Cynthia Bourgeault > Quotes

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“As we enter the path of transformation, the most valuable thing we have working in our favor is our yearning.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“RESIST no thought; RETAIN no thought; REACT to no thought; RETURN to the sacred word.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

“It's not about right belief; it's about right practice.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

“To mourn is to touch directly the substance of divine compassion.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“At the center of our being is a point of pure nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark that belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.4”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“A sophiological Christianity focuses on the path.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Somehow when the heart becomes single, the rest will follow.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“One can only imagine how greatly the political and religious culture wars of our era could be eased by this simple courtesy of the Law of Three: (1) the enemy is never the problem but the opportunity; (2) the problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction. Imagine what a different world it would be if these two simple precepts were internalized and enacted.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Centering Prayer is not about developing concentration, attaining clear mind, conscious presence, a strong witnessing “I,” some desired state. In Centering Prayer you merely practice and practice the core kenotic motion: “let go, make space, unclench”—thought by thought by thought.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

“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?”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“The Risen Lord is indeed risen. Present, intimate, creative, 'closer than your own heartbeat,' accessed through your vulnerability, your capacity for intimacy. The imaginal realm is real, and through it you will never be separated from any one or anything you have ever loved, for love is the ground in which you live and move and have your being. This is the message that Mary Magdalene has perennially to bring. This is the message we most need to hear.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity

“I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the worlds both visible and invisible.”4 Both the saying itself and the understanding that illumines it derive from a profound mystical intuition that our created universe is a vast mirror, or ornament (and the Greek word “cosmos” literally means “an ornament”), through which divine potentiality—beautiful, fathomless, endlessly creative—projects itself into form in order to realize fully the depths of divine love.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Most important of all, do everything you can to nurture your spiritual intelligence. It is your only genuine source of hope, direction, meaning, and comfort.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart

“Judaism says that you are to partner with God in the work of tikkun, repairing the world with justice, kindness, and humility.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature: Selections Annotated & Explained