The single eye unites two ways of seeing: the inner eye gazing into eternity and the outer eye engaging worldly wonders, creating unity of vision.

“The lamp of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.”  (Matt. VI 22.)

The Kingdom as a Way of Seeing

“Jesus was talking about the kingdom of heaven is a state of consciousness. It’s a way of seeing. It’s a way of seeing the world, of seeing our place in it, of seeing God at work in it. When you look at the world through these eyes that Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven, you see no separation between God and self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 3:34 Disc 1 Track 6

The Link Between Higher and Lower

“It is the faculty of the ‘lower self’ to reproduce the experience and knowledge of the ’higher Self’ or, if you like, the faculty of the ‘higher Self’ to imprint its experience and knowledge upon the consciousness of the ‘lower self’. It is the link between the ‘higher eye’ and the ‘lower eye’, which renders us authentically religious and wise, and immune to the assaults of scepticism, materialism and determinism.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p346.

“Let us put on the board horizontally: False Personality [little I’s], Personality, Essence, Real I, God. Gurdjieff once said: ‘Behind Essence lies Real I, and behind Real I lies God.'” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1266-67.

Focused Being and Presence

“Practice the doing. If you want love to come your way, do love. Focus your eyes. Focus your being. It’s so simple, and yet your life will change. Because in a very concrete way, you’re beginning to do love. … we human beings are dying for presence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 8:22 disc2 track2.

The Witnessing Eye

“Virtually all mature spiritual teaching says that really, along with a meditation practice, another thing that you need to really graduate into unconditional presence is to be able to develop a strong witnessing eye, or observer eye, or watcher. You can use whatever word that you want. It’s that thing that allows you to step back from your ordinary awareness. Because it’ll give you some sense of where the witnessing presence cuts in.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 0:33 Disc3 track1.

“One of the reasons that I think Centering Prayer is so incredibly wonderful, is that it gives you a new home for your observer eye, for your witness. Your witness is carried in magnetic center. It’s carried lower down in your being. So it’s not a matter of you’re taking one part of your head and carving it off and saying, this is the being department, and I’m going to watch what happens in me, which will always tend to throw you back into that kind of superego place. Rather, what you do is the same thing that you do in Centering Prayer, that you simply ask. You say, OK, I wish to see. I wish to remain aligned with being in that deeper way. And damned if it doesn’t come up, you begin to see. You begin to notice.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 5:10 disc3 track2.

Union, Not Destruction

“The purpose of the witness or the observer eye is to connect the two worlds in you. It’s to form a meaningful bridge between the experience that’s going on in your little eye and the larger eye that’s carrying it. It’s to bring the two of them into alignment, into relationship. And I can’t emphasize this strongly enough because so many of us have gotten the idea, and we’ve gotten the idea for good reasons because it’s been in the teaching, that the idea of spiritual practice is to destroy the ego or melt the ego or replace the ego with a higher self.

“And you’ll actually find in some teachings, things that say the ego is your enemy. So you get the idea that what spiritual practice is all about is finding this higher, jumping on it and denouncing your ego. You’ll never reach integral wholeness if you do that. What spiritual life is really about is the union of your small, beautiful, fragile, vulnerable, psychological self with this other. And they both come seeking each other like two parts of a reality meeting them. Inside your you, what that egoic castle, what that egoic armadillo is protecting is some wonderful qualities of God that were given to you as part of your finite being. Joy, equanimity, giving, peace, compassion, delight, humor, vulnerability, tears, mercy. All of you in your created being represent a slightly different role of the wonderful, inexhaustible dice of God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, disc3 track3

Jacob Boehme’s Two Eyes

“[Jacob Boehme] is trying to describe spiritual practice and the way you keep life in the divine plane, life at the innermost and life in the outermost together. He’s trying to explain how you do this in terms of the image of two eyes. Now, this is a kind of wonderful image anyway. It’s completely archetypal. And the whole visionary realm and certainly the school of theosophists that followed out of him have all these powerful images that have a picture of a heart and in the middle of the heart is an eye. You see it all, all over. And, of course, in the Sufi tradition, which Boehme didn’t know directly but knew from the same source, the eye of the heart is that incredible famous thing. So the eye is a profound and heavy image anyway. And, of course, the eye of the heart is the eye with which you see God and the eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you. All this eye stuff works incredibly powerfully. He’s taking this core image of the two eyes to describe a way of being richly and well in both worlds.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 1:25 disc2 track8.

The Right Eye and Left Eye

“Thou hast in thy soul two eyes, which are set together back to back. The one looketh into eternity. The other looketh backward into nature, and proceedeth forth always. So this other eye looks always backwards into nature, and proceeds forth always, and seeks in the desire, and maketh one glass image after another. Well, we’ve got to get that unpackaged, what it means. This is some core phrases in Boehme, and if you can understand this, a lot of it will come clear. So we know the two eyes. The one that looks into eternity, that’s probably pretty clear, isn’t it? Do you recognize inwardly that eye in you? Are you in contact with it? Not continuously, but at some point in your life. I doubt if you’d be here if you weren’t. Now this other one looks backward into nature. It looks backward and then proceeds forth. What does that proceeds forth mean? It’s directly related to this idea we talked about earlier about making fantasies. You know, we create mirror images of reality inside our own mind with this constant busy work of the will turned on its own. Another way of looking at this whole concept of glass is we make all these filters through which we see the world.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 3:21 disc2 track8.

Detachment and Drawing Back

“This whole practice of the smaller will, the eye, the left eye that’s busy in the world, this is the way it works. If you took that glass to mean self-reflexive consciousness, it works this way. It’s okay. It’s okay to go out in the world. It’s okay to get busy in the world. It’s okay to look at the world through one filter after another. It’s okay to go earn your daily keep and to put on the kind of roles that you need to put on in order to do so. But now he says, But turn not the other eye, the left eye, the outer eye, turn it not into the longing, but with the right eye, the right eye being the one that’s always fixed on eternity, okay? Draw the left backwards to thee and let not this eye with the will of the wonders go from thee, i.e., from that eye which is turned into the liberty, but draw to thee its wonders which it hath manifested and wrought. Well, this is a wonderful, complex statement if we can break it apart. Let not that left eye, that one that’s out and about in the world, go into the longing. What would be a translation of that? Right, right. Jump into the boat. That’s a really good one. Get caught up in the individual content and the individual desirousness for things. Let it not get glued on to things is probably the simplest vernacular translation. Let it not covet them. He’s teaching detachment. Let this outer eye go out and play in the world and do what it has to, but don’t let it get attached. Don’t let it get seduced into longing for the things in this world. But, he says, but with the right eye, the one fixed on eternity, draw it always back to you. Isn’t that a lovely, tender image? So that with this eye, which is your innermost eye, your innermost being, keep drawing this other eye, this outer eye, back to its source, back to its true home. And remember, we need these two eyes working together, he says. So draw it always back to you and let not this eye, with the will of the wonders, go from thee.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 5:36 disc2 track8.

The Reciprocity of Wonder and Liberty

“The very first impetus in God to spill out into diversity the absolute liberty is that unity that unified whole undifferentiated reality of God which the eye of our heart sees. So that’s what we look at. The eye that gazes at eternity looks at the liberty. The eye that gazes at the world gazes at the wonders. And this is good says Boehme. This is good, very good. And he says, and this is interesting, he doesn’t just say but keep drawing your eye back. He says draw that right eye back but he says but look or draw that left eye back. He says but draw to thee its wonders. So you’re not just fishing it up like an empty fishing line but there ought to be a fish on the hook of that eye. Can you do that metaphor? That we’re not just bringing it back empty. We’re bringing back into this freedom and into this longing the beauty of the wonders. The liberty and the unity are synonyms in Boehme’s lexicon. So what we do then is this eye that looks out at the world we’re not pulling it back so that it can’t see any wonders so it can’t interact. The goal was not to have two eyes staring at infinity. The idea is to have one eye playing in the wonders but bringing back the fullness of the wonders to this other eye which in finite life is staying, is looking. So there is a reciprocity which is the real beauty and magic of our finite life. The reciprocity between the complete liberty, the complete eternity, the infinite unity and the magical diversity of the finite. They feed each other.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 3:30 disc2 track9.

The End of Cosmic Astigmatism

“So he says, whence the right eye, which is as it were dead here in this life, becomes enlightened and rejoices with the left eye forever in exceeding joyful majesty. So in other words, they work together to nail the whole thing. And the soul sees God with both eyes eternally. The end of cosmic astigmatism. This is the gate. He that sees and knows this rightly in the spirit sees all that God is and can do. That’s pretty majestic. It’s a huge vision. One of the reasons why it’s hard to figure it out is because you almost can’t believe the words on the page are saying what they’re saying. It’s so incredibly bolder and more majestic and more awesome. It’s almost like it’s too good for us. So for me, what this means, it’s a gorgeous picture of a way that we work together. We’re always working at this boundary of diversity and unity or form and formlessness. And it’s exactly where God put us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 9:55 disc3 track1.

Legitimate Twofoldness

“Is this the only possible interpretation of duality—twofoldness, the number two? Does there not exist a legitimate twofoldness?…a twofoldness which does not signify the diminution of unity, but rather its qualitative enrichment? If we return to the conception of Saint-Martin of ‘two centers of contemplation’ which are ‘two separate and rival principles’, we can ask ourselves if they must necessarily be separate and rival? Does not the expression ‘contemplation’ itself, chosen by Saint-Martin, suggest the idea of two centers which contemplate simultaneously—as would two eyes if they were placed vertically one above the other—the two aspects of reality, the phenomenal and the noumenal? And that it is by virtue of the two centers or ‘eyes’ that we are—or are able to be—conscious of ‘that which is above and that which is below’?” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p32-33.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 22
Yeshua noticed infants nursing
and said to his students,
“These little ones taking milk
are like those on their way into the kingdom.”
So they asked him,
“If we too are ‘little ones’
are we on our way into the kingdom?”
Yeshua replied,
“When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,
but male and female become a single whole;
When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another —
then you will enter in.”

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

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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.