keating, That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), 30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Keating, 43.

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10. God

Thomas Keating, God Is All in All: The Evolution of the Contemplative Spiritual Journey (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2019), 47.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Keating, 43.

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Keating, From the Mind to the Heart (n.p.: Temple Rock, 2017), sec. 5 (pages not numbered).

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Keating, sec. 5.

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Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern, 2014), 147.

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Keating, From the Mind to the Heart, sec. 5.

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Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable, 150.

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Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 25. For more extensive discussions of this subtle point, see in this same work pages 73–74 and 113–14.

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I realize that the explanation I have just given you here is slightly more nuanced than my earlier version in chapter 8 (page 140). Is “third force” the manifest world, or is it the Secret Embrace? Technically, both are true, since the two of them are joined in a single unbroken motion. In the full Gurdjieffian teaching, third force initially arises out of a blending of higher and lower, which he describes as follows: “The higher blends with the lower in order to actualize the middle, and thus to become either higher for the preceding lower or lower for the succeeding higher” (G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson [New York: Viking Arkana, 1992], 687). Once activated, however, it functions as a completely independent line of action, making possible the reconciliation of the other two forces. In the specific application under consideration here, the Secret Embrace does initiate the blending, in a moment so instantaneous and hidden that Thomas Keating himself says it “can never be revealed” (The Secret Embrace, poem 2). The blending “actualizes” the operational third force, the manifest world, which subsequently functions as an independent, reconciling line of action in exactly the way I described it earlier. Also, displaying another characteristic noted by Gurdjieff, this new line of action is not merely activated but activating: it becomes “the cause of further consequences” (Beelzebub’s Tales, 131) in an ongoing cycle of new arisings.

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Some of the prominent medieval examples are the twelfth-century Ladder of Monks (Scala Claustralium) by the Carthusian Guigo II; the fourteenth-century The Cloud of Unknowing, and Teresa of Ávila’s The Interior Castle.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

At the forefront of this movement, of course, is contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber, whose writings profoundly impacted Thomas Keating. Wilber’s 1984 book Up from Eden was the immediate source of Thomas’s innovative stages of consciousness–based revisioning of the spiritual journey, a cornerstone of his signature teaching.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Thomas Keating, That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), 43.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Keating, 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Charles de Foucauld (1859–1916) was a French soldier, explorer, and geographer who became a Trappist monk and eventually a hermit living a life of radical poverty among the Tuareg people in the Algerian desert. He was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in May 2022.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Included as a final addendum in God Is All in All (page 111).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985). Originally published in German as Ursprung und Gegenwart (1949, 1953).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

11. Becoming God

Thomas Keating, That We May Be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Keating, 54.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Thomas Keating, God Is All in All: The Evolution of the Contemplative Spiritual Journey (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2019), 24.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Keating, 20–25.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 35.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

12. Did Thomas Keating Outgrow Christianity?

Of course, he also drew extensively on the language and cognitive framework of his “updated” psychological models, assuming (for the most part correctly) that most contemporary Westerners are comfortable navigating within that framework. This foray into the therapeutic terrain has, however, caused suspicion among some of the most conservative segments of the Christian community, who regard his work as “New Age” and unbiblical.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

This awakening is powerfully described in his beloved epiphany “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut,” familiarly known as “A Member of the Human Race” and nearly everybody’s favorite piece of Merton. See Thomas P. McDonnell, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Doubleday / Image, 1974), 345–47.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1975), 318.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

I learned of this experiment while working on the manuscript by Fr. Joseph Chu Cong, a Vietnamese-born Christian who was for many years the prior (second-in-command) of St. Joseph’s Abbey. Thomas Keating had delegated the manuscript to me as my first editorial assignment after arriving full-time in Snowmass in 1991. He was horrified when he read Father Joseph’s touchingly naive description of this experiment and insisted that the passage be removed. The book was later published as The Contemplative Experience (New York: Crossroad, 1991).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

I shared my reflections on this subject in a blog post I wrote on March 26, 2023, shortly after the closing of the monastery and the immediate suspension of the retreat program had been publicly announced. Since the thoughts expressed in that essay are not directly relevant to the topic of the present book and risk taking it off course, I have decided not to include it here. Those who wish can easily find it on either my two websites, cynthiabourgeault.org or wisdomwaypoints.org.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

“For this reason, whenever you feel yourself drawn to devote yourself to this work, and whenever you feel by grace that you have been called to do it, lift up your heart toward God with a meek stirring of love… . And if you desire to have this aim concentrated and expressed in one word in order that you might be better able to grasp it, take but one short word of a single syllable. This is better than two, for the shorter it is, the better it accords with the work of the spirit. Such a word is the word GOD or the word LOVE. Choose whichever one you prefer, or if you like, choose another that suits your taste, provided that it is one syllable. And clasp this word tightly in your heart so that it never leaves, no matter what may happen.” The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. Ira Progoff (New York: Delta, 1953), 76.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

This excellent summary of the eight points was created by my UK friend and colleague Antonio Benet for publication in Contemplative Outreach News 40, no. 2 (June 2023). For a fuller discussion of the Snowmass Conference and its agreements, see Netanel Miles-Yépez, ed., The Common Heart: An Experience of Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Lantern, 2006).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Thomas Keating, That We May be One: Christian Non-Duality (West Milford, NJ: Contemplative Outreach, 2018), 50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Keating, 43.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Keating, 55.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Keating, 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Keating, 55.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

He portrays this devotion in detail in chapter 2 of his book Invitation to Love, titled “The False Self in Action.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

With the gracious permission of Isabel Castellanos, you will find this entire correspondence included here as appendix 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Thomas Keating, Consenting to God as God Is (New York: Lantern, 2016), 54.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern, 2014), 156.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

See my book Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (Boulder: Shambhala, 2020), 173–78.
   Thomas’s nephew Ted Jones was in close attendance during these final months and has written a moving account of Thomas’s passage for Contemplative Outreach News titled “Witness to Grace” (Vol. 38, No. 2, June 2021, 2–5).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Private email correspondence, January 20, 2022.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

This is the “public” version that Erik Keeney and I transcribed and Erik read at the ceremonial closing service in Aspen. The raw text is (not surprisingly, since Thomas was only just emerging out of four days of coma) quite a bit more freeform and stream of consciousness, but I believe the essential drift of the message still remains the same. You will find the entire raw text as appendix 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Appendix 1

Recording is indistinct here. Another option is “Should we start making world contracts?”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

The final consonant is indistinguishable here. The word could be either “face,” “faith,” or “space.” Each deliver slightly different resonances of meaning. My own preference, based on that powerful line in his “Last Laugh” poem (“Nowhere is my destination. And no one is my identity.”) would be for “face.” Ted Jones prefers “faith.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

The Mass of the Assumption refers to Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven, celebrated throughout Catholic Christendom on August 15. It is not clear whether Thomas was intending to add another feminine divinity here, but it is an intriguing irony that his very final comment to the world might well have been a reference to the divine feminine as a unifying factor among the world religions.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

CREDITS

We gratefully acknowledge permission granted to reprint material from the following:

The documentary From the Mind to the Heart, © 2017 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

The book From the Mind to the Heart by Thomas Keating, © 2017 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC; Introduction copyright © 2018 Peter C. Jones; Watercolor paintings copyright ©2017 Charlotte M. Frieze.

The book The Secret Embrace by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC; Introduction copyright © 2018 Peter C. Jones; Watercolor paintings copyright ©2018 Charlotte M. Frieze.

“Out of a Stone” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“The Secret Embrace” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“Loneliness in the Night” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“Twilight of the Self” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“The Last Laugh” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“Out of Nothing” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“Stillness” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

“What Matters” by Thomas Keating, © 2018 A Rising Tide of Silence LLC.

INDEX

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book. Each link will take you to the beginning of the corresponding print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Abandonment Prayer (Foucauld), 172, 204

Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux), 12

Advaitic Hinduism, 135, 162, 196

Adyashanti, 118

al-Hallaj, 10, 176

All in All, 141, 166, 168, 170

annihilation, 84, 85, 133

apophatic teachings, 7, 102, 145

Arico, Carl, 35, 43, 46, 171–72, 204

asceticism, 20–21

Asian traditions, 5, 108, 113, 127, 128, 168, 188–89, 191–92. See also individual traditions

Aspen Wisdom School, 31

Athanasius, 176

atonement theology, 185

B

balance of opposites, 97

baraka (transmission of blessing), 35, 46

Barnhart, Bruno, 81

Benedictine monasticism, 187

Best, Mary Anne, 43, 46, 239–40n4

Blessed Mother, 202, 219

Blessed Sacrament, 199, 200. See also Eucharist

Boehme, Jacob, 59, 68, 91, 140, 168

Boros, Ladislaus; The Mystery of Death, 34–35

Boyle, Joseph, 43–44, 203, 222, 223, 229

Bruteau, Beatrice, 118, 161, 168

Buckley School, 18, 71

Buddha nature, 96, 99

Buddhism, 135, 162, 185, 189, 196, 206, 216, 227. See also Tibetan Buddhism; Zen Buddhism

C

Carmelite lineage, 123, 127

Carondolet Retreat Center, 32

Castellanos, Isabel, 47, 200, 202, 217

biographical note, 231

dream of, 224

Keating’s death and, 204, 230

last conversation with Keating, 227

moving to Colombia, 229

Catholic Theological Society of America, 115

Catholicism, 18, 158, 187. See also Roman Catholicism

Centering Pray and Inner Awakening (Bourgeault), 30

Centering Prayer, 3, 13, 143

author’s involvement, 26–27, 30

as Christian, 183, 193

creation of, 23, 190–91, 243n6

as dark-night passage, 78–79

developments in, 5, 60

faithful adherence to, 13–15

Keating’s personal practice, 32

in recovery movement, 144

repositioning, 6

self-emptying in, 192

sources, 191–92

ten-day immersion, 4, 5, 24

Welcoming Prayer and, 28

Christ, 198–201, 211, 223

identifying with passion of, 202–3, 217, 219, 221, 226, 227

living relationship with, 193

mystical body of, 147

as unitive mystic, 10, 176

See also Eucharist

Christian contemplative tradition, 6–7, 12–13, 23, 81, 181–82, 191

Christian Meditation (John Main), 29

Christian mystical tradition, 88, 202

direct experience and, 186–87

early mystics, 19

Godhead in, 135

Keating’s place in, 41, 91–92, 105

pure contemplation in, 98

road map of, 108–9

traditional, 128

Christian nonduality, 12–13, 209

influence of, 182

Keating’s distinguishing earmarks, 210–11

Keating’s role in, 99, 169, 176, 207–8

Trinity in, 164–66

Christianity, 105, 237n11

Keating’s relationship with, 182, 183–84, 185, 193, 199, 217, 242n1

mainstream theology, 108, 109, 147, 161

punitive stereotypes of God in, 157

Trinity in, 164

universalizing, 207–8

Christophany (Panikkar), 32, 179

Chrysalis House, 26, 28

Cloud of Unknowing, 5, 14, 23, 191, 233n2, 241n10, 243n6

collective planetary responsibility, 11

compassion, 35, 96, 109, 206, 207, 216

conceptualization, 15, 71, 189

consciousness, 14

in authentic contemplation, 5–6

cosmic, 160

divine presence in, 171

dualistic, 100, 127, 128, 137, 151, 168

egoic, 155

evolution of, 182, 198, 207, 208

higher levels of, 12, 138, 149, 177, 209

line-level distinctions in, 184–85

science of, 196

structures of, 173

transpersonal and personal, relationship of, 172–73

See also unity consciousness

Consenting to God as God Is, 38, 121, 200–201, 231

contemplation, 211, 230

as abiding state, 97

authentic, 5–6

diminishing emphasis on, 22

pure, 98

silence in, 45

Contemplativa Internacional, 217, 231

Contemplative Outreach, 48, 54–55, 181–82

Annual Conference (2012), 38, 161, 198

Castellanos’s roles in, 231

conflicts in, 9–10, 28–29, 74, 183

founding, 3, 4, 193–94

Keating’s final interview by, 35–36

newsletters, 46–47

publications, 38, 42–43, 235n2

succession, 220

Contemplative Society, The, 29–30

Corinthians, I, 63, 124

cosmogonic mysticism, 59, 63–64, 85, 87, 88, 161, 164, 210

cosmology, 11, 43–44, 65, 160–61

D

daily life

being simple in, 92

Centering Prayer in, 7, 15, 23

Keating’s practices in, 18, 34

Welcoming Prayer in, 28

Dalai Lama. See Tenzin Gyatso, Fourteenth Dalai Lama

dark night of self. See night of self

dark night of sense, 71, 75, 88, 111–12, 115–16, 148, 154

dark night of spirit

consciousness-based/phenomenological

models, 10, 108, 113–15, 117

and depression, distinctions between, 80–81, 116

ego self in, 148, 154, 178

higher levels of consciousness in, 149

in John of the Cross, 111

Keating’s, 9, 27, 80, 81–82, 94, 107–8, 118–21

Keating’s and Roberts’s views

of, compared, 132–34, 238nn1–2

pain of, 70, 112

perception in, 75

two models of, 108

in unitive stage, 112, 125

See also dark night of sense

Delio, Ilia, 161

depression, 80–81, 116

devotional practices, 22, 85, 169

direct experience/perception

of oneness, 186–87, 196

personal agency and, 114

of presence, 189

primordial self-reflection and, 89

of Unmanifest, 41, 117, 136, 149

divine beingness, two modes of, 67–68, 94, 136, 151, 168

divine feminine, 159, 170, 245n3

divine presence, 61, 111–12, 163–64, 171, 199, 210, 233n2, 239–40n4

Divine Therapy/Therapist, 4–5, 6, 11, 40, 68, 143, 158

E

early Thomas, 9, 39–40, 107, 163

“East Coker” (Eliot), 78, 235n4

Eastern Orthodox Church, 85, 177

Eckhart, Meister, 9, 10, 12, 59, 176, 178, 218

ego self, 85, 144–45, 154

death of, 81, 84, 151

emergence of, 114

in late Thomas, 147–48

as operational convention, 125

in “Out of a Stone,” 62–63

ego transcendence, 124, 145

Eliot, T. S., 78, 97, 235n4

Emory University, 48

emotions, 6, 71, 76, 88, 110

in dark nights, 111, 112, 116, 120

freedom from, 7, 82

leaning into, 77

Episcopal tradition, 31

Eternal Unmanifest, 65, 66, 91, 140, 151, 236n4

Eucharist, 199–200, 204, 218–19

Ever-Present Origin, The (Gebser), 173

evil, 119, 121

F

faith, 74, 75–76, 146, 183, 186–87, 195, 216, 221

false self, 10, 40, 85, 105, 154

diminishing, 62

dismantling, 34, 71

emptying of, 201

in late Thomas, 147–48

metaphors for, 155

psychologically updated, 144–46

releasing, 86, 151

and separate self, distinction in, 41, 42

in signature teaching, 143

spiritual pride and, 119

False Self System, 6, 7

final oracle

literal transcription, 215–16

public version, 205–6, 244n19

FitzGerald, Constance, 108, 119, 121

delinking process of, 115–17, 120, 125

on ego self, 148

on unitive state, 117–18

Flowers, Betty Sue, 40, 43, 46

Fordham University, 19

Foucauld, Charles de, 172, 242n14

fourth dimension, 32, 98, 100, 107, 140–41, 164, 207, 210

Frieze, Charlotte, 42

From the Mind to the Heart, 43, 162, 163, 175, 178–79

From the Mind to the Heart (film), 45, 53–54

Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit, 146

Funk, Mary Margaret, 102

fusion nonduality, 182, 209

G

Gebser, Jean, 59, 173

gendered imagery and language, 62, 158, 159, 160

Gethsemane, 200

Gift of Life, 42–43

God, 71, 97, 126, 128

as all in all, 63–64, 134, 137, 150–51

anthropomorphic, 92–93

becoming, 175, 176, 183

classic Western model, 68

as Creator, 87, 167

distinctive nature of, traditional understanding, 109, 183

as diverse and One simultaneously, 170–71

as divine therapist, 4–5, 6, 11, 40, 68, 143, 158

evolving understanding of, 68–69, 75–76

as “Izzy,” 170, 237n12

Keating’s love for, 76–77, 157, 170

Keating’s personal relationship with, 169–71

in late Thomas, 10, 11, 101–2, 159–64

presence of, 98, 100, 120, 140, 239–40n4

quantum physics and, 101

terms for, 160

two modes of, 61–62, 136, 151

as unmanifest, 121, 134, 135, 162, 211, 239n6

God Is All in All, 38, 42–43, 148, 161, 175, 177, 198

God Is Love, 42–43

gratitude, 191, 229, 236n4

Greenwell, Bonnie L.; When Spirit Leaps, 98–99

Griffiths, Bede, 159, 182

Guigo II, 241n10

Gurdjieff, G. I., 168, 237n12. See also Law of Three

H

Harvard Divinity School, 31, 40

Harvey, Andrew, 159

Heart Sutra, 124

Heartfulness, 40

Hindu traditions, 135, 162, 185, 196

Human Condition, The, 40

human journey, three phases, 66–67

humility, 20, 87

I

“I AM,” 69, 237n12

in Christian tradition, 237n11

in “Out of Nothing,” 86, 89, 90, 93, 234n6, 238n1

self-reflexive consciousness and, 153, 154

See also just the AM

illuminative stage, 62–63, 109

ego self in, 145, 150

false self in, 154

God in, 178

night of sense in, 111, 112

perception in, 148–49

personal agency in, 110

illusion of separateness, 149, 155, 186, 239n4

infinite transcendence, 69

infinite fecundity and, 67–68

as only AM, 91

source of all creation and, 101–2, 136, 140, 151, 168

Insight Meditation Society, 190

Integral tradition, 160, 169, 241–42n11

interspiritual dialogues, 40, 137, 233n4

commitment to, 200

initial interest in, 186

Keating’s contributions to, 12–13, 160, 181–82, 209

at Lama Foundation, 194

at St. Benedict’s, 197

at St. Joseph’s, 187–88, 189

Invitation to Love, 5, 238n7

Irenaeus of Lyons, 96

Islam, 100, 166, 237n17

Isness, 153, 155, 160, 169, 170

J

Job, 77

John of the Cross, 70, 71, 110, 111, 123, 125, 132, 191

John the Apostle, 237n11

Johnson, Pat, 194, 225, 228

Jones, Peter, 42, 43, 92, 221

publications, 48–49, 235n2 (chap. 2)

Secret Embrace and, 54, 55

See also Rising Tide of Silence, A (film)

Jones, Ted, 205, 215

Judeo-Christian tradition, 90

Jung, C. G., 114

just the AM, 90–91, 93–94, 127, 153, 155, 171, 238n1

K

Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 118

Keating, Cletus (father), 18

Keating, Thomas, 3, 4–5, 171

author’s relationship with, 25, 30–31, 32

birth and childhood, 18

final days, 35–36, 95, 204–5, 206, 225–30

final thirty years, overview, 8–9, 11–12

health issues, 27–28, 33, 41, 202, 203–4, 219–22, 234–35n1

mental and spiritual acuity, 33–34

personal spiritual evolution, 9–10

Roberts and, 128–29

spiritual awakening, 16, 138

teaching style, 7–8, 37, 44, 180

universal persona of, 196–97

world stature, 31–32, 81

See also early Thomas; late Thomas; middle Thomas

“Keating Four Quartets,” 42–43, 54, 235n2 (chap. 4)

Keeney, Erik, 47–48, 205, 206, 215, 230, 244n19

kenosis (“self-emptying”), 192–93, 200–202, 207, 211

knowingness, 61, 166

koans, 23, 189

Krishnamurti, 13, 99

L

Lama Foundation, 4, 24, 28, 194

“The Last Laugh,” 201

night of self in, 80–81, 132–33, 134

poem, 79–80

on silent love, 84–86, 167

on simple presence, 82

spiritual awakening in, 138

true self in, 141

waterfall experience in, 83–84, 139

late Thomas, 37–39, 160

Centering Prayer in, 193

Contemplative Outreach and, 9–10

God in, 10, 11, 101–2, 159–64

and original teaching, divergences, 10–11

in Sacred Embrace, 54

selfhood in, 147–48

spiritual synthesis in, 13, 170–71, 184, 185, 196–99

works of, 42–48

Lantern Books, 47, 235n2 (chap. 4)

Law of Three, 140, 164–66, 168–69, 170, 241n9

lectio divina (sacred reading), 57

Legacy of Wisdom project, 230

Life Surrendered to Love, A (video), 45–46

“Loneliness in the Night,” 70–73

Louchakova, Olga, 85

love, 86, 140, 178, 206

divine, 94, 166–67

as nonduality, 198

pathways of, 173

self-surrendered, 13

serving needs of, 171

shifting concept of, 76

Trinity and, 164

unconditional, 227

in unitive state, 125–26

M

Main, John, 29, 227

Mass of the Assumption, 216, 245n3

Matheson, Mary Ann, 194

meditation, 6, 183, 226, 227. See also Centering Prayer

memory, 110, 112, 115–16, 120

Meninger, William, 23, 191, 229

Merton, Thomas, 159

on duality, 94, 139

on ego self, 144, 148

“Hagia Sophia,” 61–62

on levels, absence of, 173

on nothingness, 90

Seven Storey Mountain, 19–20, 21

on true teachers, 223

unitive awakening of, 187–88

metaphysics

Christian, traditional, 128, 210

Eastern, 13

Gurdjieffian, 140, 165

middle Thomas, 63, 197

selfhood in, 146

works of, 40–41, 44, 45

Mind and Life Institute, 31, 182

monism, 168, 210

Moses, 90

Mrozowski, Mary, 28

Mystery of Christ, 223

N

Needleman, Jacob; Lost Christianity, 25–26, 191

neuroscience, 31, 34, 108, 182

New Camaldoli Hermitage, 81

night of self, 11, 41, 81–82, 87–89

and depression, relationship between, 80–81, 116

higher levels of consciousness in, 149

introduction of term, 132

in “Last Laugh,” 132–33, 134

nondual perspective in, 105

perception in, 136

in publications, 42

separate self and, 150–51, 154

Unmanifest in, 135

no self, 84, 179

Keating’s and Roberts’s views of, compared, 132, 137, 141, 178

Roberts’s view, 84, 124, 131–32, 151, 178

nondual attainment, 62, 76–78, 151

nondual awakening, 118, 138–39, 184, 186

nonduality, 105, 164, 175–76

concepts of, 76

as consciousness structure, 128

Trinitarian, 167–69

unity consciousness and, 97, 134

See also Christian nonduality; fusion nonduality

O

objectless awareness, 5–6, 14–15, 196

oneness, 11, 69, 76, 105, 164, 168, 210

of all religions, 206, 216

dualistic language in

explaining, 176

experiencing, 12, 62, 88, 97, 117–18, 186–87, 196

particularity and, 66

seeing from, 82, 100–101

true self as, 141

as ultimate consciousness, 137, 198

Open Mind, Open Heart, 4, 26, 37, 39

oral transmission, 8, 37

Osborne, John, 45, 175, 178–79

Our Lady of the Redwoods Monastery, 139

Our Lady of the Valley, 19, 21

“Out of a Stone”

cosmogonic mysticism in, 59

Creator in, 167

paradoxes in, 60–62

poem, 58

on selfhood, 62–64, 149–50

“Out of Nothing,” 69, 171, 238n1 (chap. 8)

on being simple, 92

dark night of self in, 87–89

God in, 92–93

on just the AM, 90–92, 234n6, 237n12

Oxherding Pictures and, 93–95

poem, 86–87

Oxherding Pictures, 93–95

P

Panikkar, Raimon, 32, 164, 168, 179

Parabola interview, 26

Paths to Transcendence, 34

Paul the Apostle, 63–64, 76, 146, 192

Pennington, Basil, 23

perception

dualistic, 45, 114, 148, 154, 169

dualistic, transcending, 177

egoic, 113–14, 145

through separation, 75

Person and Eros, 33–34

Philippians, 192

Pizzuto, Vincent; Contemplating Christ, 34

powerlessness, 79, 83, 87, 94, 171, 201–2, 203–4, 211

prayer as relationship, 158

presence, 97, 196, 207

in dark-night experiences, 120

direct experience of, 189

of God, 98, 100, 120, 140, 239–40n4

Keating’s, 34–35

See also divine presence

presence-absence dialectic, 72–73, 77–78

primordial self-reflection, 89

Psalm 139, 82

Pseudo-Dionysius/Dionysian tradition, 108, 110, 131, 154, 169, 177, 209

psychology, 242–43n1

developmental, 7, 144–45, 169

and spiritual ascesis, bridge between, 6–7

transpersonal, 113

purgative stage, 108–9, 111

purification

affective, 10, 119

of memory, 115–16

moral, 108, 112, 113, 115, 117, 121

through unloading of unconscious, 6

Q

quantum physics, 101

R

Rafe, Brother, 77, 82

Ramana Maharshi, 13, 99, 182

Raphael, Brother, 35

recovery movement, 40, 144

Reflections on the Unknowable, 42, 43, 197–98

composition, 81

on creation as is-ness, 163

on God as un-manifest, 135

night of self in, 132

on powerlessness, 201–2

on selfhood, 148, 149

on silence as presence, 60

Return to the Heart of Christ Consciousness, 46

rigpa. See objectless awareness

Rising Tide of Silence, A (film), 17, 19, 44–45, 53

rituals and sacred symbols, 10, 75, 120, 171–72, 217

Roberts, Bernadette, 9, 88, 91, 108, 123, 147, 179

on All in All, 141

Experience of No-Self, 70, 123–24, 133–34

on no-self, 84, 124, 131–32, 151, 178

Path to No-Self, 70, 123–24, 127, 128–29

on unitive attainment, 11, 12, 80, 81, 131

on Unmanifest, 117, 168

Rohr, Richard, 90–91

Roman Catholicism, 40, 158, 195

Rule of St. Benedict, 177

S

sacred reading, four-step method, 57

sacred word, 5, 14, 193

sacrifice, 198, 203, 234n1

science, 101, 113, 160, 205, 215. See also neuroscience

Secret Embrace, 85, 98, 134, 162–63, 169, 211

as generative, 166

introduction of image, 138

Law of Three and, 166, 241n9

as macrocosm, 91

as unifying metaphor, 139, 151

Secret Embrace, The, 42, 105, 136

accessibility, 55–56

approaching, 57–58

author’s involvement, 56–57

composition, 34, 37, 53–54, 235n1

dark night in, 70, 71–73, 107

hidden teaching of, 138

language of, 198

nontheism in, 69

publication, 54–55, 235n2 (chap. 4)

Zen Oxherding Pictures and, 93–94

See also individual poems

“The Secret Embrace,” 65–68

sectarianism, 11, 198, 199

selfhood

collapse of, 124, 131

deconstructing, 115–16

evolving understanding of, 62–64

illusory sense of, 85, 117, 179

Keating’s and Roberts’s views of, compared, 137

radical overhaul of, 121

taxonomy, 154–55

self-reflexive consciousness, 91, 92, 117, 134, 236n8

death of self and, 81–82, 84, 88

defining, 113

ego self and, 145, 148

in illuminative stage, 110, 178

as latency, 66

in Roberts’s works, 124, 127–28

self-will and, 114

separate self and, 150

suspension of, 136

transcending, 151, 154, 211

true self and, 152–53

unity consciousness and, 155

self-structure, 10, 12, 14, 34, 110, 112, 148

self-surrender, 13, 14, 200–201

self-will, 113, 114–15

separate self, 41, 42, 63, 88, 149, 150–51, 154

shadow material, 6, 25, 74, 114, 204

Shah-Kazemi, Reza; Paths to Transcendence, 218

Shapiro, Rami, Rabbi, 34

Shimizu, Bonnie, 221, 223

signature teaching, 8, 13, 196

Centering Prayer in, 193

Divine Therapist in, 158

God in, 159

Integral in, 241–42n11

and late Thomas, distinctions in, 10–11, 15–16, 209

on self, true and false, 143, 145

works of, 39–40

silence, 67, 205, 215

boundless joy of, 66

of Creator, 224

as presence, 45, 60, 161–62, 211

rising tide of, 32, 89

in sacred reading, 57

and stillness, distinctions in, 96–97

Smith, Huston, 88–89

Snowmass Conference, 31, 182, 185–86

eight agreements of, 195–96

inception of, 193–95

soul, individual, 88

faculties of, 110, 115, 120, 148, 150

in unitive state, 124

spiritual consolations, 71, 111, 119, 135

spiritual journey, 123, 143

powerlessness on, 202

psychological work on, 158

refashioning, 110–12

three-level progression of, 108–9

Spiritual Journey (video series), 40, 71

Spiritual Summit (Calcutta), 188

spiritual traditions, 169

line-level distinctions in, 184–85

mystical, 166, 177

seeking out, 187

unitive teachings of, 181–82

unity of, 31, 206, 216

See also individual traditions

spiritual warfare, 7, 211

Spirituality & Practice, 56

St. Benedict’s Monastery

(Snowmass), 3, 21, 190, 243n5

author’s time at, 27–29

Centering Prayer retreats at, 4

interspiritual dialogues at, 197

return to, 17, 24, 193–94

Roberts at, 128–29

St. Joseph’s Abbey (Spencer), 3, 171–72

abbot of, 21–22, 187, 193

Centering Prayer at, 23

final days at, 203–4, 222–23

innovations at, 22–23, 189

Needleman at, 26

resignation from, 24

St. Romain, Philip, 27

“Stillness,” 95–98

subtle body transformation, 234n1

Sufi tradition, 84, 97, 100, 101

surrender, 72, 93, 109, 112, 173, 192–93, 211. See also self-surrender

T

Taylor, Barbara Brown; The Luminous Web, 101

Teasdale, John, 118

Teasdale, Wayne, 233n4

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 64, 159, 161

Tenzin Gyatso, Fourteenth Dalai Lama, 26, 31, 182, 196

Teresa of Ávila, 110, 191, 241n10

Teresa of Calcutta, 74

That We May Be One, 38, 42–43, 234n6, 236n4

composition, 81

consciousness-based model in, 198–99

contents, 197

on God, 170

on oneness, 137

on ultimate Self, 152

theosis (“divinization”), 96, 99, 176–78

Thérèse of Lisieux, 12, 132, 135

Thomas Aquinas, 20, 239–40n4

Thomas Keating Archive, 48–49

Thomas Keating Interspiritual Celebration, 205

Thomas Keating Reader, The, 47

thoughts in Centering Prayer, 5, 14, 60, 78–79, 233n2

Tibetan Buddhism, 14, 189

Tier I, 105, 209

Tier II, 16, 105, 209

Transcendental Meditation, 22–23, 188–89

transforming union, 117–18

duality in, 137, 177

Roberts’s, 123

in signature teaching, 143

true self in, 152–53

Unmanifest and, 135–36

transpersonal qualities, 146–47

transpersonal states, 134, 138, 160, 169

Trappist order, 187–88, 199

decline, 22, 189–90, 234n1

early career, 20–24

post-Vatican II, 23–24

vows, 18, 19

Trinitarian theology, 164, 165–66, 168–69, 184, 185, 200, 210

true self, 86, 105, 152–53, 154

and false self, relationship of, 145, 146

metaphors for, 93, 155

in middle Thomas, 146–47

as oneness, 141

revealing, 80

in signature teaching, 143

trust, 67, 75, 78, 157, 206, 216, 219

“Twilight of the Self,” 92–93, 118–20

composition, 74

controversy, 10, 56, 183

disillusionment in, 75–76

and “Last Laugh,” comparison, 80

nonduality in, 167

personal transfigured in, 76–78

poem, 73–74

U

Ultimate Reality, 160, 169, 195–96, 210

ultimate Self, 41, 152, 154

unconscious, 6, 15, 32, 40, 119, 120

Underhill, Evelyn, 110

unitive attainment, 12, 70, 80, 81, 110, 117–18, 152–53

unitive awakening, 9, 187–88

unitive stage, 154

dark night of spirit in, 112, 178

in Dionysian model, 109

self-reflective consciousness in, 110

separate self in, 150

True Self in, 152–53

unitive state, 76, 123

experiencing, 15

as progression (Roberts), 124–27, 131–32

traditional Christian understanding, 128

as transitional, 11

unity consciousness, 9, 10, 41, 105, 154, 196, 199

access to, 11

descriptions, 97, 134, 153

false self of, 155

full realization, 151

higher consciousness of, 136

Keating’s, 39

line-level distinctions in, 185

no self of, 179

in publications, 42

three-step progression of, 177–78

Unmanifest, 9, 12, 162, 168, 170

direct perception of, 41, 117, 136, 149

as emptiness and Presence, 163

and manifest, relationship of, 85–86, 98, 139–41

nondual perspective in, 105

nothingness and, 87

parallels to, 135

in publications, 42

pure, 136, 141

reunion accessed through, 151, 240n5 (chap. 9)

silence and, 67

speaking mode of, 239n6

V

van Ruysbroeck, Jan, 12

Vatican II, 20, 21–22, 187, 234n1

Verboven, Lucette, 43

Vincent de Paul, 228

W

Welcoming Prayer, 28

“What Matters,” 99–102

Wilber, Ken, 31, 46, 118, 173, 182, 209

line-level distinction of, 184–85

Up from Eden, 241–42n11

will, 11, 93

in Centering Prayer, 192

in dark night of spirit, 112

divine, 109, 150

separated, 88

wisdom, 12

divine, 96

as gift of spirit, 146

nondual, 42, 55, 90

unitive, 102

Witnessing self, 82–83, 84, 85

World Community of Christian Meditation, 226

World Without End, 43–44

Y

Yahweh, 90–91

Yale University, 18–19, 186

Z

Zen Buddhism, 4, 23, 93, 189.

See also Oxherding Pictures

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

ALSO BY CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT

Chanting the Psalms

A Practical Guide with Instructional CD

Eye of the Heart

A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm

The Heart of Centering Prayer

Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three

Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity

The Meaning of Mary Magdalene

Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity

Mystical Hope

Trusting in the Mercy of God

The Wisdom Jesus

Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message

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