“[A man] may act from Good, from seeing the good of acting so. This develops the internal man.” Maurice Nicoll

“Therefore speak I to them in parables; because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.” (Matthew XIII xi-xiii)

The Nature of True Seeing

“We can’t wipe away the world and hope to see. The act of love is to see through the world.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 59:40 2.2 Other Intensity.

“It is necessary to see the difference between seeing something with the senses and understanding something with the mind. A man’s evolution is inner. His possibilities, as a created being, lie in a development of the mind and emotions, of his knowledge and being. And these form his understanding.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p248.

“With gathered attention and sensation, and turning off the dominance of the mind, you will see. The reward for seeing is more seeing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom.

Seeing as Conscious Presence

“Conscious labor means the work to stay awake, to stay in three centers, to not let reactivity to the world throw you into autopilot, to hold the ground of something in you that’s seeing, that’s witnessing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 39:00 Final Teaching Day 5.

“Being a willing participant in the relational field is the thing. What we contribute is the power to see and reflect. Attune your being to see what’s happening in the field. Beware the incomplete observation. As soon as you make judgment, you are not seeing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom.

“The inner watcher is the point of watching that goes out. Don’t try to watch the inner watcher, because you can’t. It’s the place from which all emerges, from which seeing itself emerges. Take it as a gift that allows you to be a good inner observer, a good watcher, and keep an eye on the world, and not get consumed. Take it as the grace of being able to do what comes from the innermost. Don’t turn around and try and look at it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 1:44 disc 2 track 11.

The Transformative Power of Seeing

“The inner grows by seeing the good of something. A man may act from fear—fear of law, fear of reputation, fear of opinion. Then he acts from outside. Or he may act from ambition—and many other similar forms of self-interest. Or he may act from Good—from seeing the good of acting so. This develops the internal man.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p216.

“People often suppose they will be changed in some hereafter, or they imagine that, just as they are, with the level of being they have, and all their negative emotions, vanity, self-conceit, malicious talking, jealousies, unpleasant curiosities, and so on, they can reach God. And there are many other similar illusions, all of which are due to not seeing one’s level of Being, which actually determines where we are situated in the scale or ladder of all kinds of being, reaching up to the Divine Being.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p152.

“One last thing to say about the witness, over and over and over, is that its purpose is seeing, not doing. … You endure the gaps in your being. You endure exactly what’s in this moment, and you try to see it, befriend it, and be with it as honestly and as tenaciously as you can.

“If all you can do is see, endure the seeing honestly, it’s not wasted. No conscious seeing is ever wasted. And the proper response to any piece of seeing is thank you. It doesn’t matter how painful or devastating it is to your ego. If you’ve seen something, you’re beginning to wake up because you’ve seen it from the inner observer, which begins to be the place where your true self does configure as a place that can act. So endure it, endure it, endure it, endure it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 0:00 Disc 3 Track 4.

Higher Dimensions of Seeing

“There’s a piece of the Gurdjieffian anatomy of people that says in addition to our intellectual center and sensory center or moving center and our emotional center, that we also have two higher centers, higher emotional center, higher intellectual center, which are greatly enhanced capacities of seeing and being. But we don’t really own them. They don’t have a place in our body where they exactly live. They belong to our imaginal being, and we borrow from them to see and to feel.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 18:00 Day 4b Afternoon Teaching.

“Imaginal causality can only be reliably read beginning at the level of witnessing selfhood and sooner or later demands that one join it at that level. … Imaginal seeing matches Imaginal selfhood.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 24:35 0819 IWS Wednesday AM Teaching.

“What it really is about is imaginal seeing. And what [Teilhard] is trying to say is that if we’re ever going to be really attuned with the cosmos and really experience its story and the help and the breadth and the expanse of the world as it actually is, we have to learn to see in a new way. We have to adjust our vision. We have to adjust our scale. We have to adjust our scope.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 30:56 0818 IWS Tuesday AM Teaching.

“One of the things about waking up is that you begin to discover that you have instincts in you and senses in you and other ways of seeing that allow the world to become coherent. And you begin to perceive that you do belong inescapably to it, which is something that the ego can never perceive.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 8:27 Awakened Mind Awakened Heart Disc 1 Track 8

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Logion 84
Yeshua says...
When you see your own likeness
projected into time
it makes you happy.
But when the time comes
that you are able to look upon
the icon of your own being
which came into existence at the beginning,
and neither dies nor has been fully revealed,
will you be able to stand it?

Logion 26
Yeshua says...
You detect a speck in your brother's eye,
but fail to perceive the beam sticking out of your own.
Remove the timber from your eye,
and you will see clearly enough
to extract the speck lodged in the eye of your brother.

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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)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.