I believe the answer is the following:
This "teaching begins by a fundamental re-positioning of the place of meditation in a spiritual praxis. Rather than seeing it as a tool for developing concentration, relaxing stress, or accessing higher states of consciousness," meditation or centering prayer, is seen as, " a catalyst for the purification and healing of the unconscious. This purification is itself prayer--not a preparation for relationship with the higher, but the relationship itself. It is the essence of what he means by "consenting to the presence and action of God."
How does this purification work? As the unconscious unloads during Centering Prayer, these small purifications are actually a part of a larger project. One begins to dismantle the "false self," i.e., the needy, driven, unrecognized motivations that govern most of our untransformed human behavior.
Dovetailing classic Christian teaching and contemporary psychology, Keating suggests the false self as a modern equivalent for the traditional concept of the consequences of original sin. Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory "emotional programs for happiness," as Keating calls them.
It is the false self that we bring to the spiritual journey; our 'true self' lies buried beneath the accretions and defenses. In all of us there is a huge amount of healing that has to take place before our deep and authentic quest for union with God--which requires tremendous courage and inner presence to sustain--escapes the gravitational pull of our psychological woundedness and self-justification. This, in essence, constitutes the spiritual journey.
So far this is orthodox psychological and theological fare. But where Thomas Keating takes the bold step is by his assertion that Centering prayer is a direct catalyst to this process of purification of the false self. As one sits in centering prayer with the intent to rest in and trust in God, the unconscious begins to unload "the emotional junk of a lifetime." Repressed memories, pain, accumulated dull hurt rise to the surface and are, throught the attitude of gentle consent, allowed to depart. As Keating visualizes the process in Invitation to Love:
The level of deep rest accessed during the prayer period loosens up the hardpan around the emotional weeds stored in the unconscious, of which the body seems to be the warehouse. The psyche begins to evacuate spontaneously the undigested emotional material of a lifetime, opening up new space for self-knowledge, freedom of choice, and the discovery of the divine presence within. As a consequence, a growing trust in God, a bonding with the Divine Therapist, enables us to endure the process."Thus," he continues," the gift of contemplative prayer is a practical and essential tool for confronting the heart of the Christian ascesis--namely, the struggle with our unconscious motivation--while at the same time establishing the climate and necessary dispositions for a relationship with God and leading, if we persevere, to divine union." As I see it, the most fruitful connection here is his interlinking of the "dark night' or "cloud of unknowing' of the traditional apophatic path with the psychological process--the "dark" of the "ground" or our psyche. If psychoanalysis might represent "cataphatic therapy"--that is, using words, concepts, awareness to illuminate the darkness of our inner ground, so Centering prayer is in fact being represented as a kind of "apophatic psychotherapy." What really happens when one enters the cloud of unknowing, resting in God beyond thoughts, words, and feelings, is a profound healing of the emotional wounds of a lifetime.As these wounds are gradually surfaced and released in prayer (one simply lets them go non-possessively, rather than retaining them for inspection as in psychoanalysis), more and more the false self weakens and the true self gradually emerges. For Keating this is the real meaning of the term transforming union. As he states quite plainly in Intimacy with God: "We can bring the false self to liturgy and to the reception of the sacraments, but we cannot bring the false self forever to contemplative prayer because it is the nature of contemplative prayer to dissolve it."
from Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault, pp.94-96
