Human Ground, Spiritual Ground

A REFLECTION ON CENTERING PRAYER’S CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Inspired by Thomas Keating’s conceptual background for Centering Prayer, this book begins by using the biblical story of Adam and Eve to describe four basic parameters that frame the universal human condition. These parameters or “Fruits of the Fall” are: death/change, sex/desire, good/evil choices and our existential aloneness/incompleteness apart from God. Within the framework of these parameters we experience our basic instinctual needs and their distortions into emotional programs for happiness—which happens when needs are wounded, unmet, or perceived as unmet.

Human Ground, Spiritual Ground identifies our basic inborn needs as security/survival/safety; sensation/pleasure; affection/esteem/approval; power/control; and intimacy/belonging. These needs pertain to both our human and spiritual growth. The book describes them in detail, giving examples of their healthy expressions as well as their pathological distortions into self-centered agendas for happiness that form the basis of the false-self system, the key to all of which is our inner motivation.

In addition to describing the primary obstacles to human spiritual growth, Human Ground, Spiritual Ground addresses how these unconscious obstacles are overcome through the daily practice of Centering Prayer and the divine action working in us and in our life. The ultimate fruit of this inner purification, healing and transformation process is the shifting of our inner center of identity from human ground into spiritual ground and our life in Christ—which is participation in the divine consciousness.

See also Kess Frey's more recent work for Portal Books, Centering Prayer and Rebirth in Christ on the Tree of Life: The Process of Inner Transformation (2013).