Thomas Keating Quotes

Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.

Spiritual growth is more than procedure, it’s a wild search for God in the midst of the tangled jungle of our souls, a search for which involves a volatile mix of messy reality, wild freedom, frustrating stuckness, increasing slowness and a healthy dose of gratitude

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.

When we begin to experience our life as the miraculous expression of divinity - not occasionally, but all the time - then we will know the true meaning of success.

We learn this by the precepts that Jesus left. He observed that the people were looking outward, and assured them that the kingdom of God cometh not with outward observation; and for this reason, that it was only to be known in man.

The soul... may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.

Listen to the inner light; it will guide you. Listen to inner peace; it will feed you. Listen to inner love; it will transform you, it will divinise you, it will immortalise you.

Aloneness is nearer God, nearer reality.

Well, I believe life is a Zen koan, that is, an unsolvable riddle. But the contemplation of that riddle - even though it cannot be solved - is, in itself, transformative. And if the contemplation is of high enough quality, you can merge with the divine.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes.

Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness.

Let the inner god that is in each one of us speak. The temple is your body, and the priest is your heart: it is from here that every awareness must begin.

I always had a relationship with God as early as 8 years old. I can remember having these conversations with God. I'd go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and talk to myself, but then I knew I was not the only one present.

The mind is a great gift, but it has to be quieted down in order to feel, hear and see the presence of God.

O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen.

If you want the Divine to become alive within you, first of all you as a human being have to become absolutely alive.

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.

What it takes to reach this place I'm speaking about is to be in spirit. You shift who you are away from what you have, what you do, what your reputation is, what people think of you, and all of that ego-based thinking. You shift into the understanding that who you are is a piece of God - who you are is a piece of the source - and when you stay connected to that in your thoughts you inspire others to do the same.

In order to see Jesus, we first need to let him look at us!

Experience has taught me that I connect best with others when I connect with the core of myself. When I allow God to liberate me from unhealthy dependence on people, I listen more attentively, love more unselfishly, and am more compassionate and playful. I take myself less seriously, become aware that the breath of the Father is on my face.

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

When your inner mantra becomes 'How may I serve?' rather than 'What am I going to get?' and 'Who do I need to defeat?,' you start to see the unfolding of God in everything and everyone around you and you shift into higher consciousness.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

The Ascension is actually the birth of the Inner You expressed as the spiritual individualism of the inner particle state.

We have all of us free access to all that is great, and good, and happy, and carry within ourselves a key to all the treasures that heaven has to bestow upon us. We starve in the midst of plenty, groan under infirmities, with the remedy in our own hand; live and die without knowing and feeling anything of the One only God, whilst we have it in our power to know and enjoy it in as great a reality as we know and feel the power of this world over us; for Heaven is as near to our souls as this world is to our bodies; and we are created, we are redeemed, to have our conversation in it.