For life transformation, “any conditions that are voluntarily embraced will be your teacher and will be the locus where you do your conscious labor. So that’s very, very important” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Ego and the Spiritual Journey
“I just wonder if you have any opinion on why this stuff is buried so deep in us and we have to dig so hard to find it. That you develop this egoic container. And it’s a very, very important stage in the way God manifests.
“One of the favorite images in the Old Testament and in the Christian contemplative life is that famous image in the book of Exodus of the bush that burns but is not consumed. And the contemplatives took it over because it doesn’t do any good to have a bush that just catches fire and is gone. And it doesn’t do any good to have a bush that doesn’t burn at all. What you need is a bush that can hold its bush-ness enough that the light can manifest in it. So the ego is sort of like the bush.
“It’s our container and it’s our vessel. And you need to develop it. It’s like a locked treasure chest. And it contains within it the particular names of God, the particular qualities of God that we manifest. And they’re all a little bit different for each person.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, Disc 1 Track 8.
“So you’re coexisting with your old tense self rather than just melting into it. And this is a very, very important point in spiritual life, because it begins to give you the opportunity to become a light, a perpetual light that burns from its own replenishment in source rather than being continually dependent on changing life around to meet your expectations. And it gives you the wonderful grace to flow out and meet whatever comes your way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 5:07 Disc 2 Track 4.
“There’s a very, very important and cryptic saying in the Gurdjieff work, one of my favorites. I’ve chewed on this koan for 35 years now: Behind personality stands essence. Behind essence stands real I. Behind real I stands God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2021, 23:06 24 – Friday Morning Teaching – Cynthia MONO-025.
The Path of Transformation
“The word kenosis—self-emptying—is a very, very important core concept for cracking the nut of the Christian path.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 0:59 Disc 3 Track 5.
“People have told me that they don’t like this intentional suffering word. But it’s very, very important. It’s a signal understanding. I would say that in the work, conscious labor and intentional suffering are not so much specific practices as they are a kind of underlying attitude and theme song which groups whole bunches of specific practices to allow you to do it. It’s basically the fundamental orientation towards conscious transformation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 0:46 23 Sunday Morning Teaching.
“Any conditions that are voluntarily embraced will be your teacher and will be the locus where you do your conscious labor. So that’s very, very important to do. You don’t have to go to this monastery in the sky. If your conditions at this point is that you have a room in the middle of the third floor in a senior citizen’s residential home, that is where the work goes on. That is your temple of transformation. If you’ve got a three-year-old who’s crawling up your legs, that’s your condition.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 21:29 23 Sunday Morning Teaching.
The Christian Wisdom Lineage
“The direction in which the divine is manifest in this world is not by sucking us back into an eternal spirit, but by birthing ever new and more complex and more intricate and messy forms. The journey is always through matter into new forms, not beyond and up. So you have to be very, very careful in how we’re using, you’re using the term Sophia Parentis, perennial wisdom, because ours is not a binary and upward-oriented lineage. Ours is one that embraces three-foldness, as we see it in the Trinity, asymmetry, and movement into the world, the basic evolutionary stance, as foundational to our understanding of how love becomes incarnate and present in the world. So that’s a very, very important distinction.
“And as you look around at various things with the title Wisdom in it and Wisdom Schools, it’s important to check out very, very carefully what kind of metaphysics they’re actually founded on, and to recognize and affirm that our lineage is Trinitarian, Teilhardian, evolutionary, and incarnational. And when these threads disappear, we find that the distinctive features of the Christian mystery disappear along with them.” Cynthia Bourgeault, 6:00 Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage.
Spiritual Practice and Scripture
“There is a way of working with these sacred practices so that more and more of the small self gets out of the way. And more and more of that capacity for the infinite is grounded within us. So it’s not a matter of us getting more perfected or more holy or better than anybody else. It’s a matter of a deepening capacity to truly, as William Blake called it, be able to bear the beams of love. So that’s why the work goes on.
“At any point, if you could consider Lectio Divina as a little, little wheel, a little, little gear, but as it turns every day within us as we do our regular practice of Lectio, reading, pondering, reflecting, moving into stillness, praying, that in turn drives a bigger cogwheel, like what makes a big clockwork. And that clockwork, that bigger part of it, is what the monastic tradition has passed on as the four senses of scripture. And this is a very, very important teaching.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St. Brendan, 0:57 disc 02 track 08.
Teilhard and Evolutionary Consciousness
“Teilhard sees us on a journey of a rising tide of consciousness. And he sees this journey as essentially irreversible. And I think this is very, very important with Teilhard, because from his perspective as a biologist and a paleontologist looking back over history from a mere 14 billion years, you never see it going in the other direction. Temporary glitches, temporary stalemates and arresting, but over deep tide the journey for him is going in one direction always, and the arrow of evolution has never reversed. So he says, based on that, why would we expect it to reverse now? This is one of the underpinnings of his whole regard of deep hope.
“He sees the human and particularly the development within human consciousness and human organization and human culture as carrying the spearhead of the arrow of evolution. And he says that to disregard this is to shirk our cosmic responsibility as we become, whether we want to or not, evolution made conscious of itself.
“[Teilhard is] coming, remember, from this wonderful sense of the universe as a whole plot, as everything is connected to everything else, as the kind of single tapestry in which you pull out one fiber and the whole fiber is affected. Coming from a deep sense of if you look at all of this the unity diversifies, diversity unites that he’s seen as the principle and as the universe story differentiates and concentrates, the human function becomes that of the center, the homotic center of something that’s going somewhere. And Teilhard will maintain that one of the reasons that we’ve been unable, that we’ve gone kind of catatonic in terms of our human responsibilities is that we’re afraid of that. We’re afraid because if you won’t acknowledge that axis, very quickly evolution looks random, purposeless, disconnected.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2016 Teilhard, 1:19:30 2016-06-10c Teilhard Session 2 Friday Afternoon.
The Purpose of Creation
“It’s interesting in this poem that once again, Thomas Keating is heavily going to equate the created world with the domain of love. And I think this is extraordinarily important to note. In all the poems where the word love appears, we are suddenly, firmly, and robustly in the created realm. And for me, this is interesting because you often learn in your theology that God created because God already had love, right? That because God had this sort of excess or effulgence of love, so I might as well spend it by creating something. But what Thomas is hinting at here, and what the great mystics, certainly the Sufi mystics, have talked about, is that the created realm exists in order that love can be manifest. That’s its point. That’s what it’s for. And that rather than saying that God already had this love and therefore just sort of shot out the world as a sort of bouquet of something already had, that the created realm is somehow indispensable to the full expression of love.
“And I think once again, this is a profound incarnational truth, which is not ever told you in Sunday school or in catechism. If it did, it would change your whole orientation towards life. It’s not like you were recreated as an afterthought because God had all this excess love running around. It’s like your journey through the little sufferings and fears and stuff will somehow be the deepening instantiation and epiphany of love in the world, in God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence as Presence 2025, 38:00 07 Silence Mon am teaching.
Logion 67
Yeshua says...
If you come to know all,
and yet you yourself are lacking,
you have missed everything.
Logion 70
Yeshua says...
When you give birth
to that which is within yourself,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you possess nothing within,
that absence will destroy you.
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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