The fact is, we are all in desperate need of happiness and don't know where it can be found. This teaching is classical in the Christian tradition and is described in theology as the consequences of original sin. Contemporary psychology has given us a detailed diagnosis of what this means.

The first consequence of original sin, according to traditional theology, is illusion. We don't know what true happiness is or where it is to be found. The second is concupiscence. Since we are made for boundless happiness, we have to find it somewhere and not knowing where to find it, we look for it in the wrong places. And third, we suffer from weakness of will, which means that even if someday we discover where true happiness is to be found, our will is too weak to do anything about it. This is why we need to be redeemed. It is not going to happen through our own efforts. What we can do is to recognize our dilemma. This is the great truth that those in Alcoholics Anonymous and its associated programs know Contemplative prayer brings us to the same realization through the ongoing experience of self-knowledge.

The first step of AA is to acknowledge that our lives have become "unmanageable." That is the conviction that comes through understanding the consequences of original sin from bitter experience. Our will is too weak to recover from the deep-seated drives of our emotional programs for happiness that become centers of gravity around which everything in our lives revolves. Our emotional reactions to events and persons circulate around these energy centers like planets around the sun. Anything entering into our private universe is judged on the basis of this question: "Is this good for my programs for happiness or not?"

The presences of Christ in the Eucharist are incredibly powerful, but thwarted unless we are also working at the spiritual journey through the process of dismantling our emotional programs for happiness and our over-identification with the beliefs of our group. Where is the violence in the world today coming from? It is coming from the frustrated emotional programs of innumerable people who are pouring negative energy into their communities and into the global atmosphere. The peace that Jesus promised through the power of his resurrection is unknown to them.

Contemplative prayer is life under the influence of the Seven Gifts of the Spirit. There are three contemplative gifts: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. There are four gifts for the active life: reverence, counsel, fortitude, and piety. Normally, it is in prayer and silence that we encounter the space to perceive the damage done to us in early childhood or that we have done to ourselves.

According to recent authors on the subject of codependency, ninety-eight percent of the population, at least in the West, is co-dependent or comes from a dysfunctional family. That statistic is approaching the universal character of the consequences of original sin: we have only two more percentage points to go. In effect, just about everybody in the human family suffers from the consequences of original sin and does not know what to do about it. Meanwhile, we carry out in daily life the habitual patterns, necessary in early childhood to survive, but totally inappropriate for adults.

If control is our principal idea of what happiness is, we think, "Oh, how happy I would be if I could only control this situation . . . if I could only control my daughter's marriage . . . if I could only be sure that my son gets into his father's profession . . . if I could only get out of this relationship." The history of the world provides many examples of persons who could never have enough power. The unlimited character of the emotional programs for happiness comes from the fact that they emerged at a time when there was no reason in our infant psyches to moderate them. Feelings and instincts are not wrong, but in early childhood reason is not present to moderate them. Hence they grow in wild exaggeration.

In the deep rest of contemplative prayer the human body receives permission, so to speak, to evacuate the emotional junk of a lifetime. In other words, we have a psychological tummy filled with emotional traumas. We are like persons sitting for ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years, on a meal that we never digested. The best remedy is not an antacid, but a good vomit! What we need to do to heal our psychological indigestion is a thorough evacuation of the emotional trauma itself. That requires a willingness to feel the primitive emotions of grief, fear, panic, despair, or whatever emotions accompanied the traumatic events or situations of early life. In the purification of the unconscious this healing takes place through the process of contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer gradually brings about the liberation of whatever prevents the presence of God from becoming a part of our constant awareness. Through the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, especially the gift of knowledge, the emotional programs that we counted on to bring us happiness are relativized. We are beginning to taste what true happiness really is. It is the experience of God loving us into existence.

If the Lamb of God has taken away all our sins, as is proclaimed at every Mass, where are they? They exist only in our memory. As soon as we are sorry for our sins, they are gone. Guilt feelings are harmful. There is true guilt when we do something wrong, but if it lasts more than fifteen or twenty seconds, it is probably neurotic. It reflects our disappointment at not showing up as holy or as nice as we had imagined ourselves to be.

Three basic theological principles underlie every Christian contemplative practice. We will look at the first two in this chapter. The first is the firm conviction of faith in the divine indwelling. In the practice of Centering Prayer we put ourselves in the presence of God and consent to God's presence and action within us. We consent to the fact that from the instant of our creation, the divine Trinity, Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, have been dwelling in us as the source of our being at every level. The three Persons of the Trinity relate to us twenty-four hours a day. Thus, contemplative prayer is Trinitarian in its source.

Secondly, contemplation is Christological in its focus. We commit ourselves to the process of the liberation of our conscious and unconscious motivation. We open to the contemplative gifts of the Spirit that are the source of contemplative prayer. Our suffering and our joys in this prayer are a participation in Christ's passion, death, and resurrection.

If we pray with the intention to open and surrender to God, drawing the curtains on our ordinary thinking processes for a specified time like half an hour, we are responding to Christ's call to repentance; that is, to change the direction in which we are searching for happiness. We are accepting Christ's invitation to a daily interview with him as the Divine Therapist. Through this profoundly psycho-spiritual process, the Spirit works back through our personal life history. Like an archaeological dig, beginning where we are now, the Spirit explores our personal life histories layer by layer--back through adulthood, adolescence, childhood, early childhood, and infancy. Every now and then, the Spirit gives us a breather, a plateau on which to work new insights into all our relationships. Every time we move to a new level of faith and self-knowledge, all our relationships change: to ourselves, others, nature, the cosmos, and above all to God. When that work is completed, the Spirit seems to say, "Let's move on to the next level." Thus we access each level until we come to the bottom where the real source of most of our emotional problems actually is, the fragility of early childhood.

The psychological experience of contemplative prayer often feels as if we are getting worse. Actually, we are only getting in touch with our basic problems--the primitive emotions that set off the elaborate defense apparatus that as infants and young children we devised in order to survive. When we sit in Centering Prayer, introduce our sacred symbol, and enter a certain degree of rest, our defenses go down. The growth of interior silence along with our growing trust in God, enables us to face the dark side of our personality. We know that God knows us through and through, and still loves us. In fact, God could not be more delighted to provide this information. Grace enables us to evacuate negative emotions that are stuck in our nervous system, hindering the free flow of pure love that leads to divine transformation.

In contemplative prayer we are identifying ourselves with the passion of Jesus who took upon himself all the sins of the world. As Paul writes, "God made him to be sin for our sake" (II Cor. S:21 )-not just our personal sins, but the tendencies to sin that are called the capital sins. These flow from the habitual frustration of our emotional programs for happiness when the events of daily life contradict our demands or expectations.

In sharing Christ's passion and death in contemplative prayer, we may feel endless dryness or at times a bombardment of thoughts. We experience primitive emotions as did St. Therese of Lisieux who went through this profound purification even though she was so young. Therese wrote, "I accept the wildest thoughts that go through my imagination, for the love of God." We need to cultivate a friendly attitude towards this garbage because otherwise we might try to push these painful emotions back into the unconscious. If we let the emotional junk came to consciousness, it will pass through our awareness into the atmosphere and be gone forever. All we have to do is to wave good-bye.

Sometimes in the midst of the unloading process, something serious comes up like rejection or abuse that needs psychological help. Psychotherapists who understand the spiritual journey are a necessary support in these circumstances. There needs to be a fruitful symbiosis between spiritual direction and psychotherapy.

Dryness in prayer and the sense of abandonment by God are a participation in the passion of Christ. After each humiliation of the false self, we get closer to the sources of the problems of early life, perhaps even as far back as the womb. Every time we move down in humility, we instantly move to a new level of freedom. The spiral staircase winds up as well as down. We experience inner resurrections. The resurrection of Jesus manifests itself through the Fruits of the Holy Spirit: charity, joy, peace, and the rest. Then at a more profound level the Seven Gifts of the Spirit manifest in acts inspired by the Beatitudes. The movement of humility and the movement of transformation proceed at the same time. Sometimes one predominates over the other. In the end they seem to come together in a disposition of utter humility.

The fruit of Mary's sitting at the feet of Jesus in contemplative prayer is the insight that she manifested when she poured the precious perfume, symbol of the Spirit, over the head of Jesus at the house of Simon the Leper. While manifesting the total gift of herself, there remains for her and for us the mysterious passage from union to unity. This passage consists of losing one's very self for the love of God. In the movement towards unity with God we have to let go of the self as a fixed point of reference. The Greek fathers called this process divinization. This does not mean that we disappear into the Absolute like a drop of water in the ocean. Rather, we become the whole universe when there is no "I" to prevent it. Although we still maintain our uniqueness as God's eternal gift, there is no possessiveness, no attachment; there is just freedom.

We might distinguish four stages of interior freedom: freedom from sin, freedom from the tendency of sin, freedom to love, and finally just freedom-freedom to be what God wants us to be in the present moment without reflection on self because there is no self to come back to.

When Mary of Bethany spread the perfume of incredible value over the head of Jesus, she anticipated his passion and death. His sacred body contained the perfume of infinite sweetness. The blood of Christ poured forth from his body broken on the cross is a vivid symbol of the total gift of the Father, of all that the Father is, which is the Son. The blood of Christ symbolizes the supreme gift of the Spirit poured out without measure over the world.

The Buddha, towards the end of his life, gathered together eighty thousand disciples, monks who had been working vigorously on the spiritual journey. When they had all settled down, the Buddha lifted up a lotus flower, the symbol in his teaching of the highest attainment of enlightenment. As all the monks gazed on the lotus flower, they were moved into a state of ecstatic absorption in which they forgot themselves completely and entered into unity with all creation. The vast mountain valley was filled with an incredible depth of silence. All of a sudden, a monk standing near the Buddha started to laugh: "Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" His laughter echoed off the mountain peaks and left all the other monks in a state of stunned shock. How could anybody do such a thing at such a sacred time? The Buddha, undisturbed, slowly lowered the lotus flower. Immediately he turned to the monk and imparted to him the Dharma, that is, the fullness of enlightenment. The Buddha evidently recognized that this man had attained something beyond the state of oneness that all the other monks had achieved. This monk, by his spontaneous laughter, manifested that he had transcended every means of relating to ultimate reality. He did not need any human experience, support, or ritual to sustain it. He had discovered who he was. He had become ultimate reality, not theologically, but experientially. This is the grace that Mary of Bethany manifested at the banquet at the house of Simon the Leper. In emptying the jar of perfume over the head and body of Jesus she revealed that she understood the profound significance of the passion and death of Christ. She had assimilated the mystery of redemption and was expressing her identification with it.

As we progress in the spiritual journey there are surprises. In general, we only know that they will lead where Jesus invited us to go. "Follow me," he said. Where is Jesus going? To Jerusalem, Calvary, hell, and finally into the bosom of the Father. In that place we do not need anything else. Once we have given ourselves totally to God, all that God is and has is ours. God is unconditional love and when we are unconditional love, in some way, we too are God. That is the invitation of the Gospel and the ultimate purpose of every kind of ministry, service, ritual, and sacrament. Jesus said, "Little children, here is the kingdom. It is all yours." How do we receive it? Not by striving for it, but by consenting to it. Jesus said in another place, "If you want to save your life, you will bring yourself to ruin. But if you bring yourself to nothing, you will find out who you are" (Mt. 10:39). When we are no thing, no role, no emotional program for happiness, no fixed point of reference, we too are unconditional love.

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Excerpted from The Better Part by Fr. Thomas Keating

You can obtain a copy by visiting the Contemplative Outreach Bookstore.