The Beatitudes: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
“The key to this fourth beatitude lies in understanding what the word righteousness means. To our post-Puritan, post-Victorian ears, righteousness is a synonym for virtue. It means being moral, behaving correctly. But in Israel of Jesus’s times, righteousness was something much more dynamic than that. You can actually visualize it as a force field: an energy-charged sphere of holy presence. To be ‘in the righteousness of God’ (as Old Testament writers are fond of saying) means to be directly connected to this vibrational field, to be anchored within God’s own aliveness. There is nothing subtle about the experience; it is as fierce and intransigent a bond as picking up a downed electrical wire. To ‘hunger and thirst after righteousness,’ then, speaks to this intensity of connectedness. Jesus promises that when the hunger arises within you to find your own deepest aliveness within God’s aliveness, it will be satisfied — in fact, the hunger itself is a sign that the bond is already in place. As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning. Some spiritual teachers will even say that the yearning you feel for God is actually coming from the opposite direction; it is in fact God’s yearning for you. ‘The eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you,’ said Meister Eckhart, one of the greatest Christian mystics, stressing the complete simultaneity of the energy of connection. When we yearn, we come into sympathetic vibration with a deeper heart-knowing. I spoke in the previous chapter about how the heart is an organ of alignment; it connects us. Yearning is the vibration of that connection. In this beatitude Jesus is not talking about doing virtuous deeds so you’ll be rewarded later; he is talking about being in connection with your fundamental yearning.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p44
“The Greek word for righteousness (δίκη) has the original meaning of being upright and so, between the opposites. The just or righteous man, both of the New Testament and of the Socratic teaching four centuries earlier, and of the teaching of Pythagoras as early as the 6th century B.C., is the upright man, the man who stands balanced between the opposites and is neither of them. This is a very difficult idea to understand. But the idea of the just man was directly derived from the ancient teaching about the opposites. A one-sided man could not be a just man. A fanatic, a bigoted or scrupulous man, could not be just. Nor could a man who lived in some small part of himself be just. To be righteous, to be just, is to be balanced.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p326
“Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness (not self-righteousness). I want you to understand that there is something being said here about what the Work calls the formation of the Work-triad by means of which Personality is made passive. By means of what the Work opens our eyes to, we see what all these and other statements in the Gospels, which seem so difficult to understand, mean. They are not an end in themselves. They are not about just ‘being good’. They are instructions about how to make Personality passive enough so that Essence can grow.” Commentaries, p1645.
“Righteousness in its primitive meaning was used of a man who observed the rules or customs of the society he lived in. A man behaved rightly by keeping the laws. Among the Jews righteousness was a matter of the observation of all the minute details of the Levitical law with regard to all its ceremonies, tithes, outer purifications, and so on. This form of external righteousness was many times the subject of attack by Christ. It was false righteousness in terms of what Christ was teaching because it was done before men. It had no other object than to appear right, outwardly, in the eyes of other people. Christ is teaching about how a man can evolve—how he can become a New Man. In attacking the form of righteousness belonging to the scribes and Pharisees, he is attacking the level of a man where everything he does is for the sake of his own merit and not for its own sake. He will justify himself in order that his external righteousness may be maintained in the eyes of the world—that is, before men. This keeps him at a certain level of development. This is why Christ attacks this form of feeling one is in the right. The object of the teaching of the Gospels is that Man should internally evolve and reach a higher level. For this reason it is said that unless a man’s righteousness is of a quite different order from that of the scribes and Pharisees he cannot reach this higher level, called the Kingdom of Heaven. Heaven always means this higher inner state or level possible for a man to reach.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p86.
“In this passage, to hunger and thirst for righteousness refers to a righteousness different from self−righteousness, which only regards itself and its own object. To find this other righteousness, a man must ‘lose himself’—that is, his ideas of himself and his value and merit.” The New Man, p95.
“This Beatitude refers to those who long to understand what is that goodness of being and what is that knowledge of Truth that leads to the higher level. They are those who, feeling their nothingness, their ignorance, feeling they are dead in their inner being, long to be taught what Truth the higher Man must know and follow and what Good means at the level of the Kingdom of Heaven. They hunger for Good and thirst for Truth, for the union of these two in a man makes him have the inner harmony called righteousness.” The New Man, p150-51.
Logion 58
Yeshua says...
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.
Logion 2
Yeshua says...
If you are searching, you must not stop until you find.
When you find, however, you will become troubled.
Your confusion will give way to wonder.
In wonder you will reign over all things.
Your sovereignty will be your rest.
Read more Impressions on the Beatitudes.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala Publications, 2008
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
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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