“The true self really begins with witnessing presence. With that unboundaried, commingled, flowing sense of interpenetrated selfhood, which is dimensionless and boundaryless.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Observer Eye: Introduction to Witnessing

“Let me just start to talk about the observer eye, or also known as the watcher, the witness, the witnessing presence. It’s the thing that allows you to step back from life, that allows you to not just get completely caught in a situation. Virtually all mature spiritual teaching says that, along with a meditation practice, another thing that you need to really graduate into unconditional presence is to be able to develop a strong witnessing eye, or observer eye, or watcher.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 0:01Disc 3 Track 1.

“The whole thing of the watcher, the real witnessing presence, is it is non-identified. It can watch what goes swirling through as if it was simply energy, events, and time. And it can find the experience of you from a deeper place. So what it really does is it takes you out of that egoic mode where you’re bound to get yourself in trouble and brings a different creative intelligence into play.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 3:47 Disc 3 Track 1.

Cultivating Witnessing Presence

“You should always reserve a little attention for Being. So that you think that the way that this witnessing thing works is essentially to divide the screen of your consciousness. So that part of it is you in the drama, in their swinging, and part of it is standing back watching it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 3:44 Disc 3 Track 2.

“The one thing I very quickly learned is that the place you pay attention from and the seat of your witnessing presence is not in your mind.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 37:33 11 Thursday Afternoon Teaching.

“Start building a nest where your witnessing presence can live” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom.

Witnessing and Expanded Consciousness

“When you get deeply settled in your witnessing presence and can hold the bigger picture, you begin to discover that linearity and linear causality is merely a tiny little subsection of something that at the next level of consciousness appears spatial. And what we experience as stuff coming to us from the future is actually the emergence into our own space time continuum of that larger spatial related level of awareness. It’s just that we move towards where it is.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 3b.Thursam.TeachingConsciousGWS14.

“The more our attention becomes voluntary and under our conscious stewardship, the more freedom we have in our life to live beyond our personality, to live beyond our likes and dislikes, to live beyond the conditions imposed by others. So this is what it’s really about—the work that begins to teach you to draw on this desperately underutilized power of your attention. To begin to stabilize your witnessing presence, your being at a higher level, and your capacity to draw life energy from your interactions, and also to bestow energy where it needs to be. Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-centered Knowing, 29:57 06-Tuesday Evening Reflection.

Witnessing in Contemplative Practice

“The author of The Cloud of Unknowing said in his other volume, ‘Pay attention not to what you are, but that you are.’ And what Centering Prayer has really prepared us to do is to shift the center of selfhood into what’s known in the great Eastern tradition as witnessing consciousness. The capacity to hold in an unbroken field, to not be so interested in how you’re doing, and what your qualities are, and if you’re getting there, and if God’s speaking to you, and all that stuff that’s germane to egoic selfhood. It’s preparing you to develop witnessing selfhood.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer – Knowing Without Knowing, 4:01 disc 3 track 7.

“Practices that bring you back into that witnessing state have you remember your body. It can be as simple as just really sensing your feet on the ground or following your breathing. But anything that shifts your energy slightly so that you aren’t putting the weight of your Being behind that small self-agenda will start that out.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 4:16 disc 2 track 3.

Kenosis and Witnessing

“Kenosis is any act in which you take that grasping, grabbing, self-asserting, urgent, insistent, automatic drive of your smaller self and pass it through that thing in you, that witnessing presence that can relax, that can let go, that can be, that can make room for another axis to enter. And none of those acts is ever in isolation because every time you connect through kenosis, you connect with the whole and make the whole visible and seamless.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 2:05 disc 7 track 6.

“It’s a kind of wonderful combination of what we might call witnessing presence, witnessing practice, the capacity to see, combined with kenosis, the willingness to let go of the satisfaction you get from your drama, you know, and that clears the radar screen. So, the core practice for cleansing the heart, for restoring the heart to its organ of spiritual seeing becomes supremely, in Christianity, the path of kenosis, of letting go, you know, the seeing will come.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 12:55 Day 4.2b Morning Teaching Part 2 of 3.

The Wisdom Path Beyond Egoic Identity

“[Wisdom] work concentrates not at the level of healing the false self, but rather at the level of guiding the transition from identity based primarily in the narrative or egoic self to identity stabilized at the level of witnessing presence or permanently or permeably boundaried selfhood. So what I’m saying is that while we’re open to the world, we’re not an issue-driven school. We’re not working in woundedness and recovery. That’s all good work, but it’s somebody else’s work.

“You have to move beyond the agenda of healing the false self, finding the true self, stepping beyond all that finite selfhood, and begin to learn to live stably in what the great traditions have called the witnessing self. A self which is more spacious, which has one foot in this realm and one foot in the next, in terms not of heaven after you die, but in terms of the greater cosmic coherence, and can mediate between the two of them.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage, 21:00.

Conscience and ‘Real I’

“What [Josh Denny] has done is to radically reposition conscience as a bridge between two levels of selfhood. Two levels of selfhood. And you might call them the me of personality and ‘Real I’. And he really is functionally positioning conscience as the viceroy in us and the steward and the sort of beacon of ‘Real I’. And suggesting that the way that we will stabilize it depends on our willingness and ability to shift our allegiance, our identity, out of our usual sense of self, which we’ve been so carefully working on developing for all these many years, into this more spacious thing, which in Eastern religious traditions or Asian traditions is often known as witnessing presence. And in Gurdjieff is ‘Real I’.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 2:40 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.

“You can have ‘Real I’ and live in it eternally from this very moment. The moment you learn, default instinctively, to preserve the shape of your spaciousness, of your freedom, of your impartiality, over the enormous satisfaction that comes from capitulating to your drama.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 34:25 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.

True Self as Witnessing Presence

“Whatever we mean by the true self, it does not exist at the same level as the false self. The true Self is a function of the higher contemplative, not of the lower contemplative. And the true self really begins, and this is so clear when you look at the mystical language, it begins with witnessing presence with that unboundaried, commingled, flowing sense of interpenetrated selfhood, which is dimensionless and boundaryless because it’s moving. It doesn’t stop. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t have qualities. It doesn’t have a story.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Heart of Centering Prayer 2016, 2:42 The Heart of Centering Prayer Part 4 of 4.

Witnessing Self in the Imaginal Realm

“As we stabilize in witnessing selfhood we become more and more capable for longer and longer periods of time of rolling with the greater waves and the deeper currents of the Imaginal. And then our egoic self, rather than being the seat of our identity, becomes a useful servant for agency in the world, for doing what needs to be done. Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 28:53 0818 IWS TuesdayPM Q & A.

“The witnessing self is a selfhood of a lighter density. It’s a World 24 selfhood. So its chief features in this realm are it’s contained, it’s non-identified, it’s collected, it’s balanced, it’s gathered. And the sense of selfhood that comes out of that is fundamentally different from the sense of selfhood generated at the levels below it. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing talked about it saying, pay attention not to what you are, but to that you are.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 19:55 0819 IWS Wednesday AM 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. In other words, you can do your sneak peak game for a while, but it’s not that difficult to become perfectly fluent and even masterful in imaginal causality. It only costs everything.

“Once your being energetic, vibrational field has reached and stabilized and attained at a certain level, you can’t not live in your witnessing self. Because anything else just seems to you like fingers on a chalkboard. It’s too harsh, it’s too grating, it’s too manifestly fiction.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 24:35 0819 IWS Wednesday AM Teaching.

Real I and Concentrated Presence

“Gurdjieff called it the Real I. And I like that self, that term, because the witnessing self sounds a little bit dissociative. But what it means by witnessing self, when the term is used, is that you’re just not grabbing on everything. You have that capacity to keep within, that we’ve talked about. But it doesn’t always come out feeling like that, when you look at it as a witnessing force, you try and self-detect—no thank you, I don’t want that, I don’t want to be on the benches, I don’t want to be on the bystands, I want to be in there acting.

“Gurdjieff’s capacity of the Real I, who is the real owner of this courage, talks more about a concentrated and directed force, that there’s somebody there, but that the capacities and the capaciousness of the presence has vastly increased, and it’s not finding itself by telling a story about itself. It’s finding itself in a whole different way. And this is the big cusp that we hover on now. It’s no longer the experiencer of experiences, but the generator of experiences. And it’s a profound kind of selfhood, but it’s the selfhood we see in Christ that sees and feels the tremendous poignancy and waste and cruelty and suffering and anguish of the human condition, and feels it all without a single bit of evasion, and yet stands present to it in love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 40:31 3.2 Vigilance.

Witnessing Self as Person

“But what [Ladislaus Boros] is talking about is a place of non-identification within yourself, a place where you stand, which is not your ego. The Asian traditions would call this your witnessing self. It’s your non-reactive self. It’s the one that all the spiritual traditions are aiming at, that Boros is essentially calling your person. And the freedom begins to exist in a person when something develops some new witnessing and being platform that can stand back from all the conditioning reactivity and autopilot that’s coming at you at every moment. And hold your shape and choose, pick your fights, engage or not engage, choose the more comfortable option or choose the less comfortable option. But in other words, you begin to have the freedom to paint your life like an artist rather than just living like a splat of paint thrown on the canvas.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death, 2:20:48 01 Tuesday Morning Session Mystery of Death.

“When Augustine wrote his autobiography, his confessions, we enshrine the journey of this thing called the soul and we will not set it down. We’re radically encouraged not to. We don’t have a word for the witnessing self in Christianity. We don’t even, you know, people don’t know what that is still, because we think our true self is just our narrative self, our soul, cleaned up and shorn of its bad habits.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death, 50:04 03 Wednesday Morning Session Mystery of Death.

Living in World 24

“To learn how to—when you see the presence of synchronicity, rather than just say, freaky man, God loves me, he’s sending me these signs and wonders, and continuing on as your own self—but to say, okay, we’re in World 24 right now. Bye-bye World 48 self. Solid witnessing Presence. Solid Three-Centered Awareness. Solid non-attachment. Solid curiosity about what’s going to unfold next, rather than complete investment in outcome.

“And watch. And watch. Be part of the synchronicity as it flows towards its resolution. Easy to say, but oh, wow, is it difficult to do. Because we want to swim back. We hate free fall. And World 24 is just continuous free fall. Ordered, competent, poised free fall. And when you’re ready, you can live there.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 1:13:09 RT 04 Eve Teaching Q&A

Integral Thinking and Witnessing Selfhood

“My own suspicion is that if there is a self that comes with the full dimensionality of Integral thinking, it’s going to look closest to witnessing selfhood. A capacity to stay put and see, but it wouldn’t be a witnessing selfhood that was up at the top of the tower looking down. It would rather be one that had something closer to Gurdjieffian three-centered awareness.

“Yeah, exactly. That allowed it to hold a deeper seeing that flows through it. A seeing that emerges from a different dimension of reality. But the witnessing non-identified grounded three-centered self has got the capaciousness to hold that light by which you see through the world. And in the process of seeing through it, bless it. So anyway, that’s where we’re headed. It’s wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington June 2021, 1:16:13 07 – Tuesday Morning Gebser Teaching.

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Logion 24 
His students said to him,
"Take us to the place where you are,
since we are required to seek after it."
He answered them,
"Whoever has an ear for this should listen carefully!
Light shines out from the center of a being of light
and illuminates the whole cosmos.
Whoever fails to become light is a source of darkness."

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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.