Shock points are a cosmological thin place where exchange between the worlds occurs with particular intensity, according to the Law of Seven. Cynthia Bourgeault

The Law of Seven and Hesitation Points

“Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven says basically there are two hesitation points where energy does not flow smoothly on a straight line out. It hits a kind of attenuation, a kind of place where it drops in its volume, it becomes a little unsteadier, and that unless a special kind of energy or attention has brought to this place, what will happen is the whole line of action will skew off in a different direction.

“In very short order, if you miss these crucial junction points, you’ll wind up in basically four or five turns with an organization or a program going totally opposite to where it started out from, and you won’t even notice it. You’ll think you’re going in the same direction. And these two places, we will call them the shock points. And what that means is there are places in the flow of things where they’re a big heads up. They’re the opportunity for something new to happen, something new to be brought. They’re a very, very cosmological thin place where exchanges between the worlds go on with a particular intensity. But they’re also places that if you go sailing right through them, you’re going to be caught in deeper mechanicality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:32:17 12 – Wednesday Afternoon Teaching.

The Mi-Fa Shock Point: Shifting Centers

“What the wisdom practice begins to do is shift the center of self so that your self is located not in world 48 with its finite history that it’s responding to, but is informed at another station up the Ray of Creation, where it becomes, they call it in the Buddhist traditions, more aligned with the witnessing self. And I would say the witnessing self is the World 24 self that begins to know that its being and its identity is not contained or expressed in that finite being.

“And so the two of them, for a long, long time, are in dialogue with each other. That is the Mi-Fa shock point. Your World 48 self is Mi. It’s the highest that can be developed as Mi in a couple of ways. Beyond that lies Fa, which is you’re beginning to really ride the whole Ray of Creation as your home, to draw and be informed with and flow into resonance with selfs that are more subtle and more permanent and more appropriate vehicles for the matching and the navigation in higher realms.

“And it’s tough, it’s rich, it’s a bitch of a shock point to get across because until you have really experienced that your self, your real self that you need to play the instrument of the whole ray of creation cannot ever lie in your World 48 self. It doesn’t cancel it, it doesn’t eliminate it because you’re always going to have to be bridging in both directions across the shock point because it’s from the World 48 self and the transformation that goes on there that you hand back to the higher realms the unique purpose of your human life. But on the other hand, it’s into the World 48 self that that divine wish to manifest, to be, to get into the game has to pour like the ocean pouring into the drop to do the thing that we did with Jesus, to be human, to be God in human form, God’s deepest yearning apparently. So we have to create a healthy tension and learning slowly how to shift the center of yourself from yourself to the root of yourself to the root of the root of yourself, as Rumi says, is at the essence of the prayer of the heart.

“The World 48 self with its history, its wounded-ness, its angers, its ways of regulating emotion is not unreal. It’s not the problem. It’s the vehicle. But until it’s informed by and connected to what’s really available to it and required of it further up the chain, it can’t do its thing. It’s in the purification, the constant moving back and forth across that shock point that our real purpose and beauty as a human being is served.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School 2025 CA, 58:22 14 Fri am Attention in the Heart 5-30-25.

Conscious Labor and Intentional Suffering

“I think that conscious labor speaks more to first conscious shock to the mi-fa passage. c getting taken by like or dislike, your attention gets scattered. There’s something in you in conscious labor that says, no, I’m going to be here. I’m gonna stand my ground, I am gonna draw the vivifyingness from this moment, I am gonna be braver. It has that motion of the concentrated attentive will. I think intentional suffering from the very beginning begins to practice the Si-Do passage.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 35:08 11 – FRI PM Teaching.

Our Role as Cosmic Transformers

“Receiving and giving, man speaks to God. And then here’s this line. Just as man’s structure needs to be vivified by the infusion of finer vibrations, these same vibrations require the mixing of coarse material for their maintenance. Without the upward transmission of energies through the intermediary of conscious attention, the universe would give in to entropy. So it’s in somehow or another the ability to put our lives and bodies there and to transform something in the blast furnace, in the cauldron of our own lives and to offer it back up again. That this upward chain, if it doesn’t start there, it certainly reaches an intense velocity. So I just want to translate a little bit more what we mean by each of these. Gurdjieff has specified and he simply is putting a different language on what’s been said in the religious traditions all along, are two ways in which we perform our obligatory duties as cosmic transformers at this crucial Mi-Fa shock point. First of all, conscious labor. Second, intentional suffering.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 52:06 07 Monday am Teaching.

Receiving from Higher Worlds

“The first part of our assignment as human beings is to receive from Fa and the worlds above it certain kinds of energies, nutrients, blessings, subtleties that are not manifested, not created in our world in and of themselves and transmit that down. Because remember that that’s a hesitation point. That’s the point where things don’t just naturally keep flowing. A different kind of energy has to be brought. And so one of these is to receive. What sort of things do we receive that don’t seem to be generated from farther down? Well, certainly these great powers. Some of the things we’ll talk about tomorrow, faith, hope, love, compassion, order, gentleness, joy, peace, forbearance, forgiveness, trust. These are interesting because they’re transitional spiritual substances that, you know, I can’t go to the store and buy a package of trust. It’s not a thing. It’s a process, it’s a life, it’s a quality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 48:44 07 Monday am Teaching.

Being as the Body of God

“Being is the body that God wears in this life, in this dimension. And that when we make contact with being, we make contact with mercy, the great electromagnetic field of love. We make contact with the root and ground from which all manifesting emerges. And it’s there at the center of us, and it’s there outside us. And if you really want a consciousness shock that’ll give you one of those Mu experiences, look at life itself as a body. Life itself, being itself, as the body of God, moving in which all individual consciousnesses are shown.

“Yeah, it’s right out there at the edge. But this begins to give you some ways of coming into sensing that there is at you that spark of pure being at the core of your individual existence. And your individual existence is finally and ultimately part of Being itself, of the great existence. So that while you live and move and swing around the planet, you are always in Being. Your only real choices are, are you going to be aware of this or not? And if you are aware of it, you bring the enormous vitality of being, the enormous grace and beauty of being, the body of God, into the actions of your life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 25:00 Chapter-6-The-Power-of-Being.

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Logion 50
Yeshua says…
Suppose you are asked,
“Where have you come from?”
say, “We have come from the Light at its source,
from the place where it came forth
and was manifest as Image and Icon.
If you are asked, “Are you that Light?”
say, “We are its children,
and chosen by the Source, the Living Father.”
If you are questioned,
“But what is the sign of the Source within you?”
say, “It is movement and it is rest.”

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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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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.