The ‘both and’ paradox of nondualism: “The capacity to bear paradox without the need to immediately resolve it is an essential midwife in a situation. So much of spiritual practice really hovers around increasing our skill in doing that.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Limits of Binary Thinking

“When you take it all the way out there, non-dual perception, as the Easterners talk about it, doesn’t mean paradox tolerance. What it means is that bifocal perception that drives our whole sense of reality collapses back into one, and there’s no longer a pole, there’s no longer a being called God. There is simply a God-ness that exists and I’m in it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 56:02 Day 4b Afternoon Teaching.

“Third Force is invisible to human beings in the ordinary consciousness in which they live. So there’s a couple of reasons why that’s so. Our cognitive brain that we’re mostly in is already skewed to the binary. It’s skewed to either or. We don’t hold paradox well. We want to collapse a situation into black or white, either or. And this is a function of our intellectual center where most of us process everything.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 45:00 3d.Thurspm.TeachingGWS14.

Bearing Paradox as Spiritual Practice

“The capacity to bear paradox without the need to immediately resolve it is an essential midwife in a situation. The more we can do that, the longer we can wait, the more profoundly we can hold that tension, the more we present ourselves as a locus where something else can arise. So much of spiritual practice really hovers around increasing our skill in doing that.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 4:05 5-06 True Self – Holding Tension.

“The bottom line is that we tend in our culture, in our normal mechanical, binary mind, to be third force blind. While you can’t create a straight line kind of nice little tidy program that you can drop in and run, over and over and over again, it’s been demonstrated that an increasing capacity to hold paradox, to stay still in the midst of swirling either-or-ness, to hold an open, un-coopted intelligence for about one second longer than you think you possibly can, all of these seem to have powerful catalytic roles in the possibility of something new arising.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 24:36 2e.Wedpm.Teaching GWS2014.

“As we are able to continue to walk the paradox with everything it takes, quietness, groundedness, firmness, humility, the rest is up to the weaving that’s weaving around us and my own taste is that that weaving is good. That’s all I can say. Aside from the fact that becoming a student of Third Force I think is one of the worthiest life occupations we can embrace.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 2:15 5-12 The Law Of Three And The Law Of Seven.

Paradoxical Spiritual Practices

“There is a way of paradoxically standing firm and sinking down. In Jacob Boehme, these are synonyms. And that defies logic, but if you’re a spiritual practitioner, you’ll get it. When you stand firm and you don’t run off into your personality and your defenses and your rationals, but just place your feet on the ground and be present with what is, caving without defending. That is also a deep way sinking down or surrendering into the transformed.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 2:25 7-09 Anguish To Love

“If we’re in either-or, I would say it’s about a 99% chance that we’re gonna be third-force blind. It’s once again opening up that capacity to wait, to bear tension, to bear the paradox, and to understand that seeing from the point of view of an already-arrived-at position is never gonna be the solution. It seems that third-force in some way does need to come through that, that deeply still alert, alert surrenderedness or surrendered alertness. It’s a good inner default position to cultivate.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 5:05 8-12 The Value Of Presence And Stillness.

“One does not [experience transformation] simply by realizing one’s own nothingness, but by a double and paradoxical process in which one has to make effort on the one side and yet know on the other side that one can do nothing without help.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p831

The Cosmic Significance of Paradox

“It is then the silence that is entering time, enduring the ‘sufferings, fears, and little deaths’ that are part of the burden of finitude, and then returning to the Unmanifest bearing the transformed fruits of its temporary incarceration in time… Something enters the confines of finitude, struggles within it but is at the same time touched and changed by it, and returns to the whole in some sense fuller, making the whole itself mysteriously ‘wholer.’ The paradox is ultimately sustainable because these two modes of divine beingness—’infinite transcendence’ and infinite fecundity—are not separated from each other but live in symbiotic unity. They are joined forever in a secret embrace, which in turn becomes the driveshaft of everything that exists while remaining itself forever beyond the realm of manifestation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic..

“The Christian world worships the Crucifix, i.e. the image expressing the paradox of almighty God reduced to a state of extreme powerlessness. And it is in this paradox that one sees the highest revelation of the Divine in the whole history of mankind.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p80

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Logion 50
Yeshua says...
Suppose you are asked,
"Where have you come from?"
say, "We have come from the Light at its source,
from the place where it came forth
and was manifest as Image and Icon.
If you are asked, "Are you that Light?"
say, "We are its children,
and chosen by the Source, the Living Father."
If you are questioned,
"But what is the sign of the Source within you?"
say, "It is movement and it is rest."


Poem
Willing to die, 
you give up 
your will. Keep still
until, moved 
by what moves 
all else, you move.
from Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage.

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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)

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.