Father Thomas Keating is a founding teacher at Integral Spiritual Center and has been a key figure in the Centering Prayer movement since its humble beginnings in the 1970s. Distilled from profound teachings of the Christian contemplative heritage, reaching from the early Desert Fathers and Mothers to The Cloud of Unknowing, St John of the Cross, and St Teresa of Avila, Centering Prayer has aimed to bring a living spirituality into an age where God is either reduced to the New-Age vicissitudes of emotionality or is simply dead, a la Nietzsche.

Fr. Thomas and Ken being the dialogue by continuing to explore the unconscious, false, or egoic inclinations in the human psyche—an important segment of which Ken calls the dynamically dissociated shadow, or simply, “the shadow.” As he explains, in an Integral Life Practice (ILP), there are four core modules: Body, Mind, Spirit, and Shadow. For the Shadow module, the 3-2-1 Process is a Gold Star practice, and is truly an astonishing technique.

The 3-2-1 Process works with the fact that I can deny I—that I can take parts of my self, my I-ness, and push them on the other side of the self-boundary, and therefore deny ownership of these unwanted aspects of self (negative or positive). As stated in Part 1, just because I can deny ownership of my 1st-person impulses doesn’t mean they go away. Take, for example, anger. Once I push anger on the other side of the self-boundary, once it is “not I,” that anger can be projected onto you (2nd-person) or he/she/it (3rd-person). What was once 1st-person can appear as 2nd-person or 3rd-person within my own I-stream! I know someone is angry, but since it couldn’t possibly be me, it must be you, or he, or she, or it, or them. The 3-2-1 Process is a quick, simple way to access and re-own one’s shadow, by taking 2nd- or 3rd-person projections and re-identifying with them as 1st-person impulses.

Fr. Thomas and Ken go on to talk about how religion has a bad PR problem. As they agree, much of the difficulty is that a certain level of religion is taken by the modern world to be representative of religion as a whole (technically called the level/line fallacy). Because so much attention is given to pre-rational levels of religion—Jesus was born of a biological virgin, Moses really did part the Red Sea, etc.—many people often confuse the mythic-fundamentalist level of religion for religion per se. In fact, there are more than half a dozen major levels of religion, from archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral, and beyond.

One of the most exciting contributions of an Integral Spirituality is the notion of the conveyor belt. As Ken explains, everyone must start at square one—i.e. birth—and religion is the one human institution that holds the potential to actually move people through the spiral of development, towards greater inclusivity, wisdom, and compassion.

Although it would embarrass him to hear it, Father Thomas is representative of the very best of the Christian tradition—he simply radiates the true heart, mind, and spirit of contemplative devotion, freely given to all. There could be no more important figure to engage on the topic of a spirituality that that engages and embraces all dimensions of a human being alive today. We are deeply honored to have him join us once again on Integral Naked, and we humbly invite you to join us on this journey of utmost importance, released from the necessity of self-importance, and surrendered to that One who bestows all grace....

(To learn more about Integral Spirituality, see “What Is Integral Spirituality?” To join the community forming at Integral Spiritual Center, and to read chapters from Integral Spirituality, see IntegralSpiritualCenter.org. For Part 1 of this incredible dialogue, click here.)