LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Wisdom Area: Mission and Fulfillment
Question: What role do Spirituality and Religion (God) play in the quest for
mission and fulfillment?
YouTube Video Title: Legacy of Wisdom – Father Thomas Keating – Aging
Lifestyles
YouTube URL: http://www.youtube.com/embed/4-k3uBX-FlQ
Length: 13:44
Interviewee: Father
Thomas Keating www.contemplativeoutreach.org
Father Thomas Keating is one of the foremost teachers of
contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition. He entered a cloistered
Roman Catholic monastery of the Cistercian order. Keating is the
former abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, and
resides at St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.
Father Keating, along with M. Basil Pennington, is co-founder of the
Centering Prayer movement and of Contemplative Outreach, a
worldwide nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the practice
of this Christian form of meditation. He has presented the Centering
Prayer method and its related mystical theology to gatherings of nonChristians, Protestants, and Roman Catholics worldwide. He has taken
this ministry to seminarians, priests, lay people, and prisoners. Father
Keating frequently participates in dialogues with contemplatives of
other religions.
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Question: If I could choose an aging lifestyle, what elements should I include
in this?
Transcript (ENGLISH):
Interviewer:
The second section is called aging lifestyles and relationships. Our models of aging lifestyles
are dramatically shifting. We’re living longer and many of us are seeking new levels of
engagement, activity, and meaning as we age. Staying creative appears to be an important
part for a good quality of later life. Our relationships with family, with friends, and with our
extended network are vital links to maintain this creativity. Yet relationship attachments often
hold us back. There become expectations and habits complete with all of the psychological
and physical issues that can come with this aging and relationship issues it remains a fact
that in our society the majority of older people end up living alone and saying that they’re
lonely. So the first question is, if I was to choose a conscious lifestyle for my aging years,
what kinds of elements should I try to put into that so that as I design to do such a thing, an
aging lifestyle. What would be important to have around you in an aging lifestyle?
Father Keating:
Well, I feel the relationship with the ultimate reality deepens with time and that the whole
purpose of life is to reach a union or even unity with this, and that that’s the ultimate goal of
all the great world religions. At least in their beginnings that’s the inspiration for which all the
rituals and practices are designed for. So if you have people who are not there as teachers,
although you need to have them available at least in books or audios or DVDs. But the
immediate contact with people who are actually in a fairly permanent state of relationship call
it with Reality (capital R). God goes by almost any name because He’s present in everything.
So there just isn’t a word that can encompass and all the great wisdom teachers say that you
can’t put God into a concept of one thought, because He just is. How do you describe “is”?
Especially when it’s “is-ing” all the time. It’s happening, it’s not static. Some theologies go
over the static because of the philosophical references out of which they came. But if you
have an unmentionable or unspeakable experience, you have to draw on a culture if you
want to talk to somebody else or to try to explain it to somebody. And of course you never
really can. But even to explain it to yourself you need some kind of philosophical or
theological system. And this is where I think the retired people or those who are aging are
the ideal reservoir for contemplatives. And you only need a certain number of
contemplatives that begin to change society and to begin to find ways creatively of bringing
the divine manifestation into the street or marketplace, prisons, hospitals. Change the
weapons into plowshares and all the other things that have been put forward as ideals.
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
Interviewer:
So you’re suggesting with an aging lifestyle to sort of surround yourself with some other
people who are Father Keating:
Yes, and if you can’t find other people then now it’s possible to use the internet. You can get
almost anything on there. All information is there. So that if one has the discipline to feed
oneself constantly. Now to remain in the presence of God all the time, that’s really the goal.
The presence of Reality. Now some Buddhist teachings do it by being mindful of what you’re
doing and forgetting the self in like in Zen Satori. The eye that is looking at the tree
disappears and there’s just the tree and you and unity, okay. And so in hearing when the
gong sounds, you disappear. The you, the ego, sort of disappears into the sound and into
nothingness.
Interviewer:
Is that the same experience as in Christian contemplative work, as well?
Father Keating:
Yes, but from a different perspective sometimes. This is why I think inter-spiritual dialogue
that is the communion of spiritual teachers from all the traditions, is an enormous benefit that
hasn’t yet been tapped. It’s now possible because people can travel and talk languages.
But to have them talk together and develop a common language. You can learn. I’ve
learned so much from the Buddhists and the Vedic Hinduism and the Sufis. The spiritual
wisdom teachers are going to a place that has a common element but a different articulation
and different practices to get there. You can learn from them something that is underemphasized in your own tradition or help you to recover it or at least help you to be honest in
what you’re not doing in your own. So this capacity to be open to all reality, not just material
reality, although that’s involved, but all spiritual reality, mental reality. I mean, there is no
other means that everything is speaking of God and is a teacher. Everything is your teacher
and you wonder if you really know anything at some points. But you’re willing to know
everything. And I think that’s what emptiness is in Buddhism, Shunyata. It’s a capacity to be
silent to one’s own thoughts and desires and over-attachment to anything. Total detachment.
That’s Buddhism, is it not? At least some forms of it. And it seems to me it’s present in
almost all the other, certainly the many scriptural texts that point in this direction. I am who
am. That’s the best definition there is. Who am I? I just am. And there’s no limit to am, am,
am or “is-ness”.
Interviewer:
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
So in today’s culture there’s a lot of movement often away from traditional religion into these
new amalgams of spiritual paths.
Father Keating:
Well, I think that that’s a hazardous practice, but I think that anything is hazardous in this
world. Or put it this way, it has limitations. Because there’s an element of freedom in this
world, of free choice. And you can choose. Free choice is not the same as freedom.
Freedom is what God is that’s perhaps the main attribute of Reality. It can do whatever it
likes. And so it likes all aspects of life. And the higher the life the more complex, the more
opportunity of God to manifest itself. Like there’s a playful side of God or a humorous side of
God that many people are not equal to, but it’s very real. Somethings are games. And
Hindus used to think life itself was a dance. So life is serious, but not just serious. And it’s
not just humorous.
So there’s nothing you can say about God that tells you anything definite. And there isn’t any
end to it because God is all things at every moment. And adjusting to everything where it is
and bringing it especially in intelligent beings to this incredible participation. My feeling is the
chief attribute of God is humility. He doesn’t care about being God. So what? Cause he has
everything, he doesn’t need anything. Doesn’t need our praise or our service. What he
really needs most, I think, and several other people think, is to be allowed to love us into full
existence into his own life, into and so to enter into his bosom, so to speak. Or what the
Jewish ancestors called Abraham’s bosom which is a symbol of God’s unfailing love that is
always waiting, it doesn’t push us because we have this free choice, but is kind of luring us
or forcing us or dragging us or whatever is necessary to heal the wounds of our evolutionary
process. To me consequences of spiritual evolution as a theology have not been realized
yet Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he said that God is in every subatomic particle. There’s
trillions of them in us. If that’s true you can never get away from God. Or if you did you’d just
whoosh, turn into a grease spot. So to get people to be aware of God’s presence as loving,
as trustworthy, as bride or as bridegroom, or beyond that as unity-consciousness that the
post-personal philosophers talk about, Ken Wilbur and company.
Interviewer:
It’s difficult Father Keating:
We don’t think well enough of God. We don’t think nearly big enough or how little He’s
bothered by trivia and yet He’s interested in trivia. Cause when you say God creating the
universe, what would he care about a subatomic particle? Not so, because He can do
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LEGACY OF WISDOM
www.legacyofwisdom.org
wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Project Director:
Jay Goldfarb
Contact: wisdom@legacyofwisdom.org
Team & Sponsors: Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Roshi Joan Halifax,
Harry Moody, Dr. Sarita Bhalotra, Dr. Rodolfo Musco, Mickey Lemle, Deborah Wolf
everything at once, with perfect skill. And He wants us to be able to participate in everything.
I mean many of the mystics say there really isn’t any time – past, present, and future are all
one. And that eternity accompanies or time may be just a projection of our brain that really
doesn’t exist outside of it. We’re in for some interesting astrophysical discoveries I think now
that they’re on to the boson. That was critical to find it. So if they really found it. The whole
rhythm of all creation is really trinitarian – things come in threes. But if love is the synonym
for being as some say, just to be is to be in relationship with everything else that be’s, too.
In other words, if we were willing to just accept the fact that we’re a creature, God will give us
everything else. Because if we want to be God on our own terms, as is hinted at in Adam
and Eve, it just doesn’t work. But you can have everything if you just accept your littleness.
So to help, old age really should be a transformative experience, like entering a monastery or
entering a contemplative form. And I don’t think you can do that without some process. Now
you don’t have to go to all the levels that people under a monastery do, cause they don’t
even work sometimes. But one needs to have a practice of some kind that introduces us to
the silence. Because in some ways God and silence are the same. Interior silence. And
this is what is so reassuring. To experience God awakening in us. He’s always been there.
We have no evidence of it on the merely sense level. So I always think of the elderly as the
perfect reservoir for contemplatives.
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