The Beatitudes Explained by Cynthia Bourgeault and Maurice Nicoll: Pure in Heart.
Singleness
“This may well be the most important of all the Beatitudes. But what is purity of heart? In Wisdom teachings, purity means singleness, and the proper translation of this Beatitude is, ‘Blessed are those whose heart is not divided’. When your heart becomes single, when it can live in perfect alignment with that resonant field of mutual yearning, then you see God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala Publications, 2008, p45-46.
“To be pure in heart means literally to be purged in heart or cleansed by purgation. It is first about not being a hypocrite. It is about the inner and outer in a man corresponding. It is about an emotional state that can be reached in which the reality of the existence of God is seen directly from the clear−sightedness of the purified emotional understanding, for we understand not only with the mind.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p151
The Non-Dual Teaching
“Jesus was teaching a non-dual teaching, aimed at transformation. How you get from here to there. How do you transform your understanding from this category, that category, inners and outs, winners, losers, good, bad, sin, judgment, kind of categories of the normal mind, into something that’s seen when you come from a different place. And his teaching is pitched around that. The Beatitudes. They’re non-dual teaching, and people just don’t get it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 00:25 1-04 04 Mystical unitive theology.
“Beginning right in the Gospels, the disciples, with very fragile and unreliable self-knowledge, have interpreted what Jesus is teaching on the egoic grid. And so in that grid, the Beatitudes, which are the most profound of Jesus’s teachings, and which are really a numinous hymn of unitive perception, turn out to be this thing of, if I take it on the cheap now, God will love me. They begin to be the foundation of martyrology. There’s a fugitive teaching that has been missed all along, and can only be seen when you move beyond the opposites.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 02:00 2-07 14 Unitive consciousness.
The Reciprocity of Divine Yearning
“One of the things you might look at [in the Beatitudes] is a simultaneous reciprocity. As so many of the great unitive Parables say, the yearning that you have for the Divine is already the yearning that the Divine has for you. And sometimes rather than just getting so intent on, well, now how am I gonna slake this yearning? How am I gonna satisfy it? But if you’re yearning for God and the beloved, sometimes it’s really wonderful to just pause right in the middle of that ache and feel it and understand that as the innate language of the Divine love for you. And really feel it as coming in the opposite direction. And when you do that, you’ll begin to discover how this reciprocity actually works.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Divine Exchange, 02:50 Divine 03-08.
Attention of the Heart: The Required Operating System
“Simeon, the New Theologian, makes a very interesting comment. He says, without attention in the heart, it is impossible to do the Beatitudes. It’s impossible to be merciful and to receive mercy. It’s impossible to do. Basically he’s saying that without attention in your heart, you can’t do the teachings of Christ. You won’t get them because they are designed for three-centered awareness. They’re designed for a way of paying attention that’s lower than just the mental mind that’s always gonna be nervous and jumpy about everything. What they’re suggesting is get your attention out of your intellectual center, pull it down, pull it down closer into this region of the heart, the solar plexus, stay present, learn to think from there, learn to be from there. Let that become your new center of gravity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 39:28 08 Monday pm Teaching.
“Simeon the New Theologian was one of the most powerful and articulate voices in the Eastern Orthodox tradition to talk about this other operating system in terms of what he called attention of the heart. And he saw it as a physical vibrancy, as a vigilance, as a coherent field that gathered around the region of the heart and that allowed you, when you could guard it with your vigilance, contain it with your depth, it would allow you to actually do the Beatitudes. He said in one very counter-intuitive passage that may have gotten him exiled for a few decades, that without attention of the heart you cannot be poor in spirit, you cannot mourn, you cannot be meek, you cannot be a peacemaker, you cannot have purity of heart.
“And the reason he said this is essentially that the Beatitudes follow the laws of Imaginal causality. And you can’t do them with a World 48 mentality. What Simeon was saying was that only as you gather this substance, this vibratory bandwidth that he calls attention of the heart, do you become able to cross the imaginal threshold and actually do this. He didn’t use those imaginal words, but this is what he’s actually saying. The Beatitudes become accessible as paths of action once you’ve stabilized imaginal causality within your being and are living out of that self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal WS 8-2020, 13:00 0819 IWS Wednesday PM Teaching.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God entails a primary commitment to the practice of keeping the eye of the heart clear and unencumbered to participate fully in the dance of Divine abundance.” The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, p115
Essence Over Personality
“So many apparently paradoxical or at least strange things are said in the Gospels—such as are contained in the Sermon on the Mount—about man. They are all to do with allowing essence to grow at the expense of personality and this is the only way in which essence, which is too weak by itself to grow, can continue to develop.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p5
“In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ begins by telling his disciples not what to do but what to be before a man is capable of gaining the Kingdom of Heaven. The Sermon opens with the words: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom.’ Christ is speaking of what a man must be, what he must first of all become in himself. A man must become quite different in himself to reach the Kingdom. He must change his mind, change in himself, and become ‘poor in spirit’—whatever that means.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p144
Emotional Purification as Preparation for Knowledge
“Therefore the problem of emotional knowledge consists in a corresponding preparation of the emotions which serve as organs of knowledge. ‘Become as little children . . .’ and ‘Blessed are the pure in heart . . .’ In these evangelical words is expressed first of all the idea of the purification of the emotions. It is impossible to know through impure emotions. Therefore in the interests of a correct understanding of the world and of the self, man should undertake the purification and the elevation of his emotions.” Maurice Nicoll quoting Ouspensky, Commentaries, p1083
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Logion 5
Yeshua said
Recognize what is in front of you,
and what is hidden from you will be revealed.
There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.
Logion 75
Yeshua says...
Many are standing at the door,
but only the single or solitary
will enter the place of union.
More Impressions exploring the Beatitudes.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005
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.
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