This collection has been generously curated by Bill Britten, a Wisdom Student from North Carolina
“God made you to be a precious cog in the wheel of enormous dynamism of compassion and mercy. You receive, you give.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Essential Nature of Compassion
“The demand for compassion remains unbroken throughout the realms. But if your heart has no interest in compassion, you might as well be food for the moon. It’s easier. And really, if you’re going to, before we all think we want to be enlightened in everything, look at what draws you. If you don’t like compassion, if you don’t like vulnerability, if you don’t like service until you drop and then some more, if you love your damn ego boundaries, you might as well be food for the moon.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 31:20, Friday Evening Teaching.
“Compassion is the only field that contains all the perspectives.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
The Path to True Compassion
“Increased humility and flexibility are the fruits of spiritual practice that lead to compassion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
“As attachment, as identification, ceases to be your motivation, your actions will become reflections of compassion absolute.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-centered Knowing, 50:40, Friday Morning Teaching.
“When you remove judgment, what’s left is compassion, not indifference.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
“See from non-duality, act from compassion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Vocabulary of Wisdom.
Objective Compassion
“Sentimentality may give you a more immediate, quick effect. But objective compassion is really that ability to stand in your own ground. To hold the whole thing from a depth you don’t even know you have. And without being spurred to action. And when that objectivity, which at first seems like the opposite of compassion, it proves to be the essence of compassion. Because without objectivity in this deep sense that it’s used in the esoteric tradition, there can be no compassion. Only over-identification and emotional pathos.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 54:17, Wednesday Evening Teaching.
The Reciprocal Nature of Compassion
“Our hearts know … that compassion is born out of mutual interdependency, mutual vulnerability, mutual caring and tending. And what Gurdjieff does in some of his most beautiful teaching is invoke in us compassion for God. And we spend so much time weeping and wailing around about God have compassion for me, without seeming to get that it’s a two-way street.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2022 2nd Body, 16:46.
“God made you to be a precious cog in the wheel of enormous dynamism of compassion and mercy and mutual feeding. You get to play a part in this. You receive, you give.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence as Presence Feb 2025, 1:08:56, Saturday Morning Teaching.
“The Buddhists say that it is mercy which enables the soul of the Dalai Lama to return. But why could it not be a matter of the wind, i.e. the wind of compassion and mercy, just as the thunderbolt which strikes down towers is the divine love which saves us from impasses?” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p457.
Logion 70
Yeshua said:
“If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Logion 42
Yeshua said:
Be Passersby
(Leloup)
Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Thomas, Inner Traditions, 2005
Bill and Sarah Britten live in western North Carolina, and have been students of Cynthia since 2018. In 2024 Bill began a project of harmonizing the voices of Cynthia, Maurice Nicoll, and Yeshua’s sayings in the Gospel of Thomas into short Impressions around a central Wisdom Teaching. These Impressions and other writings are on his website livingfromgood.com
