{"id":19429,"date":"2020-10-23T09:32:20","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T13:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19429"},"modified":"2020-10-23T09:32:20","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T13:32:20","slug":"what-the-mystics-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19429","title":{"rendered":"What the Mystics Know"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Thomas Keating: The Secret\nEmbrace<br>\nPart One<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>What\nthe Mystics Know<\/strong><br>\nFriday, \u202fOctober 23, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jhnJXDGfPiE\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p>Today I pause Cynthia Bourgeault\u2019s reflections and offer\na few words about the essential role of contemplation in the lives of honest\nspiritual seekers like Thomas Keating and Cynthia herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To\nmany people, contemplation is an old-fashioned word, but it simply means <em>the deliberate seeking of God by an inner dialogue<\/em>. The soul grows closer to\nGod through our willingness to detach from the passing self, the tyranny of\nfeelings, the addiction to self-image, and the false promises of culture. It is\na journey into the nothingness of true faith, where the ordinary rules of\nthinking, managing, explaining, and fixing up the smaller self do not apply.\nContemplation shouldn\u2019t be used to spiritually bypass what is real, harmful, or\nunjust in our lives or the world around us. However, with steady practice it\nwill eventually give us <em>the ability to\nstay present to what is, and meet it with wisdom, compassion, and courage<\/em>. All the major world\nreligions at their more mature stages recognize the necessity of contemplative\npractice in some form and under different names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m\nnot sure that most people in the Western world have ever really met the person\nwho they themselves really are. Most of us have lived our lives with a steady\nstream of ideas, images, and feelings that we cling to\u2014thinking they are our\nvery essence. But in reality, at that level, <em>I don\u2019t have the idea; the idea has me. I don\u2019t have the\nfeeling; the feeling has me.<\/em>&nbsp;We have to\ndiscover who this \u201cI\u201d really is. Who are we at the deepest level\u2014behind our\nthoughts and feelings or others\u2019 thoughts and feelings about us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At\nevery moment, all our life long, we identify ourselves either with our\nthoughts, our self-image, or our feelings. We have to find a way to get beyond\nthose things to discover our \u201coriginal face,\u201d the one we already had before we\nwere born. Even with great practice, most of us will only glimpse or abide in\nour True Self for moments at a time while we are alive. Mystics seem to finally\nand fully abide there, which I hope encourages us to keep going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We yearn for\n\u201cbreach menders\u201d who can \u201crestore our ruined houses,\u201d as Isaiah says (58:12).\nWe long for great-souled people who can hold the chaos together within\nthemselves\u2014and give us the courage to do the same. I pray all of us know such\npeople in our lives and that we be granted such people on the world stage. And\nI am confident such people have gone before and paved the way for us\u2014the\nmystics and saints of all genders, cultures, and faith traditions, those both\nknown and unknown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Keating: The Secret Embrace Part One What the Mystics Know Friday, \u202fOctober 23, 2020 Today I pause Cynthia Bourgeault\u2019s reflections and offer a few words about the essential role of contemplation in the lives of honest spiritual seekers like Thomas Keating and Cynthia herself. To many people, contemplation is an old-fashioned word, but it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19430,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19429\/revisions\/19430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}