“To walk through that eye of a needle and come out on the other side, what we’re immediately released into is a freedom to do the right thing, to follow conscience.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Psychological Richness as Barrier

“A person who believes in himself, in his virtue and merit, and so on, is bulky in a psychological sense. So he cannot pass through the ‘narrow gate’—or through ‘the eye of a needle’. Such a person is very much identified with himself. This is the rich man of the Gospels of whom Christ said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p284-285.

Universal Spiritual Requirements

“Whether you’re a Christian, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Sufi, or a sannyasin, you will still go through the same eye of the needle to get to where your true heart lies.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, p xvii 

“It doesn’t matter what religious practice you decide to go through the eye of the needle in. You’re going to be faced with attention, surrender, loving kindness, detachment.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 3:00 Disc 1 Track 9

Intentional Suffering as the Needle’s Eye

“Making moon in myself is the eye of a needle of intentional suffering, where you stand present in anguish to when you’ve been upset, when you’ve been unseated, when you’ve been exposed, when you’ve, you know, and rather than running and screaming and defending and blaming, you take it in, you stand still.

“That’s the [Jacob Boehme] quote, ‘here now is the right time to wrestle before the divide face. If you stand still, if you do not bend, you will see and perceive great wonders. You will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts’. So it’s that standing firm in the presence of your own chaos, taking the anguish and allowing it simply through the quality of your unmoved presence to transform.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 50:00 Final Teaching Day 5.

The Christ Path Through the Needle

“Just as all the drops are in the water, so the water is in the drop. And in the Christian lineage, which is a valid and necessary color and strain of the divine ray of manifestation, so we must work with entering ultimacy through this eye of the needle of Christ in all of us.” Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 0:44 disc11 track5 The Centrality Of Christ.

“I think it’s our cumulative, covered up frustration of the fact that we, 2,000 years into the Christian journey, are clueless about how to put on the mind of Christ. That it’s easier to go to church and talk about it and sing beautiful hymns and engage in worthy projects that don’t confront the eye of a needle that will take you through to the unity which lies so close on the other side.” Kanuga Nov 2015, 24:47 Day 5.2a Morning Final Teaching Part 1 of 2.

Death as the Ultimate Needle’s Eye

“As we do the work of rebuilding trust in ourselves and through that in our world, the buck stops, really, with our fear of death. And that the work finally becomes, before we can trust, we have to get comfortable with trusting God through our own demise. Because freedom and conscience both pick up on the other side. I don’t mean of actually dying, but of actually having come to terms with that inevitability and having found a way to integrate that into your own sacred humanity so that it’s not that which interrupts your life, but that which consummates your life. And our whole life can really be seen as an intelligent weaving in that direction.

“And on the other side of that, where we’ve been able to walk through that eye of the needle and come out even tentatively on the other side, what we’re immediately released into is a freedom to do the right thing, to follow conscience, to follow the path of faith wherever it leads.” Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 2:00 Day2.1-Creating-Sun-In-Myself.

Beyond Self-Reflexive Consciousness

“My simple suggestion is that if you want to work toward this no-self eye of the needle with the idea that beyond it lies a much more stable access to these more subtle and expanded relationships with yourself and through a new kind of self to all reality, if you want to do that, simply increase the number of experiences and practices where you’re not constantly relying on this self-reflexive mechanism of consciousness. Increase sensation.” Silence As Presence Feb 2024, 43:44 05 Silence Sat pm teaching.

Evolutionary Transformation

“We’re at this really intense eye of the needle where the old paradigm is massively failing. We language it in different ways, generally in the language of blame and guilt. But the massive failure is actually a really, really good sign. Because it means that if we look at the history of evolution, this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden we’ve been abandoned and the whole thing is going to hell. What it means is that the new structure is viable outside the womb, basically, just beginning to be. And the other thing is that, and Gebser makes no bones about it, that when you enter this kind of penumbral age, anxiety is your daily bread. It’s the air you breathe. And you can’t try to calm it, per se. If you think that your real goal here is to calm the anxiety, it’s like pushing the baby back in the womb once it’s started to be born.” Stonington June 2021, 6:39 13 – Wednesday Morning Gebser Teaching.

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Logion 42  
Yeshua said:
Be passersby.
(Leloup)

Logion 49 
Yeshua says…
Blessed are those chosen and unified.
The Realm of the Kingdom is theirs.
For out of her you have come,
and back to her you are returning.
(Bauman)

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Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.