The paradox of spiritual discernment through sensation is at the heart of these teachings. What seems most material and worldly (our physical sensations) becomes a refined spiritual instrument. These passages reveal sensation as both ‘wound and healing’–both exposure to the world and access to our deepest truth.

Direct Path to Self-Knowledge

“One of the first things that you can feel with, that you can begin to sense, when you’re using your sensation, is any sort of inner constriction or bracing, any kind of movement of defensiveness as if your turf is about to be violated, any sort of response like that really invites slowing down and taking a look at it. And by taking a look at it, don’t take a look at it with your head. Inhabit the position of the brace inside. Don’t immediately psychoanalyze it. But let the sensation of that flow through your being so you really get what’s happening. Then you can begin later to reflect on it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 40:58  21-Friday Morning Teaching.

“I have access to myself only through sensation. The being attentive to my usual state, I discover that relaxing and tensing are a constant action. Either there is an exaggerated tension where I affirm myself with violence, with pride, or there is a letting go where I give up out of weakness. When I see that this action is directed by my ego, I begin to feel the need to dissolve its hard coating so that life can spread in me.” Madame de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, p64-65?

“Eventually you begin to get to access your body. Normally we only know about it when something’s in pain. But as you practice this, you get to know it. Madame de Saltzmann actually says very plainly, she says, I only have access to myself through sensation. I think that saying should be carved in stone in the Gurdjieff Canon. I only have access to myself through sensation. Everything else which you do with your head is fantasy and introspection.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 53:05 3-transub-spiritual-substances.

A Value-Neutral Starting Point

“Sensation gives you a value-neutral starting point. Remember the quote I read yesterday from Madame de Salzmann, that sensation is our only path of access into our body. Everything else lies. Your head lies, your emotions lie. People say your emotions don’t lie, but they do, because they’re in service usually of your false selves, your attractions, and your aversions. And so sensation begins to allow us to pick up the flow of currents through the whole being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 28:00 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

“Sensing calls forth a very specific operation. And within this particular body of teaching, as we’re working on it, it’s an operation that can be tremendously liberating and vivifying, tremendously balancing. It’s a therapy and an enlightenment all rolled into one. So sensing is really, again speaking very specifically, and from the point of view of the work we’re doing, sensing is what happens when you bring your attention directly to a part of your incarnate physical being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 15:13 08-Wednesday Morning Teaching.

Beyond Head and Heart Dualism

“We [in the West] still don’t properly value sensation and attention as modes and viaducts of learning. So for me, the one strength of three-centered awareness and the access  through sensation is it instantly grounds consciousness in the whole system. It takes it down farther than just the heart. I’ve long suspected that the heart by itself can’t carry it. If you just isolate it out and prioritize it, you immediately fall back into this dualism, head versus heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 26:29 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

“As long as we’re … going back and forth between thinking and, quote, quote, feelings, we’re the blind leading the blind. We will lead ourself around by the nose. And it’s only something else that’s cutting in. And you learn, virtually all of us in the West will approach it through attention slash sensation. And I put attention together with sensation not because that’s the only way that attention works, but it’s because for most of us we have to start with sensation. If you don’t have any idea of what sensation is, you’ll quickly turn attention into another bright idea. It’s only when you have become attuned to how things actually manifest in your body. Like rather than identify, oh, this is the emotion of fear … unpleasant … I should do something about it. Only once you’ve moved beyond that to be able to say, oh, this is fear … Hmm … Let’s move into it at the sensate level. See what is going on bodily that something in me recognizes and names fear. Let’s just experience it as an energy pattern. Let’s dance it. Let’s paint it. Let’s not tell a story of I about it. Only when you can begin to do that and become really attuned to sensation do you begin to have a measure of truth in you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christians, 39:35 08 Thursday Morning Teaching.

Foundation of Real Feeling

“The core components of the Moving Center are sensation and motion, particularly rhythmic or ritual motion. And so it is the foundation for real feeling. You’ll never find real feeling that is devoid of a deep component of sensation. It’s also, and I’m just gonna put this out right now, that  the well-trained moving center in touch with sensation at a subtle level is the gateway to your inner body, your second body.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 25:36 04 Sunday pm Teaching.

“In order to actually sense and feel this wholeness, you have to bring in these other capacities, particularly those that happen at the synapse of the feeling center and the sensing center, where feeling becomes sensation and sensation becomes feeling. And there you can begin to hold this absolute visceral understanding of a oneness that your mind will never, ever, ever, ever be able to grasp. So, yeah. Yeah, you have to get into it slowly. You really get the hang of it. And I think one of the great but subtle achievements and teachings in the Gurdjieff work is to give you the space to get the hang of it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 59:52 08 – Tuesday Morning Teaching.

“It is within a deeper capacity to work with and within the moving center that you really begin to discover the secrets that make conscious being possible and help you to realize the things that your head yearns for and even your heart yearns for, because it’s through the moving center that you’re going to be able to start to walk the path of sensation. And the path of sensation is going to take you way closer to where you’re yearning to get than almost anything else we have. So in the general cultural parlance, what we call the guts type has to do with the primitive feelings of emotion, anger, you know, the churning nervous system. In the Gurdjieff work and in the definitions we’re using in our wisdom school, the moving center basically is about intelligence through movement.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 30:00 Day 1.2b Morning Teaching 2 of 4 The Moving Center.

The Senses as Wounds of Truth

“The senses—given that they are sound and functioning normally—are wounds through which the objective world, without regard to our will, imposes itself on us. But the senses are organs of perception, not of action.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p110.

“What is the state of intelligence which has abandoned all metaphysics and has decided to hold to and to limit itself solely to ‘objective facts of the senses’? What is most characteristic of this state is that intelligence no longer moves forwards but backwards. It looks to the least developed and the most primitive for the cause and explanation of what is most developed and most advanced in the process of evolution. Thus, it looks for the effective cause of the world not in the heights of creative consciousness but rather in the depths of the unconscious—instead of going forward and elevating itself towards God, it retreats into matter.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p523.

Discerning Truth Through Gentleness

“A lot of people go into trying and measuring the truth of their divine orientation, the impulse that’s coming from within, by feeling the intensity of it. There’s a brilliant, brilliant passage in Valentine Tomberg toward the end of Meditations on the Tarot that just demolishes that. He says you have to tell the truth of the impulse, the spirit impulse, not by its intensity, but by its clarity and by its gentleness. And it’s almost always that you’d hear two voices clamoring within you, and one with a great, raging size and drama, and the other that’s just, bing! Go for the bing!” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christians, 39:35 08 Thursday Morning Teaching.

“From this teaching there results an important rule of ‘spiritual hygiene’, namely: that he who aspires to authentic spiritual experiences never confounds the intensity of the experience undergone with the truth that is revealed—or is not revealed—through it, i.e. he does not regard the force of impact of an inner experience as a criterion of its authenticity and truth. For an illusion stemming from the sphere of mirages can bowl you over, whilst a true revelation from above can take place in the guise of a scarcely  perceptible inner whispering. Far from imposing itself through force, authentic spiritual experience sometimes requires very awake and very concentrated attention so as not to let it pass by unnoticed. It is often difficult to even notice it, without speaking of being seized or bowled over by it. If this were not so, what good would exercises of concentration and profound meditation be? For all the exercises that all serious esotericism prescribes are necessary in order to render attention so awake and intense that it is in a position to perceive within the calm and silent domain of the depth of the soul where spiritual truth reveals itself.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p644.

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Logion 29
Yeshua says…
If flesh came into existence for the sake of spirit,
it is a wonder,
but if spirit exists for the sake of flesh,
it is a wonder of wonders.
I am truly astonished
at how such richness
came to dwell in such poverty.

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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.