“Agape love is generated when craving is finally transformed into the willingness to surrender and give back.” Cynthia Bourgeault
Revolutionary Insight: Love is Not What We Think
“My insight, that I haven’t been pried loose for in 20 years, is that agape love as we know it does not exist a priori in God like all the stories tell us. God is love. Not so. You can’t find that. When energy starts to flow it manifests first and foremost as eros, craving, with all the pain in it. And love, agape love is an alchemical product. It’s the fruit of the transformation process that goes on between craving, eros, and kenosis.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week 2024 in Rockland, 33:00 04 – An Imaginal Vigil
Divine Yearning: Where It All Begins
“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, and so I created the world as visible and invisible. So many of us, when we actually bump into God, bump into the absolutely amazing and often disconcertingly, embarrassingly intimate realization that the divine yearns for us as much as we yearn for the divine. Everything in the planet, every created star, every created atom, every quivering, quivering quark and spring, quivers with the yearning of God to form.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 04:39 disc 4 track 9.
The Nature of Eros and Agape
“Agape is God’s way to man. In other words, Eros is a special type of love, and its core component is desiring. And agape is a different type of love altogether whose core component is lack of desiring. In other words, it just spontaneously and freely and full in itself wishes the good of everyone.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 03:35 disc 4 track 9.
Cosmic Formula: E × K = A
“To try and say that there’s this kind of sublime love that doesn’t yearn and therefore it’s pure, just absolutely knocks the living guts out of the cosmos. Like fuel to drive your car, agape is the product of the refiner’s fire. And the refiner’s fire is created when Eros is passed through a path of radical self-giving. What emerges from this alchemy is agape. God is agape. And agape is created across the system, through the system, by the transformation of Eros into agape. Through self-giving.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 05:19 disc 4 track 9.
“Agape is the product of a huge process of alchemy, of transformation, of transfiguration that is being worked through by every human being in the creation, by all creation. And there’s a formula to it. It’s as simple as Einstein’s formula, which looks like this: E times K equals A, which means basically eros times kenosis yields agape. In other words, the desiring, the yearning, the vibration, the yearning to take all, to have all, to become one, to bring it in, if you can take that yearning, which is where most love starts, somehow work it through the pathway of kenosis, the learned discipline of warmly letting it be, transforms the nature of the love into agape.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 07:40 disc 6 track 8.
Humans as Transforming Machines
“Agape is generated when craving is finally transformed in the willingness to surrender and give back. I think this emerges in the Ray of Creation. Right there in that epicenter with World 24, World 12, and world… So that eros comes down as craving, desiring, and is transformed in a beautiful way, and in a particularly powerful way in human consciousness as we have to dance back and forth one foot in the finite, one foot in the infinite, one foot in the Imaginal, one foot in the muck, and somehow become transforming machines in our life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Week 2024 in Rockland, 33:41 04 – An Imaginal Vigil.
Living Example: Personal Transformation
“You get it by being dragged toward your soul cage, through it, and out the other side, toward a love which has become transfigured. I watched this in my own path with Rafe, where we went from a love that was at first so clingy, clutching, and overdramatic, into one that little by little learned how to love and serve.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 9:07 disc 6 track 8.
Logion 25
Yeshua says...
Love your brother and your sister
as your very own being.
Protect them as you would the pupil of your eye.
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.
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