The Law of Three: from the primordial ground of arising to accepting the tensions of daily life. “Third force has its genesis in bearing the tension of emergence.” Cynthia Bourgeault
Origins of Manifestation
“Tensioning both for Teilhard de Chardin and for Boehme is the fundamental process that allows manifestation to start at all.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 44:50 Day 1c Evening Session.
“Jacob Boehme’s fantastic assumption, as was Gurdjieff’s, is that the origin of everything is clash-based. Motion, movement that allows anything to happen has to begin in struggle, tension, the tension of emergence, out of which flow can form. And flow forms smoothly for a while and then it runs into more clash. And this is the way it is. So the only thing I would also want to say really, really strongly to you from a pastoral point of view is that you control the mix on the degree of the tension of emergence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 1:13:09 Session 3: Trinitarian Metaphysics.
Emergence of Third Force Through Tension
“Staying in that intense tension of the becoming. Third Force has its genesis in bearing the tension of emergence. [Gurdjieff] says that although this third independent force is only the result of the first two fundamental forces, it is nevertheless the spiritual and reconciling principle of every cosmic formation. It is somehow in the bearing of this tension that the force arises.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 1:05:26 Session 3: Trinitarian Metaphysics.
“This canonic principle, this I allow myself to suffer, to be diminished for the sake of the emergence of something else, becomes the primordial fecundity out of which everything else flows, even how you are going to go through today.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 1:20:12 Session 5: The Cosmogonic Wellspring.
Tension as the Birthplace of Love
“Love is what God, is what the divine unity actually looks like when it’s playing on a ground of separability and division, which in turn implies the possibility of consciousness, reflective consciousness. Now, the implications of that, is that love is not a property of the divine endless unity that can become manifest apart from the ground of separability and division, motion.
“So, love is the first counterstroke of the divine endless unity. It’s what God looks like when it’s playing in a field of moving parts. And so what you can say is those old theological premises that said God is love, that out of the effulgence of love, God created everything, don’t make sense metaphysically. Because love is not, according to this map, a preexistent capacity of God. It may be a preexistent potentiality of God, but that potentiality can only become real and come into play when you first set up a playing field in which dynamism, i.e. separability, i.e. consciousness is the medium. Otherwise, love is non-applicable. It doesn’t make sense within the terms of the endless unity.
“You know that in your own love life, don’t you? You know, it takes two to make one. So, this is a profound statement whose implications are staggering. And for me, as a Christian mystic wannabe, what I see just in the short, quick and dirty version of them is each of the realms and each of the reiterations, as the Trinity turns, allows this quality love, which is joined at the hip with consciousness, it allows it to materialize and take form and take shape in more subtle and profoundly luminous realizations and so on. And, in a funny way, the more you put love under tension, under the constriction of form, the more luminescent and tender it glows.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 18:51 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.
“The more you put love under tension, under the constriction of form, the more luminescent and tender it glows.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 22:00 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.
The Body as Instrument for Understanding Cosmic Tension
“It has to do with exploring these primordial motions that lead from World 1 to World 3. The way you can find that world is in the reverberations of that original kind of non-material big bang in your body. You know the suffering. You know the separation. You know the tension. You know the constriction. You know the poof of something else arising when the thing has resolved. And using those tools and honoring your body and what you’re learning here as the most reliable toolkit for the exploration of the inaccessible light may revise a little bit your respect for how you work in your body, maintain your body, and use it as an instrument of deep cosmic, cosmogonic truth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Gurdjieff – Trinitarian Master – Nov 2024, 1:23:28 Session 5: The Cosmogonic Wellspring.
Living in the Tension of Everyday Life
“And [Thomas Merton] began to realize that there’s a deep holiness that’s involved just in accepting the tensions of the posts in daily life. Having to earn a living, raise children, care for aging grandparents, all the stuff of human life is not a distraction from our spirituality. It is the place where we put legs on our yearning. So, the second striving kind of pairs with that. They’re the polarity. The second striving to have a constant and unflagging instinctive need to perfect oneself in the sense of being. And this is a sort of triple enforcement to have a constant unflagging instinctive need to pursue being. In other words, to live in the world, but not of it, not to lose the main thread of the plot, that the main thread of the plot is not your next promotion or your next paycheck. It’s being, it’s being, it’s always, what is this perfection? We’ve talked about how real inner authority, authority comes from being.
“And not to lose sight in the hurly-burly of the fact that we are called to this path of radical transformation, and to prioritize it, and to somehow step into the tension that most of us experience in life between the near aim of making a living and keeping your family together, and the far aim of the perfection of being. And it feels like a clash, particularly if you’re trying to do this practice with a two-year-old and a five-year-old pulling on your skirts, while the 13-year-old is being busted for drugs and the 15-year-old is, you know how it goes in life. But these are the conditions, and remember Gurdjieff is always talking about the struggling, the struggle between the two, and it’s in the way you stay present in the struggle that your particular path of transformation is going to emerge.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 17:05 Final Teaching Day 5.
Logion 42
Yeshua says...
Come into being as you pass away.
Logion 58
Yeshua says...
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.
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.
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