Quotes representing a core idea that flows through Cynthia Bourgeault’s teachings: the basic gestures of gathering and letting go, balancing will and aim with a posture of receptivity, navigating with attention and surrender.
“Attention and surrender need to be in balance. They are the joysticks you use to navigate the cosmos.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer retreat, November 2019
“These two skills, attention and surrender, are what spiritual teachers work on over and over and over again with to help you learn the gentle act of being present.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 6:53 Disc 1 Track 5
“In 40 years now of working with centering prayer, and working with the Gurdjieff work, I’ve come to believe strongly that the two joysticks in the spiritual journey are attention and surrender, and that you need both of them. You need a deeply grounded and unreserved capacity to give, to surrender, to let go. You also need a deep capacity to pull it in, to concentrate, to focus, to pay attention, and not just have your attention pulled.” Cynthia Bourgeault, A Fresh Perspective on Centering Prayer with Cynthia Bourgeault, 2024
“Attention and surrender. They’re both completely non-negotiable. And how you hook them together and the proportion of them is something like finding your own right touch with the path. I like to think of attention and surrender as the breathing of the cosmos. The two essential motions, the drawing in and the letting go, concentrating and releasing, that really not only are our own core spiritual experience, but if we can put it in this way, God’s spiritual experience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 0:03 Chapter-7-Voluntary-Attention.
“Being lies in the direction of summoning Will and Aim to gather a structure that I can call ‘I’”. Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 7:50
“There are fields upon fields that we can find, but only if we have a strong enough attention, and a quiet enough Will to go there.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, disc 5, track 4.
“Most of the work in advanced level spiritual discernment is around the question of Real Will and surrender, and how they fit together, because it spirals apart and together and apart and together, through our entire finite yearning. It’s a wonderful dance, so keep your eyes open and your heart open.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont Wisdom School 2014 Track 3d Thursday pm around 1:42:45
“The deep surrender of self through Kenosis is the access path to abundance, not your will.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Pendle Hill, May 2019
“Like the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and gives itself up for the harvest to come. The whole emphasis on self-abandonment. We’ve got these two fundamental tensions: the one towards gathering and collecting, and the one towards letting it all go.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 8:40
“I’m quite sure that these are Affirming and Denying in a higher resolution, and you need them both.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 10:00
“When I consider where to start—on the surrender end of the pole or the gathering end of the pole, recognizing that both are necessary—I will put my eggs in the basket of surrender as the start and the basis to come back to.” Cynthia, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 45:40
“The grabbing motion, the concentrating motion, tends to lock you into the smaller cognitive self. Letting go opens the gateway to spacious self, or Kesdjan selfhood. The spacious mind opens up the possibility of receiving help from the collective.” “You give up without giving up, and you receive help—you see this on the movements floor.” Cynthia, Holy Week in Rockland, 2024 03 47:25
“What becomes most important in life is not to gain anything, but to not fall out of alignment. Because when alignment is there, the whole thing comes into a relational field that in every moment is giving and receiving the all.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week in Rockland, 03 53:15
Logion 42
Yeshua says…
Come into being as you pass away.
Logion 48
Should two make peace in one house,
they could speak the word,
“Move!” to a mountain,
and it would obey them.
All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
More quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault from The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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