“What may be called the ‘astral body’ is obtained by means of friction, by the struggle between yes and no in man.” Ouspensky
The Nature of Divine Love
“Divine love is not about sentimentality. It is fire. And when it touches you, it transforms you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p. 98.
“The world that Teilhard is talking about when he talks about the omega point and everything being consummated in love and the personhood, it’s the world we recognize. We feel it in the great saints. We feel it, it’s the world in which what we see happening is eros is alchemically transformed and emerges as agape, as love. It’s the point, I believe, where what goes on in our worlds below is handed back and changes the nature of things, bringing about the consummation of the personal and of the meaning of human love and divine love. We taste it as a love which is like a very, very sweet tiger. As it hugs you and embraces you, its claws almost cut you to ribbons with its intensity. You can’t bear it almost and yet you know that that’s not because it bears you any malevolence. It’s just that you’re not yet quite strong enough to bear the beams of love at that intensity. So when we meet occasional people that are bearing that intensity or when we bump into it, I think we recognize it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 14:02 08 Monday pm Teaching.
The Challenge of Bearing the Beams of Love
“When T.S. Eliot says to live at the intersection of the timeless with time is the occupation of a saint, what he failed to mention in the fine print is the saint is simply a shorthand term for a real and authentic human being. A saint is simply one who’s managed to stabilize a World 24 presence in this world and thus is in a position to be of cosmic service and to render the world and speak to the world and on behalf of the world in and through conscience. So we’re all there. We all have that yearning and it becomes so important to see it early, to understand it and to consciously weave the warp of your finitude and the weft of your infinitude into a single tapestry which connects the realms. And so in order to really participate more fully in 24, it’s not as if you don’t need substance to be able to bear. And that’s the beauty of these [Gurdjieff] exercises in awakening that it’s not harps and clouds and strumming. No, I mean the people that speak of it like William Blake, we are here on earth a little while to learn to bear the beams of love. You know? Cupid is not sending little taps. This is ferocious. And was it T.S. Eliot who also said that human beings can bear only a tiny bit of reality, which is why the mercy of God doesn’t give us more than we can bear.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal was 8-2020, 36:00 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A.
“When objective knowledge, objective conscience begins to download in a human system, it will have a tendency to fry circuits. So basically what happens is you pass out, you become a gibbering idiot. Because the system is not strong enough to hold it. You leak it, you throw it off so you don’t get shocked to death. So what happens in monastic discipline, properly understood or inner work properly understood is you begin to build and purify a physical structure that can contain it lucidly without passing out before it. And this is done by bringing sobriety and balance to your whole bodily being. Engaging as we’ve talked about in our group’s three-centered awareness so that your body is also carrying it, your moving center, your emotional center so that you can bear the beams of love. And still remain conscious. And the whole work of inner embodiment is about that. It’s not about renouncing sex and being pure and never drinking so that God loves you more because you’re both pure. It’s about creating the maximum, the optimum conditions in which consciousness can abide and survive its encounter with that which exists at a quantum leap higher of reality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 18:15 01 Tuesday Morning Session Mystery of Death.
Building the Vessel to Bear Higher Energies
“Gebser is very, very clear that every structure has a point. And every structure has its purpose. And the mental structure has a really extraordinary purpose because it’s the structure that creates, through its particular constructs, the experience of a selfhood that’s strong enough to bear the beams of love as an experiencer. And this is really important. You know, in the magic stage of consciousness, you just disappear back into the experience. And the mythical begins to get a soul, but it’s an inward, introspective journey. You know, it’s sort of swishy around the edges. And in here, we have something that can stand up, something that can stand up to the angel and say, hell no, I have a choice. So there’s backbone, there’s spine.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 38:28 2.2 Other Intensity.
“One of the important things to realize is that the body, it’s important to incarnate it, not only because it grounds you and gets you out of your mind and all that sort of stuff, but because the gateway into your inner body, your subtle body, is through your outer body. And as you enliven it with sensation, fill it with aliveness, fill it with vitality, and learn, finally, how to direct your attention inwardly, to pick up, actually, not just fantasy, but to pick up the nurture that comes from the ah sound, or the oh sound, to realize this whole subtle mechanism of exchange that’s always there for you, that was given to you in life by the fact that you came with a physical body, and yet we put it on a hat rack. What’s that all about? I think it’s because we’re afraid of sex. We’re afraid of the life force, the wild, the bad, and the recklessness that runs through this, so that rather than learning to train the body to bear the beams of love, we just lower the decibels to the whole system, where we live our life numbed out. And Christianity is not a religion that can be lived numbed out.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 41:59 Day3.1-Reflections-on-Zhikr.
The Formation of the Astral Body
“What may be called the ‘astral body’ is obtained by means of fusion, that, is, by means of terribly hard inner work and struggle. Man is not born with it. And only very few men acquire an ‘astral body’. If it is formed it may continue to live after the death of the physical body, and it may be born again in another physical body…Fusion, inner unity, is obtained by means of ‘friction’, by the struggle between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in man.” P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, London, 1969, pp. 31-32.
Early diagram of the Worlds and corresponding body Gurdjieff drew in Russia. In Search of the Miraculous, p94:
All Suns – Fourth Body, 6 Laws
Sun – Mental Body, 12 Laws
All Planets – Astral Body, 24 Laws
Earth – Physical Body, 48 Laws
“It’s all grace. And the idea is if we do our practices out of devotion, sometime God may fly by and swoop us to a new level. But the thought of, oh, there could be a technology of transformation, no, no, no, no, no, you’d get in serious trouble if you ever mentioned that. But there is. There is a way of working with these sacred practices so that more and more of the small self gets out of the way. And more and more of that capacity for the infinite is grounded within us. So it’s not a matter of us getting more perfected or more holy or better than anybody else. It’s a matter of a deepening capacity to truly, as William Blake called it, be able to bear the beams of love. So that’s why the work goes on. At any point, if you could consider Lectio Divina as a little, little wheel, a little, little gear, but as it turns every day within us as we do our regular practice of Lectio, reading, pondering, reflecting, moving into stillness, praying, that in turn drives a bigger cogwheel, like what makes a big clockwork. And that clockwork, that bigger part of it, is what the monastic tradition has passed on as the four senses of scripture. And this is a very, very important teaching. The idea of the four senses of scripture is that it’s this little gear turns by our constant faithful daily practice of Lectio, the bigger gear turns, which is our deepening apprehension of wisdom.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brendan, Wake 02-08.
Logion 108
Yeshua says...
Whoever drinks what flows from my mouth
will come to be as I am
and I also will come to be as they are,
so that what is hidden will become manifest.
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
TS Eliot, Four Quartets, Burnt Norton
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala Publications, 2008
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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