“There is something in the heart of Divine purpose that impels it to manifest outwardly, to recognize its own wholeness. All part of the revelation of the divine immense formlessness coming into form.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Divine Imperative to Manifest

“There is something in the abyss of the divine unmanifest that pushes it towards form. And when you ask the question, why?, the great mystics tend to hover around the same answer, which is a variation on the theme that so the divine omniscience, so that originary presence, as Gebser calls it, can become conscious. Now, this sounds like anathema to many people. But the idea, if you’re working with Jung, it’s less difficult. Because Jung uses the word consciousness very, very narrowly and circumscribed. And one of the components for Jung in consciousness is self-awareness. So that the divine omniscience could become self-aware, could reflect, could be aware of its own self.

And notice that the word consciousness literally means with knowing, or knowing in a relational field, knowing in relationality. And the sense that relationality is fundamental to consciousness and that this becomes part of the great secret of the divine heart that is being communicated in this ‘ursprung’, this forever welling over of the formless into form, into form, into form. There’s something there that’s headed at. Remember when St. Paul brilliantly says at the end of Corinthians, now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as I am also known, the knowing and being known, the giving and taking in the relational field, which begins to say that knowing and awareness is not even a noun.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 45:52 0.1 Overview.

“Something ontologically in the heart of divine purpose that impels it to manifest outwardly, to recognize its own wholeness. So that form is not just a bad imitation of formlessness, but rather the two are in a continual, what Thomas Keating called a secret embrace, which in its totality is the heart of the revelation of the divine mystery. All part of the revelation of the divine immense formlessness coming into form.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 21:57 07 Monday am Teaching.

Ursprung: The Ever-Present Origin

“In Jean Gebser’s map, it starts out with origin. As a matter of fact, the book is called The Ever-Present Origin. And the word for origin in his native German is ursprung, which means sprung forth. It doesn’t mean ‘in the beginning’ like in the Greek terminology. It has that kind of cleared spring dimension to it. You know, you take the lid off a jack and jack of the box and jack is ursprung. Play with that a little bit. Take the lid off the box, ursprung. It’s a really powerful image, kinetic image, for how anything tumbled into form. It’s ursprung. And it comes from some primordial and always inscrutable, divine imperative to manifest outwardly. And what is interesting is at least four or five mystics have called attention to this.

“There’s a lot of trial and error built into the system. But at the heart, it’s bloody purposeful. The long arc of evolution bends toward consciousness, says Teilhard. I think that’s a pretty good thing to remember. And long arc it is. Billions of years. Billions of years. And we have only set out to live it. So that was, that was that. The other thing that’s very interesting in Gebser’s fact is that origin is ever-present. You know, the whole essential message of the book is in the title. It doesn’t just go away. It was not just the push that knocked things into motion in the first place, and then it’s gone off to another universe to have a, you know, a drink and a smoke. It’s, it’s always recreating, in every moment, continuous incarnation. So it’s always there.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 24:14 03 Sunday am Teaching.

“Ursprung, it’s the divine will to manifest, constantly flung into form, into new creation, and in imaginal causality, the center is intelligent and purposeful. It’s not passive and inert, and it’s not vacant and empty. God knows it’s not mechanical. It has intelligence. It tangoes with you. That’s a pretty good dancer. And it flows out, and this is really, really interesting, it flows out in all directions from center, and this means, and this is not rocket science esoteric practice, it means that the present can and does redeem the past. And this is true, this is true for you on your personal life, as well as in societal work.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 51:22 1.2 Chiastic Advent.

“The throwing stuff out into form is God’s chiastic move.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2021, 1:21:50 03 – Monday Morning Gebser Teaching.

The Incarnational Process

“God of unlimited potential, Holy Spirit, coming and seeking form. It’s why the story of the incarnation that we’re celebrating this time in the Christian year is so important. We’re all exactly like Mary and the angel Gabriel. We all have this human form and this great spirit seeking to come into form through us. And where they meet, where they unite is the Christ soul in us. It’s not just the higher. It’s not just the lower. It’s the two of us in a beautiful amnesty, which is our grace, which doesn’t override our humanness, but like the bush that burns but is not consumed, our humanness becomes the bush in which the divine light can glow and form.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 4:06 disc3 track3.

“So what is the incarnation? If not the universe taking on ahead of us a face and a heart. And the necessity, if you want to look at Jesus in no other way, than as the universe taking on a face and a heart so that in the realm of the personal, the human being can surrender themselves to the reality of the alchemical flames of love that will take them beyond their egoism.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 1:07:22  016-Teilhard and the personal.

“What made [Thomas Keating] a cosmogonic mystic among cosmogonic mystics, was that finally, you know, he began to see that when you were at the point of the manifest, when you were gazing into the unmanifest, needing nothing to happen, when you were gazing into silence, needing it not to have to give you a message, all of a sudden, something reveals itself. That moment of pure nothingness also becomes instantly a moment of pure latency, of something springing into form that’s absolutely surprising. And more and more and more, he began to prefer to use that term rather than using terms like the void or the nothingness. He called it the latency, the latency, God coming into a whole new becoming. And he sensed that so beautifully. In one of his most beautiful quotes, he writes, our three-dimensional world is not the real world because the most important dimension is missing, namely, that from which everything that exists is emerging and returning in each microcosmic moment of time.” Cynthia Bourgeault, 2:01:22 Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism 2025

The Laws of Manifestation

“[Gurdjieff’s] Law of Three, known as the Law of World Creation. And its companion piece, the Law of Seven, the Law of World Maintenance. And these two were the two fundamental cosmic laws that governed the arising of everything into form, everything into manifestation, from the tiniest little quirks to the greatest cosmological heavens, and in all domains, politics, religion, the arts, changing your kids’ diapers—they all arise and manifest according to the Law of Three. Once they get into form, they unfold according to the Law of Seven.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 3:40 Disc1 track2

Our Role in the Process

“We down here in this little finite, cooled down, redshift corner of divine will are not just the end point of the journey into form. We’re part of a wonderful food chain that’s mirroring something back, creating something, bringing something to fruition in our own way that everything depends on, and that this whole food chain operates under the banner of that great saying, I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, and so I created the realms visible and invisible. Each of us in this realm, and it’s a collective as much as an individual enterprise, are about a particular kind of human alchemy that is required to be a part of this great food chain in which we find ourselves. And our personal happiness and sense of meaning as a human being depends on our playing our part in it willingly and consciously. I remember being told by one of my work teachers, we have two choices in this life. You can be servant or slave.” Divine Exchange, 1:13 disc4 track6.

“I am one with the source insofar as I, too, act as a source by making all I have received flow. In other words, for Panakar, source is as source does. And a source that doesn’t flow simply goes stagnant. The very nature of source is to engender, to move out into form. So I am one with source, I can say the Father and I are one to the extent that I act as source. Not by hanging on to this entitlement, I am divine, so through the rest of the world. That’s about it. So that my being willingly given engenders new life, new form. And Panakar caught this as the essence of the mind of Christ. He says that the trinity, when you properly understand it, conveys as its core message that dynamic interabiding that allows states to coexist because they’re bound together in a continuous flow of process.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 4:27 Disc1 track10 The Mind Of Christ

“Our role, as most of the great teachings have talked about, is to perceive the divine mercy, the divine qualities, as they wish to come into form and enact them. In other words, things like generosity, peace, truth, forbearance, love. And to the extent then that we are biaxial listeners, where we listen, we listen, we receive the power, the energy, the incantation, the potential of the divine realm, and then we enact them upon the horizontal wall. So that things like grace, truth, peace, can be made manifest, can be enfleshed on this planet. And so that the world can flow with generosity. And when we perform this function, everything seems to go along swimmingly.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene Path of Conscious Love, 10:43 disc2 track5 12 The wisdom map of the world.

The Heart as Meeting Place

“The great Sufi maxim could say that the cosmos is vast, but the whole cosmos cannot contain the heart. And that beautiful piece of Sufi wisdom, which is so true, says that because the heart is not just the thing that’s beating inside every human being, keeping them alive. But it really is the whole field subscribed in the ever-dynamic dance between the infinite and the finite. The infinite yearning to come into form, the finite need to always be in relationship to take its bearings from the infinite. And so by nature, the infinite is vaster than the finite, no matter how vast the finite. And so the heart, understood as this huge, massive field, takes that role. And it can also respond in a deep and beautiful way to the great one heart of the human collective.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 18:13 Day 4.2a Morning Teaching Part 1 of 3.

“So there are many who stand at the door and knock, but only those who are single, who are unified, enter the place of union, enter the bridal chamber. These practices invite us to stand in the heart as the integrating center between two worlds, where the heart is the place where the infinite flows outward into form and expression in the finite, and also the finite flows inward into the infinite. It’s the marriage of heaven and earth there in the ground of the heart.” Matthew Wright, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 15:00 Day2.3-Names-of-God-Zhikr.

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Logion 23
Yeshua says…
I choose you,
one from a thousand,
two from ten thousand,
and you will stand to your own feet
having become single and whole.

Logion 75
Yeshua says…
Many are standing at the door,
but only the single or solitary
will enter the place of union.

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Read the companion article on AI announcing Gebers’s Integral Consciousness

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.