“Spiritual sacrifice means to make holy. Make holy means to make whole.” Cynthia Bourgeault
Three Sacred Vows
“It is a matter of sacrificing the three powers of the soul to heaven. This sacrifice is nothing other than the three traditional and universal vows—that of obedience or the sacrifice of the will, that of poverty or the sacrifice of thought, and that of chastity or the sacrifice of imagination. It is thus that the will, thought and imagination become reflectors of the revelation from above, instead of being instruments of human arbitrariness.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p324.
True Meaning: To Make Holy
“When we work with the question sacrifice, it’s really important to start with the inside of that term and not on the outside. That in the inside, it comes from Sacre Bacciere, which means to make holy. And so in that sense, we jump too fast to the fact that sacrifice means giving up something, that it externalizes it too quickly. If you can keep realizing that it’s the power, Sacre Bacciere is the power to make holy. In other words, to raise something’s state. If you assume that holiness is a higher state of intensification, of beauty, of wholeness, and that power lies within us, that we are each in some sense priests of our own lives because we can take each moment and make it holy by essentially the action of raising it from a lower state of disorder to a higher state of coherence and clarity.
“In almost all cases, the path begins with the inner let it be. The path to sacrifice almost always begins in the letting go of what you are hanging onto so ferociously. An internal gesture at the moment of handing it over.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:31:48 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling
“[The Imaginal world] is where your true self is, and as you set flame, through the process of taking that raw material of your life, offering it up in the flame with the spirit of becoming, what burns in the real and Imaginal is your true self. It is directly related to your essence. Sounds sacrificial. It is, exactly. Sacrifice means make holy. Make holy means to make whole, right? It sounds highly energetic, too. I mean, it’s like labor, it’s giving birth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc4 track8.
Bearing Suffering and Paying for Our Arising
“To offer stuff up, to willingly bear what must be born, which is very, very different from victimization, to willingly bear it and offer it as the sacrifice into the suffering of Christ releases extraordinary energetic beauty and freedom. It’s different every time, but I’ve never seen it not release something positively extraordinary.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, disc2 track13.
“Once the sacrifice of self, the donation of self is intentional and completely transparent, it becomes a powerful sacrament of grace and releases an extraordinary energy into the cosmos…. striving from the beginning of one’s existence to pay as quickly as possible for one’s arising. In other words, we didn’t get here for free. There was sacrifice and there was struggle that was incurred in this linear chain, in the co-inherence as Charles Williams calls it, to bring us here. And we pay that back by our responsible householding, by our bringing ourselves to what’s required through doing the drill of yes, growing the personality and then beginning to feed it back into essence, establishing oneself.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 23 Sunday Morning Teaching.
“The substance that is generated through our own sacrifice lightens the suffering of our common father. While at the same time deepening in our own self the connection with the wellsprings of authentic, objective conscience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 43:19 013-Outside of Gurdjeffs Pessimism.
What Must Be Sacrificed
“We’re caught in a squirrel cage. And many people are happy to be caught in that squirrel cage. It takes real, real courage and trust to step beyond the squirrel cage. And to sacrifice that immediate intensity of emotion that you can get by feeling the energy running along one of those covalent bonds and calling that your soul. It takes real courage to sacrifice that to see what lies beyond it. So the way that you are going to find and begin to spot identification is through self-observation largely carried in sensation.
“Certainly one of the first things 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 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.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 40:02 21-Friday Morning Teaching.
“As you feel that call to move to what a human being can truly be, to sacrifice your sufferings, to sacrifice your entitlements and your justifications at one level to participate in another.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 56:12 21-Friday Morning Teaching.
“To wake up your whole three-centered presence so you can actually be here. And in order to remain present, what do you have to sacrifice? You have to sacrifice a lot. You have to sacrifice daydreaming. You have to sacrifice the dream and the story of yourself. With its inevitable drama about people wounding you and not understanding you and judging you and victimizing you etc. All that … has a place here … but it still has not yet hit the threshold of human transformation. To consciously be here you have to sacrifice that tendency of the mind to go off and tell itself stories all the time to keep track of itself.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff -Teilhard, 1:10:33 14 – Thursday Morning Teaching.
“The bottom line, quick and dirty summary of the practice, is that you daily sacrifice the smaller self, the ego self, the self that will never have more than just first body. You sacrifice it daily on the altar of the becoming of this greater life through your conscious work.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 2:01:20 06 Thursday afternoon session Mystery of Death.
Evolutionary Exchange
“Something that’s within us is alchemized and made real by our willingness to get into the dance. To sacrifice the known for the power to see. If you don’t do it, it’s like a seed that failed to germinate.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 35:41Day 3.5 Afternoon Teaching Gospel of Thomas, Logion 3 & Gurdjieff & the Work What is the Fourth Way.
“You sacrifice a degree of personal autonomy in order to gain a far, far higher level of function and range at the next evolutionary level up. It costs your impermeable egoic boundaries and your weddedness to the story of your Self. That’s why we meditate as the start of it. Because for twenty minutes twice a day or however long you do it, you get used to being in a different corner of yourself.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 12:52 Day 2.6a Evening Part 1 of 2 Questions & Response.
“There’s a sacrifice of an actualization at a certain level on this planet, the little fish level, in order to commit oneself to the actualization of oneself and of the Kingdom. And ultimately you can’t separate them at the other level. It seems to be the pattern we see over and over and over, that the more we bring ourselves into actually being able to trust and literally go for broke with that assumption, that wild wager, giving is receiving, is the vibration, is the energetic frequency on which this planet is aligned, the more the planet seems to be harmonious and our life seems to be harmonious.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 5:05 disc3 track2
“We’ve all got mostly pretty good personalities, a pretty good intact functioning ego structure. Are you going to sacrifice that as food for Real I? Or are you just going to hang on to it and polish the hell out of it in this life and call it good? That’s what Gurdjieff is meaning by the struggle between coating your first body, cashing in your gains in this world, or taking this structure and in some sense allowing it to become the third force that drives the possibility of the emergence of Real I or your Imaginal self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 1:02:00 05b-Thurs am Teaching Evil.
“In other words you begin now to essentially sacrifice your pleasure and your consummation of self at a certain level to become as it were a cosmic servant.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff -Teilhard, 1:06:00 14 – Thursday Morning Teaching.
True Love as Transforming Force
“There’s a quote which will actually be the theme song, which is this, by a very wise, anonymous spiritual master. It says, true love demands sacrifice, because true love is a transforming force and the beginning of union at a higher level. We’re going to look at the whole question of sacrifice, the laying down of life, the exposing of our uttermost intimacy, vulnerability, and mortality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, disc4 track1.
“The Paschal Mystery is the ultimate laying down, the sacrifice in love that makes possible the liberation of all the stuck points in us. It’s the ground of love in each one of us. So our own sacrifices and our own struggles move beyond that barrier of our own security, our own self-preservation, and find their resonance.
“And I think if you take it that way, you can still have the mystery of the cross put onto a ground that has nothing to do with shame and guilt and punishment and morbidity, but has to do with the sublime ritual of the exchange. If you take just that statement, true love demands sacrifice, because true love is a transforming force and the beginning of union at a higher level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 3:27 disc7 track4 52 The paschal mystery – a sacrament of exchange.
Logion 70
Yeshua says…
When you give birth
to that which is within yourself,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you possess nothing within,
that absence will destroy you.
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.
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