“A new sense of hope—a hope that’s grounded in the faith, hope and love of consciousness.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Characteristics of Mystical Hope

“Mystical Hope has three characteristics. First of all, that it’s not tied to outcome. It’s not an optimistic feeling based on expectation of positive outcome. It has nothing to do with outcome. You know, outcome can be anything but it’s within. And it has to do not with the future, not with the meaning of future, but with the present. Or if you want to put it at the next small step, with presence, which means being present to the present. And because it doesn’t happen somewhere out in intellectual abstraction land. It’s always here and now in the midst of the circumstance. And finally, it enters at the physiological level as an experience of resilience.

“In the moving center, it’s experience of resilience, lightness, upwardness, levitation almost. Those are the things we’re feeling. Plenitude, strength. And at the emotional level, it tends to manifest itself as joy, bizarrely. So this is for me an example and a brilliant example of how these things that we now call, you know, have captured as reactive responses are actually something that has a life and a force and an intelligence of its own when it meets a receptive home in our bodily being. So hope happens to be one of the three, what the theologians call the theological virtues. You remember what the other two are? Faith and love, yeah, you know, faith, hope and love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 25:50 11 Tuesday am Teaching.

“In contrast to our usual notions of hope: Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions. It has something to do with presence— not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand. It bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy, and satisfaction: an ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it seems to produce them from within.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, p9-10

Hope as Attention and Presence

“Attention is where hope resides. Attention is where hope resides.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 42:34 08 Thursday Morning Teaching.

“Love hopes all things. Generally, we think as hope is related to outcome. It’s the happy feeling that comes from achieving the desired outcome, as in, I hope I win the lottery. But in the practice of conscious love, you begin to discover a different kind of hope, a hope that is related not to outcome, but to a wellspring, a source of strength which wells up from deep within you independent of outcomes. It is a hope that can never be taken away because it is love itself working in you, conferring the strength to stay present to that highest possible outcome that can be believed and aspired to.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 7:30 disc1 track1.

Hope as Evolutionary Force

“What’s implicit, both of these men [Teilhard and Gurdjieff] in different ways came up with a portrait which is ultimately hopeful but you have to apply hope on a really, really deep and broad scale to see how this works. You can’t generate hope in the teacup we’ve been using to ponder history and meaning and purpose. It’s too small. Hope is geological. Hope is paleontology. It stretches across the eons. It’s measured in what Teilhard calls an inexorable rise toward consciousness over billions of centuries and thousands of fallbacks and cutdowns and changes of courses and catastrophes some of thousands of years of length. And both Teilhard and Gurdjieff talk about this.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 22:55 01 – MON PM Teaching.

“Hope, for Teilhard, is the ingredient which we human beings must contribute at this critical place in evolution if the whole thing is going to keep evolving toward how it’s been evolving for billions of years. Deep hope flows over deep time” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:06:51 03 – TUES AM Teaching.

“Hope is not something subjective due to an optimistic or sanguine temperament, or to a desire for compensation. It is a light-force which radiates objectively and which directs creative evolution towards the world’s future. It is the celestial and spiritual counterpart of the terrestrial and natural instinct of biological reproduction. … In other words, hope is what moves and directs spiritual evolution in the world.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p471

Gurdjieffian Hope and Conscience

“If you had to put Gurdjieffian hope in one sentence, it’s that the quality, the connection to objective conscience has not entirely atrophied in the human being. It can still be resurrected. It can still be reached. And working through this capacity, that it’s possible to restore, reframe, restructure, not only one’s personal life, but one’s societal order.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 16:10 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.

“Remorse of conscience is actually the linchpin in this whole Gurdjieffian teaching. Which you can read between the lines in the way it comes back again and again. And it’s the piece of hope he gives us. That the possibility of our connection with objective conscience has not completely atrophied us. That it can be called out. That’s the hope. But if that’s the case, and if it’s awakened by remorse of conscience. And if remorse of conscience, if the seeds of objective conscience are actually the particles of the emanations of the sorrow of our Common Father. This pretty much clinches the case that remorse of conscience can only take place in the realm of the personal.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 1:03:16 016-Teilhard and the personal.

Hope as Divine Agency

“There’s really nothing to fear and there’s nothing lost. And if we could only tell that, then we would be able to mediate to the planet that’s so stricken in its terror of extinction. A new sense of meaning, a new sense of hope that wasn’t just frantic hope, but a hope that’s grounded in the faith, hope and love of consciousness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 1:08:58 020-Conscious Circle of Humanity.

“I must act with courage, and I must act with hope. Even if I’m feeling hopeless, you don’t generate things out of your feelings. You generate them out of your yes to the need that’s manifest.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 34:00 02c-Monday Eve Q-A Evil.

“♪ Hold fast the hope that anchors the soul ♪ ♪ Which is sure and steadfast that you may float ♪ ♪ Above the world sea ♪ ♪” Quaker leader, George Fox, from Epistle #314 (1675). Set to music by Paulette Meier.

“If we begin to think of faith, hope, and love, then they’re called the theological virtues of the cardinal virtues because they’re the big three, like the primary colors in a watercolor box, red, yellow, and blue, and basically all the other virtues, which we will be looking at shortly under the heading of the fruit of the spirit, are divisions and mixtures and blendings of those three cardinal virtues. But think agency, think characteristic pathways of action that affect the dynamics of the whole relational field, and originate from places far beyond you, far, far further up the Ray of Creation than just how your psyche happens to be feeling about the world on a certain day. That’s why we spend a lot of time just sort of soldiering our way through the whole Ray of Creation so that you can understand that some of these things which come to you so powerfully and immediately brought tears to the eyes of some of you when I read that Ravensbrück poem. [a little poem left by the grave of a dead baby in Ravensbrück concentration camp. “Oh, Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they inflicted on us.”]

“These don’t come from our world. These are sweet gifts from world 12. Their energy, their intelligence, their agency is far beyond the skins of our own psyche. So, and the really good news is that we can, as we clarify and prepare, and realize that our real, the beautiful, consummate use of our bodily being in the form that it was created to serve, is to receive, alchemize, integrate, and transmit these virtues. So, we become conductors of these streams of divine agency and intelligence as they work into the world. And that’s a noble human calling. And it can be exercised under any and all circumstances, the worse the better.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 33:01 11 Tuesday am Teaching.

“We discover that the fundamental nature of the transaction between us and the higher realms is covered with this kind of tender purposefulness. We’ve touched that. We’ve touched qualities, you know, the faith, hope and love are always there. The fruits of the spirit are always there. But I wanna touch a special quality that may split through the cracks that nobody ever mentions it directly. And I think it’s absolutely crucial to effective action as we begin to work effectively in alignment with consciousness at the Imaginal, you know, using the agency of the imaginal realm. So this is the quality. I first heard the word that really nailed it for me from Peter Kingsley. The quality is called metis, M-E-T-I-S.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 7:27 20 Thurs am Teaching.

---

Logion 113
His students asked him,
“On what day will the kingdom arrive? “
“Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside,” he said.
“You cannot say, ‘Look, it’s over there,’
or, ‘No, here it is.’
The Father’s realm is spreading out
across the face of the earth,
and humanity is not able to perceive it.”

---

Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope, Cloister Books, 2001.

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

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.