The Beatitudes: Blessed Are the Meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Now I will turn to the Sermon on the Mount. Amongst other things it says:
Blessed are the poor in spirit—(those who do not identify)
Blessed are the meek—(those who are not resentful)
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness (not self-righteousness)
They are not an end in themselves. The Beatitudes are not about just ‘being good’. They are instructions about how to make Personality passive enough so that Essence can grow.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1645
“The Beatitude about Blessed are the Meek and they shall inherit the earth, which is a terrible translation of it. It basically means blessed are the ones, the gentled ones. Blessed are the ones who have domesticated their passions, have become gentle, for they alone are the ones who can be entrusted to inherit the earth because they’re the only ones that aren’t going to destroy it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christians, 36:15 20 Saturday Afternoon Teaching.
“You may be fairly certain that when this Work becomes remote and cold in you, you are up against conceit. Probably you are resenting. That is, some form of your conceit which is up against the Work. We spoke about the phrase so badly translated: “Blessed are the meek.” The meaning rather should be: ‘Those who do not resent have inner happiness.’ This is quite different from outer happiness.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p1738
“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. Blessed are the meek. The meek interpreted as the wimps. Blessed are the wimps, for they shall inherit the kingdom. When what it really means, the meek are basically the ones who are, the word comes very much close to domesticated, but that means the ones who have really mastered the horizontal axis. Blessed are the ones who have put their own house in order, who have dominated, who have mastered their bestial nature. There’s a fugitive teaching that has been missed all along, and can only be seen when you move beyond the opposites. Now for me, this is wildly exciting, because it gives us a chance, with the help of people like the Buddhists, like Meister Eckhart, like Eckhart Tolle, to begin to look at Jesus and his teachings within the line of transformation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 02:00 2-07 14 Unitive consciousness.
“A better translation is Blessed are the gentle, and perhaps Blessed are the gentled. Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually ‘domesticated’: the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature. Only when we have dealt directly with our animal instincts, and the pervasive sense of fear and scarcity … are we truly able to inherit the earth rather than destroy it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p43-44
Logion 7
Yeshua says...
A lion eaten by a man is blessed
as it changes to human form,
but a human devoured by a lion
is cursed as lion becomes human.
Read more Impressions on the Beatitudes.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala Publications, 2008
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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