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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