In the Wisdom way of service, “there isn’t a my will and thy will. There is only one will, which you join.” Cynthia Bourgeault.

In Service of Love

“It’s not love in the service of enlightenment. It’s enlightenment in the service of love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 39:45 3d.Thurspm.TeachingGWS14.

“Put your lives in the service of love itself, to let the material of your own selves, your hopes and fears, irritations and shadows, your intimate jostling up against each other, become the friction that polishes you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 5:00 CL 01-01

The Kenotic Path

“What is Jesus teaching? I would say he’s teaching a radically kenotic path, kenosis in service of singleness, singleness in service of compassion manifest, i.e., the kingdom of heaven.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 2:00 Day 5.2b Morning Final Teaching Part 2 of 2.

True Freedom and Will

“Thomas Merton has a wonderful take on the difference between choice freedom and response freedom. He says the real freedom begins often as an experience more deeply in situations where we have no choice. That’s where we begin to discover freedom. There’s less and less ability to just sort of randomly and compulsively choose whatever we like, according to our like and dislike.

“We become more and more clear about the one thing we must do. So, in that sense, you could say our choice freedom diminishes. And yet, as we’re able to surrender to that in a total willingness of our being, freedom emerges. Freedom emerges. You know that old cliche of the Episcopal Anglican tradition, in whose service is perfect freedom? And yet it’s true. So, essentially, the will, real will is the ability to apprehend, that’s my favorite word, to sort of wrap one’s being around that which one must do. Not out of compulsion, not out of ego programs, not out of like and dislike, but out of obedience to the divine moving through you, and obedience to God’s DNA for your own wholeness, if you want to put it that way. And to respond to that completely, fully, intuitively, and wholly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 58:59 Chapter-7-Voluntary-Attention.

Conscious Attention

“One needs to be at the service of conscious attention. First, however the attention is not mine. In the moment of its presence one knows that it does not originate entirely with oneself. It soars surrounded by mystery. Attention communicates energies of a quality the mind cannot represent. One needs to be at the service of conscious attention. One prepares for its advent. Yes.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 54:50 21-Friday Morning Teaching.

“What [Gurdjieff] was suggesting is that what the quality of aliveness that he called Real I, you can’t get to in your usual mechanisms. You can develop and stabilize your connection to it in this life. You can, through your conscious work, develop and essentially alchemize something within you that endures easily the passage through death, but that’s not the real point. The real point is that it is immediately and instantly of service and eternity. And we only touch it in little pieces here, not because it doesn’t exist, but because we can’t bring our smaller apparatus into meaningful relationship with it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 51:43 02-Tuesday-Morning-WS2016.

Mediating Between Visible and Invisible

“If we could get over thinking that dualistic was a naughty word, that there’s an intrinsic dualism in the service that we’re asked to perform. In the classic maps, one of the things about our world is that we mediate between what are called the visible spheres and the invisible spheres. That’s probably only for the perspective of our own human eyes, but isn’t everything from our perspective?

“So it’s an awkward and painful placement. But if we can see that it renders a profound cosmic service, because it’s precisely from taking up our place on this junction point, and working through it, and with it, and in it, and transforming it with our conscious awakeness, that we can do something. And all of the qualities that we’re talking about—trust, faith, forgiveness, peacefulness, gentleness, temperance, self-control, forbearance. They’re all in Galatians 5.22. All of those are not really natural substances. They’re created out of the alchemy of surrendering gratifications at a certain level on ourself. Surrendering our survival impulses, surrendering our pleasure impulses, in order to create out of the constriction created through that a new possibility. It’s like diamonds are made by being pressed, and pressed, and pressed.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 53:46 RT 03 Afternoon Teaching.

Humans as Transformers

“If we human beings are transformers, we mean this in the biggest sense of the word, that we can take higher substances, filter them through our body, through our being, through our sensation, through our moral fiber, and pass them back into the world changed. And we can start with those things, our being, our yearning, and pass the stuff of the world through that. And the world changes. The world becomes sweeter, kinder, gentler. So service is done to our planet. Service is done to ourself. Service is done to God, as we choose to live in that way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 1:08:05 RT 03 Afternoon Teaching.

Cosmic Service

“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.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal WS 8-2020, 36:43 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A

“It is in and through the developed second body that this communication, this communion, the natural bridge is made. So the work we do in this sense should not be approached from the point of view of earning Girl Scout or Boy Scout merit badges, but rather from fine-tuning the instrument of service. Because I would further say that we cannot really even offer help in our first body. There’s sincerity, certainly. And certainly we do our bits, and enormous goodness does accrue out of that. I’m not in any way denying or doubting it. But to really be able to see what’s needed, to respond, and to essentially bring into the atmosphere the finer elements that are needed to really shift things and midwife things at the level that it happens. It happens at that next level. So for me the schools, the really work of the school, the maintenance that we do in the teaching, in the cast, in the movements, in the way we are, is all part of developing the inner equipment that will allow us to help and to take our part in the great chain of offering ourselves as a nexus of assistance. And it’s for that and nothing else. And when we forget that, it becomes so damn isolated and self-referential, it’s just egoism on another scale.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 18:40 020-Conscious Circle of Humanity.

Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering

“Think about it. It’s heroic duty. But as we begin to get practice with it, as we take these moments where the opportunity to transform something is on our plate, and we transform it, and say, oh, that wasn’t so bad. As we begin to get a taste for that, it increases our yearning to more and more steadily be stabilized in it. So for Gurdjieff, there are two tools that one uses, which are really the joysticks in our little individual rocket ship toward this building of second body: Conscious labor and intentional suffering.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 33:01 11 – FRI PM Teaching.

“If you choose to become a conscious servant it is constant intentional suffering and conscious labor here. And you infold the particularity and individuality and yearning and brilliance, the soul you’ve come by honestly in this life, and dedicate it into the service of the next level along the transmission chain.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:29:19 08 – THU AM Teaching

Beyond Individual Enhancement

“The purpose of this world, sorry medieval theologians, is not to create a stage on which each individual soul can reach its maximum enhancement. If you’re lucky enough and successful enough to generate the soul in the first place in this map, then the soul is simply a more refined instrument for being able to do your work of cosmic service consciously and not begrudgingly. That’s what it’s for. So everything is fleeing back into the whole. Now, having said that, when I say it’s not individual, the purpose is not individual, it is still personal. And when I gave you the task this morning of meeting and getting to know just not as an it but as a who, what meets you, it’s saying that something does meet you that has a very, very personal care for you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:10:48 10 – FRI AM Teaching

The Call to Compassion and Service

“Only one who has already found, in some sense, the generosity and the scale to think for the good of the entire collective, can even begin, will even be interested in this. And if you think you’re going to coat your soul so that you can live in a gated community in World 24, forget it. There are no gated communities. It’s all barrios. So think that way. And if you’re up for the cosmic barrio and that you really want to bring something of a closer, open, wide, open heart into eternal service, then proceed. Otherwise, just take the hand of cards you were given now and hang on to it for dear life and just enjoy being food.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:25:26 14 – Thursday Morning Teaching.

“The demand for compassion remains unbroken throughout the realms. But if your heart has no interest in compassion, you might as well be food for the moon. It’s easier. And really, if you’re going to, before we all think we want to be enlightened in everything, but look at what draws you. If you don’t like compassion, if you don’t like vulnerability, if you don’t like service until you drop and then some more, if you love your damn ego boundaries, you might as well be food for the moon.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 31:20 11 – FRI PM Teaching.

The Inner Struggle and Divine Conscience

“[Gurdjieff] explains in a very, very interesting way that there is struggle—not between virtue, right and wrong, morality—there is struggle between the desires of the planetary body, which is for its own satisfaction, comfort, endurance, and the needs and the desires of our higher being bodies—tension and so on, which essentially will, once crystallized, begin to confer upon us agency, individuality, identity in realms just beyond this one, so that we can really serve as bridges and transmissions, of liminal conductors between the realms. So in the struggle between these two apparently and really phenomenally, experientially tasted struggles between what we used to call our ideals and our desires, that so much of all spirituality is with. Between the flesh and the spirit is another way that this has classically been pictured. It’s in the struggle that the being impulse is released. The birth, you know, that’s the crucible of the emergence of authentic conscience.

“And one of the interesting things in the way [Gurdjieff] pictures it, not just using the old language of the struggle between flesh and spirit, is that he sees it as the struggle between a higher and lower, or a service in one world as opposed to a service in another. He sees it as a struggle between two levels in ourselves, not between two warring ontologies, substances. But he goes on then:

Consequently, like all three-centered beings of our great universe, we men existing on the earth, owing to the presence in us also of the factors for engendering the divine impulse of objective conscience, must always inevitably struggle with the two quite opposite functionings arising and proceeding in our common presence, the results of which are always sensed by us either as desires or non-desires.

In other words, do we satisfy our desires or do we in some sense discipline them, transcend them, sacrifice them? This is universal spiritual truth. If you’ve ever worked in the Tibetan Buddhist practice, when you look at… I got to paint one year when we were in wisdom school at a Buddhist center in Scotland, I got to paint the angry dragon of craving. These things that just suck us back. And it’s going to be this way, he says. It’s going to be this way. We are going to be caught for as long as we live here in the struggle between impulses in us emanating from fundamentally different orders of being and possibilities. What we might call in the old language you know, desire and the sacrifice of desire. Not my will, but thine be done, O Lord. This is all turf you’re familiar with. The only thing you’re not familiar with perhaps is the kind of slightly tangential language he’s putting to this. And then he draws the conclusion of this:

And so, only he who consciously assists the process of this inner struggle and consciously assists the non-desires to prevail over the desires behaves in accordance with the being of our common father creator himself. Whereas, he who consciously assists the contrary only increases His sorrow.

“His incidentally being capital H. The sorrow of our common father. So we’ve come full circle on this Mobius loop. If you want to relieve the suffering of our common father, if you want to help, it is in the continuous and courageous embracing of the struggle as it plays out between you. In you. In every breath, some of the teachings would say. Between the higher order impulses and the lower order impulses. Or the higher order desires and the lower order desires. The desires which are going to lead to the satisfaction of your sense of self and being at this level. But are going to increase the darkness, the drama, the confusion, the suffering of our common father. Or to to participate as much as we can in any moment. In the honest taking on, the acknowledgement of the conflict and doing the best we can as it presents itself with any moment. With the conflict between these desires. And to the extent that we gain some measure of distance. Control is not exactly the right word, but equanimity mastery. So they’re not dragging us around. To that extent we are able to to place into the planet the the final fruits of a conscience that works in that direction. Which will be a greater likeness, a greater equanimity, a greater spaciousness, a greater letting be. And that substance that is generated through our own sacrifice lightens the suffering of our common father. While at the same time deepening in our own self the connection with the wellsprings of authentic, objective conscience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 36:23 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

Work for the Collective

“This work, finally, of the struggle with yourself, the work on yourself, is in the context with and on behalf of the collective. It’s never about you. It’s never about coating your particular angel wings in whatever realm you aspire to, because they’re all going to dump you back the same chute. You think it’s any more fun in the imaginal realm? Uh-uh. The services become more and more intense, more and more all-embracing. This is the easy realm. So, there it is.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 52:00 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

One Will, Purified

“You begin to learn that it’s possible to give service and to play the part that falls before you without any reference whatsoever to the I. That’s for me a little bit of what the feeling of conscience is. Wow. That whatever this whole overlay of needing to get validation, positioning, and rectitude, all variations on the theme of personal power, out of it, is at the point where you find out there isn’t a my will and thy will. There is only one will, which you join. And in that will, your own will is handed back to you, purified of its own toxins. It’s a long journey, but God, it’s fun. And it’s painful in an ironic way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 49:00 020-Conscious Circle of Humanity.

The Bodhisattva Vow

“The bottom line, of course, always is that one is not granted immortality of any sense as a personal reward. It’s always and only for service. Because this precious fruit that’s been entrusted to you in advance of immortality in a body beyond your outer body, is granted on condition of the bodhisattva vow, that you wish in your deepest heart to relieve in the best way you can, the suffering of humanity and the suffering of God, and that your life is centered around that yearning. And in that possibility, you can have everything.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 1:08:25 RT 03 Afternoon Teaching.

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Logion 4
 Yeshua says... 
A person of advanced age must go immediately
and ask an infant born just seven days
about life's source.
Such asking leads to life
when what is first becomes last.
United they become a single whole.

Logion 106
Yeshua says...
When you are able to transform two into one,
then you will become a "Son of Humanity,"
and it will be possible for you
to say to a mountain, "Move," and it will move.

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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.