This page lists some of the all-time best Cynthia Bourgeault quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Religions & Christianity Quotes
- Body & Self Quotes
- Contemplation & Nonduality Quotes
- Centering Prayer Quotes
- Wisdom Way of Knowing Quotes
50+ Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Wisdom, Contemplation, Centering Prayer, & More
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Religions & Christianity
“I’ve worked closely with many of the religious traditions, and I have a great belief that like colors of the rainbow they all belong together, and it requires every one of them to show the full spectrum of divine love.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Religion is not a philosophy. God is not a first cause. All that level is just explanation; meaning is something different.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Life hangs together by some deeper coherence and compassion, and our theologies, and our doctrines, and our dogmas, and our principles try and take that and put it in mental form, but the mental form never touches that sense that something holds together … These are all kinds of things that are absolutely real, but they make no sense on the level of the mind alone.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The path of Christianity that I’d formerly only known as doctrine and dogma shoved down my throat began to come alive in that same way it had as a child as the experience of love and beauty offered to the infinite.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“While I hold down the corner in Christianity, it really is a universal work. Each of the traditions participate in it in their own way to reveal what divine love looks like in created form.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“I began to notice, to my horror, that no matter how much I preach the scripture at people, no matter how much you offered up the Eucharist, people remained people—gossipy, nasty, confrontational, divisive, always tending to splinter into small groups and to act out of their hidden agendas. And, I realized, ‘Dear God, there’s nothing we’ve got here that’s actually getting people to change.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“I don’t have any sort of special notion of my importance or of being in some sort of consecrated path—that’s too inflated terminology. Every human being is consecrated just by the fact of being born.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Try, wherever you are, to be conscious and to be grateful. See what needs to be done in the moment, and to do it in such a way that you’re moving in a direction of greater compassion, greater love, and greater understanding.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Body & Self
“This era is about embodiment … We’re in the body for a good reason, and the body is our profound vessel of truth and spiritual exploration.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The world calls us to embodiment with every breath. We just have to learn to attune to it again and to value the body as a sacred temple of perception.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“What solitude is about is becoming more restful in embodiment.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“We often equate ‘going into silence’ to find profound states of being, and this will come around, but the first thing that silence does is it ruthlessly exposes the evasions. The first evasion is simply our own restlessness … And then you begin to discover the evasion of time … You begin to see that so much of what you thought you were about is only being cued to that evasion you’ve already set in place.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The ego is merely the mirage of self that you get by running the egoic operating system which is a program that perceives reality by discriminating/differentiating subject and object.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Most of us think we’re free and yet we’re not free at all because we’re under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions, and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life and sometimes from the womb.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“At the obvious level, ‘freedom’ is what you’d call freedom from the false self.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“As you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon’ of your own inner calling, you realize that it’s only in complete obedience that freedom lies … ‘Obedience’ comes from Latin, meaning ‘to listen deeply.’ As we listen deeply to the fundamental ‘tuning fork’ of our being—which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realization because the self melts as that realization comes closer—you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God. But, you have to get free of the false self to see that.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Freedom begins when you can stabilize in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“We have our life to live, and we either live it awake and consciously or we snooze through it. And, if we live it awake and consciously, we touch other human beings who are trying that same way.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Contemplation & Nonduality
“The real meaning of ‘contemplation’ is not resting in stillness, but it designates a path of luminous knowledge—knowledge of an extremely high order of intensity, and coherence, and magnitude. It’s not content-free by any means; it’s simply that the content is so high, and so ordered, and so intense, and so brilliant that it tends to overwhelm the faculties of our usual rational mind and the mind falls still and silent before it.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Contemplation is the closest equivalent in the Western Christian experience to what’s known in most of the world as ‘nonduality.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“One of the really powerful insights that the Christian tradition brings to the whole spiritual playing table of transformation is that these higher states of consciousness—these states that we call nondual, or unitive, or contemplative—aren’t just attained by the mind alone. They’re attained by bringing the mind into the heart.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The shift into second tier (see Integral Theory) is contingent on the mind being in the heart, and mind and heart working together to run the nondual program which can perceive from oneness.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Steady, non-state, non-dual perception is not possible until the mind is in the heart.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The Christ teaching comes from a nondual level, and you can’t run it when you’re running a dualistic program.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The nature of heart-seeing is that it’s intrinsically moral—this is not because of what it sees but how it sees.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“I first touched in a very simple and direct way what you might call the mystical field of love that surrounds us and binds our hearts together and is the real presence of God … There was just that ancient sense of familiarity once again that this dimension that had been missing all my life that I hadn’t found was there … There was a deep sense of invitation to a path—it was really an initiation.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Things always fall into your lap when you say you’re searching.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Centering Prayer
“Jesus taught a method, and once you saw it, you saw it everywhere. His method was let go—it was a basic non-clinging practice … The mind in this attached state identifying with everything, he practices let go, let go, let go.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Centering prayer is a simplified form of meditation in the Christian tradition. It was developed in about the mid-1970s by Father Thomas Keating and a group of his Trappist, Catholic monks with the purpose of putting the essence of the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer into a simple meditational form that would be accessible and practicable for people actually living busy lives out in the world.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Letting go is in association with what Christian theology calls ‘kenosis’ or the non-clinging or self-emptying of Jesus … It’s in solidarity with putting on the mind of Christ … Kenosis is the word in Greek which Saint Paul used to depict putting on the mind of Christ. It basically is pretty close to what the Buddhists mean by non-clinging—doesn’t hang on, doesn’t insist, doesn’t assert, doesn’t grab, doesn’t brace, doesn’t defend.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Centering prayer is boot camp in meditation form for putting on the mind of Christ, for putting the mind in the heart, for rearranging the neurology and the theology of perception.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Centering prayer is a non-clinging meditation practice. It really works with the simple idea of release, release, release—moving our mind from a state of being attached to an object to a state of letting go … The instruction in centering prayer is to just let it go … You catch yourself thinking, you let the thought go … It gives you a very simple method for releasing thinking once you notice you’re engaged with it.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“In centering prayer, your intention is to let go of every thought. A ‘thought’ is anything that brings your attention to a focal point—whether it’s an idea, or an emotion, or an itch on your nose. If you become aware your attention is attached to it, you simply let it go. To help with that, you choose a simple, short word or phrase—one or two syllables like ‘God’ or ‘peace’ or ‘let go’—to help remind you to sweep it away. Whenever you begin to be aware that you’re engaged with thinking, just let it go … Every time you let go of a thought—even if another comes back—you’re practicing this deep motion of non-clinging, letting go, consenting, surrendering.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“In centering prayer, the intention is everything because we’re not giving our mind a focal point, something to put your attention on—not a breath, not a manta, not anything. So, our intention carries the weight of how we do this practice. It’s the depth and sincerity of your intention that will carry how quickly you notice when you’re hooked by thinking and return to the practice … Be available to God. Be available to divine source.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Centering prayer is ultimately a pathway of return. It understands that thinking is normal, particularly for us overstimulated Westerners, but every time we’re able to let go of the thought it’s a pathway of return and opening to something deeper.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Rather than clearing away thoughts so we can encounter God or source in unbroken silence, centering prayer is a repeated practice with release—release of the attention from an attached state onto an object of thought to a different thought.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“When you open your heart to the world, what you can guarantee is that your heart is going to be broken—and to hear the pain of the world and to hold the pain of the world.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The inner action of letting go becomes the outer action of letting be.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage
“The wisdom tradition has been a great underground stream feeding and nurturing the life of all traditions.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
1. “We are founded on a daily practice of sitting meditation, predominantly but not exclusively Centering Prayer, anchored within the overall daily rhythm of ‘ora et labora,’ as set forth in the Rule of St. Benedict. In other words, the first and most important thing to say about our lineage is that it’s a practice-driven, practice-based lineage. It’s not about speculation, it’s not about cognitive knowledge, it’s not about books of esoteric doctrine. It’s about sitting on the cushion, subjecting yourself to the rhythms that our tradition has passed on as the great vessels in which transformation happens … Centering prayer is particularly congruent to what we’re doing because as a practice it’s founded on the continuous letting go of thought, letting go of content, letting go of issues/agendas—letting the mind relax, unclench, release its stranglehold on objects of imagination and thinking … Wisdom is not about knowing more, but knowing deeper—knowing with more of you engaged, with more of your perceptual understanding awake and online.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
2. “We are rooted in the Christian mystical and visionary tradition, understanding contemplation in its original sense as ‘luminous seeing,’ not merely a meditation practice or lifestyle. In service to this luminous seeing, we affirm the primacy of the language of silence and its life-giving connection with the subtle realms, without which spiritual inquiry tends to become overly cognitive and contentious … We believe that silence is not just a place you go to but a way of knowing in and of itself. And, without this silent way of knowing, knowledge itself begins to become too cognitive, cerebral, and confrontational … Contemplation is a luminous seeing, very often it’s described as a pure beholding—in other words, a direct perception. It’s sometimes described as knowledge impregnated with love … People emerge from times of contemplation with a different knowing and a different way of knowing … We’re opening ourselves to both the disciplines and the gifts that happen when silence as a way of knowing becomes the whole of our life.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
3. “We incorporate a major emphasis (much more so than in more conventional contemplative circles) on mindfulness and conscious awakening, informed here particularly by the inner teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and by their parallels and antecedents in the great sacred traditions, particularly in Sufism … The transformation that we’re looking at comes a lot closer to awakeness, enlightenment, a whole different consciousness that becomes stabilized and interiorized in us.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
4. “We are an esoteric or ‘gnostic’ school to the extent that these terms have come to be understood as designating that stream of Christian transmission through which the radically consciousness-transforming teachings of Jesus have been most powerfully transmitted and engaged. But we eschew esotericism as simply mental or metaphysical speculation, and we affirm the primacy of the scripture and tradition as the cornerstones of Christian life. In other words, we’re stating first and foremost that we’re interested in transformation … We’re a Gnostic school to the to the extent that we’re interested in the knowledge of, and the actual practice of putting on, the mind of Christ—in other words, learning to mirror, to interiorize, and to live more closely and clearly out of the place that he came from.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
5. “In contrast to many branches of the wisdom tradition based on Perennial or Traditionalist metaphysics (with its inherently binary and anti-material slant), we are emphatically a Teilhardian, Trinitarian lineage, embracing asymmetry (threeness), evolution, and incarnation in all their material fullness and messiness … Wisdom assumes in a very fundamental way the shape of its container … The direction in which the divine is manifest in this world is not by sucking us back into an eternal spirit but by birthing ever new, and more complex, and more intricate, and messy forms—the journey is always through matter into new forms … Ours is one that embraces threefoldness as we see it in the trinity—asymmetry and movement into the world, the basic evolutionary stance, as foundational to our understanding of how love becomes incarnate and present in the world.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
6. “We are moving steadily in the direction of revisioning contemplation no longer in terms of monastic, otherworldly models prioritizing silence and repose, but rather, as a way of honing consciousness and compassion so as to be able to fully engage the world and become active participants in its transition to the higher collectivity, the next evolutionary unfolding. We see contemplation as a tool of luminous seeing, not as a lifestyle … The contemplation, the inner work, is the ground for a deeper seeing, and in that seeing, a participation in this evolutionary journey of our planet and of our universe toward the fullness of love.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
7. “We are an integral school, not a pluralistic one (to draw on Ken Wilber’s levels of consciousness); our primary mission field is teal, not green. Our work concentrates not at the level of healing the false self, woundedness and recovery, substance abuse, equal rights, restorative justice or political correctness (although we acknowledge the importance of all of these initiatives), but rather at the level of guiding the transition from identity based primarily in the narrative or egoic self to identity stabilized at the level of witnessing presence, or ‘permeably boundaried’ selfhood. While we are open to the world, we’re not an issue-driven school … Since it’s work that still is, by and large, undertaken out of the finite sense of selfhood and the narrative selfhood, it’s very vulnerable to the shadow side … What the wisdom schools have traditionally attempted to do is shift the center of selfhood out of which we work … You have to carry your selfhood in a different place. You have to move beyond the agenda of healing the false self, finding the true self, stepping beyond all that finite selfhood, and begin to learn to live stably in what the great traditions have called the ‘witnessing self’—a self which is more spacious, which has one foot in this realm and one foot in the next, in terms not of heaven after you die, but in terms of the greater cosmic coherence and can mediate between the two of them.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
8. “Our most important teachers and teachings are Jesus, St. Benedict, The canonical and Wisdom gospels (Gnostic gospels, The Gospel of Thomas, etc); The Cloud of Unknowing, the greater Christian mystical and visionary tradition (including Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Ladislaus Boros, Bernadette Roberts), the Desert and Hesychastic traditions; Bede Griffiths and the Christian Advaitic traditions (including Raimon Panikkar, Henri LeSaux/Abishiktananda and Bruno Barnhart); Rumi, Sufism, G.I. Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And of course my own teacher, Br. Raphael Robin.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
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