St. Thomas Aquinas said in the thirteenth century: “If it is true, then it is from the Holy Spirit.” The important question is not who said it or where it was written, but “Is it true?” If there is indeed one God of all the earth, then it is this one God who is breaking through in every age and culture, and monotheists should be the first to recognize this one truth (Ephesians 4:4-6) and that God is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). As Rumi said, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
Many writers in the early Christian era called the radical shift away from the judging and separate self “contemplation.”
Buddhists called it meditation, sitting, or practicing.
Hesychastic Orthodoxy called it prayer of the heart.
Sufi Islam called it ecstasy or delight in God.
Hasidic Judaism called it “living from the divine spark within.”
Vedantic Hinduism (the earliest) spoke of it as non-dual knowing or simply breathing.
Native religions found it in communion with nature itself and the Great Spirit through dance, ritual, and sexuality, and often enjoyed “original participation,” as Owen Barfield called it.
Presence is experienced in a fully participative way, outside and larger than anything the mind can do by itself.
For more insights and words of wisdom from Richard Rohr you can sign up to his daily meditations on the website http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/
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