“The idea of reciprocal feeding is very central in the work of Jesus. And this wonderful mirror that Gurdjieff gave us really allows us to go back and look at the teaching of the head of our own particular wisdom stream to hear it with a fundamentally different resonance.” Cynthia Bourgeault,  Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives

The Core Teaching

“The idea of the divine exchange or reciprocal feeding as it’s known in the Gurdjieff work.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 23:30 01 Tuesday Evening Session.

“Reciprocal feeding, as Gurdjieff lays it out, and how we see this idea of reciprocal feeding is very, very central in the work of Jesus. And this wonderful mirror that Gurdjieff gave us really allows us to go back and look at the teaching of the head of our own particular wisdom stream to hear it with a fundamentally different resonance.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 1:27:15 08 Thursday Morning Teaching.

Cosmic Bootstrapping, Not Hierarchy

“In place of a ‘beam me up, Scotty’, into the higher realms, there is this model of a cosmic bootstrapping, an intercosmic bootstrapping, you could call it, that exists in what Gurdjieff calls reciprocal feeding between the densest realms and the lightest are all completely bound up with one another and all joined together in this, not a ladder, but circulating, replenishing web of feeding and relationship and accountability. So that world’s visible depend on world’s invisible and world’s invisible depend on world’s visible.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 45:30 03 Wednesday Morning Teaching.

“The other important part of the realm is that there is a food chain that’s going on here. And this is the part that we really need to get to, because our relationship between the realms is not hierarchical. It’s not just that God the Almighty throws himself out, and in this cosmic redshift, we finally get down into this forgotten little realm where we are in coarse flesh. It’s much more gentle than that. That each realm, each succeeding density, has a way of feeding and receiving food from the next realm, so that there is a reciprocally feeding, nurturing, interrelatedness between all the realms.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 4 track 6

Organic Wholeness

“Gurdjieff’s whole brilliant and challenging metaphysics of reciprocal feeding depends on the absolutely felt sense that not only this planet, but space time is one. The whole depends on the whole of itself and the functions are within an organic whole. So that even these theoretical demarcations that we put on it, like time and distance and hierarchies, are not really separators. They’re place markers in something which is always drawing from and relating to the whole. And the mind is naturally predisposed to think in terms of the separations. It’s part of the hard wiring of the intellectual center that it’s skewed to differentiation. It proceeds by separating things out and saying, this one has this characteristic, this one has this characteristic, this one has this characteristic. And that’s part of what’s going on in Gurdjieff’s three-centered knowing, when he says you can’t get it with the mind. Because trying to understand something that’s fundamentally with the whole, where the mind is, I like to say like playing a violin with a chainsaw.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 58:05 08 – Tuesday Morning Teaching.

Jesus and Reciprocal Feeding

“There is this reciprocal feeding here. The vine gives life to the branch, but the branch makes manifest what is the secret of the vine. That also gives life back. There’s a symbiotic union in which each part feeds the other. And this is at the heart of Jesus’s exchange. It’s a dynamic exchange, an exchange of feeding and building up. I really encourage you all to read about what we call the Eucharist in Beelzebub’s tales in the wonderful chapter on religion, where he really sees the thing is essentially opening up an inner body connection in which, because he’s going to be departing from the planet before the work is done, a channel is developed in which he can be inside them and continue to teach them and they can be inside him and continue to teach them. So it’s the acting out of the abide in me as I in you, abide in me as I in you.

“Everything is in everything else. The whole is in the part and the part is in the whole, so that all may be well, may be one. It’s this dynamic interabiding, the exchange of being that doesn’t take away being but brings forth what being is and maintains beingness, that is so brilliantly foreshadowing of what Gurdjieff would really lay out so majestically in Beelzebub’s, in his description of the reciprocal feeding. All there in Jesus.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 16:14 20 Saturday Afternoon Teaching.

Conscious vs. Unconscious Participation

“Whether you take this literally or symbolically, the whole situation is this, as Gurdjieff sees it. Everything is inescapably enmeshed in a web of reciprocal feeding, mutual bootstrapping. You can participate in it consciously or unconsciously. It’s your choice. And if you participate in it unconsciously, we don’t want to rattle sabers because we talked yesterday about any talk about what happens at the moment of people’s death. If you haven’t personally died and come back, it’s out of line. We don’t know. But in general, the pattern seems to be, and what Gurdjieff was very strong about, is that if we choose to opt out and not participate consciously, in other words, just to take the horizontal axis, as we call it, at face value, and to ride on all the rides in this amusement park, like success, fame, fortune, love, you know, at the end of your day in the amusement park, that nothing will have gone to waste because your bodily remnants will certainly be recycled, distributed to their appropriate levels of being, and be part of the general bank out of which sentient life and the whole thing continues. If you choose to work consciously, to become a conscious servant rather than an unconscious slave, a different realm of options definitely opens up.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 1:43 23 Sunday Morning Teaching.

Building Second Body

“In other words, the idea that we come not with a soul, but with a proto-soul. And by the quality of our work and presence, we can choose to develop it or coat it so that it has viability beyond the planet Earth. Or we can choose not to do it. … And the idea that there’s a reciprocal feeding going on, and that through the quality of our intentional suffering and conscious labor, we actually can coat something within ourselves, which contributes to our own viability beyond the body, and also contributes to the whole cosmos.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 58:41 09 – Tuesday Afternoon Teaching.

“As we begin to develop and, as Gurdjieff said, coat within us this incipient people’s soul, which actually belongs to World 24 and above. Real I. That’s my answer to the solution of why true self can never be found in this realm, because it exists, and it’s a citizen of a different realm. And your real self, your Real I, is not a mirage. It simply exists in its intrinsic home, its intrinsic conditions are at that more subtle level.

“And we can find that self, and we can live out of it, but it requires an energetic, it requires an alchemy, and what becomes the food and the material for this alchemy is our lower self. Rather than appeasing it, dragging it around, perfecting it, you know, etc., etc., we plow it under, we plow it in, and I don’t mean destroy it, but we own it more, we roll it in so that it becomes the food and the raw material for the liberation in our self of something different. Gurdjieff talked about it as building second body.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:03:21 14 – Thursday Morning Teaching.

Living as Food for the Whole

“You’ll know it from the inside. When you’re living out of that sacred essence that you share with your angel and are cultivating it in such a way that it becomes rich, beautiful food, not only for the divine, but a banquet for this realm as well. So that’s just a little bit of the reciprocal feeding and the sense of the exchange. The poignancy of human beings stuck, you know, that one I read today about his heart, by heart ached for the children of humanity because they’re blind from within, become empty, they’re leaving empty. So to begin to bring your attention inside just for a little while, to coincide with that, the inner feeling tone of that sacred stream of being that you’ve been given, and to guard it, and to love it, and to nurture it, and to tender it, and to let it then flow out to dance with the other streams of being, is a little bit how we learn to live in this planet in such a way that our life becomes food for the whole.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 5:19 disc5 track3.

Source as Source Does

“It becomes a beautiful image of reciprocal feeding. Because these points are all correlative and joined together in a dance, there is no higher or lower. The higher is the lower. There’s a constant exchanging of forms. Panikkar has a beautiful line in here about that, that says, so many of us, whether we would admit it or not, have this dream that we want to be one with the source. Can I find my divine self? Can I have the non-dual realization and awakening of my divine nature? Very good, says Panikkar, but there’s a little catch to this program. And he then throws in one of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever seen written. He says, I am one with the source insofar as I act as a source by making everything I have received flow again. And he adds in there just like Jesus. I am one with the source insofar as I act as a source by making everything I have received flow again. In other words, source is as source does. And that if you were to be so lucky as to crawl your way all the way up the great chain of being to that top position, as we like to depict it in our down here imagery, the throne of divinity, the holiness of holiness, you know, this state of total oneness, if we got up and sat on that throne and peeked through God’s eyeballs, what we would see would be immediately that point, just like at the top of the Ferris wheel before it falls back again into self-giving love, which is the only way that God can be God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc7 track7.

Our Cosmic Purpose

“I would say the far aim in the Gurdjieff work, in the exercises, is to prepare us so that we can actually equip the student to become a consciously embodied participant in the exchange between the realms. Remember, this is what I talked about in the Imaginal stuff yesterday, or in the Eye of the Heart book, that really our whole thing exists for the sake of the megalocosmos and the giving and receiving of energies, of substances amongst the various forms of materialization. We can call them planets for a while, as long as you know I’m not talking about them all being planets, the dimensions of reality. The dimensions of reality are in a relationship of reciprocal feeding.” Stonington June 2021, 19:34 04 – Monday Morning Azize Exercise Teaching.

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Logion 77
Yeshua says…
I am the light shining upon all things.
I am the sum of everything,
for everything has come forth from me,
and towards me everything unfolds.

Split a piece of wood, and there I am.
Pick up a stone
and you will find me there.

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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.