
Watch for this new publication coming soon from Monkfish Book Publishing Company:
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.
Check back here for link when publication becomes available.
Cynthia Bourgeault is. . .
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article

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”. . .
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article
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
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article

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. . .
Read the full article