Quotes from Cynthia Bourgeault and Maurice Nicoll on Imaginal Seeing, or seeing from the eye of the heart.

“It takes a higher seeing to spot a lower seeing that you’re trapped in.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet Wisdom School, May 2024 

“With gathered attention and sensation, and turning off the dominance of the mind, you will see. The reward for seeing is more seeing” Pendle Hill Wisdom School 2019

“Imaginal seeing matches Imaginal selfhood.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020

“Imaginal causality can only be reliably read beginning at the level of witnessing selfhood and sooner or later demands that one join it at that level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, Shambhala Publications, 2020, p108

Maurice Nicoll expresses a similar idea:  “As we are raised in being, so is meaning transformed. If we fall back the old meanings return. This up and down motion keeps on until a step is definitely reached. Then it will begin again, so as to reach the next step. At each step new meanings flow in and old meanings shrink.” Psychological Commentaries, p1542

In Logion 41, the teaching is unsparing:

 Yeshua says…
To the one who has something in hand,
more will be given.
To the one whose hands hold nothing,
Even that “nothing” will be taken away.

Maurice Nicoll interprets this as meaning if you are given teachings on Wisdom, as a force or seed within yourself, it is for you to grow. As Cynthia says, sooner or later there is a demand to join at the Imaginal level. If you do join in and grow the seed, “the reward for seeing is more seeing.”

Further exploration of this topic:

In a short talk on Understanding the Work, Maurice says,  “Knowledge comes before understanding in the day-by-day horizontal passage of time, but in the eternal, vertical scale of values, understanding is far higher and so far greater than knowledge. … there is no greater force we can create in ourselves than understanding.” Commentaries, p1629-30 

We must continually seek to increase our understanding of the Teachings. This is the parable of the Talents, or Logion 41. All of the knowledge of the Work is stored in the Intellectual Center. If it stays there only, it remains knowledge only. “Only when the Work becomes emotional can you begin to understand it.” p1630 “The Work is then no longer a matter of mere memory or of words. It is no longer merely knowledge. It becomes a living experience affecting the Being of a man and entering into his Will. Thus Knowledge and Being unite to form Understanding.” Commentaries, p1630 

Maurice discusses the Parable of the Talents, in which Jesus praises and rewards servants who take the talents and produce more, but he reprimands the servant who saves and protects the talent given to him. Here, Jesus utters the famous teaching: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away.” Commentaries, p1294

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See related Impressions for this topic.

See other writings on the Imaginal Realm

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

All quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

All quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault are from The Vocabulary of Wisdom unless stated otherwise.

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.