If you learn to practice conscious presence, you will practice conscious love. The two are completely bound. You can’t do one without the other. Cynthia Bourgeault
“Conscious love transforms, it nurtures, it calls people into being. Something blossoms in it, and it does come out of a deep attitude of servanthood, but it has this transforming quality. A couple of things that are said very, very clearly in a lot of the spiritual books. One, and this is very important, is that it’s an act of our will and of our purpose. I won’t call it an act of will so much, because you think of willpower, but it’s an act of intention, rather than a feeling. Which means that at root, conscious love is a proactive, rather than a reactive experience. Proactive love is a love that comes out of a choice which you then enact. And conscious love is in that ballpark. The other thing that wise mystical teachers say over and over again about conscious love is that it has no opposite. Emotional love can turn into hate. Emotional love will do that because feelings swing 180. Conscious love has no opposite. The experience of pain or rejection does not diminish it. The experience of affirmation does not enhance it because love simply is its ownworking.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 01:45 CL 01-02.
“The path of conscious love is a path of one wholeness to another wholeness, one vulnerability to another vulnerability, enacted by an act of non-plaguing self-giving. It requires four elements, and these four elements are the essence of what Jesus taught. The four elements are conscious presence, kenosis, shadow work, and exchange.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 06:25 6-01 40 The path of conscious love.
“Conscious love is best learned by cultivating conscious presence. Functionally, this means one must develop a strong observing eye. About seeing when you’re in a lesser place, and to learn a yearning and a grounding in attention of the heart, which is the willingness to yield, to yield into the larger, no matter who is right or wrong. These two practices together, learning to see and learning to yield, together make heart. And heart is what makes it possible to love fully consciously, because heart mediates between our wounded essence and our huge and unbounded spirit.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 07:30 CL 03-12
“If you learn to practice conscious presence, you will practice conscious love. The two are completely bound. You can’t do one without the other.” Conscious Love, 01:21 CL 01-03.
“Jesus is teaching something radically different. Paul gave it its name, self-emptying. If you want to get a sense of this, you have to begin to learn how letting go is more like letting be than getting rid of. It’s not a removal of your emotional involvement in something. It has a much warmer undertone to it. It’s a genuine, warm, round, allowing your space to recede so somethingelse has the space to be.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 05:53 6-05 44 Self-emptying or kenosis.
“We can flow out from our innermost and then manifest through our outermost. You can tell the difference between the innermost and the outermost, and to practice conscious love, you eventually have to be in an alignment from the innermost, out. This is how it generally works in all spiritual work.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 05:52 CL 01-03.
“The person that you’re intimate with will uncover your shadow stuff, will mirror where you’re stuck, and through the intimacy and support contained in the wish for each other’s becoming, and the fact that you hold the little window, the mirror of who the other is, you hold that precious in your heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 01:43 7-02 50 Listening to the path given to you.
“One’s arising is always with the help of others. And one’s life feeds into others. The word for exchange and the word mercy share the same root word. And as we participate willingly and fully in the exchange, we participate in a microcosm in what God is like in the whole sacred business of making divine love manifest. In other words, your bond with whoever your partner or beloved is is contained within this vast, luminous web of giving and receiving.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 01:56 7-03 51 Substituted love.
“One form of exchange, and it’s a form of the exchange which is most powerfully represented and understood in Christianity, is the idea of substituted love or substitution, which is to say that a human being can bear another human being’s burdens. And not only can a human being bear another human being’s burdens, but in the process of willingly doing this, that person can relieve the other person of that particular burden. I stand on the planet today as one who is able to breathe because another took my burden away, and carried it willingly and consciously.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 03:55 7-03 51 Substituted love.
“All conscious love depends on throwing out what is bad and selecting only what is good. Mechanical love is of a quite different order. The passage in question was as follows:
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear,
because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth is not made
perfect in love. (1 John IV 18)
In the Gospel of John and in the Epistles of John we find love emphasized—not emotional love, as the conversation with Peter shows in the last chapter of the Gospel of John, but a different kind of love, which is connected with the idea of a goal, an aim, a gradual perfecting.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p611
Maurice Nicoll, quoting Ouspensky: “What we call love can turn to dislike, suspicion, jealousy or hate in a moment. Love means positive emotion and we do not know positive emotions. Their characteristic is that they never turn into opposites because they include all opposites. We only know emotions that turn readily into their opposites, and do so often in a flash. We call it love but it is not love. It is self-love. The term love is used in the Gospels in a special way. It is conscious love, conscious relation, not mechanical love, that is meant. That is clear enough. When a man begins to realize he cannot love as he is, then at least he is nearer truth. He is no longer a fool. He has at least got rid of some imagination, some part of False Personality, got rid of some make-up, and so is nearer the possibility of conscious love. What passes as love in mechanical life is chiefly imagination. What people call love is usually satisfied self-love. To love is to work. Love is work.” Commentaries, p917
“External considering is a deep internal act and is based on an increase of consciousness—that is, on love—for all real love is consciousness of another person’s difficulties through finding the same difficulties in yourself. Conscious love is not blind. This makes a new neutralizing force—a Work-force. So in a sense it is done in silence—internally.” Commentaries, p1025
“Our idea of justice on this Earth is illusion. On this level, all sleeping humanity belongs to a tiny planet which is a kind of lunatic asylum. There is no justice, no fairness. Only if everyone on this Earth became conscious, then the whole story would become quite different. Just notice what is happening here in the world to-day. So instead of referring everything to the idea of fairness and justice it is far better to will what you have to do in everything and try to awaken from your negative emotions. That will give you freedom and inner peace. Kicking against the pricks will make you more negative and therefore less and less free. This paper is about two ways of taking the events of life. One is that you do not identify with them; the other is to will them. Sometimes we have to use one method, but sometimes to use the other, or both. I will also tell you a secret. We have to will one another: this is the beginning of conscious love.” Commentaries, p1316
“The first or lowest division of the Emotional Center is where mechanical liking and disliking lie, and development in this part of the center alone gives us low mechanical being. Conscious love cannot exist in the mechanical division of the Emotional Centre. It really only begins to exist when you begin to make a conscious relationship with someone else, a Work-aim, not a life-aim.” Commentaries, p1443
“Observing, in quiet, the same fault in yourself as you have heatedly or bitterly pointed out in another seems to me to be practical love. For by the Work method of finding the same thing in yourself, you eventually see your neighbor as yourself, and yourself as your neighbor. But you must know yourself to begin with. You must begin to be conscious of yourself. This is the most necessary part of Conscious Love, which is not blind.” Commentaries, p1636
Logion 82
Yeshua says...
Whoever comes close to me
dwells near the fire.
Whoever moves away from me
remains far from the kingdom.
Read other Impressions in the Love Series.
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.
Thank you, Marty!