“It’s not the nature of the Divine providence to lay on us more than we’re really willing to bear. You won’t be able to hear what you’re not yet able to live.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Nature of Revelation

“No real truth in the world has ever been revealed apart from revelation. And revelation always comes from outside of time, not from inside of it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 5:34 disc 8 track 3 Origin Of The Enneagram

“[Imaginal]: a realm which surrounds, encompasses, and enfolds the realm of temporality and is, and this is the important part, causal with respect to this realm. In other words, nothing really real originates in the world of space-time. It arises from a different dimension and moves into this world, flowing outward into, like a ring thrown into the circle of a pond, moving outwardly, concentrically into this world, generally according to the principle of synchronicity rather than linear causality. But it’s from this realm that we go to find deep meaning, deep insight, deep revelation. … The sense that there is a different order of reality that we’re already engaged with and that is always, in some mysterious way, informing our journey here, if we know how to listen to it. … In fact, it is the place of origin from which what we usually refer to as reality is merely the shadow projected upon time and space.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brenden, 1:27 disc 1 track 14.

“There is something ontologically in the heart of divine purpose that impels it to manifest outwardly, to recognize its own wholeness. So that form is not just a bad imitation of formless, but rather the two are in a continual, what [Thomas Keating] called a secret embrace, which in its totality is the heart of the revelation of the divine mystery. So we’re part of the revelation down here in our T-shirts—all part of the revelation of the divine immense formlessness coming into form.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 21:57 07 Monday am Teaching.

The Conditions for Revelation

“Silence is the indispensable climate for all revelation; noise renders it absolutely impossible.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p71

“The thing that I call the Centering Prayer state is not sitting on your cushion. It’s the state of continuous surrender to God, inner surrender. And certainly, ‘ecstatic states’ come on people all the time, and inward revelations and sudden softenings of the heart happen all the time. Thank God, or we’d think that the Divine had abandoned us. But for most people, if we are in our usual egocentric container, we can’t hang on to them. We quickly transmute them, we quickly turn them into more of the story about ourself. We don’t know how to really allow that experience to take us where it wants to take us, because we’re using too weak a container. So the whole idea is that if you can learn to keep your being in this state of inner surrenderedness, then all the higher has the possibility to work with you and dance with you. And we learn that, first of all, in Centering Prayer.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 0:00 05 disc 1 track 5.

“If you take the simple, very simple practice that in absolutely every situation, there’s a deep innermost place where you can give and yield. I’m not talking about changing any external things internally. You can brace against the pain and fight it, or you can yield into it. The pain continues, but the yielding into it is as if a trapdoor opens in the bottom, and you go down into a place of deeper revelation, deeper love. To the extent that you resist, the trapdoor doesn’t open. And you learn over and over and over and over that the last gesture you finally may learn to make with your conscious mind is, with your conscious heart, is give and yield.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:20 disc 4 track 13

The Gentle Nature of Revelation

“As a general rule, the spiritual world does not at all resemble the surging of the sea—at work to break down the dams holding it back, so as to inundate the land. No, what characterizes the spiritual world, i.e. the ‘sphere of the Holy Spirit’, is the consideration that it has for the human condition. The amount and frequency of revelation from above, destined for a human being, is measured with a lot of care, so as to avoid every possible perturbation in the moral and physical equilibrium of this person. What the spiritual world prefers most of all is ‘reasonable inspiration’, i.e. a gentle flow of inspiration which intensifies to the extent that the intellectual and moral forces of the recipient grow and mature.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p644

“It’s not the nature of the divine providence to lay on us more than we’re really willing to bear. You won’t be able to hear what you’re not yet able to live. if you don’t push too hard and allow it to take its place, what you gradually learn will come in, in some sort of tandem with what you’re able to assimilate. So, you may feel really wiped out the moment it hits, but if you haven’t pushed and grabbed—I got to get there first, I got to get enlightened first, but just take it.

“You may be undone by a revelation, but your Heavenly Father knows your inside and knows at this point that you’ve come along enough that you can face a little bit more of this and stand in the presence of it without being destroyed. God is not in the business of smashing egos.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 43:00 Day 2c Evening Session.

“To the extent that we’re ready to walk the talk, revelation can flow more powerfully. When there’s a clear window that it can pour through, more can pour through. But it’s not the intention of the Holy Spirit to try enlighten you in a series of mystical high pit stops. The whole idea is the integration that manifests itself in loving kindness, in compassion, in integrity, in forbearance. And to the measure that these things, which have classically been called fruit of the spirit, start to manifest on your vines. Then it’s a sign that the intensity can be upped because you’re able to bear it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 13:30 2.2 Other Intensity.

Ongoing Revelation

“The Gurdjieff work is not generically oriented toward the past. It’s oriented toward the future, accessed through a wider ability to stay present in the present. … What he’s really trying to do is to show us the practices that make us amenable to ongoing revelation. And when ongoing revelation happens, and it happens when a level of being is accessed, then you see what is needed in the world. You see what is happening. You see what form something has to happen to dialogue.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 24:15 03 – Monday Morning Teaching.

“You play creatively with the conditions of your own time. Sorting out through your wisdom, what are the givens? You know, what belongs to living revelation and what belongs to dead ritual? And the capacity to let go of or adjust dead ritual, the capacity to hold on to ritual that still lives, but the ability to recognize when there’s water in the well and when there isn’t.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 28:04 03 – Monday Morning Teaching.

“I’m not going to lay it on you too heavily, but we’re going to see that what’s up for grabs in the vision in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene is the entirety of ongoing revelation. And what virtually all the unitive religious teachings will teach you is that the great teachers don’t go away, they just get mostly invisible. And that as the eye of your heart opens, you can and do receive spiritual assistance from the great light holders.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene the Path of Conscious Love, 0:25 1-07 07 Biblical references.

The Purpose of Revelation

“[Jacob Boehme] derived the reason why evil was in the world according to what Gurdjieff would call the law of three, which means a process dynamic, which is evil is not a permanent ontological state, but is an absolutely necessary step in the revelation of the good, and in the revelation of the terms through which the divine can manifest the secrets of the divine heart in which the mystery can become articulate. You can’t have it without the step that we now, using the mental structure of consciousness, define as evil and try to separate it out as something very bad and terrible and a mistake.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 56:00 02a-Monday am Teaching Evil.

“[Gurdjieff, Teilhard, etc] don’t fit within the traditional categories with which either academic discourse or spiritual discourse has established their limits and their modes of conversation. So if they can’t talk with the rest of the world, we might as well get them to talk with each other. And as they sit there and they listen, I think a world of revelation opens up to us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 14:19 01 – MON PM Teaching.

“At the literal level, elements in the tradition such as the virgin birth or the profuse, difficult symbolism of the book of Revelation make no sense at all. To the awakened unitive imagination, they become precise roadmaps of the path of inner transformation, increasingly verifiable as the depths of interior silence increase.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brenden, 1:32 disc 3 track 1.

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Logion 5
Yeshua says…
Come to know the One in the presence before you,
and everything hidden from you will be revealed.
For there is nothing concealed that will not be revealed,
and nothing buried that will not be raised. 

Logion 17
Yeshua says…
What your own eyes cannot see,
your human ears do not hear,
your physical hands cannot touch,
and what is inconceivable to the human mind--
that I will give to you!

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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)

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.