Cynthia’s Blog

To all my beloveds,

He is Risen! And has invited us now, in the spirit of St. Peter (“where I am going you cannot follow me now, but soon…”) to hit the trail. The bushwhacking is done. The path has been cleared. Time to get underway.

For these forty days that we Christians celebrate as Ascensiontide, he appears among us shining forth from his resurrection body—or as one might call it in Gurdjieffian language, his second or kesdjan body. (And yes, it’s probably a way more subtle body than that, more likely his third or fourth body), but it is at least his second body, and through it he lives and moves among his beloveds, “in the world, but not of it.” He eats, shares final teachings, socializes, bilocates, walks through walls, gives each one what he or she needs to move into the world in completely unconflicted unity of inner seeing and outer doing. And it is their own nascent second bodies that receive this gift and are fed and empowered.

Christianity was literally founded in the second body, by second bodies on fire and fully animated with the light of truth and truth of. . .

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In this very heartening account, Cynthia Bourgeault shares her personal experience having presented her teaching on “radical kenosis” at the annual meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops in March 2022, and the blessings that emerged from their time together.

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Imaginal Assistance

I am reticent to say too much about my teaching sojourn with the Episcopal House of Bishops last month, not because it wasn’t richly rewarding (it was!), but because in the end, the meeting felt so intimate, so intensely their own healing work (to which I was a merely a privileged onlooker) that it almost feels like a violation to try to summarize it from my own (ad)vantage point. The whole gathering unfolded with an intuitive purposiveness that was clearly greater than the sum of its parts and left us all with a newfound sense of commitment and hope. One doesn’t talk too much about moments like this; they just have to unfold. But let’s just say that the whole thing was real.

I guess life is too short and the present times too urgent for anything less than REAL. Still, it’s a miracle when it actually happens.

It. . .

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Cynthia Bourgeault continues her series of reflections upon Integral structures of consciousness and ideas brought forth in Jean Gebser’s book, Ever Present Origin (EPO). See below for related resources and links to prior posts.

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Yet another connecting link between the Gebserian and Gurdjieffian systems lies in the fruitful interplay between Gurdjieff’s three centers and their respective counterparts in the Gebserian structures of consciousness. The correlation is not precise, but the energetic resonance is palpable. It’s clear that centers and structures dialogue readily with each other, and the energetic bridge thereby created opens up a whole new access route to the integrative task evolution has now placed on our collective human plate.

The moving center corresponds with Gebser’s magic structure in its vital energy and direct, sensation-based perception.

The emotional center corresponds with the mythical structure in its ambivalence and emotional polarity.

The intellectual center corresponds with the mental structure in its linearity and directedness.

Both Gebser and Gurdjieff explicitly stipulate that before one can advance to the next “level” (or “structure” of consciousness), the earlier structures must be consciously integrated. Not simply “transcended and included” as in the popular. . .

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This is not the New Year’s message I might have chosen to share with you all, my beloved Wisdom community. But it is the only message that rings true in me this year, that speaks from my own heart to this forlorn and bewildered world in which we still find ourselves. Forgive me if I step on toes, but…

Enough is enough. It is time for us humans to collectively get a grip. It is not Omicron that is laying waste to the human race; it is our own massive panic and failure-of-nerve in the face of all it truly means to be human (like courage, hospitality, trust, and self-sacrifice, for starters) and in the face of what is now being asked of us.

The word COVID has by now become what Valentin Tomberg calls an egregore: a malignant thought-form which has gathered such toxic energetic force that merely invoking its name can create mass (and always manipulable) hysteria. In Tomberg’s time, Nazism was such an egregore; in our own anxiety-prone times, we first had “terrorist,” then “security”—and now “Covid.” Merely mention the phrase “Covid-positive,” and our imagination races right back to those traumatic early days. . .

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Cynthia Bourgeault continues her series of reflections upon Integral structures of consciousness and ideas brought forth in Jean Gebser’s book, Ever Present Origin (EPO). See below for related resources and links to prior posts.

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After a long hiatus, I am finally back on my task of exploring the surprisingly fruitful interconnections between the work of Jean Gebser and G.I. Gurdjieff. While neither man officially acknowledged the other’s teaching (nor in the case of Gurdjieff, had likely even heard of it!), their respective takes on the conscious evolution of humanity are more in sync than you might initially suspect, and the rich Gurdjieffian repertory of consciousness-transforming practices offers itself as a powerful and by-and-large overlooked resource for “putting legs” on Gebser’s intuitively brilliant but highly cerebralized vision of evolutionary emergence.

Today’s topic, three-centered awareness, is a good starting point.

According to Gebser, one of the chief hallmarks of the rising Integral structure of consciousness is that it will feature a whole new method of verition, as he calls it—i.e., of verifying to ourselves what we know. This system will be totally unlike the weary dialectics of the mental structure of. . .

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For prior blogs in this series exploring the common good and the potential of an emerging Integral structure of consciousness, please refer to the links included below this post.

From everything I’ve said so far about flow systems and keeping the infrastructure rolling, you may get the idea that any form of constraint is an intrinsic obstacle to the common good. And yes, this proposition has been periodically aired both politically and economically and has its diehard libertarian advocates. But from an evolutionary perspective it can be quickly demonstrated to be flawed—not just operationally flawed but conceptually flawed. Constraint is a crucial ingredient in the evolutionary trajectory. Without it the entire system collapses.

For the original (and still the most extensive) development of this evolutionary argument we turn once again to Teilhard de Chardin, whose entire “complexification/consciousness” theory can be said to hinge on this single insight. From his long view as a paleontologist, Teilhard observed that only when a system is put under external constraint is it forced to articulate itself internally. As long as it can simply expand outwardly, it will do so. Only when it finds itself enclosed within a limited space does the system buckle. . .

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For prior blogs in this series exploring the common good and the potential of an emerging Integral structure of consciousness, please refer to the links included below this post.

This is the second half of the previous post.  Heads up: I skate a little close to thin ice here. Want to make clear that this is simply ME speaking, not ex cathedra, and all souls in this community are deeply honored as we collectively bushwhack our way toward truth.

The second take-away from this more “thermodynamic” approach to the common good (again an easier stretch if you’ve already worked with Eye of the Heart) is that since we are fundamentally dealing with subtle energetic substances here (not abstract moral qualities), increasing that overall quantum of wellness can happen at either end of the stick: either by implementing policies that contribute to the overall enhancement of wellness, or by direct infusion of the missing substances into the mix, resulting in an increased ability to make the difficult but necessary policy choices.

This second option, unknown and largely even unimaginable in the Mental structure of consciousness, has been the longtime “secret ingredient” of Wisdom transmission. In the Integral. . .

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For prior blogs in this series exploring the common good and the potential of an emerging Integral structure of consciousness, please refer to the links included below this post.

The third aspect to note about the common good as it manifests in the Integral structure of consciousness is that it is, well, good. It is not just virtuous, righteous, dutiful, or morally correct, but palpably satisfying, like a home-cooked meal or a warm hearth on a cold winter night. It brings an immediate sense of coherence and well-being, of being part of a harmonious flow. Even when a decision is costly or not in one’s favor, one can still sense the goodness in the coherence itself. In a fractured universe, coherence is a very big deal.

Those of you who have waded through my Eye of the Heart book will have some intimation of what I am speaking about here. What we experience here in ‘World 48” (the familiar world of our mind and senses) as “qualities” or “virtues,” are at a more subtle level cosmic substances—in a word, nutrients—needed for the building up of our collective planetary body. They pack an actual energetic punch. . .

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For other blogs in this series exploring the common good and the potential of an emerging Integral structure of consciousness, please refer to the links included below this post.

The second major shift as we approach the question of the common good through the Integral structure of consciousness is, I believe, that we will increasingly understand it as an emergent property of a self-specifying system—or in other words, not as an externally imposed template of “right conduct,” but as innate “inner knowingness” that emerges within a living system that has achieved the capacity for autopoiesis, or internal self-regulation.

I know this sounds like a barrage of heady concepts, and the science that has put all the pieces together has only been around for the past fifty years or so. But the concept itself is far more ancient—St. Paul already anticipated it in his celebrated teaching in 1 Corinthians 12 when he intuits “We are all members of the one body of Christ.” Fundamentally, it’s as simple as that: diversity within a greater overarching unity. But the scientific technicalities add important details which may prove pivotal to the reshaping of our political and constitutional notions of the common good. . .

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The following provides further reflections on the “Civics for Wisdom Students” theme, as introduced in the prior post  EVOLUTIONARY THEORY AND THE COMMON GOOD: The Beginnings of a Wisdom Inquiry

So let’s begin by situating our inquiry on a Gebserian roadmap. Clearly that places our inquiry into the ‘Common Good’ (like just about everything else presently weighing on our hearts and minds) on the evolutionary cusp between two structures of consciousness. The last ramparts of the disintegrating mental/rational structure splinter into a cacophony of warring siloes as the rising Integral increasingly sweeps us onto a whole new playing field. In view of this critical placement, at what can only be seen as a major inflection point in the evolution of consciousness, it seems that rather than wasting our time trying to rekindle the fading embers of the mental/rational notion of the common good, we would do better to look instead to the notion of the common good emerging out of a whole new structure of consciousness.

The basic building blocks of this new vision have already been well prefigured, but not in the places we are accustomed to looking. It is not to the traditional “usual suspects”—i. . .

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One of the more surprising revelations to grow out of our winter’s pilot “Civics for Wisdom Students” project has been the growing realization that while our Constitution pays lips service to “the Common Good,” it actually makes very little constitutional provision for it. The founding documents come down heavily on the side of individual rights (explicitly laid out in the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments), while failing even to minimally define what the Common Good might be, let alone how it might carry the day in a legal challenge posed by any apparent infringement of these traditionally sacrosanct rights.

From a Gebserian/evolutionary standpoint, it is not hard to see why this is so. The founding documents emerge from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just at the highwater mark of the “rational” (a.k.a., “deficient mental”) structure of consciousness. Within this structure of consciousness, egoic consciousness is the principal vehicle of self-awareness, and the individual is the sacred expression of this self-awareness. Selves are individuals—and individuals are the building blocks of larger social units, and ultimately of nations. These larger units grow by simple aggregation: i.e., by an optimization of individual “life, liberty. . .

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The following review of Cynthia’s book Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm is provided by David Lorimer from Paradigm Explorer, the journal of The Scientific and Medical Network, edition 2021/1

Cynthia Bourgeault is a mystic (my dictation system insisted on mistake!), Episcopal priest, theologian and retreat leader who is one of the leading contemporary advocates of centring prayer and the rediscovery of the Wisdom and Mary Magdalene as wisdom teachers on the basis of the Gnostic Gospels. I reviewed her book on Mary Magdalene in December 2019. This new book is quite remarkable both as a personal spiritual odyssey and a profound journey into the neglected imaginal realm that can be perceived through the eye of the heart. The revival of Christian contemplation is essential to the spiritual renaissance of our time where unity and union is found only in the depths. This is mediated equally in intimate encounters and persistent spiritual practice.

It is particularly important to insist on the reality of subtle realms at a time when scientific materialism cuts us off from these dimensions by denying their very existence, which is equivalent to pulling up our spiritual roots. . .

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Cynthia Bourgeault continues her series of reflections upon Integral structures of consciousness and ideas brought forth in Jean Gebser’s book, Ever Present Origin (EPO). See below for related resources and links to prior posts.

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In all honesty it must be stated that what little Gebser knew of Gurdjieff he spoke of most disparagingly. In his entire 562-page tome, his comments are confined to a single sweeping back-of-the hand aimed primarily at Gurdjieff’s chief interlocutor, P.D. Ouspensky:

“[Ouspensky’s] interpretation [of the fourth dimension]…is surely the most bizarre possible form of mythical-mental deficiency. It is further confused by his emphasis on “ecstasy,” and the author’s devotion to the magical attitude of his shaman-like teacher, George Gurdjieff, “master” of the “’School of Fontainebleau.’” (EPO, p. 351)

If only Gebser had looked further! While he indeed may be correct in his assessment of Ouspensky’s partial seduction by “ecstasy,” he fails to distinguish that this issue was in fact one of the chief breaking points between Gurdjieff himself and his celebrated pupil. Had Gebser encountered this “shaman-like teacher” first hand, he might well have recognized that, decidedly au contraire, it was Gurdjieff’s. . .

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Cynthia Bourgeault continues her unfolding series of reflections upon Integral structures of consciousness and ideas brought forth in Jean Gebser’s masterful book, Ever Present Origin. If you’re new to Gebser’s revelatory ideas, Cynthia recommends starting with Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebster and Integral Consciousness, by Jeremy Johnson, available at Revelore Press.

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When I say that the ability to access and sustain the Integral structure of consciousness is developmental, I mean just that: it is fundamentally a question of physiology, rather than of moral virtue or mystical yearning. We cannot think, pray, meditate, or conceptualize our way to it. It is fundamentally a matter of preparing the entire body to receive it. To embody it.

The Abkhazian-born Kebzeh teacher Murat Yagan once commented: “Spiritual practice is fundamentally about strengthening the nervous system.” I believe he is 100% correct here, and that the failure to recognize the full implications of his observation has been the largest single impediment to would-be-integralists trying to till the inner ground for this emergent new structure of consciousness. As in the classic case of the word “repentance” (metanoia in the original Greek, noia being “mind”. . .

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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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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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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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