“What if attention is the new form of time in the fourth dimension? That time gets converted into attention, which yields Jean Gebser’s intensification of consciousness.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Nature of Intensification

“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 any picture of [expansion] 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 going to, 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. You know, rung forth. And when we talk about an intensification of consciousness, we get into difficulties from the start.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:21 2.2 Other Intensity.

“Intensification really has to do with the carving of the structure deeper so that it can bear and bear forth more weight, more coherence, more energy, more unity. And in this kind of a structure that’s in intensification, time, you’re going to see, is no longer an extension. It’s no longer a metronome. It’s actually an energy of intensification that can move into the thing, complete it, hold the whole thing together. We’ll get back to that more. But I just want to see that for you for a while. So does this make sense? You know, that it breaks unforgettable lines. We are here on Earth a little while, a little space, to learn to bear the beams of love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2021, 1:08:30 03 – Monday Morning Gebser Teaching.

“I’ve never met anyone except Jean Gebser who could write a 508-page book and give you the entire meaning in the three words in the title [Ever Present Origin]. If you can read the title and understand what it means, this is what he’s talking about. He’s talking about that origin, what it all began out of, where it all came from, what was there in the beginning is always with us. And it’s not only always with us, but is always coming. And that in every moment, we bear both all that has been already and all that is coming toward us as latency. I won’t say in an eternal now because that already cheapens it, but in an intensification of presence that holds the whole thing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 37:00 0.1 Overview.

Intensification through Attention and Presence

“In Gurdjieff, attention functions as an intensification of consciousness. So I leave to you what is the relationship between time and attention? Is conscious attention the new form of time in [Gebser’s] Integral? And without committing myself to that I would say that gives you a hell of a lot to work on. And if you just took the next 20 years to work on that you would be doing some good work for the coming of it. At the end of the clear impressions exercise Joseph Azizi writes commenting on the exercise in Gurdjieff’s system it is axiomatic that while one is in dreams one’s thought never proceeds beyond the purely associative. A thought grabs you and you start thinking it. One is at the mercy of negative emotions. And while we are governed by negative emotions the influences coming from higher centers cannot reach us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:09:23 3.2 Vigilance.

“We understand that something in this fourth dimension is going to be a more hyper-vitalized intensification of consciousness. We know that attention functions that way in our life. It reduces the volume of time, or at least our experiential sense of it, and converts it instead into an impression-based vitalization of experience. That, and in and of itself, ought to give you enough to work with. And while I’m not, at this point, prepared to say that in this fourth structure, in the Integral structure of consciousness, that the form of manifestation of time is attention, but I’m sliding closer to that all the time.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 28:42 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.

“When we play with time, we know that time is an accordion. It’s volitional. You can experience it in your own life, expanding and contracting, getting long and heavy and getting short and intense. We know that it isn’t really a duration. It’s an energy. And that what we’re really talking about, when I’ve sort of suggested, what if we paid attention to, what if attention is the new form of time in the fourth dimension? And Gebster didn’t know much about what Gurdjieff was doing with attention, but I swear it hangs true. That when we pay attention in a deep kind of way, not that kind of tunnel vision nervous, but this free attention that can be simultaneously aware of its movement, but is not fixated on its object, when we bring that kind of objectless alert attention to a situation, it serves for profound intensification of impressions, of presence. So you experience that time gets converted into attention, which yields intensified consciousness. And as I say, I think that for lack of anything else, that’s a pretty good path to go down as you’re trying to put legs on Gebser.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 59:50 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.

“You can create intensification through concentration. You concentrate yourself by squeezing out everything that doesn’t belong in the moment. Your thoughts, your worries, your story of self, your distractions, your cell phone calls, all that sort of stuff. Concentrate yourself and then you can receive the whole intensification in another timeless moment. And your attention is what creates the rhythm of time, not some damn metronome.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 23:55 Eastertide Challenge with Cynthia Bourgeault – Q & A part 2.

Intensification in Spiritual Transformation

“The fire of transformation, heated up enough to begin to catalyze that sacred alchemy of your being, which catapults you beyond egoism, will be generated only in the flames of devotion, and the flames of devotion cannot be generated in any realm but the personal. Sufism 101. But I want us to consider this a little bit more, because this brings us right to that head-on-head impasse between the current models that say non-dual transfiguration requires leaving the personal, and the other models say, uh-uh, it requires an intensification of the personal, but a whole new transfigured level. And how you walk that choice, a lot will fall out.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 43:10 016-Teilhard and the personal.

“If we think of the evolution of a man as the inner connecting up with an already existing possibility—just as an oak−tree is a possibility in an acorn, being a higher level of an acorn—and that this connecting up can only be possible through a growing intensity of insight and conviction which enables a man to tilt the balance in himself, as it were, and point in a new direction—in this one and single direction that Christ is so constantly speaking of in metaphor and parable—then we can more easily understand that passive belief through what the senses prove is useless and that faith must be something alive and constantly at work in a man to effect its supreme art, its alchemy—which is the creation of a New Man in a man. And in this process the laws of another order higher than his own must begin to influence and affect a man, just as, for an acorn to undergo its latent possible transformation, it must begin to obey the laws of oak−trees and gradually cease being an acorn at all.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p172

Intensification in Religious Experience and Death

“The season of Advent is just totally Gebserian in its agenda. It recognizes that what Gebser is saying is that the new structure of consciousness, when it emerges, the new mutation is going to be an intensification of consciousness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 13:15 1.1 Temporicity

“[Gebser] commenting on what we’re going to see is an intensification of Christianity. He writes that the new, a-perspectival age has overcome the rational era just past, an era marked by strong anti-religious feeling, and is at the same time the countercurrent to the un-Christian nihilism of our time. This also implies that the a-perspectival age, the age coming, can no longer and will not be anti-religious. Only rational thought is anti-religious. Now, I think that is a powerful comment.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 30:30 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.

“Time, rather than being this passive and well-coordinated, well-leveed river, bursts over its banks into a now and becomes a quality of intensification which is its true nature. The true nature of time is to serve not as this kind of metronomic background, but as a factor which the consciously present being can use to intensify and cohere and hold sequence together in an eternal now. Well, guess what, kiddos? That’s the moment of death.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 53:41 01 Tuesday Morning Session Mystery of Death.

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Logion 59
Yeshua says...
Give attention to the Living Presence
while you are alive
so that when you die
and have the desire to do so,
you may have the power to attend.

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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.
 
TS Eliot from "East Coker," from *The Four Quartets* 

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Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man refer to Martino Fine Books, Eastford CT, 2019

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.