“The passions divide the heart. They render it incapable of reflecting the cosmic heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Attachment to matter gives birth to passion without an Image of itself because it is drawn from that which is contrary to its higher nature. The result is that confusion and disturbance resonates throughout one’s whole being. It is for this reason that I told you to find contentment at the level of the heart, and if you are discouraged, take heart in the presence of the Image of your true nature. 
Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Dialogue 1

The Window of Opportunity

“It’s a window of opportunity that’s been described in the Christian faith since the fourth century. One of the great spiritual psychologists by the name of Evagrius spoke way back in the fourth century that there’s a sliver of time before thoughts, that first sort of apprehension that, oh, this isn’t fun anymore, turn into passions, as he called it, which is where your full-blown sense of self is bound up in it. And if you can catch it right there, you can change things. If you can’t catch it right there and you’ve already gone over the waterfall and you’re still a throbbing mess, you can practice it right after it’s happened. But the closer you get, the more you can actually do some amazing things in your life.

“It’s a practice where you don’t try to step back or make the emotion go away, but rather you ride it, like on a surfboard or a bucking bronco. You ride the energy of the emotion without identification, without putting that feeling of I into it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, disc4 track4.

Blocking Dense Matter

“Let the devil roar at thee, making a noise before thy left eye. Remember, that’s the one that’s looking at the world. He cannot get in, unless thou sufferest thine eye to receive in dense matter. Now remember what dense matter meant. It meant all the passions, right? So, the devil can be out there roaring, but unless you get hooked, he can’t get in.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc3 track1.

Blessed Are the Meek: Domesticating the Passions

“[Blessed are the meek] basically means blessed are the gentled ones. Blessed are the ones who have domesticated their passions, have become gentle, for they alone are the ones who can only be entrusted to inherit the earth because they’re the only ones that aren’t going to destroy it. You know, as soon as the lion, as long as the lion is still peeping out the eyeballs of the man and walking around and strutting, you can be sure we’re going to destroy the earth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 36:22 20 Saturday Afternoon Teaching.

Transformation, Not Destruction

“It is beautiful. That’s the alchemy. That’s the human alchemy, and it’s alchemy all the way, transubstantiation, that we take the things that were rough and shaggy and energized but dense, and by this measure of conscious labor and intentional suffering, we allow them to live at a different level, the different alchemical mix. So you don’t give up your fire, you don’t impress your fire, you don’t give up your devotion or your adoration or your clinging or any of those things that you’ve pre-identified as your passions. You transform them through consciousness. So they become the new transformed essence ground.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 37:28 20 Saturday Afternoon Teaching.

“So that plugs right into, like the man who swallowed the lion, plugging right into Logion 7 in the Gospel of Thomas. That is when we can bring our passions, our shadow side, all that unruly self, under some sort of higher, more civilized creature within us. When we domesticate our passions, which is very different from destroying them, then we are ready to inherit the earth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc3 track9.

Passions as the Great Obstacle

“Our passions are, in this tradition, precisely what drag us down through chaining us to stories, expectations, agendas. And so the great teaching of the past is to attain a state of apatheia, which means passionlessness, which means calm equanimity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 17:25 0819 IWS Wednesday PM Teaching.

“The work is to purify the earning at the ground of our being, as Julian of Norwich said. So what gets in the way? What’s the principal culprit? And for this, the tradition is absolutely clear. The problem, the thing that obscures the heart, that covers it over, is known in the tradition unilaterally, unanimously as the passions. There’s a direct saying in the Philokalia, the problem with the passions is they divide the heart. In other words, they render it incapable of its unbroken work of mirroring and transmitting, reflecting the cosmic heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025 CA, 36:50 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

Evagrius and Self-Observation

“The automatic, mechanical, reactive nature of passion, which is what the desert fathers and the Philokalia ‘way of the heart’ teaching, was really on to. The mind which was being dragged around by anything was a mind that was not free, and if it’s not free, it can’t attain to these great higher, more refined tools of contemplation, which are often described as impartiality, objectivity, the ability to see fully and not through the lens of your own craving.

The great spiritual psychologist who taught this was Evagrius, one of the early desert fathers, who is appropriately known as the first psychologist of the Christian faith. Evagrius taught, and Thomas Keating reflects, a method of dealing with things that basically says that if you’re going to have any way of breaking the cycle of getting trapped in a passion, you have to have enough self-observation to nip the thing in the bud. So he taught a practice of self observation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025 CA, 41:00 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

The Endless Cycle

“It’s the failure to see this, it’s a failure to act on this that just keeps us, even our spiritual aspirations, revolving around endless repetitive cycles of our attractions and aversions. Our emotional programs for happiness are hidden. Once we go out in the world trying to get them met, we encounter resistance, and immediately it wounds one of those deeper programs of self-identity. We act out, we’re depressed, we lose the energy, on and on we go.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025 CA, 45:55 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

The Lion and the Human

“Jesus said, blessed is the lion that the human devours, for that lion will become human. But cursed is the human that the lion devours, for that lion will become human. You get that? That’s a really subtle one. Devouring the lion would be akin to being able to master and swallow the passions, integrate them without repressing them, so they become part of your sacred being. And this is, blessed is the lion that the human devours, for that lion becomes human. To devour, to eat, to reintegrate, to identify with our passion. Lets that animal nature in us move to a higher level on the food chain and play out in us as a vital kind of aliveness at the level of human beings. But cursed is the human that the lion devours. In other words, if you get swallowed up by your passions. And then he adds in the kicker, for that lion will become human.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025 CA, 47:20 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

The Sleep of Passions

“When we are governed by our passions, by our mechanical impulses, by our having our own way, we are not really quite comfortable in ourselves. To follow self-will does not lead to any real satisfaction.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p635.

“Now Man asleep is a man, a woman, who is always governed by various passions and moods. People say in this Work, when they first hear that we are all hypnotized, that they do not understand that they are hypnotized by their passions to begin with. They say they always know what they are doing. They do not realize that they are not free but governed by different kinds of passions. Playing on life to keep humanity asleep are various passions. As long as the passion works in you, you are asleep and in certain cases can even do murder under the influence of the passions that play on humanity. This is one example of what it means that mankind is kept asleep.” Commentaries, p1254.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

---

Logion 7
Yeshua says…
A lion eaten by a man is blessed
as it changes to human form,
but a human devoured by a lion
is cursed as lion becomes human.

Logion 58
Yeshua says…
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.

---

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.