The Human Condition Quotes

“The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self-worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did, fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“The fact that we experience anxiety and annoyance is the certain sign that, in the unconscious, there is an emotional program for happiness that has just been frustrated.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“In the world that lies ahead, religious pluralism is going to penetrate all cultures. How we live together with different points of view is going to become more and more important. I don’t know whether we can make progress in such a project without a contemplative practice that alerts us to our own biases, prejudices, and self-centered programs for happiness, especially when they trample on other people’s rights and needs.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Einstein believed that science was directed toward discovering God’s thoughts. Quantum physics itself is a kind of spirituality insofar as it is always looking farther into the unknown to see what is beyond the known. It is a search for ultimate reality.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Where are you?” God’s question to us never changes. In some cases, life has been so tragic that we are not free to decide where we are. But the power of divine grace, especially as it is experienced in contemplative prayer, opens us to the unconscious and introduces us to a world of unlimited possibilities that are unknown to us now.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Contemplative prayer starts modestly, but as soon as it begins to reach a certain intensity, it opens us to the unconscious. Painful memories that we have forgotten or repressed begin to come to consciousness. Primitive emotions that we felt as children and that we have been compensating for may come to consciousness.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“The contemplative journey, because it involves the purification of the unconscious, is not a magic carpet to bliss. It is an exercise of letting go of the false self, a humbling process, because it is the only self we know. God approaches us from many different perspectives: illness, misfortune, bankruptcy, divorce proceedings, rejection, inner trials. God has not promised to take away our trials, but to help us to change our attitudes toward them. That is what holiness really is. In this life, happiness is rooted in our basic attitude toward reality.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“As soon as we notice we are annoyed or angry about something, we tend to protect ourselves by projecting the cause of our upsetting emotion onto a situation or another person: “They” did this to me. “They” are always a problem. But, in fact, the real problem is not “them” but us. All biases and prejudices are the attitudes of a child from ages four to eight. If they are present in us, we are still functioning at the level of a preadolescent.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“(1) we don’t know where happiness is to be found (ignorance); (2) we look for it in the wrong places (concupiscence); and (3) if we ever find out where it might be found, the will is too weak to pursue it anyway”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“In the Old Testament, substitutes for the divine presence were called demons or false gods. If we can grasp the fact that only the experience of God can put into perspective all other forms of pleasure or the promises of happiness that various creatures provide, then we will realize that we are looking for happiness in the grass, in the wrong places. All the help we can get from other people who experience the same psychological privation won’t do a bit of good.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“How should we handle these afflictive emotions? By facing them, by feeling them. Feelings that have been repressed have to be allowed to pass through our awareness once again in order to be left behind for good. Most of the time, they don’t need psychotherapy; they just need to be evacuated. We might say that we are suffering from acute psychic indigestion, a nausea of a psychological character that is interfering with our mental health and all our relationships.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Contemplative prayer is a deepening of faith that moves beyond thoughts and concepts. One just listens to God, open and receptive to the divine presence in one’s inmost being as its source. One listens not with a view to hearing something, but with a view to becoming aware of the obstacles to one’s friendship with God.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“The false self is looking for fame, power, wealth, and prestige. The unconscious is very powerful until the divine light of the Holy Spirit penetrates to its depths and reveals its dynamics. Here is where the great teaching of the dark nights of St. John of the Cross corresponds to depth psychology, only the work of the Holy Spirit goes far deeper. Instead of trying to free us from what interferes with our ordinary human life, the Spirit calls us to transformation of our inmost being, and indeed of all our faculties, into the divine way of being and acting.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“All of us have been through the process of being born and entering this world with three essential biological needs: security and survival, power and control, affection and esteem.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“God is available through many sources besides the religious quest. I don’t mean to imply that psychology replaces the work of religion, but it seems to me that it greatly supports religion and brings a certain clarity to areas of the human condition, especially the discovery of the unconscious.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“Where am I? Where am I in relation to God, to myself, and to others? These are the basic questions of human life.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“When thinking and self-reflection begin, since the experience of God is missing, some other form of happiness has to take its place, just for the sake of survival.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation

“All human history is under the influence of the false-self system that easily moves from our hearts into our families, communities, and nations and then afflicts the whole human race. God invites us to take responsibility for being human and to open ourselves to the unconscious damage that is influencing our decisions and relationships.”
― Thomas Keating, The Human Condition: Contemplation and Transformation