I have taken it upon myself to completely transcribe this ten minute talk with two of the prime deliverers of spiritual knowledge. Ken let's FTK roll, and I absolutely love his enthusiastic expose on centering prayer as seen through Old Testament references/buddha/mythic lit/epistemology/mysticism/subject-object duality/rationality, etc. He hits this one totally out of the ballpark... bravo.

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Father Thomas Keating, a prayer, a presence, a secret.
Via Integral Naked...

In the context of the book, Intimacy With God, these various names for contemplative prayer, at least in some form, were popular for certain periods in history. The most important one hasn't been discussed in recent years, and I consider it the most important. It comes from the wisdom saying of Jesus in Matthew 6:6, "If you wish to pray, enter your inner room, close the door, pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who is not secret will reward you." So here it seems to me is a formula that might have been more detailed originally, but perhaps if there was a method it was kind of lost. So it seems to me that all forms of prayer that lead to or are despositive to the dispositon useful or necessary for contemplative prayer, this is offered in one or other of the names that became attached to this prayer. So it's a prayer, the fundamental formula speaks of prayer in secret, so right away you're in a metaphor which is arresting to say the least. And it resonates with some of the Jewish mysticism that you find in the old testament that you find in the patriarchs and in the prophets and in the Torah in general. For instance, you have the famous passage, about Elijah, a great prophet, and he was on the wrong side of the controversy with a very violent lady named, I think, Jezebel. And she had priests that served her pagan deities. And he brought down fire- if you recall the story- on his sacrifice, and the priests of Baal cut themselves and jumped around and nothing happened. Whereupon I think he killed all the priests, naturally she was upset. And she tracked him down in the desert, and he was running away, and he finally sat down under a tree, he said, this is it, all the prophets are dead, I'm the only one left, I've had it, let me die. At this point in the story, an angel appears, and gives him something to eat, which is always a help, and on the strength of that food he walked for forty days, forty nights, according to the text, to Mt. Horeb. And there on the top of Mt. Horeb, God said, that he would pass by. Give him a view of his...obviously we're talking about a mystical presence here. So he's standing, and he's in this cave.. and along comes a hurricane, huge wind that blows the boulders all around, and God was not in the wind. There was an earthquake, everything shook, rocks flying around, and God was not in that power play. And there was a fire of great proportion. God was not there. Finally, Elijah heard a whisper, and it was in sheer silence, there was just sheer silence. And Elijah recognized that this was God. And wrapped himself in his cloak and went to the entrance of the cave. Another event, if I may give this background, uh... Moses of course is a very prominent figure in Jewish history and mysticism for that matter. So, when God appeared in the burning bush, if you recall, sending Moses to pharaoh to deliver his people from slavery of Egypt, Moses naturally asked, well who shall I say sent me, when I see pharaoh? So God said, my name is I Am, or as some quotations have it, I am I am, or I am that I am, it's not an easy thing to translate. But what is communicated in all the translations is that this power that met with Moses at the burning bush was Is-ness, without any limit in any direction or any conceptual form whatsoever, he just Is. So everything that is must be in relation to is-ness in someway. So in so far as WE is, we participate in the divine creative manifestation, and hence there is something within us, it's an interpretation of the image of God that Genesis is referring to, there is something in us that is vibrating on some very subtle level of body soul and Spirit that mirrors the presence of God in some way that only a creature that has intelligence and will could do. In other words, up until now, as someone has said, everything just reflected God, but unconsciously. There was no consciousness of the gift. Now with the human intelligence developing, rather slowly, some view, this presence is now appreciated, or it can be thanked, or it can be praised as a great artist, and indeed creation is an incredible, fabulous expression of the most creative activity in every level, including the subatomic world and the astronomical world which our mind can't wrap around either, in other words there's a whole world of creation which we don't know, but what we do know is quite significant. And is-ness..is.. in fact, Ramana Maharashi, as you know, the great pundit of India, the great embodiment of Advaita, hinduism, he said, this is the best description of the absolute that ever was. I am. Am. Am. Am. Am. Never ends, never began. Just always is. So this is the primary movement of any mysticism, is this resonating to the awesomeness, the wonder, the greatness, the goodness, of a... you can't say a being cause God is beyond both being and not being, as we know it. So it's a mystery that is tremendous in the sense of being overwhelming, and something that our intellect can't get around. So this is really a starting point, it seems to me, for mysticism, as a relationship with reality as it is, rather than as we perceive it or would like it to be, or conceive it to be. One of the great Episcopol theologians, John Macquarrie had this definition of God. God is reality. That's a magnificent description in one word. But again, anything you say about God really doesn't work. St. Thomas Aquinas put it this way in the middle ages, that we know more about God by what we do not say than by anything we can say. And so as the Buddhists have known from even earlier periods, whenever you start talking about God, you've ceased to manifest God. So God is not manifested in talking or thinking so much, as in manifestations of being. So if... the problem is that God is so present that we have no faculty or instrument with which to interpret that presence and so it seems to be absent. It's so present that we can't handle it. But that doesn't make it go away. It's still there. We just think it isn't. And so the whole adventure of life is becoming more and more aware of what is, including ourselves. So to penetrate or to find God in the fullest possible way, I guess we have to become secret ourselves. Cause that's where he is. So, secrecy consists in letting go of our external environment, that preoccupies our mind, symbolized by the inner room that Jesus recommends going into. Close the door, symbolizing letting go of the interior dialogue which is sometimes noisier than the world outside. And then moving the further step to forgetting the self. That is to say losing, temporarily, one's self identity, or the enormous propensity to reflect on what's going on in our life, even if it's silence. There's still an inclination to think about that. So prayer in secret then, is sheer silence. It's not an emptiness, it's the fullness of everything. It's not a place to go since you're already it. It's not something you have to earn because it's a part of our very nature. It's something in other words we have to realize. Awaken to, and various terms that are used, or be transformed into. And the fact that this seems to be an overwhelming project and all the mythical literature points to the struggle to find, through various trials, to come...the hero goes into the cave or he goes to the bottom of the sea or the end of the world or the top of a mountain; all symbols of the active search for a presence that is already there. So you finally, in most of the literature, finally comes home and realizes that's where it was all the time, and what he was looking for was right within himself.