Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes

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.

We all live with this terrible, heartbreaking hypocrisy in Christianity, when the teaching finally leaves us in th dust. How do we die before we die? How do we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we bridge the gap between what we believe and what we can actually live?

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.

It's not about right belief; it's about right practice.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.

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.

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

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.

Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness.

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.

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.

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.