Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
The Nature of Intentional Suffering
“Intentional suffering has to do with taking on a piece of that burden that is not of your own making.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil Feb 2023 CA, 40:50 Final Teaching Day 5.
“And intentional suffering, which is really in all ways related to, you know, it’s archetyped as the paschal mystery of Christ. But it’s the, it’s the willingness to voluntarily and consciously bear suffering, either merited by yourself, you know, to accept or shoulder the burden of your own karma, but even more to take on voluntarily and proactively in advance something that you are not required to do on behalf of the greater whole. To pay in advance, to pay willingly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 55:42 07 Monday am Teaching.
“At the heart of the Christian mystery is the Paschal mystery, which is the mystery of intangible suffering. That one who is free and clear in their own self willingly takes up a place, takes a piece of the burden of this pain body, of creation itself, so that others don’t have to, so that others are spared, so that the divine sorrow is itself healed. You can’t really put a bottom line on what the benefits are, but it does lie beyond your personal place in heaven.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont Oct 2019 Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 37:13 07 – WED Q&A.
Bearing Our Own Burdens
“Each person is given his own negative emotions, as it were, with their cognitions, with their false knowledge, and each person, if he or she wishes to work, must in some way lighten the burden of the total fog of negative emotion existing in the world.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p579
“Everyone, without exception, is crossed in life. But if a man in the Work begins to reach the point of understanding that he must bear the burden of his own life and begin to work on himself and change himself, then the whole situation is changed.” Commentaries, p250
“You cannot get rid of the burden of yourself save by falling asleep. Awakening is painful. But it takes a long time to understand this essential meaning of the Work. It is not only that we have to bear the unpleasant manifestations of others. We have to bear the unpleasant manifestations of ourselves.” Commentaries, p1486
“Bearing the burden of another’s failings will produce some heat. Yes, but something more is necessary. Eventually, you must bear the burden of your own failings and not be negative. We are complacent about ourselves, not seeing our contradictions. But it is useless to have a good opinion of oneself. It makes the Work of no account.” Commentaries, p1488
Transforming Suffering Through Conscious Choice
“I do this. I get up, and I bring what I can find of joy or stability or attentiveness or presence to the world, not because it’s earned or not because I feel like it, God knows, but because it’s needed. And you pay in advance. You sign the dotted line. You sometimes can’t control the circumstances of your life. You usually can, as a matter of fact. It was not your fault that you got this cancer, but how you decide to respond to it is something which you can indeed, you know, choose. And it’s in the voluntary choice to bear a burden on behalf of the greater whole, on behalf of conscience, on behalf of some higher value that you participate in the realm of intentional suffering. And it’s through these two that the turn is effected, and the energy which is up to that point, just going downhill towards equilibrium, meets something unexpected, totally unmechanical, because the one thing that both conscious labor and intentional suffering have in common is that they are not mechanical. They are elected by the free choice of a free human being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 57:00 07 Monday am Teaching.
“And a lot of how we deal with suffering really starts from the idea, from the starting perspective of, do we regard it as a mistake? Or do we regard it as one of the necessary costs of the enormous gift of arising at all? And therefore, the goal is not to eliminate it, because it can’t be eliminated, but to transform it and carry the burden in love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building Second Body June 2022, 9:00 4-alchemy-of-suffering.
Logion 90
Yeshua said...
Come to me;
my yoke is good,
my command is gentle,
and you will find repose within you.
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020)
Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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