Time and consciousness, time and attention. “I’m more and more persuaded that attention is the new time in Gebser’s Integral [structure of consciousness].” Cynthia Bourgeault

Traditional Views of Time

“Time creates nothing; it only combines and recombines that which is given for ever in space. Time is like the wind, and space is like the sea; the wind produces waves in infinite repetition on the surface of the sea, but the sea remains the same; it does not change at all. Therefore there is nothing—and there cannot be anything—new under the sun.” Meditations on the Tarot, p497.

“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said: See, this is new? It has been already, in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after.” Ecclesiastes i, 9-11

“Eternity enters into time, and it is in time that all movement takes place … Eternity is not limited by the conditions of time, and time is eternal in virtue of its cyclic recurrence.” Hermetica/Asclepius III

The Subjective Experience of Time

“What does it mean that time is not a duration but an intensification? Well, you can start playing with just the elasticity of time a little bit and realize that why is it that centering prayer periods where you’re collected go by real fast and things where you’re struggling and having a lot of resistance, every minute of the 20 minutes seems like 20 minutes. You know, that somehow there’s a relationship between time and resistance, time and attention.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 11:00 14 Tuesday eve QA.

“When we play with time, we know that time is an accordion. It’s volitional. You can experience it in your own life, expanding and contracting, getting long and heavy and getting short and intense. We know that it isn’t really a duration. It’s an energy. And that what we’re really talking about, when I’ve sort of suggested, what if we paid attention to, what if attention is the new form of time in the fourth dimension?” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 59:50 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.

“And we all know, even without ever having heard of the Gurdjieff work, that very often when you’re having these wonderful, wonderful moments, where you’re with your beloved, or you’re in these great moments, that time seems to collapse. And things get very, very vivid. And in moments that you most remember in your life, it’s like you can still remember things from when you were four years old, that when an impression registers on you, it’s extraordinarily powerful.

“And that what seems to happen is the duller and more scattered the state of your consciousness, the longer duration seems to take. Oh, God, how many more minutes in this meditation period? Time can become an imperishable duration. But it can also convert into intensity of impression. And in that place, the duration of time converts instantly to a volume of impression.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 26:00 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.

“With respect to moral memory, there is hardly any automatism. Here the remembrance is no longer something which happens but rather it is an authentic magical act, although subjective. It is love which is at work in moral memory when it recalls things from the past. Here it is admiration, respect, friendship, gratitude, affection and a thousand other things which have deeply moved you, which render things from the past unforgettable, i.e. evocable at each instant. The more one has loved, the more one remembers through moral memory.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p345-346.

Time as Attention and Energy

“I’m becoming more and more persuaded that attention is the shape of time in the Integral Consciousness. That whereas in World 48 consciousness we have it’s linear time. So many of the things that parallels between what Gurdjieff and the whole work has said about attention and what Gebser says about the shape of time in the impending Integral are so closely resonant that to begin with it has volume more than duration. It has intensivity rather than extensivity. It has quality. It’s not a blank backdrop. It’s a substance. It’s a conductive medium. And it’s a conductive medium that can change it’s shape and change it’s space time configuration to create the kind of current of conduction that’s needed.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 52:30 Eastertide Challenge with Cynthia Bourgeault – Q & A part 2.

“Gebser is saying, in this new structure of consciousness, time is going to look like this. And he never quite pins it down. It’s an energy, he says. It’s purposeful. It’s directive. It’s a force. He has these various things. And you say, what is time going to be? And he says, we’ve got to concretize time. I have noticed over and over again that everything that Gebser says about time matches exactly with what Gurdjieff says about attention. And without saying that time and attention are equivalents, I would just say that the properties which Gurdjieff is talking about as free intention correspond strikingly closely to Gebser’s visions of what time in the achronon of the new age is like. To the extent that attention is free, not bound, that it can be centered in itself, it becomes a force of intensification. It helps you to receive impressions.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:06:39 3.2 Vigilance.

“The other thing that Gebser is constantly saying is that time is an energy. Time is a force. And in this, once again, there’s a direct parallel between what Gebser is saying about time and what Gurdjieff is saying about attention. So this whole idea of working with attention, it becomes almost the sacred element in the Gurdjieff work, as we learn to bring attention to the three centers, to receive impressions consciously, which is what we’re working with in the clear impressions, by distracting and diverting the energy away from this endless meandering of the mental system.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 29:00 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.

Time and Integral Consciousness

“When you move into Imaginal causality and into Integral Consciousness, time takes on the dimension of an intensifying factor, rather than a linear metronome. It shape-shifts. T.S. Eliot got this a lot in his poetry. And Gebser says over and over and over again that the new Integral Consciousness is not an extension of consciousness, but an intensification. I’ve been struck and mentioned many times that the more you work with things, the more time in the Integral level of consciousness and in the imaginal world begins to look an awful lot like attention. Don’t we use it in movements and other places to generate energy, to intensify impressions, and to do really amazing things with time? And when there’s no energy being fed into and through time, time goes longer. When you’re bored, it takes forever. Things that can happen, things that happen with attention and intensity can really be conveyed in a nanosecond.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 7:07 5. Gebserian Integral and Gurdjieffian Imaginal in Dialogue

“So I’m not all the way there yet and I’m not enough of a scientist to go there but in six months of sitting with it that intuition has gotten stronger. So the giving and receiving both work as part of the reciprocity once you get into thinking of attention not not just as an energy per se but as a conductive field in which connection is made. A conductor. And if we call attention a kind of conductor between the realms.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 52:30 Eastertide Challenge with Cynthia Bourgeault – Q & A part 2.

“We understand that something in this fourth dimension is going to be a more hyper-vitalized intensification of consciousness. We know that attention functions that way in our life. It reduces the volume of time, or at least our experiential sense of it, and converts it instead into an impression-based vitalization of experience. That, in and of itself, ought to give you enough to work with. And while I’m not, at this point, prepared to say that in this structure, in the integral structure of consciousness, that the form of manifestation of time is attention, but I’m sliding closer to that all the time. Because what used to be in the middle structure of consciousness was the spatialized abstract volume of time is concretized as a magnified capacity of presence. Because attention is an energy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 29:00 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.

“Gebser didn’t know much about what Gurdjieff was doing with attention, but I swear it hangs true. That when we pay attention in a deep kind of way, not that kind of tunnel vision nervous, but this free attention that can be simultaneously aware of its movement, but is not fixated on its object, when we bring that kind of objectless alert attention to a situation, it serves for profound intensification of impressions, of presence. So you experience that time gets converted into attention, which yields intensified consciousness. Everything [Gebser] says about the new time … is really the fullness of present attention, converted out of this kind of sloppy durationality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 59:50 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.

“If you start by working with perceiving the force of attention as an energy coming to you, I think we usually just think of attention as the backdrop for everything just like we think of time as the backdrop for everything. And when you actually begin to encounter it as a living force that intensifies experience then you see it in a different way. And I am still saying that everything you say about time you can say about attention and you can use the two to reinforce and leverage and bootstrap your way into a whole new level of collectedness that is worthy and capable of receiving the beauty, the love the healing and the harmony that are flowing to us always from a loving and tender universe.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:13:04 3.2 Vigilance

“The comment is made by Joseph Azizi, that the appearance of a normal human and not merely a mechanical consciousness requires three forces: sensation, and impression, and presence. Now, that’s something you should copy into your notes if you’re copying. Three things are needed: sensation, impression, and presence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 26:00 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.

“The universe endures. The more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution; trsl. A. Mitchell, London, 1964, p. 11

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Logion 18
His student said to him,
"So, tell us, then, what our end and destiny will be?"
Yeshua answered,
"Have you already discovered your origin,
so that you are now free to seek after your end?
It is only at your source that you will find your destiny.
Blessed are those who come to stand
in their place of origination,
for it is there that they will know their end--
never tasting death."

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“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
TS Eliot from “East Coker,” from The Four Quartets

“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 from "Burnt Norton", from The Four Quartets

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

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.