“In Centering Prayer, your attitude towards life becomes more spacious, more unboundaried, more present.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Nature of Spaciousness
“Think for a minute and go inside yourself and see if you can find the difference between that part of you that is more surface, the one that is more reactive, more trapped in your personality, more conditioned, more judgmental, more frightened, more rigid—find that person. And then find in yourself something else that is deeper, freer, more spacious, truer. And I emphasize over and over again that nobody’s looking. Find this in your own self.
“There’s no right answer. The important thing is that you recognize those two places. If you recognize that there’s a part of you that’s constricted, needy, and there’s a part of you that isn’t, a part of you that’s free, even if it’s a very small part, you all have it, and it’s your inner chamber.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene Conscious Love, 5:08 disc3 track6.
“Heaven is in the spaciousness, that experience of that whole different self. When you move beyond your ever-frightened and scarcity-ridden usual ego self, and just feel the strength of your I am deeper within, you’ve just dumped into a new dimension. So that’s what we’re talking about.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil April 2023 NC, 31:50 01-Sunday Teaching Evil II.
“[Thomas Keating] says, this presence, once established in our inmost being might be called spaciousness. There is nothing in it but a certain vibrancy and aliveness. You’re awake, but awake to what? You don’t know. You’re awake to something that you can’t describe and which is absolutely marvelous, totally generous, and which manifests itself with increasing tenderness, sweetness, and intimacy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism – A Teaching with Cynthia Bourgeault 2025.
How Spaciousness Shapes What Manifests
“As the Buddhists talk about in mindfulness, the shape of your mind really becomes the container for what is held there and what manifests. So it’s the same life force flowing through. But if it flows through a field which is ordered, spacious, non-attached, if the shape of the mind is spacious, it’s going to manifest in one way, the same life force. If it flows through an atmosphere which is jumbled, the chances of it manifesting in the opposite way, as anger, as rage, as outbursts are increased. It’s not that the healthy get one set and the unhealthy get another set. It’s that as we learn to manage and actually work directly with the shape of our mind, preferring the shape of our mind over the content of our drama, then we begin to generate the energies or conduct the energies, manifest the energies that are more appropriate to the shape of the mind they flow through. It’s a closer symbiosis.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, Day 3c Evening Session
“When your attention is purified of all the external distractions, when you’re present and when you’re not co-opted, and particularly when you’re in an expanded and spacious attentiveness, then it does become like a pure crystal vibrating in resonance with the cosmos and the creative forces of the cosmos, and you do become a conduit for that kind of thing. You discover that your attention doesn’t belong to you, but you are really then just sensing the scale at which a communicative universe seeks to communicate with us and through us, and we’re never listening.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 14:57 10 – Tuesday Evening Q&A.
“The one thing that’s absolutely pure, I can see, is that when we look on the universe with gratitude, a situation will shift in the direction of largeness and spaciousness. When we look on it with entitlement, things close down.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 52:27 17 – Friday Morning Teaching.
“As you begin to practice seeing how to genuinely see gratitude, once you get it, my God, the whole picture changes. Respect enters, spaciousness enters—this healing force beyond anything.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 38:28 12-Wednesday Evening Reflection.
Practices That Cultivate Spaciousness
“Everything depends really on learning to recognize and finally rest in a deeper self that does lie latent within you and beyond you, that inter-being zone, that greater spaciousness. And the thing that most gets in the way of it is any inner grabbing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, A Fresh Perspective on Centering Prayer, p11.
“What would you say would be the difference in quality between whatever you know as multitasking and whatever this experience is that we’re trying to sit with? Spaciousness. What’s the difference? Spaciousness. Spaciousness. Somehow you simply have to be patient and allow the field of awareness to expand to the fact that all of these things are layers which are simultaneously going on in one field of attention that’s holding them all. And it’s very spacious.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 40:15 17 Friday Evening Q & A.
“[In Centering Prayer] your attitude towards life becomes more spacious, more unboundaried, more present. You’re able more and more quickly to bring yourself into mindfulness in the moment. All these things will happen naturally just out of the 20 minutes twice a day.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Heart of Centering Prayer 2016, 30:01 Part 2 of 4.
“To move from a situation of more lost in your stuff to more alive, more spacious, more receptive, more subtilized, more able to stay with what’s happening on so many different levels, that is conscious labor.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 55:07 07 Monday am Teaching.
Spaciousness as Witnessing Presence
“You have to first train yourself to begin to see that moment when you make a downward shift and you slip out of a sort of more spacious state of viewing and being into all programs and the old identities that go with them. So I think that what you can see very clearly is that envy belongs to the old identity. And whenever you’re in envy, you’re in untruth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 0:21 disc2 track3.
“It’s a witnessing self, as the Buddhists like to call it. It doesn’t have a dog in the fight. It can stand out. It can hold simultaneously not only the content of consciousness, but the shape of your mind. It can hold awareness in a much broader and more spacious configuration without immediately tunnel visioning into I need, I want, I got to get out of, I’m afraid of.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 48:08 RT 04 Eve Teaching Q&A.
“You can have Real I and live in it eternally from this very moment. The moment you learn to default instinctively to preserve the shape of your spaciousness, of your freedom, of your impartiality, over the enormous satisfaction that comes from capitulating to your drama. And this is a secret of the inner life hidden in plain sight. You can have it the moment you want it, but the price tag is high. Because we luxuriate in our suffering.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil April 2023 NC, 34:25 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.
Spaciousness and Identity Shift
“How do you move beyond our habitual gravitational field that pulls us into small self-consciousness? How do we move from that as the gravitational center of our universe into something that’s larger and more spacious? And in a way, it’s awesome enough just to visit there in that other more spacious place. You begin to see, oh yeah, it actually exists. But to live from it, not to vacation there, but to move there is a whole different and very challenging methodology which the Gospel of Thomas speaks to directly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 4:22 disc2 track9.
“The way that we will stabilize [Real I] depends on our willingness and ability to shift our allegiance, our identity, out of our usual sense of self, which we’ve been so carefully working on developing for all these many years, into this more spacious thing, which in Eastern religious traditions or Asian traditions is often known as witnessing presence. And in Gurdjieff is Real I.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil April 2023 NC, 2:40 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.
“You have to move beyond the agenda of healing the false self, finding the true self, stepping beyond all that finite selfhood, and begin to learn to live stably in what the great traditions have called the witnessing self. A self which is more spacious, which has one foot in this realm and one foot in the next, in terms not of heaven after you die, but in terms of the greater cosmic coherence, and can mediate between the two of them.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage, 25:00.
Living from Spaciousness
“Remember, Wisdom is integral knowing. And what we’re really working on in a wisdom school is developing the capacity in you to move from deep silence and gathered recollected stillness into action without losing the spaciousness, without losing the recollection. So that we can extend our silence in the form of gathered presence into everything we do without getting rattled and without getting frenetic.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 3:45 0.1b First Evening Welcome & Introduction Part 2 of 2.
“I think that’s what Gurdjieff is really groping towards when he talks about this elusive quality called Real I, which is not essence. It’s something else. It’s a relationship with essence. And when you can find yourself in that relationship between your finite being and your infinite being, and realize just how expansive and spacious and flexible and supple that place is, then becoming one with everything is no longer boggling.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 26:19 07 – WED Q&A.
“We’re bilingual in that a lot of the work that we’re doing is very intensely translating between the finite and the infinite, between the constricted and the most spacious. And we don’t do well when we try and collapse the tension. It’s like we’re straddled here at the intersection of the timeless and time, as T.S. Eliot called it, because that’s where the work is done.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 17:59 15 – Thursday Afternoon Teaching.
“We live in the infinite and we live in the finite. Well, that would be a good and not inaccurate way to picture what causes the struggle. The struggle between the nature in us, which is free, spacious, unboundaried, accustomed to the infinite. And the part in us that is contingent, time bound, protected, defended, anchored here. It’s funny how often they get caught at cross purposes. And I like to look at it this way rather than just calling it our higher nature or our lower nature.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 11:19 Day3.2-Crucible-Welcome-Practice.
Spaciousness in Service to the World
“And so we trust and we know that we can participate in this exchange between the realms. And we know that at this particular juncture, where we are, there’s a vital importance in keeping this line of inter-realmic exchange open. There’s simply not enough spaciousness, breath, hope, love, empowerment, or real juice left in the visions of either our secular or traditionally religious roadmaps. We can’t think our way out of this mess. And we can no longer even imagine our way out. Only this deeper listening will be what guides our way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, Gurdjieff Exercise Day 5.
“As long as you’re bringing this much bristle and insistence, you’re not going to be able to work in the much more spacious and forbearing boundaries in which we try to find this other kind of selfhood and bestow it back toward the world. That’s our work and we need to be very clear about that. We encourage people to, yes, stay very closely connected to whatever their post is at the pluralistic level. Work there with your full heart and soul. But to work there from that position of non-identification and spaciousness and inclusivity that you’re learning in the Wisdom School, in this lineage. And that’s what we’re here to teach.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage, 28:29.
“Learn non-identification and act in the world in alignment with the mercy and truth and compassion that are always available at that higher level. But the price tag is you’ve gotta renounce, or at least distance yourself from your story. The basic contemplative practices that would allow you to begin to open to a more spacious and ultimately more compassionate and efficacious, contemplative action in the world.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter with Evil April 2023 NC, 44:37 04b-Wed am Teaching Evil.
Logion 61
Yeshua says…
Two will be resting on a bed.
One will die, the other will live.
Salome said,
“Then how is it, Sir,
that you, coming from the one Source,
have rested on my couch and eaten at my table?”
Yeshua said to her,
“I am he who has appeared to you
out of the Realm of Unity,
having been granted
that which belongs to my Father, its Source.”
“I will be your student!” she exclaimed.
“Then I say this to you:
if you become whole you will be full of Light.
If you remain fragmented darkness will fill you.”
Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
TS ELIOT from The Dry Salvages, (no.3 of the Four Quartets)
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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