William Keepin: The Inner Science of Divine Love
William Keepin, Ph.D., the author of Belonging to God: Spirituality, Science & a Universal Path of Divine Love, is the co-founder of the Satyana Institute and the Gender Equity & Reconciliation International project. William Keepin has studied and practiced intensively in Eastern and Western spiritual disciplines for 35 years, immersing himself in contemplative practices from the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, and he trained with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. His spiritual mentors include Father Thomas Keating (Christian), Swami Ambikananda (Hindu), Jestunma Tenzin Palmo (Buddhist), Llewellyn Vaughan Lee (Sufi), Ravi Ravindra (Hindu/interfaith) and Sr. Lucy Kurien (Christian).
William Keepin is also a mathematical physicist, social activist, and environmental scientist whose research on sustainable energy and global
warming influenced international environmental policy. He was a whistleblower in nuclear science policy and presented testimony to the US House of Representatives and the parliaments of Australia and several European countries. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, M.S. in mathematical physics, M.A. in East-West psychology, and an honorary doctorate in Spirituality and Social Change (from the California Institute of Integral Studies). William Keepin has over 40 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, and his books include: Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation between Women and Men (Hohm Press, 2007), co-author of Women Healing Women (Hohm Press, 2009), and co-editor of Song of the Earth: A Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews (Permanent Publications, UK, 2012).
In his most recent book, Belonging to God: Science, Spirituality, & a Universal Path of Divine Love (2016), William Keepin sought to recover the esoteric heart of spirituality, which has the potential to create peace and respect between religious traditions and between science and religion. Identifying the “path of divine love” as a kind of universal spirituality that leads to mystical emergence into the very essence of God, William Keepin traces this invisible doorway, deep within the heart, both as it is described in spiritual texts and as it is symbolized in ways observable to contemporary science.
Interview with William Keepin, Ph.D. – The Inner Science of Divine Love
The fire of divine love burns on every level of existence—from the heart of the sun, to the human heart, to each tiny cell in the human body, to the subatomic particles and the core of every star across all galaxies. It is a grand fractal fire of divine love! There is no force in the cosmos more powerful, and nothing propels spiritual evolution as swiftly as love. Ultimately, love is a transforming fire that burns away everything that is not love. ~William Keepin, Belonging to God
OMTimes talked with William Keepin about his journey and how he found his way from being a scientist to a seeker in search of the divine to now, where he lives a life that integrates science, spirit and helping humanity heal and embraces our unity.
OMTimes: What initiated your shift away from a career in science and toward spiritual inquiry?
William Keepin: As a young mathematical physicist thirty-five years ago, I was researching quantum physics of diatomic molecules, chaos theory, and global energy systems. I had begun practicing silent meditation, and one day I meditated intensively on the question, “Who am I?” At that time, I had never heard of Ramana Maharshi or his practice of self-inquiry. As I settled into deep stillness within the heart, I let go of the words, and simply focused on the question as a sustained yearning in my heart. After a couple of hours, I suddenly became aware that “I” was somehow “floating” about three meters above my body, near the high ceiling of the meditation room. I was startled at first, and briefly alarmed, but then noticed a remarkable luminous silver cord that flowed from me down to my body below. I quickly discovered I could move freely up and down this cord at will, and realized that I was perfectly fine, and could get back into my body.
I spent the next half hour entirely outside of my body, and the experience was astonishing, exhilarating, and profound beyond measure. I could move around in any direction at will, with no resistance and no physical form whatsoever. Amazingly, I could see everything vividly in the room around me, down to minor details like reading the clock on the far wall, even though my physical eyes “down there” in my head were shut tight. My body below me felt like a very heavy, lifeless, stone statue, but “up here” I was sheer consciousness, thinner than air, utterly free, and suffused with an ecstatic sense of refined intimacy. I could also think perfectly clearly. Ever the scientist, I performed some mathematical calculations, just to test out that I was all “up here”, along with all my faculties and memories. Finally, I reluctantly and gently slid down the silver cord, and slowly reinhabited my body.
My entire view of reality and life was forever changed by this and other mystical experiences. The orthodox materialist scientific worldview, in which I had been deeply trained for decades, basically had to be jettisoned because I had directly experienced an aspect of the ‘soul’ and its non-material nature as pure consciousness, distinct from the physical corpus. I later learned about etheric bodies and the ‘silver cord’ I had seen, which is severed at death. I also learned of Ramana Maharshi’s self-enquiry practice and subsequently spent significant time at his ashram in south India. I became a research scientist at Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, where I studied all manner of ‘paranormal’ phenomena. I also began attending meditation retreats, in Vipassana and Vajrayana initially, and then in heart-centered silent meditation and contemplative prayer which remains a core practice for me today.
One auspicious day in the mid-1990s, a spiritual teacher appeared mysteriously in my life, who led me more deeply inward than I had ever imagined possible. I was fortunate to be initiated into a path of divine love, and my inner psychospiritual structures were radically transmuted, as my teacher (who wishes to remain anonymous) ignited an invisible flame in my heart, and taught that the opposite of ignorance is not knowledge, but rather ‘knowledgelessness’—a placeless place, beyond all knowing, where the soul merges into the divine.
OMTimes: What is meant by the term “interspirituality”?
William Keepin: Interspirituality goes beyond traditional ‘interfaith’ dialogue and invites a deeper conversation and exchange of spiritual practices that relate directly to the soul’s transformative journey within the various religious traditions. The major world religions—far from being polarized in endless conflicts from which they can never recover—are, in fact, mutually complementary aspects of a larger, unified spiritual reality. This is the central insight of “interspirituality,” a term coined by the late Brother Wayne Teasdale to underscore the systematic metamorphosis that is rapidly emerging at the intersections of the major religions.
OMTimes: What is the fire of divine love, and what teachings on the path of divine love are shared across the scriptures?
William Keepin: The ‘fire of divine love’ is the universal energy of love that flows in and through all things at every level of existence. In physics, the four fundamental forces—the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity—are all regarded as a single, unified force. This unitary force is actually Love, creative energy and transforming ‘fire’ that ignites, incinerates, purifies, and burns at the core of everything and being. In different ways yet with one voice, scriptures and mystics down through the ages proclaim the ineffable mystery of the soul’s intrinsic oneness with this divine love. The core teaching across the religions is this: the inmost essence of the human being is none other than the very essence of God.
OMTimes: How are the similarities across religions more profound and illuminating than the differences?
William Keepin: The soul’s journey across the faith traditions entails a deep alchemical process of radical purification and transmutation that is fundamentally alike across the traditions, despite outward theological disparities. In Christianity, for example, a saying attributed to St. Teresa of Avila describes the fruit of mystical realization in the devotee: “Christ has no body on earth now but yours, no mouth but yours, no feet but yours.” This process is essentially no different from the Islamic Hadith in which Allah proclaims, “I become the eyes with which he sees, the mouth with which he speaks, the feet with which he walks.” Both accounts illuminate the transformative process in the human soul, and both lead to the same result: the human being is emptied of separate personal selfhood, and ‘divinized’ into a living instrument of divine love and will. As Fr. Thomas Keating expressed it, “the entire purpose of Christianity is a transformation into Christ, nothing else.” Similarly, the entire purpose of Buddhism is a transformation into Buddha; the entire purpose of (Vaishnavaite) Hinduism is a transformation into Krishna—nothing else.
This points to a universal inner science of the heart. Our culture is enamored with the love of science, yet we have failed to develop a genuine science of love. The hidden currents of divine love that flow ceaselessly in the depths of the heart are largely lost upon us, due to excessive emphasis on outer physical forms and the conceptual structures of the mind. For this, we pay a devastating price! The mind has rightly been called “the slayer of the Real,” and we are left bereft of inner practices and treasures of the heart, which facilitate the true inner journey and transformation.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with William Keepin, Ph.D.
