“The wellsprings of life are bubbling up anew each moment.” Thomas Kelly, Quaker mystic and scholar, from A Testament of Devotion (1941)

Disowning the False Self to Find the Wellspring

“[Meister Eckhart] writes, that after a time of kind of disorder and searching and questing and sort of loose ends life, all of a sudden something came together, and he touched this wellspring of abundance. That wellspring chant is a Thomas Kelly chant. So he writes in Holy Obedience, Meister Eckhart wrote, there are plenty to follow our Lord halfway, but not the other half. There are plenty who will give up possessions, friends, and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves. Well, when we hear disown ourselves, we immediately, because of our well-habituated rut tracks, take it back into saying, this is just a further abnegation of my will. You know, I disowned myself, I’ve already distributed all my goods, and now God wants me to lay down the objects of my clinging still more. Disowning yourself really comes closer to the ballpark of letting go of attachment, not at the object pole, but at the subject pole. That’s what disowning yourself means. And most of us are willing to plea bargain all the way to the gallows.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 16:23 6-holy-martyrdom.

The Wellspring of Silence and Presence

“Silence is not just an empty space in which nothing is happening. It’s a living more subtle presence coming to meet us, suffuse us, saturate us and finally transform us into it. And that’s beautiful and it’s alive. And as we chop off every possible inroad where that could happen, we consign ourselves to a life below. We become a kind of artificial intelligence in and of ourselves even though we are still embodied because we fall out of comfortable communion with this larger consciousness that doesn’t have to see the world through its own kind of isolated and pixelated viewing platform and can begin to come into and draw its wellsprings from the sheer dynamism of the whole field, which is in its essence, God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, A Fresh Perspective on Centering Prayer with Cynthia Bourgeault, by Heather Ruce and Jeanine Siler-Jones, p13

Connecting to the Cosmic Wellspring

“We’re gonna ask you to stand as you sing this and place your feet on the ground and see if you can sense, as you get ready and you learn the music, that cosmic wellspring flowing through your own being, okay. “♪ ♪ The streams of my Father’s [Mother’s] Love run daily through me, from the holy Fountain of Life to the seed throughout the whole Creation. ♪ ♪ ” [Wellsprings of Life, by Paulette Meier] Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:25:28 11 – FRI PM Teaching.

The Wellspring of Hope and Consciousness

“There’s a possibility in this life to discover how broad and rich and deep and vast are the wellsprings that hold our life up and context it forever. Not as egos that will live, but the connection with that reverberation of the ‘I am’, and the gratitude continues, and you know in some sense that it’s you, and that there is nothing to fear. There’s really nothing to fear and there’s nothing lost. And if we could only tell that, then we would be able to mediate to the planet that’s so stricken in its terror of extinction. A new sense of meaning, a new sense of hope that wasn’t just frantic hope, but a hope that’s grounded in the faith, hope and love of consciousness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 1:07:45 020-Conscious Circle of Humanity.

“In the practice of conscious love, you begin to discover a different kind of hope, a hope that is related not to outcome, but to a wellspring, a source of strength which wells up from deep within you, independent of outcomes.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 7:30 disc1 track1.

Desire as Shared Wellspring

“It’s not something that God is free of desire and we have it and we got to get rid of desire in order for us to be like God. We and God share desire as the wellspring, as the driveshaft of creativity, of manifestation, of manifest becoming. So okay, I’m comfortable with that one.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 6:46 disc3 track2.

From Going to a Wellspring to Coming From It

“We draw our water from the spiritual well and then bring it home to translate it into all the benefits it confers in our daily life. From there, we translate our thanks back to the God in the form of wordless or spoken prayers. But there comes a time when the ego translator drops out, and we are simply there, hearing and responding directly in the native language of being. There is oneness, and that is fundamentally what is meant by non-dual consciousness. Then this inner wellspring is no longer a place you go to, it’s a place you come from. It’s a whole new structure of consciousness that can perceive without first splitting the field.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer – Knowing Without Knowing, 1:42 disc1 track9.

Living From the Wellspring in Challenging Times

“We don’t really know how to live in a world that isn’t safe anymore. It’s appalling. So standing here and going back to what I would call the white knuckle wellsprings of the work is I think whether we want it or not a refresher course in how to live in the world with sobriety and vigilance but with an open heart. And that’s not impossible. You don’t have to shield your heart and shut it down in order to protect yourself from the crazy actings out in lower worlds. But it does take some skills to learn how to keep it open.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 27:00 Session 1 Introduction to the Seminar.

The Cosmogonic Wellspring Within

“The solar plexus, this region, to breathe into it and sense it. And sense its aliveness. To relate it to the Trinity. To see it as reconciling principle in the law of three. That which by its addition breaks the impasse and lets something new. And to know that when three are converged that way, there will be a new arising. So it is to discover the cosmogonic wellspring in your own being. And this is not small stuff. You discover that each one of us has God. And you don’t own it, like this is my own little piece of real estate, others give away. But by the fact that you belong to it, you participate in it. You have all the rights and privileges to allow this principle. This cosmogonic force, this ever replenishing principle, to exist in you and to replenish you. And to carry you in connection with the infinite and in connection with what needs to be done on this planet. It’s the hidden wellspring at the heart of your heart and your being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 44:16 04 Sunday pm Teaching.

Living From the Wellspring

“Discover this wellspring of being that is rising up inside you at every moment. Live in it. And live in it confidently without telling a story. But see what happens if you live out of that matrix.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:08:50 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.

“The heart expresses its awakeness with this underground river of yearning that’s always there, this underground river of truth, this orientation towards something that’s more whole than is manifesting in the moment but that you know is there. And because your heart is already always orienting towards that, sometimes these magical moments occur in which this greater peacefulness, this greater blessing, this capaciousness and joy enter, and they flow out from that wellspring.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:26:09 Advent-Session-with-Cynthia-16Dec2022.

The Relational Wellspring

“Consider that you are not you. You are not this thing with an enneagram type with imperishable characteristics with, but that there is a quality of aliveness that dances through you and manifests in your snakeskin, but is not your snakeskin, let alone your being. And it’s that that we want to pay more attention to. It’s a big question mark because, you know, we’re used to having it all pinned down. But you can taste it. And the chants we’ve been using today in this place invite you to taste it. You know, what have we been singing? ‘Christ dear to all, the light of all, seed sown in, and I like to say, seed sown in the heart of all.’ So it’s not just the hearts of individual human beings, but it’s the one heart of the planet. And this sense of a wellspring of some aliveness bubbling up, holding, connecting everything in a relational field we can’t even fathom yet, because our brains and our minds, our consciousness is still too low order magnitude to comprehend it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 1:13:00 RT 02 Mornning Teaching 9:26.

Continuous Replenishment

“Sense and validate in your own being that something stronger than your own self is replenishing and restoring in every nanosecond. And once you actually know that and validate that, then you have within yourself a freedom and a wellspring that allows you to do some of what we were talking about last night, to actually live this gospel teaching, which is not based on and is not accessible to a self that’s scared for its life. It’s accessible to a self who knows that its life is grounded in a continuous replenishment that isn’t going to happen just when you get to heaven, but is happening every breath you take. And you hold your own bodily life as precious and everyone’s bodily life is precious and the earth’s bodily life is precious. And rest in that and go about your business. So, it’s not like you permanently hit no-self and never come back again, because having been able to ground and replenish that wellspring as you are able, you can then pick yourself up again as a human being in a finite skin and know more clearly why you are here, to participate in that deeply relational consummation of that hidden treasure that the divine loved to have known and be known.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 58:00 07 Silence Mon am teaching.

The Deep Wellspring of Contemplation

“A contemplative that can be in the world without having their fragile psyche disrupted, whose relationship to silence is so deep and so profound, whose validation of the inner wellspring is deep enough that you can ride even these huge perturbations that we’re going to see without being completely undone.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 7:05 09 Silence Tues am teaching.

The Ever-Present Bubbling Up

“♪ ♪ The wellsprings of life are bubbling up anew each moment. So when the angel is troubling the waters, it is no time to stand on the bank and recite past wonders. The wellsprings of life are bubbling up anew each moment. ♪ ♪”  Wellsprings of Life, by Paulette Meier

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Logion 108
Yeshua said:
Whoever drinks from my mouth
will become like me,
and I will become them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​,
and what was hidden from them will be revealed.
(LeLoup)

Logion 13
Yeshua asked his students,
“Tell me, then, who am I like?
To whom will you compare me?”
Simon Peter said,
“You are like a just angel.”
Matthew said,
“You are a philosopher of wisdom.”
Thomas said,
“Master, I cannot find words to express who you really are.”
Yeshua said,
“Thomas, it is no longer necessary for me to be your Master
for you are drinking from the gushing spring
I have opened for you,
and you have become intoxicated.”
Then Yeshua took Thomas aside
and spoke three sayings to him in private.
When Thomas returned to the company of his companions
they, of course, asked him,
“What did Yeshua say to you?”
“If I were to tell you
even one of the things he spoke to me,” Thomas replied,
“you would pick up these rocks and stone me,
and then fire would blaze out of them and burn you.”
(Bauman)

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Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005

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.