“Blessed are Poor in Spirit” illustrated by the constriction that accompanies spiritual growth.

“For every new arising there is a cost to be paid.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rockland, ME 4/2024

“Progress comes through the voluntary acceptance of constriction and diminishment. And that’s the unpleasant bottom line. Because all of us think that evolution comes through expansion. And we automatically equate our larger personhood with expanded space, expanded agency, endless opportunity, a whole canvas to paint on. But it’s actually, spiritually speaking, in the opposite direction. It’s in the leaning into the conditions that you at first experience as intolerable, that you gradually realize that they are exactly the conditions that bring forth something new, something that can’t be born forth in any other way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, 2023 Wisdom School at Claymont

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Logion 58
Yeshua says…
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.

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“We have to grasp firmly with our minds that this place of narrowness, Mi-Fa,  this difficult moment, must inevitably come in everything—in all we attempt as well as in every relation that we make… To alter things in any way shocks are necessary. To revolve in the circle of one’s laziness is simply death”. Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1220

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More Impressions exploring the Beatitudes.

Here’s another Impression illustrating the concept of Poor in Spirit.

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.