He who aspires to authentic spiritual experience never confounds the intensity of the experience with the truth that is revealed.

The Nature of True Spiritual Experience

“An important rule of ‘spiritual hygiene,’ namely, that he who aspires to authentic spiritual experiences never confounds the intensity of the experience undergone with the truth that is revealed—or is not revealed—through it, i.e. he does not regard the force of impact of an inner experience as a criterion of its authenticity and truth. For an illusion stemming from the sphere of mirages can bowl you over, whilst a true revelation from above can take place in the guise of a scarcely perceptible inner whispering. Far from imposing itself through force, authentic spiritual experience sometimes requires very awake and very concentrated attention so as not to let it pass by unnoticed. It is often difficult to even notice it, without speaking of being seized or bowled over by it. If this were not so, what good would exercises of concentration and profound meditation be? For all the exercises that all serious esotericism prescribes are necessary in order to render attention so awake and intense that it is in a position to perceive within the calm and silent domain of the depth of the soul where spiritual truth reveals itself.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p644

“The integral structure of consciousness is another intensity. But it’s nothing like what we imagine intensity to be, which is ratcheting up the volume. It’s as a matter of fact, that’s where so many of us go off the rails in the spiritual journey because we equate profound spiritual experience–we equate insight with intensity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 4:38 2.2 Other Intensity.

Understanding True Intensity

“The region of eternity is that of intensity, which surpasses the measures of quantity that we employ in time and space. ‘Eternity’ is not a duration of infinite length; it is the intensity of quality which, if compared with time and thus translated into the language of quantity, is comparable with an infinite duration.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p180.

“One of the things that Gebser insists about as we talk about this emerging Integral structure is that we’re talking about an intensification of consciousness, not an expansion of it. And this is a really, really important distinction that gets lost because we keep creating these maps where we look at a new level, that it’s gonna be more consciousness, it’s gonna be greater, it’s gonna extend further out using that same perspectival mental rational machinery to generate our picture of it. And any picture of that is gonna land us in these breathy concepts of evolution understood as progress, onward and upward. It is all part of the kind of fatal skew we put on things by our distortion, by the distortion of time caused by our mental rational hardwiring. So, we’re talking about an intensification of consciousness. It’s not gonna get bigger, it’s not gonna get more, it’s not gonna add on. It’s going to become more concentrated, more glowing. The candle power of clarity increases. A dimension is added rather than an emotion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:21 2.2 Other Intensity.

The Path of Spiritual Maturation

“I remember my esteemed colleague Rami Shapiro once saying that what the Holy Spirit is really about is not an altered state of consciousness, but an altered state of behavior. So what happens is you get a little dose, you integrate it, and as you’re able to assimilate it, and it manifests itself in changes in your actual behavior, in change in your orientation to the world, your ability to be present, your ability to forgive, your own gradual transparency as more and more of the shadow stuff in you is gradually brought to light and integrated so that we can walk the talk, basically. And to the extent that we’re ready to walk the talk, revelation can flow more powerfully because, as Gebser will say, transparency is what it’s all about, diaphaneity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 12:30 2.2 Other Intensity.

“When there’s a clear window that it can pour through, more can pour through. But it’s not the intention of the Holy Spirit to try enlighten you in a series of mystical high pit-stops. The whole idea is the integration that manifests itself in loving kindness, in compassion, in integrity, in forbearance, these things that we talked about. And to the measure that these things, which have classically been called fruit of the spirit, start to manifest on your vines. Then it’s a sign that the intensity can be upped because you’re able to bear it.

“The Holy Spirit, the spiritual world prefers a reasonable inspiration, i.e. a gentle flow of inspiration, which intensifies to the extent that the intellectual and moral forces of the recipient grow and mature. Really beautiful, profound teaching there. I remember being introduced to that early on, beautifully and graciously, by Thomas Keating in our early Centering Prayer teaching.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 15:19 2.2 Other Intensity.

“It comes gradually, but I think revelation is basically only a reasonably stable three-center awareness being able to exchange with the help emerging from higher levels of consciousness that would have squashed you before with its intensity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 51:05 Session 2 The Trinity – An Ongoing Christian Conundrum.

The Value of the Ordinary World

“What characterizes the spiritual world is the consideration it has for the human condition. And I think most of us, after years and years and decades and millennia of thinking of our world as illusion or mirage or sin or exile or the problem, you know, sort of assume all too easily that the world is a problem and that you’ve got to get rid of it, and then what remains is spiritual. But we don’t sufficiently appreciate that in this static or incarnational model, there’s something precious in this condition, in this condition of density, just as it is, in the form, in the structure, in the fragility of this whole realm. There’s something precious here, and it wouldn’t be this way unless the conditions were actually excellent for the bringing forth of what’s being aimed at. So there’s this gentleness, there’s respect, and I love it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 10:56 2.2 Other Intensity.

“It has to do with the slow, gradual opening up of a capacity for full, deep seeing, which Gebser in some points calls seeing through the world. That has just a higher candle power of clarity, of differentiation, of integration. It sees with more radiance. It sees with more luminosity with less judgment. It comes gradually. It’s the fruit for most of a mature word. For Gebser, this diaphaneity or clarity is of an entirely different order from any kind of emotional perturbation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021.

The Way Through

from “East Coker,” from *The Four Quartets* TS Eliot

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire 
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment 
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

---

Logion 28
Yeshua says...
I stood to my feet in the midst of the cosmos,
appearing outwardly in flesh.
I discovered that all were drunk
but none were thirsty,
and my soul ached for the children of humanity,
for their hearts are blind.
They cannot see from within.
They have come into the cosmos empty,
and they are leaving it empty.
At the moment you are inebriated,
but when freed from the effects of wine,
you too may turn and stand.

---

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.