The Wisdom Jesus 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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Somehow when the heart becomes single, the rest will follow.”
― 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

“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

“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 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

“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

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“And my soul sang: “What has bound me has been slain. What encompassed me has been vanquished. Desire has reached its end, and I am freed from Ignorance. I left one world behind with the aid of another, and now as Image I have been freed from the analog. I am liberated from the chains of forgetfulness which have existed in time. From this moment onward I go forward into the fullness beyond time, and there, where time rests in the stillness of Eternity, I will repose in silence.”8 This beautiful quotation exposes what was no doubt at the heart of the conflict: Mary, more than any of the other disciples, caught the incredible subtlety of what Jesus was teaching. She saw that he really did come from another realm of being and that his purpose was to make that realm manifest here and now. She also had a strong personal taste of its atmosphere: its timelessness and the clarity of eternal remembrance (that is, pure consciousness) once the passions have been brought under control. She was able to penetrate into his integral, nondual vision of wholeness. And that was absolutely galling to the other apostles, particularly to Peter, who had a much more traditionally Jewish view of the place of women in spiritual groups, which was certainly not right at the feet of the Master. The conflict again breaks out in full force in the final logion of the Gospel of Thomas, as Peter announces abruptly, “Mary should leave us, for women are not worthy of this life.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“To be "in the righteousness of God" ... means to be ... anchored within God's own aliveness ... To "hunger and thirst after righteousness", then, speaks to this intensity of connectedness ... 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

“Repent" is a very popular word in our Christian lexicon ... But what does the world actually mean? ... The Greek that it's translating is 'metanoia' ... The word literally breaks down into 'meta' and 'noia', which ... means "go beyond the mind" or "go into the larger mind".”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Jesus ... says, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you" (that is, here) and "at hand" (that is, now) ... You don't die into it; you awaken into it.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“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

“As in the Gospel of Thomas, it’s merely the “seek and you shall find” part without the confusion, wonder, and reorientation—and also, without the “sovereignty.” For all such spiritual sleepwalking bypasses that crucial first step, that moment when the heart has to find its way not through external conditioning but through a raw immediacy of presence. Only there—in “the cave of the heart,” as the mystics are fond of calling it—does a person come in contact with his or her own direct knowingness. And only out of this direct knowingness is sovereignty born, one’s own inner authority.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“In one of his most beautiful insights, the contemporary Christian mystic Thomas Merton once wrote, “At the center point of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point of spark which belongs entirely to God.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“A soldier bursts into a monastery cell and thrusts his rifle into the belly of a meditating monk. The monk goes right on meditating. “You don’t understand,” says the soldier, a bit taken aback: “I have the power to take your life.” The monk briefly opens his eyes and smiles sweetly at the soldier. “No, it’s you who don’t understand. I have the power to let you.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Every moment of conscious presence actually takes place in eternity.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“Could it be that this earthly realm, not in spite of but because of its very density and jagged edges, offers precisely the conditions for the expression of certain aspects of divine love that could become real in no other way? This world does indeed show forth what love is like in a particularly intense and costly way. But when we look at this process more deeply, we can see that those sharp edges we experience as constriction at the same time call forth some of the most exquisite dimensions of love, which require the condition of finitude in order to make sense—qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness. These mature and subtle flavors of love have no real context in a realm where there are no edges and boundaries, where all just flows. But when you run up against the hard edge and have to stand true to love anyway, what emerges is a most precious taste of pure divine love. God has spoken his most intimate name.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind