Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes & Sayings

It's very, very simple. You sit, either in a chair or on a prayer stool or mat, and allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists. — Cynthia Bourgeault

It's not about right belief; it's about right practice. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually "domesticated"; the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature. — Cynthia Bourgeault

RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word. — Cynthia Bourgeault

A sophiological Christianity focuses on the path. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Beginning in infancy (or even before) each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment in compensatory "emotional programs for happiness," as Keating calls them. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Meditation is the tool you use to "upgrade your operating system," to move from that "either/or" thinking of the binary mind into the more spacious heart awareness that sustains the wisdom way of knowing. — Cynthia Bourgeault

I find nothing in the Gospel of Thomas that contradicts any of Jesus's teachings in the canonical gospels. Rather, it rounds them out metaphysically and creates a newfound sense of awe as we see just how original and subtle his understanding really is. He is the first truly integral teacher to appear on this planet. As we take a fresh look at these teachings at once familiar and strange, we're catapulted forward again along a path that rings with the power of truth. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Philippians 2:5: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." The words call us up short as to what we are actually supposed to be doing on this path: not just admiring Jesus, but acquiring his consciousness. — Cynthia Bourgeault

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively. — Cynthia Bourgeault

My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana [annihilation in God]. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present "myself," this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills, He can make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not "thinking about" anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, who cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is invisible.3 — Cynthia Bourgeault

When the field of vision has been unified, the inner being comes to rest, and that inner peaceableness flows into the outer world is harmony and compassion. — Cynthia Bourgeault

As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. He pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there. — Cynthia Bourgeault

JESUS'S PATH WAS exactly that, a radically unmanageable simplicity - nothing held back, nothing held onto. It was almost too much for his followers to bear. Even within the gospels themselves, we see a tendency to rope him back in again, to turn his teachings into a manageable complexity. Take his radically simple saying: "Those who would lose their life will find it; and those who would keep it will lose it." Very quickly the gospels add a caveat: "Those who would lose their life for my sake and the sake of the gospel will find it." That may be the way you've always heard this teaching, even though most biblical scholars agree that the italicized words are a later addition. But you can see what this little addition has done: it has shifted the ballpark away from the transformation of consciousness (Jesus's original intention) and into martyrdom, a set of sacrificial actions you can perform with your egoic operating system still intact. Right from — Cynthia Bourgeault

Somehow when the heart becomes single, the rest will follow. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Somewhere in those depths of silence I came upon my first experiences of God as a loving presence that was always near, and prayer as a simple trust in that presence. — Cynthia Bourgeault

To mourn is to touch directly the substance of divine compassion. — Cynthia Bourgeault

The Jesus Trajectory Love is recklessness, not reason. Reason seeks a profit. Loves comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed. Yet in the midst of suffering, Love proceeds like a millstone, hard-surfaced and straight forward. Having died to self-interest, she risks everything and asks for nothing. Love gambles away every gift God bestows. The words above were written by the great Sufi mystic Jalalludin Rumi.6 But better than almost anything in Christian scripture, they closely describe the trajectory that Jesus himself followed in life. — Cynthia Bourgeault

What Jesus is saying here, powerfully and clearly, is that if you do the work of transforming your being, moving beyond the egoic mind, then you become a living spirit. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations. His two great requests were that we "love one another as I have loved you" and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love. — Cynthia Bourgeault

As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning. — Cynthia Bourgeault

Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness. — Cynthia Bourgeault

All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness, so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling. — Cynthia Bourgeault