Cynthis Bourgeault: The Trinity

The Trinity understood in a wisdom sense:

The Cappadocian fathers, however, were not looking at individual persons, but at the flow of energy between the persons. In fact, the word we translate as “person” (hypostasis in Greek) does not mean an individual at all, but more a state of being—just as water can manifest as ice, liquid, or vapor, but remains the same chemical compound throughout. The Cappadocians were interested in how this movement, or change of state, takes place. They saw it as an outpouring of love, from Father to Son, from Son to Spirit, from Spirit back to father...

The Trinity, understood in a wisdom sense, is really an icon of self-emptying love. The three persons go round and round like buckets on a watermill, constantly overspilling into one another. And as they do so, the mill turns and the energy of love becomes manifest and accessible. The Cappadocians called this complete intercirculation of love perichoresis, which literally means “the dance around.” … God reveals his own innermost nature through a continuous round dance of self-emptying. On the great watermill of the Trinity, the statement ‘God is love’ brings itself into reality





Cynthis Bourgeault in ‘Wisdom Jesus’

Cynthia Bourgeault: with a dual mind

The catch-22 for most Christians is that we're trying to do a nondual teaching with a dual mind.



Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthis Bourgeault: koans

[Jesus's] parables are much closer to what in the Zen tradition would be koans... that are intended to turn the egoic mind upside down.



Cynthis Bourgeault

Cynthia Bourgeault: nondual consciousness

The Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus's own favorite way of describing a state we would nowadays call a “nondual consciousness”



Cynthia Bourgeault

Cynthis Bourgeault: Kingdom of Heaven

The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from.



Cynthis Bourgeault

Jean-Yves Leloup : Miriam

Yeshua loved John or Miriam not more than he loved Peter or Judas, but differently. He loved them all with a universal and unconditional love, but he also loved each of them in a unique and particular fashion. Human love can still function while being subsumed in a divine love that includes all beings, even our enemies. It was this love that he proposed to all who would walk with him. Human love consists of preferences, affinities, particular resonances, and intimacies that are not possible with all.

When Miriam realized this divine Love, she was no longer a woman who could be possessed, either by man or by demon. She became the faithful, blessedly happy friend of the one who had delivered her. Henceforth she could not be “had,” not even by death itself, for her lover remained faithful to the great life that spoke through him. This new desire of hers was one that he would never betray.

This is how it is with those who give themselves to love. How can they think of anything better, how can they have any concern other than loving even more, giving themselves with no expectation of return?

"When you make the two into One,
when you make the inner like the outer and
the high like the low; when you
make male and female into single One,
so that the male is not male and the female is not female;
when you have eyes in your eyes, a hand in your hand,
a foot in your foot, and an icon in your icon,
then you will enter into the Kingdom."




from 'The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition'

By Jean-Yves Leloup

J-Y LeLoup: the Annunciator

[Yeshua] was the Annunciator, Witness, & some... say the Incarnation of the possible reign of the Spirit in the heart of this space-time

the manifestation of the Infinite in the very heart of our finitude, the voice of the Other within the speech of human-ness.



J-Y LeLoup

Gospel Mary: rules

Do not lay down any rules beyond what I appointed for you, & do not give a law like the lawgiver lest you be constrained by it.



Gospel Mary

G.K. Chesterton: Christianity

Christianity isn't a failure; it just hasn't been tried yet.


G.K. Chesterton

Abhishiktananda: no matter

There is no matter which doesn't shout aloud the presence of the spirit.


Abhishiktananda [Fr Henri le Saux]

Thomas Merton: one awareness

The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and second, awareness of the answer.

Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing.

The question is, itself, the answer. & we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the 2nd kind of awareness.

We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer.

And all is summed up in one awareness—not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM."




Thomas Merton

Apocryphon of James: want of reason

Become full of the Spirit, but be in want of reason.




The Apocryphon of James

Abhishiktananda: God

God is everywhere, God alone is both hidden and unveiled in his manifestation.



Abhishiktananda [Fr Henri le Saux]

Abhishiktananda: face

Jesus is God's face turned towards man and man's face turned towards God.



Abhishiktananda [Fr Henri le Saux]

Abhishiktananda: form

God has no form. God is beyond every form. Precisely for that reason God can reveal and manifest himself under any form.



Abhishiktananda

Thomas Merton: an impostor

We must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.




Thomas Merton

Nicholas of Cusa: beyond nothing

God is beyond nothing and beyond something, for nothing obeys God in order that something may come into being.



Nicholas of Cusa

Abhishiktananda: no other to name it

In this annihilating experience one is no longer able to project in front of oneself anything whatsoever, to recognize any other “pole” to which to refer oneself and to give the name of God. Once one has reached that innermost center, one is so forcibly seized by the mystery that one can no longer utter a “Thou” or an “I.” Engulfed in the abyss, we disappear to our own eyes, to our own consciousness. The proximity of that mystery which the prophetic traditions name “God” burns us so completely that there is no longer any question of discovering it in the depths of oneself or oneself in the depths of it. In the very engulfing, the gulf has vanished. If a cry was still possible— at the moment perhaps of disappearing into the abyss—it would be paradoxically: “but there is no abyss, no gulf, no distance!” There is no face-to-face, for there is only That-Which-Is, and no other to name it.



Abhishiktananda [Fr Henri le Saux]

Bede Griffiths: God in everything

God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn.

I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything. -



Bede Griffiths

Gospel of Thomas: divider

I'm not a divider, am I?



Gospel of Thomas