“The Fruits of the Spirit are all alchemical byproducts of conscious labor and intentional suffering.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Calling of Human Beings

“My own take, simply in a nutshell, is that what we human beings are called to produce in this planet are what have been called by St. Paul the fruits of the spirit. Gentleness, joy, peace, love, forbearance, patience, self-control. There are a few more. You can find them in Galatians 5. These we are called forth to produce. They are not just moral character things that we can wear like merit badges. They are actual energies. They are food that nurture this planet and that become gifts for higher realms. And as we fail to produce them, our planet sickens.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 1:01:32 0816 IWS Sunday Evening.

“The food that this earth needs is essentially the food which we call the fruits of the spirit. They are actual being food for our planet. And it’s hard to believe that, but it does not do well if we don’t believe it. And again, to go over what those fruits are, I enumerate them. Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Again, dears, love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. From the fountain of our surrendered being, they flow out into our immediate earth environment, where they do indeed help it to become more supple, more fully animate, more responsive, more personal.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 51:34 0820 IWS Thursday AM Teaching.

The World 24 Trousseau

“Paul says the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, which you could also call fidelity or steadfastness, gentleness, and self-control. So he’s listed another nine things and people translate them in different ways. Forbearance is often translated as patience. These words sort of dialogue with each other and reading them in various different translations is interesting. But what if we suggested that perhaps this was our World 24 trousseau. This is the color palette. These are the compounds that we can work with to create a world of a different order and shape.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 18:31 2-the-generation-of-spiritual-substances

Emergent Properties of Collective Consciousness

“I believe that what Jesus called the fruits of the spirit—peace, gentleness, joy, forbearance, you know how they go—are not attainable on an individual basis. But they are participated in holographically once the consciousness of the whole can stabilize them. In other words, they are emergent properties of the body at the next level up.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 43:19 11 – FRI PM Teaching.

Nutrients and Toxins: The Direct Impact

“The decisions we make morally show up eventually in the fruits of our labor as we wreck and rape our way through the world, but it’s even more direct if we can begin to think of things like faith, hope, love, joy, generosity, abundance, forbearance, not just as energies or positive qualities, but as actual nutrients, in the absence of which the whole thing becomes dysfunctional and is poisoned in the same way that our soil is poisoned and our air is poisoned.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 03:00 0819 IWS WednesdayPM.

“Be aware, that right here at this junction point is the place where what we call in World 48 virtues or qualities at World 24 are actually energy streams, subtle substances flowing in energy that nevertheless are absolute nutrients for our planet. So you could ask yourself the question for the next little while, what is the state of the earth environment right now, imaginally speaking? What are the substances that are prominent in the air? What is the toxicity? What do you pick up when you sniff? Because what you pick up with your sniff is what’s feeding the earth and what’s back in your face.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 59:00 0820 IWS Thursday AM Teaching.

The Land Bears Witness

“Valle Crucis itself is the gentlest place I’ve ever been on the planet. It has a history going back to the early 19th century of people deeply inspired and carried by the spirit who came here to do the first experiments in monastic community in living in a way that was consonant with the fruits of the spirit. And the energy of their collective work still soaks this land. And if you go a few miles down the pike where the human organizations were not undertaken on this basis, if you’re sensitive enough, you can smell it when communities are developed just to become rich and founded on the principle of individual pleasure. You could go to Aspen where I spent many years of my life and it’s geographically beautiful but it stinks. And the absence of gentleness, the absence of peace, the absence of joy just harshens the planet, turns it into sadness, turns it into toxicity, barrenness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 54:22 0820 IWS Thursday AM Teaching.

The Alchemical Process

“One thing I would say that might be the place to end today is that the Fruits of the Spirit are all, in my book, alchemical byproducts of conscious labor and intentional suffering. You know, they don’t come naturally to the human soul. They’re created by lion taming. You know, our natural setup is for self-preservation, for narcissism, for maximization of self. And what flows out as these qualities is all, in some sense, the fruit of an alchemy that goes on deep within our being, using our own being as the raw material in it, in which who we are and our interests and our pleasures and our self-maximization is somehow changed through conscious labor, the thing that brings us together and allows us to receive in a collected way. And intentional suffering is transformed into these things. So that’s where the connecting link happens. And that’s why Gurdjieff puts so much emphasis on these two sticks, because they’re the way we begin to do the work of producing out of the marrow of our own lives the substances that are needed within our own particular earth sphere.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 2020, 01:00:17 0820 IWS Thursday AM Teaching.

The Stages of Spiritual Development

“You must all understand that this Work is to produce in you something new both in the realm of thinking and of feeling. First of all you hear the Work and this is like growing some leaves. Then you begin to feel the beauty of the Work, and that is equal to making the blossom and you see far more than you did in the leaf-state. Finally, the fruit-stage comes in which you must produce grapes. This is only possible when you see the goodness in a large way and will it. Otherwise you may produce sour grapes or embittered emotions. I can only say that too many people are leafy, i.e. they just grow leaves. For that reason I have been emphasizing recently that you must try to see the meaning of the Work for yourselves and its goodness, in yourselves, in your understanding heart. If you are evil and hate, then no fruit can come. By their fruits ye shall know them. Does a man gather grapes from thistles? An unpleasant, negative person, prickly, is a thistle—from which no fruit can come save sour grapes. So it is necessary to work on one’s being—otherwise this Work cannot possibly produce any good fruit. So we start with work on oneself.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1482.

Intelligence and the Kingdom of God

“For the kingdom of God brings with it the absolute certainty of the cooperation of faith at first hand and intelligence—it is the kingdom of intuition. This is why the Master made appeal not only to faith but also to intelligence, not only to essential certainty but also to consistent certainty, by stating the fundamental principle of intelligence, i.e. judgement by effects, knowledge of things by their fruits:

You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. (Matthew vii, 16-18)

“This is the briefest and most complete characteristic of intelligence and its role. Its role is immense, if one considers that intelligence is called to constitute an integral part of intuition which, in its turn, determines greatness and smallness in the kingdom of God.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p537-538

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Logion 45
Yeshua says...
Grapes are not harvested from thorns,
nor are figs gathered from thistles.
Thorns and thistles do not produce fruit.
Good people bring goodness
out of a storehouse of inner treasure,
and evil ones bring wickedness
out of the repository of evil collected in the heart.
It is from there that they speak.
For from the heart's overflow evil enters the world.

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

Uncited quotations from Cynthia Bourgeault are from The Vocabulary of Wisdom.

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.