Dear wisdom friends,
By now the word is out that I am officially stepping back from active duty as a core faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation. As a newly minted “faculty emeritus,” I will no longer actively teach in the Living School or be a regular presence at CAC symposia and conferences. My course material will continue to factor prominently in the Living School curriculum for the forseeable future, and the expectation is that I will keep a hand in with occasional special teachings and presentations.
I want to make very clear to all that this decision to step back is motivated neither by ill health nor ill will. Entirely au contraire, it rests squarely on both of these rather remarkable graces: of a still robust health, and dear, trusted friends at the CAC who have given both support and wise encouragement to what the Quakers would call a “leading”—a strong inner prompt to accept a new invitation. In this time of global upheaval I have found myself increasingly called. . .
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Now available to purchase.
MYSTICAL COURAGE
Commentaries on Selected Contemplative Exercises by G.I. Gurdjieff, as Compiled by Joseph Azize
By CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT
When the global pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, spiritual teacher Cynthia Bourgeault sensed an invitation to go deeper than a continuous round of Zoom calls. She turned to Joseph Azize’s newly published collection of spiritual exercises from the Gurdjieff teaching, exercises that for decades had been kept apart from the general public. She invited members of her Wisdom School Community to join her in a rigorous practice with six of these exercises. What emerged over a six-week collective journey was a remarkable series of revelations and reflections encompassing not only the Gurdjieff tradition but her own deep insights into the Christian mystical and Wisdom traditions, together with sagacious tips on practice and a prophetic vision of a post-pandemic future. The fruit of that alchemy—presented here—is a profoundly renewed vision of Mystical Courage, a hope and strength emerging from beyond our own making that is available right now to guide our way.
ORDER MYSTICAL COURAGE HERE
Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, and theologian. She is a core. . .
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The following are offered to guide and deepen your Pascal journey through Holy Week, Easter, and beyond:
We need to hear the word “love” mentioned as we go into Holy Week. As we stand here in a world so abruptly and sometimes brutally awakening to discover ourselves as one — interconnected, fragile, radically dependent on our great spiritual traditions to reconnect at the point of the heart… As we stand at that place in our world today, we must come to see that despite the venerable input of tradition, that the exclusivistic, judgmental, punitive theologies we have promulgated are a luxury the world can no longer afford. The epicenter of Christianity is Love, and this week we enter the epicenter. May we do so in Love.
~ Cynthia Bourgeault, 2013 Palm Sunday sermon
MARY MAGDALENE AND ATTENTION OF THE HEART with CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT – Online March 30, 2021
This online talk is part of the Bonnevaux Speaker Series hosted by the World Community for Christian Meditation.
Event Description:
She’s known as a lover, but what is love? Cynthia will explore the often sensationalized relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus as a pathway of conscious love, grounded. . .
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The following update was recently posted by friends at The Contemplative Society, and provides a great summary of my recent and upcoming activities.
What’s new with our Principal Teacher Cynthia Bourgeault?
Recently we’ve heard from a number of you wondering what Cynthia is up to while in-person events and retreats are widely curtailed.
Well, unless you happen to spot her on the high seas, here are some opportunities to tune into Cynthia’s activities and catch some of her upcoming appearances:
CONVERSATIONS & BLOGS
New ICN Podcast: From a Cosmic Nudge to an Integral Christianity – A Conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia and Integral Christian Network hosts share their converging interests and inspiration drawn from Jean Gebser’s influential
Ever Present Origin.
This engaging dialog includes the emerging scope and potential for an Integral mode of Christianity.
The shared conversation includes personal experiences and insights on a range of spiritual themes and topics – see details and listen here.
Cynthia’s February video interview on Buddha at the Gas Pump
Cynthia illuminates aspects of the Imaginal Realm and other key insights from her most recent book
Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey. . .Read the full article
There are two other things you should know about Gebser’s “aperspectival” time: it is non-exclusionary, and it is purposive.
Linear or perspectival time, the time we’re used to, is exclusionary. Its linear, unidirectional flow provides sequencing and causality. Things that happen earlier cause things that happen later, not the other way around. To choose to do one thing often means choosing NOT to do something else. If you decide to become a monk, you can’t marry the girl of your dreams. If you’re an artist painting a full-on portrait of somebody’s face, you can’t simultaneously show their backside. As the medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing laments, “God never gives us two moments at once.”
It is not so in aperspectival time. Here everything that is qualitatively in a moment can and does display simultaneously, as time “irrupts” into the present from a greater coherence beyond it, where seeming opposites or dissonances are harmonized in a more capacious whole. This is the “intensification” that Gebser speaks of. All our possible “courses over history” which in perspectival time can only be lived partially and sequentially, are instantly available in any moment of direct encounter with the “originary”. . .
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Whatever you may take Gebser’s Integral structure of consciousness to be, its most striking characteristic is that it entails a radically different approach to time. Time presents in a strikingly different way in Integral. Gebser rightly describes it as a “fourth dimension,” and the capacity to grasp what he is laying before us here is frustratingly commensurate with our own attained capacity to begin to think, perceive, and connect the dots according to the conventions of this new language of temporicity.
For most well-educated Westerners, this will be the toughest nut to crack in the journey to the heart of Ever Present Origin. We are used to thinking of time as a duration, metronomically flowing from the past to the future. Even though we know theoretically that Einstein totally up-ended that illusion in his theory of Relativity, in the practical, commonsense world we mostly inhabit time still seems to flow steadily and to present itself as an objective backdrop against which we play out our lives, order our datebooks, and construct the narrative of ourselves. It conveys a reassuring sense of continuity, and its functional indispensability in maintaining the fabric of a well-ordered society is so obvious. . .
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Help flows to us of its own volition…It doesn’t help the cosmos for a human being to fall apart and die and give up. The fact that we’re here at all is a consecration and we are sacred simply from the fact of being born. Because we have this chance to be a conscious pixel in form, and everything that ever brought anything to existence wants this little pixel to flourish.
~ Cynthia Bourgeault, BATGAP interview, Feb 2021
Watch this lively and wide-ranging conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault and Rich Archer, host of Buddha at the Gas Pump (BATGAP), recorded live on February 6, 2021.
Included in the topics they explore:
Cynthia illuminates aspects of the Imaginal Realm and other key insights from her most recent book
Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm
How the work of showing up in ‘the laboratory of our lives’ impacts structures of awakening consciousness
Reflections on forgiveness and love, as well as suffering, confusion, and pain as conditions that contribute to transformative new arisings
And much more… (full topic outline available on BATGAP here)
A spiritual seeker that doesn’t dare to screw up is. . .
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By the skin of her teeth (the way she always seems to do things), Cynthia has made it onto the prestigious Watkins List, honoring the hundred most spiritually influential people of 2021. This recognition comes partly on the strength of her acclaimed new book Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm.
“a truly fresh and panoramic vision of the purpose of human existence…” Russ Hudson
“a transformational elixir—both rigorous and luminous—simultaneously intoxicating and sobering….” Mirabai Starr
“an immensely original piece of thinking, feeling, writing,…” Roger Lipsey
View Watkins’ List
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In my last post I invited us all to begin thinking more specifically in terms of the gifts and strengths contributed to the whole by the magic and mythic structures of consciousness. By now we’ve been working in Gebser long enough to see how that popular Wilber cliché, “transcend and include,” in fact merely muddies the waters. The “more primitive” structures of consciousness are not simply folded into the new structure like eggs in a cake batter. Rather, like rooms in a museum, they continue to stand in their own integrity, each with its own center of gravity and way of making connections. They are all needed to create that “paroxysm of harmonized complexity” through which the Integral light can shine.
This is true on both the micro-and macro-level. It is true in the healing of our own souls, and it is even more true in the healing of our culture. For Gebser, the individual and cultural expressions of evolutionary consciousness are joined at the hip. The outer world is not simply a gateway or metaphor for our inner journey. If anything, the flow is in the opposite direction. Conscious evolution is measured in Gebserian scale by. . .
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No, dear friends, I didn’t send you off on a wild goose chase to immerse yourself in 450 pages of some of the most dense and intellectually challenging prose ever crafted on this planet. That was not my intention when I launched this deep dive into The Ever Present Origin late last fall. My concern was —and remains—entirely practical: to help us find our way to a broader vision that might allow us to see more clearly where our nation—and more broadly, evolutionary consciousness itself—seems to have gotten hung up, and to help set things back on course.
Gebser’s brilliant unpacking of the five structures of consciousness, together with his helpful delineation of how each structure moves from “efficient” to “deficient” expressions, help us to see more objectively where we’re pinned, and to chart a course of practical action in some perhaps unexpected directions.
The following post is a first effort in that direction, offered in deep gratitude for the profound work that those of you in the Wisdom community—joined by praying, caring, sincere people all over the planet—have contributed to pulling things back from the brink of madness. We now have a little running room, thanks. . .
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If you’re considering the multiple online course opportunities with Cynthia that are coming up, she provides this message to the Wisdom community and offers some additional input for consideration.
It occurred to me that people may want a little guidance as to how to pick and choose among the sudden embarrassment of riches of Cynthia Bourgeault online course options currently opening up for registration. Here’s a bit more information to help you make your selection(s).
Spiritual Gifts of the Imaginal Realm
I would love to have as many hands as possible on deck for the Spirituality & Practice e-course, Spiritual Gifts from the Imaginal Realm, which will launch February 18 and run through the six weeks of Lent. This is my pilot online course unpacking the material in my recent book Eye of the Heart. I’m trying to lay out the basic building blocks in a way that is broadly inclusive (even if you haven’t read Eye of the Heart) and practical, based in actual practices that people can do to help our entire planet through the perilous eye of the needle we’re collectively facing. If we could get a thousand people on this. . .
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Note from Cynthia: Jonathan Steele is one of the younger members of Cynthia’s Wisdom network—but in chronological age only! The following reflection, posted on the day following the assault on the US Capitol and the highest daily death toll yet reaped by the COVID virus, speaks eloquently to the deeper meaning and urgency of the Wisdom path in our own times. It’s not only “Where we come from” but even more powerfully, “where we are going “ as the world plunges toward an uncertain future.
Over the last year I’ve worked closely with the sick and the dying in the context of hospice as a chaplain. Mostly though, I have sat with caregivers still often wrestling with the shock of being flung into their current circumstances, many of whom are either, completely overwhelmed at the prospect and realities of care, coupled with the incipient grief of imminent loss, or, completely overwhelmed with gratitude at the beauty and privilege of caring for their sick and dying loved ones, with its intimate, though at times terrible, experience of embodied wonder.
Typically, both poles of this spectrum are held at some level. The difference lies in who’s driving the vessel. . .
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Gebser names his book The Ever Present Origin, and Origin is indeed the center point around which everything else in his in his magisterial teaching revolves. But his vision of Origin is unique, to say the least, and highly elusive to our habitual perspectival modes of thinking. It comes closer to my own notion of “chiastic epicenter” as I unpack it in Eye of the Heart than to its usual mental/rational placement as the beginning point on a horizontal timeline (or even as what lies just “behind” that beginning point.)
The first and most important thing to keep in mind about Origin-according-to-Jean-Gebser is that it does NOT mean “in the beginning.” In Gebser’s native German the word for origin is Ursprung, which literally means “sprung forth.” The concept is verb-based, not noun-based; it designates not a primordial state, but a primordial action. It is not “cosmic inflation” (the current scientific buzzword for the cosmic “steady state” apart from local irruptions into physical manifestation), the zero point field, or “ground luminosity.” These are all terms with which it would otherwise have strong resonance, but The feeling tone is off. As Raimon Panikkar puts it in Christophany (p. . .
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Dear Wisdom Friends,
As we enter this Feast of Epiphany, celebrating the arrival of Holy Wisdom at the stable, I invite you all to join me over the next twenty-four hours in keeping Wisdom vigil for our American nation as we enter the eye-of-the-needle of what will surely be one of the sorest tests ever pressed against our democracy and against the resiliency and common sense of our people. Whatever your politics, there is a deep need for Wisdom to arrive again, bearing her gifts of steadfastness, lucidity, and forbearance.
Here are few specific practices you might try:
1. If you feel prepared both inwardly and outwardly, by all means offer tonglen. Sitting still and fully present in your body, consciously breathe in a piece of the toxicity—the psychosis, the fear, the pathology; then breathe out sobriety. No more than ten minutes at a time, then transition into Centering Prayer. This is intentional suffering at it most literal and direct, and it does work powerfully if you can remain rock-steady inside and simply breathe.
2. In addition to or instead to the breath prayer, stay close to this cherished teaching in Philippians 4:8:
Whatsoever. . .
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Sometimes I wish we could all just declare a temporary moratorium on the term “Integral!!!” What Gebser intended when he chose that name for his emerging fifth structure of consciousness is challenging enough to wrap one’s mind around in the first place. But when his already elusive notion gets repackaged and progressively distorted in a series of popular contemporary misinterpretations, all grandly proclaiming themselves to be “integral,” then we have little choice but to begin by draining the swamp.
So okay, folks… here’s what Gebser’s Integral is NOT:
It’s not about political or social inclusiveness. It does not equate to “tolerance,” “broadmindedness,” or affirmative action. (This is all still synthesis, solidly ensconced within the perspectival modus operandi)
It is not about “soul work,” self-awareness as we typically understand it, or “integrating the shadow.”
It is not “non-duality,” “a higher state of consciousness,” “self-realization,” or “enlightenment.” In that sense, it has nothing to do with spirituality whatsoever.
It is not the top tier of the evolutionary pyramid (what part of “perspectival” do you still not understand?)
It is not “living in the now.” It does not negate. . .
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On Monday December 21, 2020 Cynthia Bourgeault sat down with Marcella Kraybill-Greggo on zoom to have a conversation about the work of Jean Gebser. This conversation came into being through the desire to share with the larger Wisdom Community how the Gebser teaching has come ‘toward us from the future’ for such a time as this. This 2020 year has held THREE new teachings for our Wisdom Community…each a seeming surprise and each coming with a particular heft and leavening call. First the Azize practices arrived in Spring (right after the COVID 19 shut down); second, Cynthia’s Eye of the Heart Imaginal teaching arrived in book form and in a Wisdom school in summer, and now this fall the Jean Gebser teaching has arrived. Cynthia shares with us how all 3 teachings have ‘come to us from the future’ and that as Wisdom Seekers our hearts have been prepared for each of these teachings.
Advent coming toward us!
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“You Can’t Go Home Again…”
Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebster and Integral Consciousness, by Jeremy Johnson, is available from the publisher, here at Revelore Press or Amazon.
I know that a number of you, in growing awareness of the of the blind spots and shadow elements in the mental structure of consciousness, have been casting a fond glance toward indigenous cultures, which seem to offer counterbalancing strengths in precisely the areas where the mental structure is weakest: a deeper connection to the natural world, a more organic sense of belonging, and a greater awareness of the evocative power of ritual and the numinous. Your intuition is fundamentally correct, for part of the tragic hubris of the mental structure is its disdain for structures “less evolved” than its own and its conviction that it has “transcended and included” all previous developmental stages, bearing uniquely on its own shoulders “the axis and the arrow of evolution.”
Still, one must proceed cautiously with this mythic turn. It has been tried twice already during the past century, and both times it has arrived at a dead end.
The first attempt got underway between the two world wars and gave birth. . .
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Structures of consciousness have their own life cycles. When a new structure bursts definitively onto the stage of history, it is typically at its most vital and creative, filled with powerful constellating energy and psychic force. It will quickly establish itself as the new culturally dominant structure. When the structure enters its deficient mode (typically toward the end of its era of cultural hegemony), it tends to become stale and increasingly rigid, fixated around its own worse habits.
In Gebser’s analysis, the turbulent social upheavals that erupted full force in the early twentieth century and have continued more or less unbroken right into our own times can be attributed in large part to the phase of the cycle now playing out: the mental structure of consciousness in its deficient mode. The good news is that this turmoil is in fact a birth canal, and the contractions we are collectively anguishing through are indeed the birth pangs of the rising aperspectival structure making its presence powerfully known. The bad news is that labor is bloody hell.
When the mental structure becomes deficient, it displays two signature—seemingly contrary—tendencies: it TOTALIZES, then it SPLINTERS.
We started to explore Gebser’. . .
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All structures of consciousness have their center of gravity, a core value or “moral mainspring” around which all else is ordered. Often unstated and even unrecognized, it nonetheless establishes the yardstick by which value is measured and priorities are assigned within that structure.
In the mental structure of consciousness the skew is definitely toward THE INDIVIDUAL.
This orientationl should come as no surprise; it is essentially built right into the hardwiring of this structure of perception itself. Perspectival consciousness comes into being part and parcel with the establishment of a perceiver, the artist who stands outside of his or her canvas and orchestrates the entire artifice from a perch slightly beyond it. It bursts upon the world stage joined at the hip with the capacity for self-reflective consciousness, the ability to stand outside of oneself and look back upon oneself and upon the world as if in third person. This slightly removed viewing platform is the ego, the crowning achievement of the mental structure of consciousness, and Western Civilization has ridden to glory on its back.
By “ego” I am not referring here to what religious folks are all too quick to demonize as “. . .
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Gebser’s brilliant unpacking of the structures of consciousness in terms of PERSPECTIVE (as it is understood in the art world rather than in philosophy) gives us a powerful new visual tool with which to begin to see where we’re pinned. In art, perspective is a technique for creating the illusion of depth and space on a two-dimensional plane. It works by establishing an arbitrary “vanishing point” on the horizon, then arranging all the elements on the canvas on a hypothetical line leading back to it. Instantly the size of the objects relative to one another on the canvas comes into correct proportion, and a sense of realism is established.
As I ponder this striking visual metaphor, I am struck by how this same basic configuration seems to apply to that other organizing convention of the mental structure of consciousness, TIME. In perspectival time the “vanishing point” would be that arbitrary “consummatum est” (whether you construe that to be your own death, the Armageddon, the Omega Point, or simply the end of some process you’re currently involved in). The line leading back to it is linear time, and what in a painting takes shape. . .
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Gebser’s cultural home base was the world of art. He was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso’s, and examples culled from art history dot the landscape of his THE EVER-PRESENT ORIGIN, illustrating almost every significant point he makes. So it’s not surprising that his master interpretive lens, perspective, should itself derive from the domain of art.
Yes, perspective. Just like you learned in elementary school art. When you first began drawing pictures, probably as a preschooler, Mommy and Daddy and your big sister were always bigger, no matter where they appeared in your picture, because that’s what they WERE! Then someone taught you about foreground and background, and you learned how to make things at the back of the picture smaller to show that they were farther away. You learned to turn your house at a slight angle on the page so that you could show two sides of it at once. You may or may not have consciously realized that you were learning how to proportion the various bits and pieces in relation to a hypothetical point on the horizon. But your drawings got more orderly, and they began to convey a sense of. . .
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If you’ve cut your teeth on the Ken Wilber roadmaps, the Gebser terrain will at first look reassuringly familiar. The familiar levels of consciousness are all right there, even designated by their familiar names: the archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral. Nor is this surprising, since Wilber explicitly acknowledges Gebser as the primary source of his model.
There is one crucial difference, however. In Wilber, these are stages of consciousness. In Gebser, they are STRUCTURES of consciousness.
Perhaps the significance of this nuance escapes you. (It certainly escaped me initially.) But on this nuance, actually, all else turns.
Stages EVOLVE. They are like steps on a ladder, building sequentially one upon the other in a journey that leads onward and upward.
Structures UNFOLD. They are like sections of a jigsaw puzzle or rooms in an art museum, gradually filling in to reveal the big picture (which already implicitly exists.)
This means that stages are essentially developmental. The earlier stage is folded into the next, in the process losing much of its distinctive character. The earlier stage lays the groundwork for what emerges next.
The inverse way of stating this is that the earlier. . .
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Well, the oasis of grace miraculously opened, and now it’s time to roll up our collective sleeves and get on with the healing work! I know that my own first assignment has something to do with helping to expose— and hopefully defuse— some of the reactivity and sanctimoniousness that boils just below the surface in my immediate peer group, the spiritual liberal intelligentsia.
Sometimes a book simply falls off the bookshelf when the time is right. In this case, it wasn’t the bookshelf, but my nightstand, where for the past year this modest, aqua-covered text had been slowly inching its way down in my pile of unread books. To whomever the now-unremembered giver may have been, THANK YOU!!! It has definitely proved to be the right book for the task now at hand.
The book is called Seeing Through the World by Jeremy Johnson and is a brilliant introduction to the teaching of Jean Gebser, a name you may not even have heard of. As I devoured the book in a single weekend (fortunately, it’s short), I could feel my world once again gently rocking on its foundations, always a good sign that a book has really hit. . .
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This is Part VIII of an eight-part Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020. Cynthia introduced the series with this message:
Dear Friends,
As the new decade gets underway, it feels like an appropriate moment to share one of my earlier essays, which is still to my mind one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was originally published in the 2018 anthology, How I found GOD in Everyone and Everywhere, edited by Claremont School of Theology faculty members Andrew M. Davis and Philip Clayton and published by Monkfish. Compiled in honor of Marcus Borg, this anthology is broadly structured around the theme of Panentheism and features the usual suspects among Christian nondual teachers, including my colleagues Richard Rohr, Matthew Fox, and Ilia Delio. It’s well worth a read in its entirety.
I will be sharing my entire essay in eight successive posts, which will be headed your way in bite-sized doses over the next several weeks.
Throughout the essay “I Am Not a Space that God Does Not Occupy,” Cynthia deftly weaves her personal inner experience and dynamic relationship with God and life—from the time of her childhood to the present—with. . .
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