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Originally Posted by tv1a
N David showed ignorance on the subject. Contemplative prayer is not mindless chants. Contemplative prayer is sanctifying the imagination to allow God's spirit to be more than an shallow emotional experience.
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Contemplative prayer focuses on the inner divine self. That's from a contemplative website. It removes God from the equation by saying a "sacred word" and repeating that "sacred word" over and over while viewing your inner divine self.
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Originally Posted by tv1a
King David mastered the art of contemplative prayer. Many of his writings are the result of times of meditation and contemplative prayer. David was a man after God's heart.
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From a contemplative prayer website:
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TASK – If you have not previously practiced Centering Prayer, take a quiet moment to allow a sacred word to emerge in your heart, then sit in silence using your word to express your intention let go of all thoughts as they arise.
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This is NOT what David did.
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Throughout your day find moments when you can pause and observe the flow of lectio divina “moving from mind to feeling to stillness and back again.” Observe how this opens you to a “deepening interiority.”
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Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault:
"In Centering Prayer, then, we leave the cataphatic world and step completely into the apophatic ground, on its own terms. Both the challenge and the opportunity, from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, is to yield ourselves fully into the embrace of the silence rather than 'using' the silence to shore up the projects and goals of our ordinary awareness."
Do you really believe David was a believer of Apophatic Theology?
Apophatic theology: "is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God."
"The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man."
John Scotus Erigena: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."
I also find it hard to see David sitting with the sheep, chanting the welcoming prayer.
This welcoming prayer centers on "energy centers" inside of us: affection/esteem, control/power, and safety/security.
Here's part of Thomas Keating's writing on this:
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First, we must find ways to increase our awareness of what is happening within us in response to the stimuli that come to us from the world around us and from our fellow creatures. Second, when we are aware of reactions and mixed motivations, we need a way to remind ourselves of our purest intention and to return to it in our actions.
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This is opposed to what David actually wrote. Here you have Keating telling you to look within yourself and think of your purest intentions.
I believe the Bible had something to say about that, and it's not in support of this false doctrine.