“In a moment of remorse of conscience, you finally take responsibility. And in that moment, you are free of blame and self-justification.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Conscience in Different Worlds

“In World 24, we’re moved by conscience. Conscience is something we can glimpse and something we know about in World 48. But only in World 24 do we really begin to understand what conscience is. It’s a deep sense of our accountability and belonging within a part within a whole. And what is right is right within the whole. What is right is not right for what’s good for number one. What’s right is right within the overall integrity of a situation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 1:01:12 0817 IWS Monday PM Teaching.

“[Man] is a machine. Everything with him happens. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts. He cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention. He lives in a subjective world of I love, I do not love, I like, I do not like, I want, I do not want. That is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want he does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep. What is called clear conscience is sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 25:48 005-Gurdjieff’s view of consciousness.

Objective Conscience as Gateway

“As to objective consciousness, I can’t say much, except that it is attainable. It’s the capacity to see beyond our own perspective, our own slice, and to see in a deeper way from the whole. To see in multidimension at once so that it brings an impartiality. But real objective seeing can’t be attained even by the wisest perfection of the intellect. The intellect, it simply overrides the capacity of the intellect to do it. Even by being enormously learned and compassionate in your nature, you can get a bit of the ways, but you won’t have objective seeing. It’s a sense of the whole situation. I believe, and I’m not prepared to commit myself to this 100%, but it’s gathering in me, that Gurdjieff taught that the gate can be entered, but it must be entered through the gateway of conscience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 56:31 005-Gurdjieff’s view of consciousness.

“The only chance that human beings will wake up from their sleep lies in the stirring of them, of the still not yet completely extinct sense of objective conscience. It’s in the Ashiata Shiemash passage, the heart, the chiastic center of Beelzebub. That objective conscience, that possibility still exists in the human being. But objective conscience consists, [Gurdjieff] says, of the remains, of elements, of the sorrow of our Common Father. And it links in us and touches ground in us as remorse.

“It’s that cry of the heart of our own remorse. And when we’re strutting around like happy little evolving egos, incapable of finding that place of remorse and conscience in us because we’ve outgrown it, we lose our connection, our one possibility to connect with objective conscience and to actually change things.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 32:52 006-Teilhard optimism and Gurdjieff’s pessimism.

Real Conscience vs. Acquired Conscience

“There’s something here that’s so precious that you need to keep returning to the post and trying again. And that is the whole question of conscience. Or more particularly, objective conscience, as [Gurdjieff] calls it. As the transforming force that might just turn something around. And why this is so crucial to a deeper sense of hope that the whole thing isn’t completely gone. There is a place to begin. And to make clear from the start that before you can even begin to get into this subject, you have to distinguish between conscience and morality. Or as Maurice Nichol will describe it in his teachings, in the Commentaries, between real conscience and acquired conscience. So whether we call it acquired conscience or morality, it’s not the thing we’re talking about. And the first step in beginning to have this conversation is to dispense with that notion. That in polite society we can’t often tell them apart. Because morality or acquired conscience is specific to the cultural conditioning of a particular era or a particular set. … So, acquired conscience belongs to the realm of what Gurdjieff would call the sphere of personality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 8:53 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

The Origin and Struggle of Conscience

“So, all the beings of that planet then began to work in order to have in their consciousness this divine function of genuine conscience. The fourth [Obligolnian Striving], the striving from the beginning of one’s existence to pay as quickly as possible for one’s arising in individuality in order afterwards to be free, to lighten as much as possible the sorrow of our Common Father.

“Well, there it is. Boom. All of a sudden, things shift a whole level. And if that, in any sense, shifts the whole attention, center of your attention, toward your heart, it’s accomplished. It’s doing. To sense all of a sudden in here that there isn’t just take, there’s pay. That this came at a cost. That this came at a huge cost, both horizontally and vertically. That we know that there is a cost of our arising as we arise from the blood, sweat, and marrow of our parents and our context.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 21:12 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

“From there, we flow out into the compassion for others. It’s a very interesting arc in these things–a very compelling arc. So, with that as a backdrop, and with the question of, well, what’s all this about the sorrow of our common father? We shift to the passage that I walked in on the first night I was haplessly here. And someone said, Oh, why don’t you come to the Beelzebub meeting? We’re talking about objective conscience in this passage.

“Well then, it was to those very same great initiates who were first set apart that the very saintly, now most saintly, Ashiata Shiemash, then explained in detail, among other things, what this being impulse of objective conscience is, and how factors for its manifestation arise in the presence of free brain beings. In other words, what’s the origin of objective conscience in us? If we actually still have the seeds of it or the embers of it blowing in it, where does it come from? What is its nature? And here begins this absolutely astonishing teaching.

Concerning this, he once said the following: The factors for the being impulse of objective conscience arise in three brain beings from the localization in their presence of particles of the emanations of the sorrow of our all-loving and long-suffering endless creator. That is why the source of manifestations of genuine conscience in three-centered beings is sometimes called the representative of the creator. Do you hear what he just said there? That it arises, the factors for the being impulse of objective conscience arise in three brain beings from the localization in their presence of particles of the emanations of sorrow.

“Particles of the emanations of sorrow from our all-loving and long-suffering, endless creator. You know, we’ve been running around like drunken idiots trying to drink into our body these emanations that arise from the sun which is the most wholly absolute to code our being bodies. But what the seeds of objective conscience lie in the sorrow of our creator, of our common father, of our God. And this is where, this is the origin of objective conscience in us. The tears of God, if you want to put it in metaphoric form. The divine receptor planted in our own being consisting of nothing else but the sorrow of the divine. So, you know, this says it goes back way, way, way, way, way, way, way into the bowels of the manifested.

“First of all, [Gurdjieff] is saying, suffering is ineradicable in human beings. Basically, because it is the absolutely necessary conditions for the awakening of conscience, authentic conscience. And we’re going to see how awakened conscience is really the driveshaft of everything, the driveshaft of evolution, the driveshaft of emergence. But you’re not going to take away suffering even from God. Because it’s part and parcel of the continuing engendering of this holy being impetus.

“So he’s going to go on and explain this a little bit further. Consequently, and we must be suffering, he says, because this being impulse can come to its full manifestation in us only through the constant struggle between two quite opposite complexes of functioning, issuing from two sources of quite opposite origin, namely between the processes of the functioning of our planetary body and the parallel processes of the functionings arising progressively from the coding and perfecting of our higher being bodies within the planetary body of ours, which processes in their totality actualize every kind of reason in three-centered beings. So the struggle goes on because this being impulse of conscience can come to its fruition, can really be born only in the struggle between what you might call the higher impulses and the lower impulses of us.

“And he explains them, he pictures them in a very, very interesting way in this paragraph. That there is struggle not between virtue, right and wrong, morality, you know, there is struggle between the desires of the planetary body, which is for its own satisfaction, comfort, endurance, and the needs and the desires of our higher being bodies, tension and so on, which essentially will, once crystallized, begin to confer upon us agency, individuality, identity in realms just beyond this one, so that we can really serve as bridges and transmissions of liminal conductors between the realms. So in the struggle between these two, apparently and really phenomenally, experientially tasted struggles between what we used to call our ideals and our desires, that so much of all spirituality is with.

“Between the flesh and the spirit is another way that this has classically been pictured. It’s in the struggle that the being impulse is released. The birth that’s the crucible of the emergence of authentic conscience. And one of the interesting things in the way he pictures it, not as just using the old language of the struggle between flesh and spirit, is that he sees it as the struggle between a higher and lower, or a service in one world as opposed to a service in another. He sees it as a struggle between two levels in ourselves. We are going to be caught for as long as we live here in the struggle between impulses nin us emanating from fundamentally different orders of being and possibilities. What we might call in the old language you know, desire and the sacrifice of desire. Not my will, but thine be done, O Lord.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 27:15 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

The Freedom of Remorse

“One further comment about remorse of conscience and its usefulness in the spiritual work. In a moment of remorse of conscience, you finally take responsibility. And in that moment, you are free of blame and self-justification, self-meritoriousness. You quit making yourself the victim. And of course it’s those three things, the two in particular, blame and self-justification, that tie us like chains to our smaller self, to our ordinary sleep, waking sleep.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 0:00 016-Teilhard and the personal.

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Logion 58
Yeshua says...
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.

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.