WB: These teachings on what love is are gathered from a single Wisdom School on Conscious Love in 2001. Cynthia grounds these teachings in everyday practice, and they form a counterpart to the more cosmological teachings on the Energy of Love.

The Nature of Conscious Love

“Love is that which in any situation is the most life-giving and fruitful.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 6:50 disc1 track1

“Conscious love is sustainable love. It’s easy to fall in love. That happens automatically. But to sustain love, whether we’re doing it with a partner, or with children, or with God, or with whatever, requires being able to go inside oneself and find a place of sustainability.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 0:05 disc1 track2

“Love is finally an act of purpose. I won’t call it an act of will so much, because you think of willpower, but it’s an act of intention, rather than a feeling. Which means that at root, this conscious love is a proactive, rather than a reactive experience. … Proactive love is a love that comes out of a choice which you then enact. And conscious love is in that ballpark. The other thing that wise mystical teachers say over and over again about conscious love is that it has no opposite.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:46 disc1 track2

“True love is love in truth. Conscious love is love from conscious presence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 1:10 disc1 track3

Love’s Movement and Gesture

“Love is intended to move us from outermost to innermost. Love really works as the magic transforming alchemy. It honors another’s deepest, innermost reality. It sees it, honors it, and supports it. So it’s moving.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 1:11 disc1 track7

“Love is by its nature completely self-giving. And the nature of self-giving is to do something different with boundaries, melt them.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:39 disc2 track1

“The meaning and worth of love as a feeling is that it forces us, with all our being, to acknowledge for another the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very center of our personal lives.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 1:17 disc2 track4

“Our love is calling on us to break out of this prison and become the vast being we truly are. We often feel tremendous resistance to letting love in, because love is a power that can dissolve the shell of our false self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 4:07 disc2 track7

“Love is a quality that doesn’t exist in abstract. Love only exists as it’s manifested. And so to say that God is love without creation is impossible. And so we talk about creation growing out of a desire to come to fullness of manifestation in God. And when we lose track of that, we lose track of our own human accountability and of the fact that in our own human partnerships we are made in the image of God in our desiring. It’s not something impure. 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.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 5:59 disc3 track2

Love as Total Self-Giving

“Love is the triumph over death. Not because it abolishes death, but because it is itself death. If we can begin to wrap our minds and hearts around that, we begin to get a glimmer of the template of our Christian faith, and the template on which to pattern our human love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 3:09 disc4 track3

“Love and death have something in common in the respect that love is a dying to self. And this dying is accessed not by renunciation, but by total self-outpouring. Not by holding back, but by total giving until there’s nothing left. So, that’s what love is. Love is a giving unto death. It seeks the limit by pouring itself out through complete self-emptying.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 0:00 disc4 track4

“True love demands sacrifice, because true love is a transforming force and the beginning of union at a higher level. A very, very profound, profound concept. That this true love, this outpouring, this total self-giving at one level, begins to unleash and bring into being a more profound, more powerful expression of the same love at another level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 3:17 disc4 track4

“Ladislaus Boros, talking about this love and death and total giving kind of loop, which I think is the heart of what the experience of love is. He says, love does not exist then until two people can say we, because that is what they are. The word we contains a full and binding pledge. I want to be with you, and I also wish that you should be with me. From this moment on, I belong to you and am at your disposal.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 0:00 disc4 track5

“The gift that is given in love is ultimately always the giver himself. It’s lovely, isn’t it? The gift which is given in love is ultimately always the giver himself. All the other gifts which may be received in love are shot through with the splendor of this self-giving. This joy, this light, is a phenomenon that accompanies love, and is at the same time a revelation of the fact that someone who loves has come close to the origin of all being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:58 disc4 track5

The Real Work of Love

“We often feel tremendous resistance to letting love in, because love is a power that can dissolve the shell of our false self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 4:57 disc4 track6

“We ought to start right from the start in our marriage counseling partnerships, not telling people how to communicate well, to restore sort of specious calm and pleasantness. We ought to teach people how to support each other in the real work of love, which is unleashing the shadows. How to fight like hell and make up. You know, how to move through it. How to trust that this untidiness is exactly what love is all about. It’s the purification of love. And to trust that. We need to teach that. We need to teach and teach and teach and teach the practice of the observer eye. Because without it, you’re going to get hooked. Your own needing and clinging and wanting and demanding is going to kick in. Your own sense of being threatened.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 3:14 disc4 track7

“Love is a path of spiritual transformation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 0:00 disc4 track8

Love Deeper Than Terror

“Love is deeper than the terror. Anything you resist, anything you’re frightened of, and that you brace against, has you. And love really wants you a hundred percent. So there’s this constant undermining. It is hard, but in the midst of the most frightful and devastating pain, in the midst of the most frightful and devastating loss, you can find, if you’re quiet and willing, a place you can be completely okay in it. Gathered in it. It may be no more than the eye of a pen, but you can find that place and you can rest in it. And that place always connects with the total abundance of God’s mercy. 

“It’s a hard, hard, hard lesson. But it really is the only one that’s reliable. And I think one of the purposes of love, as we’ve been talking about it this whole time, is to teach us to begin to trust that. Because love is in its basic fundamental gesture, the yielding and giving. And as we begin to interiorize that gesture and learn to apply it in all situations, our life changes.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 3:23 disc4 track13

“You don’t have love. It has you. And if you’re open to it, it will express through you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 1:13 disc4 track14

“Love is a motion which you are born knowing how to do. It’s part of what gives you your being as a human merely being. And if you come to practice the gesture in its own right, the opening, the softening, the yielding, in every moment of your life, consciously present, love will create its subjects and objects. So try to forget finding objects. Find yourself as that gesture of freedom.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:14 disc4 track14

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Logion 25
Yeshua says…
Love your brother and your sister
as your very own being.
Protect them as you would the pupil of your eye.

Logion 90
Yeshua says…
Come to me
for justice is my yoke,
and gentleness my rule,
and you will discover the state of rest.

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Read other Impressions in the Series on Love.

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

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