“With the engagement of this property of sympathetic resonance, being able to fully enter the insides of things, and a blind beholding into the naked being of God himself.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Meaning as Resonance

“Meaning is not explanation. Meaning is resonance.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom.

Imaginal Causality and Correspondence

“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 correspondance, 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.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, p68.

“The poet Baudelaire, that great French poet of the 19th century, wrote this marvelous poem called Correspondance, which says that nature is a living forest that speaks to us in symbols. And in the great poetic language, we’re able to apprehend these symbols and see the correspondance, the correspondences, the resonances that capture us in a web of meaning. And that’s that deeper apprehension of coherence, which is missing when we’re at the literal level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brendan, 4:35 disc2 track 10.

Lectio Divina and Symbolic Reading

“The whole process of Lectio Divina had really been intended to cultivate in the gradually developing monastic the capacity to explore this world more deeply, to read the horizontal in the light of the vertical, to see synchronously through meaningful symbol and word play and light play and resonance, all of these being heart faculties, the coherence and depth patterns of meaning in the world.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brendan, Disc2 track 13.

Centers and Their Ways of Perceiving

“The moving center really explores the world through gesture, perception of rhythm, beat, meter, and through sensation. The emotional center perceives through sympathetic resonance, through vibrational entrainment. The mind perceives, at least at this stage in the evolution of the human consciousness, the intellectual center, through separation, distinction, weighing, measuring.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:05:20 3.1 Verition.

“You understand with some deeper level how everything is interconnected and how everything is precious and how everything is giving and taking and that everything is giving its life into another, that another rises. And there’s a sort of sobriety in this and a harshness, but not a meanness. And you feel the weight of the bits, how they fit together. And what emerges out of this is true conscience. And that’s the tool that we probably most need to rekindle and regrow in our human species today if we’re going to avoid the permanent destruction of our planet. 

“So the emotional center, the third of the three Gurdjieffian centers, explores the world by means of sympathetic resonance. The three centers move at different speeds. And the emotional center is by far the fastest. It gets things instantly because it sees the whole picture.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory WS May 2025 CA, 1:01:07 02 Mon am Three-centered Knowing 5-26-25.

“That which is the root of the root of your being grows deeper and is grounded in your sympathetic resonance with the cosmic heart, the total mind. And if this were not the case, you would not be alive.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory WS May 2025 CA, 29:00 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

Heart Knowing Through Resonance

“If we haven’t purified our heart, it can be covered with all kinds of coarse, dense, mucky emotions that are actually obscuring the true knowing of the deeper dimensions of the heart. So there’s a process of purification that must happen. But when the heart is truly purified and online, it knows by way of resonance, it reads things from the inside out, the mind reads things from the outside cuts them apart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 23:00 Day2.3-Names-of-God-Zhikr. Matthew?

Resonance with Higher Octaves

“Because of this resonance between your own octave and the cosmic octave. And you can follow what [Jacob Boehme] is saying if you’re always bringing it back to, this is how I’ve experienced it in my own journey of transformation. It’s really hard to approach him, it’s virtually impossible to approach him with an academic mind alone, which is one of the reasons why he’s got the reputation for being so difficult. I don’t think he’s difficult at all. I think you just have to meet him at his level, which is actually easier because his level is in everybody. It’s the level of the awakened heart. And it has nothing to do with IQ or academic preparation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 22:06 5b.Satam.TeachingGWS14.

Sympathetic Resonance and Divine Exchange

“With a loving stirring, with the engagement of this property of sympathetic resonance, being able to fully enter the insides of things, and a blind beholding into the naked being of God himself. In other words, not God as an object, but being able in to sense the deepest vibrational field of your own heart and the deepest vibrational field of the divine heart come into some mysterious entrainment, and there is an exchange. And it doesn’t happen at the cognitive level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer Knowing Without Knowing, 1:13 disc3 track4.

“Through intimacy, through sympathetic resonance, be on the inside of things, whether that thing is a person, a tree, and your mind is balanced and thinking, and thinking not just in this sort of either-or shorthand, which has come to be the signature thought form of our structure of consciousness. Not just doing that, not just in mental thought forms, not just in rumination, but in the concrete creative application to tasks using intellect, brain, creative impulse. When that happens, you have a human being who really can hold paradox, hold deep sorrow, hold boundless joy, and hold the collective inside your own stable heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 35:12 01-Sunday Teaching Evil II.

Symbolic and Synchronous Resonance

“Our capacity to understand where we are in the great planetary system is like a symbol, like a bell rack, and you ring one bell and it gets another bell going and it gets another bell going, that things touch things off and spin them into resonance. And that this creates a profound and value-enhanced system of meaning. 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. The level in which we can see how one thing speaks to another to create a deeper and more profoundly meaning-imbued reality. 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.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St Brendan, 5:15 disc2 track10.

Heart as Resonant Field

“[Kabir Helminsky] says, ‘this total mind we call heart.’ And that is so delightfully multivalent in its meaning. Does it mean, just this total mind, all our own faculties online; is that what we call heart? Or do we call, as I believe, our total fractal, online, firing up-to-speed, that in sympathetic resonance with the divine. The total field between them is heart. I like to think of it that way. That heart isn’t something that you have as much as your participation in this resonant, radiant, loving, mutual feedback loop between your heart as holograph of divine heart. The whole thing, the whole energetic field, circumscribed by that is heart.

“I think it’s why the great Sufi maxim could say that the cosmos is vast, but the whole cosmos cannot contain the heart. That beautiful piece of Sufi wisdom, which is so true, can say that, because the heart is not just the thing that’s beating inside every human being, keeping him alive. But the heart is the whole field subscribed in the ever-dynamic dance between the infinite and the finite.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 17:17 Day 4.2a Morning Teaching Part 1 of 3.

Cosmic Resonance

“Every action we put forth is more than that matched and doubled in a cosmic resonance. So even though it looks like we’re very small pebbles in a very large ocean, don’t underestimate cosmic intelligence or cosmic purpose. As my teacher Rafe used to teach me, no conscious act is ever wasted.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 9:00 Day2.1-Creating-Sun-In-Myself

“The disciples are trying to turn the Jesus path into a manageable complexity. What are the rules or guidelines? Who’s in charge? How do we enforce them? What are the entry requirements of our way of doing it? Who’s the power structure? What’s our curriculum? Can we set up an e-course and get people certified? The professionalism of spirituality, old as the hills.

“And instead, Jesus comes down with his karate chop. Stop lying and do not do what you hate. And if I were to send you home with homework from wisdom school, it would be to let those two reverberate in your soul until you can come up with a real inner resonance of what that means for you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, Day 4.5c Afternoon Teaching Part 3 of 3 The Gospel of Thomas Logion 6.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 6
His students asked him,
“Do you want us to fast?”|
“How shall we pray?”
“Should we give offerings?”
“From what foods must we abstain? “
Yeshua answered,
“Stop lying.
Do not do what you hate,
because everything here lies open before heaven.
Nothing hidden will remain secret,
for the veil will be stripped away
from what lies concealed behind it.”

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The Root of the Root of Yourself

Don’t go away, come near.
Don’t be faithless, be faithful.
Find the antidote in the venom.
Come to the root of the root of yourself.

Molded of clay, yet kneaded
from the substance of certainty,
a guard at the Treasury of Holy Light —
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

Once you get hold of selflessness,
You’ll be dragged from your ego
and freed from many traps.
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

You are born from the children of God’s creation,
but you have fixed your sight too low.
How can you be happy?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

You were born from a ray of God’s majesty
and have the blessings of a good star.
Why suffer at the hands of things that don’t exist?
Come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

You are a ruby embedded in granite.
How long will you pretend it’s not true?
We can see it in your eyes.
Come to the root of the root of your Self.

You came here from the presence of that fine Friend,
a little drunk, but gentle, stealing our hearts
with that look so full of fire; so,
come, return to the root of the root of your Self.

Poetry of Mevlâna Jalâluddîn Rumi
Translated by Kabir Helminski

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Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart, Shambhala Publications, 2020

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.