The real spiritual journey

an invitation to silence

The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story.
It is a series of humiliations of the false self that becomes
more and more profound.

— Fr. Thomas Keating.

Are you daring enough to find your path in all that crosses it? Even if that which crosses it is humiliations, failures of your own mind, and way of doing things?

Can you let go, and give it all up?

Father Thomas Keating shared a passion for silence, stillness, and meditative contemplation as the ground on which to live our life.

It's only through meeting ourself in this silence, through the inner gaze, that we come to know ourself. This knowing is wordless, indescribable, total, and complete.

What he describes here, in these few words, is the humiliations that we experience, as our imagined idea of selfhood, or even the absence of it, is kicked out, over and over and over again.

There are no shortcuts — other than, perhaps, one mighty and final humiliation, irreversible and profound.

This inner journey is not for the faint of heart, and the riches and fruits are formless. They are not fruits to be received, but rather, they are the removal of the idea that there is anyone to receive them.

The profundity Fr. Keating refers to is more of a profound absence, than a profound presence. This absence is the presence.

The absolute presence.

You — without you.

Words by Fr. Thomas Keating & Andō.
Image created from a photo by Leo Foureaux.

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