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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