“The Quakers taught a practice of welcoming that inner light of conscience when it entered, standing still in it, submitting to it.”
The Nature of Conscience as Inner Light
“Direct communication between intelligence and wisdom is, truth to tell, only the development of conscience, which is extended from the domain of action to the domain of knowledge, and is awakened there to the point of becoming the inner light of intelligence. Therefore intuition is, after all, only the marriage of intelligence (having renounced its absolute autonomy) with conscience awoken to the point of becoming a source of concrete and precise revelations for intelligence. Conscience is the door—the sole legitimate and healthy one—to a world at least as vast, and much more profound, than the world that we perceive with the senses.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, XVIII
“Because the moon is the principle of reflection: just as it reflects the light of the sun, so does human intelligence reflect the creative light of conscience—and the latter is eclipsed when ‘materialistic intellectuality’ prevails.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p511
Following the Light of Conscience
“Those who follow the ‘star’ must learn a lesson once and for all: not to consult Herod and the ‘chief priests and scribes of the people’ at Jerusalem, but to follow the ‘star’ that they have seen ‘in the East’ and which ‘goes before them’, without seeking for indications and confirmation on the part of Herod and his people. The gleam of the ‘star’ and the effort to understand its message ought to suffice. May those who follow the ‘star’ do so completely and without reserve! May they not seek—once having the ‘star’ before their eyes—scientific confirmation, approval or sanction…or, what would be still worse, direction on the part of science! May they follow the ‘star’ above them and nothing else!” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p533-534.
Confronting the Light: The Quaker Understanding
“The light within is more like the searchlight of conscience. And the way the Quakers worked with this, and I think this is really key to us about how we proceed as we go forward, the way they worked with it was to teach people first and foremost not to run from the light and not to expect that the light is going to be pleasant and affirming, that it’s going to make you writhe. And what happens in your transformation begins on the other side of that writhing because it’s a process of really surrendering your immediate comfort zone, your sense of value, your self-calming, as Gurdjieff would call it, your ability to restore a happy, coherent, self-justified picture of who you are. Let it go. And listen, because with the very light that conscience shines in your life, it’s shining from a higher place in you, from a higher capacity in you. And while the experience is usually horrible empirically, it’s actually sacred in terms of the final evolution. So the Quakers taught a practice over and over again of welcoming that inner light of conscience when it entered, standing still in it rather than running, submitting to it, and then allowing the real alchemy of that to begin to infuse into your life as newfound strength, newfound clarity, newfound resolve.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 3:50 018-Evening Questions.
Remorse of Being: The Sacred Encounter with Conscience
‘I feel scared that I know myself as little more than an accumulation of defenses, contrivances, and flaws.’
“That little note, whoever penned it and put it in the box, that’s a holy moment. That’s what we would call in the real work of the inner work, ‘remorse of being’. And remorse of being has a whole different flavor to it from personal guilt and personal shame and beating up on yourself.
“There’s a beautiful shared transpersonal dimension to this because in naming this, you name what’s at the heart of all of us if we’re honest enough. Are we all just a big sham bag underneath? And that place where we understand finally that we are the veil that hides the paradise we seek. And it’s our own finite beingness, the sharp edges that cut us into life out of the all that also keep us separated from it.
“And every so often when the defenses drop and the justifications drop and the trying to fix it drop, you stand there in the presence of that. And the response is its own kind of awe. Is this all there is? Is this what it is? But that is a moment of deep cleansing. Very often that leads to tears, which is the only response to that really pervasive sense of just seeing how fatal and flawed it is. But it is a holy moment if you don’t grab it back and turn it into drama. And what I can say at least from what I would be able to pass on out of my own life as a seeker occasionally in these places is they are very protected.
“And that what has allowed you to see that is what the Quakers call the light. It’s the conscience. It’s the light of conscience that beams down and exposes to the light all that seems false. But with that light leading, you do have something trustworthy in yourself. And so don’t try to analyze it. Don’t try to pin it down. Rather, put your trust in the whole encounter. You’ve asked, you’ve confessed from the deepest personal place in your life. And the seeing which you record there is itself touched with divine wings and will carry you. Trust that something in you will hold and that something in you will lead and will make its presence known and that you will be able to root beneath the layers of all the sham and all the fabrications which are in all lives. And still touch that place of infinite mercy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 12:25 Day 4.6b Evening Teaching Part 2 of 3.
Logion 75
Yeshua says...
Many are standing at the door,
but only the single or solitary
will enter the place of union.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
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