You have to find something in yourself that already lives beyond death and begin to live out of it now:
Second Body, Kesdjan Body. Cynthia Bourgeault 

The Essential Definition

“You have to find something in yourself that already lives beyond death and begin to live out of it now.” Cynthia Bourgeault quoting Rafe, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 11:48 1-what-is-second-body.

“When the inner corresponds with the outer and when the outer obeys the inner, then a man possesses a second body.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p216

“In the Gospels Christ says that unless a man is re-born, he cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Birth means a body and Re-birth a second body. To be re-born is to have a second body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p220

The Vehicle for Higher Worlds

“The second body is the vehicle par excellence for our navigation in the Imaginal world, in world 24. It’s what allows us to enter this world, to move in this world, to begin to live according to its causality and to implement this causality in World 48. So to find that within you which already lives beyond death and start to live out of it now is basically to discover world 24 causality and live out of it while you’re still living in world 48. It’s the second body activated within the first.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 30:16 1. What is Second Body.

“The second body, the wedding body, is made up of quality and substance and energy, purified substance that has been transformed in this life through the conscious application.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 1:51:33 01 Tuesday Morning Session Mystery of Death.

The Foundation: Division and Self-Observation

“There is a phrase in the Work which says that unless a man divides himself into two, into an observing and an observed side, he can never shift from where he is. This is the starting-point of all else. It is actually the starting-point of another body in the sense that unless this division begins in a man, unless he can become the subject of his own observation, nothing can ever develop in him that can eventually control him internally and make the outer man-machine obey. That is, no second body can be organized in him.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p218

“The outer psychology must be eventually controlled by the inner psychology. This is reversal. This is the formation of a second organized body—an organized psychological body—composed of finer matters than the physical body. The beginning is self-observation and the memory and insight that arise from it. Through this we begin to form a new inner psychology that looks at the outer psychology—Second Body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p930.

The Witnessing Self

“It’s a witnessing self, as the Buddhists like to call it. It doesn’t have a dog in the fight. It can stand out. It can hold simultaneously not only the content of consciousness, but the shape of your mind. It can hold awareness in a much broader and more spacious configuration without immediately tunnel visioning into I need, I want, I got to get out of, I’m afraid of.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 48:08 RT 04 Eve Teaching.

“The [human] who has reached a stage in which he or she has something independent of outer conditions, something which is independent of failure or success, cold or heat, discomfort or comfort, starvation or plenty, such a [human] has second body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p927

Inner Freedom and Impartiality

“The real goal in mature spiritual practice is not to replace negativity with positivity, but to develop an impartiality … to say I can be okay in negativity, I don’t have to change the external situation to make it safe for me to be. I can and I will change the external situation when the time is right, but I don’t have to have that as a precondition of my being okay because I’ve learned how to find myself from this within place so that I’m not dependent on replacing the bottom half of the dualism with the top half. And what this means is that when you work in the world without having this inner agenda of having to replace negativity with positivity, then you can work with impartiality, which is the mother of compassion. Nothing frightens you because something in you has found that the roots of trust, the roots of belonging, have gradually come to grow deeper than the roots of the storms that are always battering on the rocky shores of the poor ego self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 45:30 2-the-generation-of-spiritual-substances.

The Role of Essence Development

“Now the formation of second body is connected with a growth of Essence, which is internal to Personality. A man cannot start from Essence. Essence must be taught to develop.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p223

“The Work speaks almost from its starting-point of the Essence in Man being undeveloped. It defines a growth of Essence as a change in the level of Being: and it speaks very often about making Personality passive so that Essence can develop. Especially does it speak of False Personality or Imaginary ‘I’ and of the necessity of observing ourselves in regard to these and separating from them. The object of this is to allow something else to grow. Essence can develop. It is where a man can grow from. And in connection with the development of Essence a second body can grow. But it cannot do so as long as Personality is active and controls the inner life.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p221.

Obstacles to Formation

“Pictures, roles and attitudes prevent us from any real understanding of ourselves or of our lives and they all make us dependent on outer conditions. A man or a woman full of pictures, roles or attitudes cannot form Second Body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p929.

“It’s a perceptual task that only when you are in humility can you see anything. Only as you draw force from the power of your being beyond the finite can you begin to heal the history of the finite and develop an egoic operating system which is a functional tool for manifestation rather than a seat of identity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 00:26 disc 3 track 3 Our nature is holy.

The Practice: Non-Identifying and Work

“In the practice of non-identifying we begin to make this Second Body and, in fact, everything the Work teaches is connected with this goal.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p928.

“You all know that this Work is to create something new in you, to give you new ways of taking things, new ways of thinking about life. This is the whole object of the Work. The whole object of the Work is to create something new in you—a new man in place of the old man. If you see what is meant then you will understand better what the creation of a Second Body means.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, p226

“All this Work is so arranged in every detail that if you understand and practice it and more and more feel its daily presence, and try to will it and so to obey it, you will form a new psychology in yourself distinct from the multiple chaotic psychology of many ‘I’s that people possess. You will form a new body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p935.

“If you understand something of the Work and have begun to wish to hold on to it so that it may change you in the indescribable and unfathomable way in which it does, once you value it enough, then you will see that you must obey the Work and put it higher than yourself by struggling against this pride, against the forms in which it expresses itself in your life. Then you will be hearing, understanding and obeying the Work and this will begin to make in you a new psychology, a new person, which we can call Second Body.” Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries p938.

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Logion 22
Yeshua noticed infants nursing
and said to his students,
"These little ones taking milk
are like those on their way into the kingdom."
So they asked him,
"If we too are 'little ones'
are we on our way into the kingdom?"
Yeshua replied,
"When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,
but male and female become a single whole;
When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another --
then you will enter in."

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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. 

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

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.