Our Consciousness is Like A Great River

June 18, 2025 at 4:20 pm
Our consciousness is like a great river.

On the surface of our consciousness, superficial thoughts and experiences pass by like boats, debris, water skiers, or other things.

The river itself is the participation God has given us in God’s Being.

Our consciousness is that part of us on which all the other faculties rest, but of which we are ordinarily unaware because we are absorbed with what is passing by along the surface.

In Centering Prayer, we begin to shift our awareness from the boats and objects on the surface to the river itself and to that which sustains all our faculties and is their source.

The river in this analogy has no qualities or characteristics. It is spiritual and limitless because it is a participation in God’s being.

Keep turning your awareness from what is on the surface of the river to the river itself, from the particular to the general, from forms to the formless, from images to the imageless.

Return to the sacred word and renew you intention to consent to God’s inward presence in pure faith. (Keating, OMOH, 2005, p.47)

I would like to reflect on this reading:

This reading provides insight into the mystery of who God is and how God dwells within us while exceeding our ability to articulate God as God is. We grasp for metaphors such as “A great river” to capture this mystery.

Keating describes ordinary consciousness as the thoughts and feelings on the surface of the flow of our mind that absorb us. We are depth deprived. We identify ourselves as those thoughts and perspectives. We are attached to them and may even overidentify with them. We may be addicted to them. (Consider your political affiliation for example.)

We can drop into the spiritual level of consciousness through the practice of centering prayer as we detach from thoughts and let them go and let them flow. We do not seek to make our mind a blank. We have a bit of separation or distance from the thoughts. The hardpan of our identity and connection with the thoughts will be increasingly loosen and softened over time.

We become present to the Loving Presence of the Divine within as we pause from skipping along the surface of life. We connect with our Source within Who is also the Transcendent Loving One beyond us at the same time.

We make an act of faith whether or not we experience this Presence within and without. It is up to God. We wait in hope and longing.

Training to be Open and Accepting

June 12, 2025 at 6:08 pm

When you experience the undifferentiated, general, and loving Presence of God beyond any thought, don’t go back to the sacred word. You are already at your destination.
Accept the fact that thoughts will come. Don’t try to make the mind a blank. That is not interior silence.
Our best response is to ignore them; not with a feeling of annoyance but with one of acceptance and peace.
Every response to God must begin with the full acceptance of reality as it actually is at the moment.
The constant starting over with the sacred word with patience, calm and acceptance trains us for the acceptance of the whole of life.
It prepares us for action.
There should be a basic acceptance of what is actually happening before we decide what to do with it.
Our first reflex is to want to change reality or at least control it. (Thomas Keating, OMOH 2005, p. 40,46)
Receiving the inflow of God’s love is all about receptivity. That is the key! We become more aware of our relationship with God. (Bill Sheehan)


I would like to reflect on how we can expand the walls of our inner room to the embrace the day. Fr. Keating states that we should not fight our thoughts or evaluate our prayer time. Simply accept the presence of our thoughts. Constantly return to the sacred word to cultivate detachment from them as they flow through us. So too we can accept and not resist what happens to us over the course of the day.

The beauty of this acceptance is that we can then decide what the current situation is calling out of us. How would God have us respond in this particular situation? Instead of being reactive with our emotions in charge of our response, we can pause. In the pause, we experience the purity of our God-given emotions as we accept what is happening and discern the appropriate response. Instead of an instinctual first movement of our wills, we catch ourselves and make a godly second movement as we act out of who it is God has made us to be.

We may even recognize that a particular situation that triggered us in the past, does so no longer. God’s purifying perhaps even emotionally painful touch that arises from the circumstances gives us an opportunity to open ourselves to God’s help. Using the daily events that arise as our practice becomes a means for God’s healing touch. Let us see that God is constantly working moment to moment in our lives. We are in relationship to God always.