From our earth plane perspective, this manifests as a series of meaningful coincidences or striking synchronicity. And these features are indeed the primary hallmark of Imaginal causality at play. Cynthia Bourgeault

Contrasting Forms of Causality

“In World 48, it’s asynchronous causality. In other words, it’s sequential, one thing after another. You all learned in logic somewhere, ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’. Are there enough people who speak Latin still who can remember that? Which basically means the earlier things cause the later things, and not the other way around.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 14:18 16 Wed am Teaching.

“World 24 has synchronous causality, that means that things resonate with each other, tending to resonate around the center of being and purpose.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 41:20 1-what-is-second-body.

“In World 24 the causality, time, tends to be radial and spatial. It moves out from center and it can flow in two directions around a center core. In our world, things move in sequence. In the Imaginal world, they move in spontaneous resonant clusters, which we often call synchronicity or coincidence or serendipity. But whereas things tend to prove their linearity by falling into logical order here, in Imaginal cause, they come in flashes of meaningful collections of incidents, meaningful convergences, simultaneous and spontaneous.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 59:11 0817 IWS Monday PM Teaching.

The Nature of Synchronicity

“We all pay attention to synchronicity as a sign of divine intervention. And we’re partially right there, because we’ve burst upon another sort of causality that registers in our being as real. We sense in this, what makes a feather dropping out of the sky feel like it is a confirmation of a sign of something.

“It’s a sign that the inner and the outer are really connected in a much more powerful way. And the fact that something in you picks up a feeling of full dimension in this is, even though it’s a little rough and unlettered, because you immediately interpret it along magical structures of thinking, it still is a sign that you are responding to a coherent, synchronous universe. Yes, synchronous causality is one of the classic hallmarks that Imaginal providence has entered.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 15:19 16 Wed am Teaching

“Third force can sometimes take the shape in a situation of something you see entering with an ah-ha. Very often, I would say in almost more than 50% of the cases, it’s something that looks like it suddenly drops in out of left field. You call it coincidence. It seems to be working according to the laws of synchronicity, and you can’t quite see how we got from here to there. We may be receiving grace, but what we do know when a third force situation enters is that it’s characterized by its satisfaction and in a way its elegance. It tends to dissolve the playing field and reconfigure.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity Law of Three, 00:43 Arising Of Third Force disc 5 track 9.

“Because of this fundamentally spatial aspect of Imaginal causality, the bits and pieces inside the frame do not usually hook up in a linear fashion. More often, they appear as simultaneous overlapping resonances or patterns caught by the heart rather than the mind. Speaking in the language of resonance or “correspondances,” as the poet Baudelaire called them, announcing their logic by the strength of the connectivity they establish between them. Typically, this manifests from our earth plane perspective as a series of meaningful coincidences or a striking synchronicity. And these features are indeed the primary hallmark of imaginal causality at play.

“But while this impression is technically correct—coincidence and synchronicity do indeed feature prominently in imaginal causality—the overall picture we get from the description tends to be misleading. For to our usual way of hearing these words, they seem to depict random, extraordinary, or exceptional, even weird events. And this part is manifestly not true. When the higher vibrational laws of the imaginal realm bleed through into this earth plane, they can and do strike us as extraordinary. But they really are not. They are simply following the rigorous constructable logic of that higher realm, a different and more subtle way of making connections. There is always an underlying pattern.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 47:39 0818 IWS Tuesday AM Teaching.

Accessing Synchronous Reality

“Atemporal means it’s typically synchronous, a lot of things happening at once, but it also means it’s not constrained by the dumb drumbeat of time. Time expands and contracts like an accordion. There is no longer a metronome. It’s one of the amazing and freaky and liberating things about Imaginal causality. But as you begin to learn to see it and work it and work with it and cultivate the places in you that can respond to it, discern it, and read, as Jesus said, the signs of the times, imaginal causality is always threading through this world, there to be interpreted, there to be cooperated with, bringing wider viewing platforms and solutions.

“But we have to be alert and we have to be present. We have to be in our World 24 bodies in order to reliably engage in it. And mostly we just recoup it as superstition and miracles that happen to us and get on about our egoic self. We human beings are doomed to live at the interface between World 24 and World 48.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 1:05:32 0817 IWS Monday PM Teaching.

“You find a lot of synchronicity. You find a lot of meaningful configuration. Whenever you begin to see meaningfully configured patterns, verbal, visual, or temporal, be on the lookout. Particularly when there’s an element of surprise and a certain sense of force or inevitability, a flowingness to it, that we’re looking at the Imaginal. Because the Imaginal is in fact always interpenetrating and interfusing our world. We’re just mercifully spared from accessing it because we don’t yet, we don’t stably exist at a level of being that can hold it and tango with it. So, in order to do that, the next step as we begin to bring our being into readiness is the whole gentle subject of purification. What needs to be strengthened, what needs to be diminished, what needs to be overcome?” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 1:07:12 0818 IWS Tuesday PM Teaching.

“The presence of synchronicity automatically tells you heads up, you might get farther processing this situation by just shifting to World 24 causality and see if the picture makes sense there. Because the picture will always look a little bit anomalous and freaky if you try to incorporate World 24 synchronicities into World 48 logic.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sep 2022, 1:11:43 RT 04 Eve Teaching Q&A

Higher Dimensions of Connectivity

“There are realms of consciousness that work at far higher orders of coherence with non-localized action, simultaneous transmission, synchronicity, but you have to have three-centered awareness online to be able to pick them up and run them. But in these realms, death is not the end. The great saints have not departed. Jesus, as God knows, is not gone.

“And help is given and received from the dead, from the living, from the saints. It’s a great exchange across what look like the visible barriers that define and circumscribe reality to the dying mental body. It’s a whole extraordinary aliveness, resilience, hope, and iron-fisted purposiveness driving the thing to where it’s going, that is ours to draw on.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 1:08:00 01 Saturday Night Welcome.

“And one of the reasons that we’ve gotten stuck in the West in such a poignant and alienated state is because of the almost total atrophy of our human capacity for reading that symbolic synchronous resonance, which was trained in the monastic discipline by the access to the Christological school.

“The level in which we can see how one thing speaks to another to create a deeper and more profoundly meaning-imbued reality. So in the 13th century in our church, an important watershed happened. The great allegorical schools of monastic knowing gave way to the rising star, the scholastic way of knowing, which was factual, analytical, and not tuned to this whole synchronous resonance.

“And with that great change and with the rise of the great universities and the great Gothic spires that replaced the rounded dome of the earlier way, we lost our capacity to entrain with nature. We lost our capacity to entrain with and see the Christ mystery alive in every cell and wavelet and living flame. We lost this kind of capacity to navigate in Imaginal turf.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brenden, 4:31 disc 2 track 10.

“In Imaginal causality, our sense of identity is not nucleated, but is spontaneous and interpenetrated. Boundaries are much more permeable. But selfhood is carried in the Imaginal realm, basically in witnessing selfhood. And it no longer identifies itself with a set of fixed characteristics which define me as opposed to you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 59:11 0817 IWS Monday PM Teaching.

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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!

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?

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Correspondances

Nature’s a fane where down each corridor
of living pillars, darkling whispers roll,
— a symbol-forest every pilgrim soul
must pierce, ‘neath gazing eyes it knew before.

Like echoes long that from afar rebound,
merged till one deep low shadowy note is born,
vast as the night or as the fires of morn,
sound calls to fragrance, colour calls to sound.

Cool as an infant’s brow some perfumes are,
softer than oboes, green as rainy leas;
others, corrupt, exultant, rich, unbar.

Wide infinities wherein we move at ease:
— musk, ambergris, frankincense, benjamin
chant all our soul or sense can revel in.

— Charles Baudelaire
Translation: Lewis Piaget Shanks, Flowers of Evil (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931)

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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.