Blessed are merciful, who shall receive mercy—mercy and exchange.
“Our role, as most of the great teachings have talked about, is to perceive the divine mercy, the divine qualities, as they wish to come into form and enact them—things like generosity, peace, truth, forbearance, love. We listen, we listen, we receive the power, the energy, the incantation, the potential of the divine realm, and then we enact them upon the horizontal wall.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 10:43 disc 2 track 5
“You are able to receive help from the mercy, because as long as you keep your heart open, you can receive the imprint of the whole from that origin we’re talking about.” Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 08:42 disc 6 track 7
“And one’s arising is always with the help of others. And one’s life feeds into others. So the word exchange and the word mercy share the same root word.” Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 01:56 disc 7 track 3
“The word mercy and the word commerce and merchant have exactly the same root. They come from an old Etruscan word, merc, which means exchange. It says that etymologically, anyway, the mercy of God has to be understood in terms of exchange. God doesn’t have mercy, God is mercy, because the nature of the divine is exchange.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Divine Exchange, 01:11 disc 1 track 1
“Anything that is done to increase exchange increases the visible manifestation of the mercy, and anything that restricts, inhibits, constricts, and blocks exchange results in the opposite. Instead of seeing around us the face of the mercy, what is mirrored back to us is hardness and constriction, frustration.” The Divine Exchange, 03:10 disc 1 track 7
“To become conscious in Third Force is mercy and release. But it will remain impossible if you secretly feel how excellent you are or how blameworthy you are. At the level of the earth it is possible to make contacts with Third Force as Personality is made passive.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1656
“A person is neither good nor bad, nor am I. Once you can see this in yourself, then in your relationship to other people, you begin to find a Third Force, a way of taking people and yourself as not being wholly evil or wholly good. This is the beginning of mercy in you and it is what mercy means. Mercy is not violence and as long as you are in opposites you are always violent. Someone says: “What, he does that kind of thing! I won’t have anything more to do with that person.” And someone in the Work says: “But don’t you do it?” And after a lot of humming and hawing I think: “Well, I am perhaps like that myself.” So try always to think what mercy means, because it lies between the opposites.” Commentaries, p1374
“A rigid associative path laid down in the associative center gives a rigid sense of what is good and bad, and it is from this that we judge others inflexibly, without understanding or mercy. However, the Work makes it possible for us no longer to live such a rigid and sterile life, because, seeing in ourselves the things that we judge others for gives infinite flexibility in our associations, and this gives rise to mercy, forgiveness and all that really belongs to Good and Truth.” Commentaries, p1434
“We cannot see that there is something higher in ourselves than we are ourselves—namely, higher levels of consciousness, higher levels of Being and Knowledge, higher levels of understanding and so of mercy.” Commentaries, p904
“There is nothing more merciless than the logic of Truth alone. All the persecutions in the Church were from Truth alone, from some disputed detail of knowledge, without mercy. When a man thinks intellectually, he thinks logically; emotional thinking is psychological. A man who thinks logically has no mercy. To forgive must come from the heart. It is emotional.” The New Man, p118
“To act from compassion, to act from mercy, is to act from Good itself and not from any idea of reward. Truth alone has nothing to do with compassion, nothing to do with mercy. The most merciless and atrocious acts have been done in the name of Truth. For Truth divorced from Good has nothing real in it. It has nothing to check it, nothing to unite with it and give it any real being.” The New Man, p77
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
More Impressions exploring the Beatitudes.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man refer to Martino Fine Books, Eastford CT, 2019
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
0 Comments