“When Jesus said, in my father’s house are many mansions, I think that the Great Chain of Being’s maps allow us one way to imagine what he’s talking about.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Universal Teaching of Many Mansions
“Virtually all the wisdom traditions of the world have some sort of variation on a basic metaphysical roadmap called the Great Chain of Being. And the way it gets developed is different and even eccentric from tradition to tradition. But the map itself is so universal that it really belongs to that greater tradition of Sophia Perennis, you know, perennial wisdom. It’s part of the world’s transformational legacy. Jesus referred to this very elusively in a comment that he made in his farewell discourse when he said: In my father’s house are many mansions.
“And I think that the Great Chain of Being’s maps allow us one way to imagine what he’s talking about when he talks about many mansions. That this greater reality beyond what we can see just with our naked eye, without a telescope, is a multi-dimensional, various, infinite expanse of experiments in created order in how the pure absolute formless expresses itself in full. And there are a lot of these, says Jesus. Generally, when you try to depict these many mansions, you can start from two starting points. One is just plain old contemporary astrophysics. Another way that it’s been classically developed in the inner traditions has been in terms of realms of spiritual being or spiritual realms. And depending on what map you’re using, they tend to vary from four in number to upwards of 20. But the idea is always that out of the sheer undifferentiated formless primordial intention of divine consciousness, worlds spew out in increasing degrees of density and coarseness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, Day1.2-exchange-between-realms.
“All the great wisdom consciousnesses spoke of not only an outer metaverse, but an inner metaverse as well, consisting of … the inscrutable will of the most holy source to manifest outwardly in form. Out of this spewed realms and realms of consciousness, which the old maps have tabulated, calling them logoic worlds, archangelic worlds, Imaginal realms, our own planet Earth, which has been called from the beginning in these great maps the mixtus orbis or the mixed realm, and then down to the lunar realms and the sublunar realms on this great sort of fiery procession out of the heart of God, each with its own set of conditions, each with its own sense of time, its approach to consciousness. This whole map has existed. Wisdom teachings have always known and honored it. Jesus talked about it briefly when he said, In my father’s house are many mansions. And when he’s talked so frequently in the parables about the Kingdom of Heaven is this and that, and this and the Kingdom of Heaven is within you, I believe strongly he’s talking about the Imaginal realm nested in the human body as the new center of intelligence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 1:09:00 01 Saturday Night Welcome.
The Dynamic Exchange Between Mansions
“But the idea is that the whole shooting match, the visible universe, the manifest realm, came into being to create a sort of steady state dynamic reciprocal equilibrium so that the whole thing could stay alive and not be fatally subject to entropy. That’s a very layman’s cut-to-the-chase interpretation of Gurdjieff’s view. But every planet, every form of manifestation, every mansion in Jesus’ many mansions is both giving and receiving from the ones immediately adjacent to it and from the whole.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 NC, 20:26 Day 1b Afternoon Teaching.
“Something that comes together under the alchemical pressure of our own conscious work packs a deeper cosmic punch. And guess what? As we work and transform and release this into the cosmos continuously through the quality of our own conscious work and dedication on life, we’re also gaining and building in ourself, activating in ourselves more subtle inner bodies that become viable in realms beyond our own, in some of these other mansions that Jesus was alluding to.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 45:46 RT 03 Afternoon Teaching.
Many Mansions as Inner Realities
“In the Gospel there is the idea that Heaven has many places. Taken with another great saying that ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you’ it may help us to understand the importance of knowing where we are in our psychological country. The two ideas warn us that our state of being will be our own judge in deciding to which mansion in our Father’s house we shall go at death.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1765
“As we allow ourselves to become aware and attuned to deeper levels the biggest thing that I think wisdom brings is the absolute certainty that in my father’s house are many mansions that there are worlds and worlds and worlds and the worlds are interconnected the worlds can actually be directly perceived this is not theory you can pick it up in your body as soon as you attune your body to look for it and you can receive help directly from this and it’s from the other worlds that and from a reconnection with the other worlds that i think that we’re finally going to find and mediate the strength the force that is needed to radically re-sculpt the face of our culture.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, RT 11 Final Morning Teaching.
“The walls between the realms are paper thin. Along the entire Ray of Creation, the ‘mansions’ are interpenetrating and mutually permeable by love. The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood. Our personhood remains alive and well … and here and now we can draw strength from it to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of eternity. If we can simply keep our hearts wrapped around this core point, the rest of the Christian path begins to fall into place.” Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, p133.
Logion 11
Yeshua says,
The sky and all that lies in the dimensions above it
will cease to exist.
The dead know nothing of life, and the living will never die.
When you consume that which is already dead,
you are turning it back into life.
So, then, when you too re-emerge into the Light,
what will you do?
For on the day when you were created one,
you also became two,
but when you come to realize your twoness again,
what will you do?
Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.
Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus, Shambhala Publications, 2008
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
0 Comments