This eCourse includes over 40 sessions filmed live during a five-day Imaginal Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault at the Valle Crucis Conference Center in North Carolina August 16-21, 2020. The Course materials have been formatted and organized for easy access and use in an eCourse format, while carefully preserving the daily rhythm and structure of the live event. The materials have been designed to empower and equip you with everything you need to reproduce the Wisdom School learning experience in your own setting and circumstances. And when you enroll in this eCourse you’ll be joining a vibrant community of committed students as you experience the profound and practical nature of these teachings.
About the Imaginal Wisdom School eCourse
In this unique online learning opportunity, Cynthia Bourgeault illuminates the particular qualities and gifts of the Imaginal realm as an accessible world just beyond our own, and available to us for spiritual nurturance and exchange. Furthermore, as Cynthia emphatically states, “we are counted on for our uniquely human contribution to this exchange—a role contemporary humans have tragically lost sight of.”
Drawing from her groundbreaking book EYE OF THE HEART: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, Cynthia. . .
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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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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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Spiritual Mettle and the Good Company of the Holy: A conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia joins Terry Patten to explore what it is to live and imagine from the “eye of the heart” in a seemingly apocalyptic world. They reflect on how each of them is relating to death and also discovering new strength and guidance by keeping the company of saints, sages, and our courageous ancestors — one of the most important spiritual fruits of awakening into the “imaginal realm.” Cynthia suggests we aspire to “live the laws of the next world,” like those who began building great cathedrals they knew they wouldn’t live to see completed.
Click here to listen to the episode and to learn more about their discussion.
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Are we all just irrelevant specs? Does our life actually have meaning? Listen to Cynthia Bourgeault discuss her newest book, Eye of the Heart, on the latest goop Podcast.
Eye of the Heart investigates the mystical depths of the imaginal realm.—an energetic realm well known to the mystical traditions but often forgotten in our own times. Though invisible to the physical eye, it is clearly perceptible through the eye of the heart.
The imaginal realm has long been associated with the personal world of dreams, prophecy, and oracles, and it also points toward a higher vision of our human purpose that is both evolutionary and collective. Roger Lipsey, author Gurdjieff Reconsidered, writes, “Eye of the Heart is an immensely original piece of thinking, feeling, writing. There is nothing like it. It opens new terrain, plants new seeds, starts them on their way toward the light.” In this unique book, Cynthia opens up our hearts to the imaginal realm, speaking to those of us with a lifelong longing for oneness with God.
Eye of the Heart is available now from Shambhala Publications. Listen to Cynthia unpack this mystical wisdom in the podcast episode A Different Way to Live Virtuously. . .
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Cynthia Bourgeault presents “Oneness: The Secret Embrace,” Thomas Keating’s final gift to the world, as expressed through the poetry of his later years. This is the first of three Zoom calls held April 30 – May 2, 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, sponsored by Contemplative Outreach of South Africa and Contemplative Outreach International, with support from The Trust for the Meditation Process. Cynthia deftly and gracefully presents an evolved view of the being and theology of Fr. Thomas through a review of eight poems from the book, The Secret Embrace. These profound and personal poems capture some of Fr. Thomas’ emerging and final vision — a state of consciousness/selfhood, oneness among the religions and oneness in our fragile and embattled world.
This video has a pause for Centering Prayer, where more than 2,000 people prayed in silence together from over 59 countries, the largest gathering of the worldwide Contemplative Outreach community to date.
The video recordings of these sessions, held on April 30, May 1, and May 2 2020, can be found here:
Session 1 – April 30, 2020
Session 2 – May 1, 2020
Session 3 – May 2, 2020
Session 1 includes a. . .
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Cynthia participated in the 24th Annual Festival of Faiths, filmed in Louisville at the Kentucky Center for the Arts Bomhard Theater, April 25-27, 2019. Both of Cynthia’s sessions are now available to watch on YouTube.
The Festival of Faiths is a sustained series of annual events and programs, whose mission is to promote interfaith understanding, cooperation, and action through exploring how the different participating faith traditions address a common issue, topic or theme. The theme for 2019 was Sacred Cosmos: Faith and Science.
“Christian Spiritual Practice with Cynthia Bourgeault: Contemplation as Luminous Seeing”
“Being Is Not Something You Are… with Cynthia Bourgeault”
You can also enjoy watching all of the 2019 sessions through the Festival of Faiths YouTube channel.
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When people gather in silence, a deeper kind of collective, synergistic, numinous knowing unfolds. And that’s the only knowing that’s worth a damn, particularly when you’re working with the infinite.
~ Cynthia Bourgeault
On February 25, 2019 Cynthia was interviewed for a podcast on the Encountering Silence website, hosted by Carl McColman with Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson. These recording are available in two parts, as Episodes 58 and 59: Encountering the Heart of Silence: A Conversation with Cynthia Bourgeault (Parts One and Two). You will find all the links to these podcasts at the end of this post. All thanks to Cynthia and to the folks at Encountering Silence for this delightful interview!
Encountering Silence describes the interview in this way:
“Cynthia shares how her love for silence originated with her early education in Quaker schools, where she recognized silence as a “liturgical expression and mode of divine communion.” There she discovered silence not merely as the absence of noise, but as a sacred container of presence. For her, after a long meandering journey from Christian Science to Episcopal ordination, she became (in her words) a “Trappist junkie” as she began to study centering prayer. . .
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