On chastity and being emotionally present: “The purifying of the emotional center corresponds directly with a monastic vow of chastity.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Defining True Chastity

“The vow of chastity means putting into practice the resolution to live according to solar law, without covetousness and without indifference. Because virtue is boring and vice is disgusting. But that which lives at the foundation of the heart is neither boring nor disgusting. The foundation of the heart is love. The heart lives only when it loves. It is then like the sun. And chastity is the state of the human being in which the heart, having become solar, is the center of gravity.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p113.

“Chastity in our spiritual work really means the simplest thing of keeping your atmosphere under stewardship.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 35:00 Day 4c Evening Session.

“The practice of chastity does not concern solely the domain of sex. It bears equally on all other domains where there is choice between solar law and all sorts of dulling intoxications. Thus, for example, all fanaticism sins against chastity, because there one is carried away by a dark current. The French revolution was an orgy of perverse collective intoxication, just as the revolution in Russia was. Nationalism—such as in the Germany of Hitler—is likewise a form of intoxication drowning the conscience of the heart and is therefore incompatible with the ideal of chastity.” Meditations on the Tarot, p113.

Chastity and the Emotional Center

“The heart has its own purification it has to go to. The heart has to learn to move in the direction of sobriety, prudence, and that good old word, chastity. Because the heart, the feeling center, as we’ll call it, is always getting pulled by emotions, by this siren call to bring it back and to collapse it into either sentimentality on one end, over empathy, over identification, over feelingfulness, or else the whole range of retributive wrathful emotions, violence, anger, a sense of injustice, and to rise up out of that to act. And anger may be a motivator for action, but never for skillful action. Because when the emotional center gets co-opted, it can no longer function to provide the prudence or the compassion that keeps it present.” 28:04
Métis Teaching by Cynthia Bourgeault.

“I think without any doubt that the value, the virtue that goes with the emotional center is chastity, because our emotional center is a whore. It goes around and lies down in everybody else’s bed, doesn’t it? You know? You know? That’s just the poetic way of picturing our lives getting embedded with others. And so the vow of chastity hobbles the emotional center and forces it to stay within its own virginity, its own purity, its own self-sufficiency or impartiality where it can pay attention to a situation without having to get into bed with your partners.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 45:00 20 Thurs am Teaching.

“The purifying of the emotional center, the feeling, corresponds directly with a monastic vow of chastity. It’s not letting this sacred center, whose genius is empathy, get itself promiscuously entangled with everything. So that it runs the show. To allow your feeling center to remain in a deep way, virgin.” 40:46 Métis Teaching by Cynthia Bourgeault.

The Work of Purification

“The object of this Work is to purify ordinary centers for the reception of the influences of Higher Centers.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p651.

“The Work says that we must work on our Emotional Center and purify it, clean it out, get rid of unnecessary emotions that keep us asleep and keep us slaves to external life.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p910.

“All work is prayer: for all real prayer is to connect Man with Heaven, and all work on oneself is to purify lower centers and make right order in the mind through being taught right knowledge, so that the influences of higher centers can be heard.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p159.

“So a man must purify himself from self, in his emotional life, and this means he must develop emotionally. That is, he must begin to love his neighbor. This is the first stage of emotional development taught by Christ. And how difficult it is.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p134.

Chastity in Community

“[A web] is a group that’s come together for a common aim. It’s a group that is abiding by chastity, keeping our atmospheres clean and clear, collected within ourselves. It’s given over to poverty in the meaning of letting go of outcome, of where that nourishment and help is to flow and how, and also obedience by meaning listen, listen, listen from the depths.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 8:11 Gurdjieff Exercise Day 3.

“Again, we come back to these stipulations of chastity, keeping our atmospheres within themselves. And that is the same with this group atmosphere, it needs to stay coherent and clear, able to stretch across distances and circumscribe without being ruffled by waves of passion or grandiosity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, Gurdjieff Exercise Day 5.

“Let’s form an order. Let’s get a website. Let’s get courses. Let’s get organized. Let’s get a certification program going. Let’s make more wisdom teachers. Without realizing that … there is something about Wisdom that by its very chastity— remember, wisdom is the virgin—does not permit itself to get that heavy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 50:26 08 Thursday Morning Teaching.

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Logion 28
Yeshua says...
I stood to my feet in the midst of the cosmos,
appearing outwardly in flesh.
I discovered that all were drunk
but none were thirsty,
and my soul ached for the children of humanity,
for their hearts are blind.
They cannot see from within.
They have come into the cosmos empty,
and they are leaving it empty.
At the moment you are inebriated,
but when freed from the effects of wine,
you too may turn and stand.

Logion 22
Yeshua noticed infants nursing
and said to his students,
"These little ones taking milk
are like those on their way into the kingdom."
So they asked him,
"If we too are 'little ones'
are we on our way into the kingdom?"
Yeshua replied,
"When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,
but male and female become a single whole;
When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another --
then you will enter in."

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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)

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man refer to Martino Fine Books, Eastford CT, 2019

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

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.