“This unity of opposites, this reconciling force, is a third thing, a Third Force, connecting both opposites and yet different from either.” Maurice Nicoll

The Cross as Unity of Opposites

“The Cross is the union of two pairs of opposites, and the practice of the Cross is the work of conciliation of four opposites—two horizontal and two vertical opposites. The Eagle and the Bull are vertical opposites: they are the tendencies towards the heights and the depths, towards the general and the particular, towards a comprehensive overview and towards the minutiae of points of detail. The Angel and the Lion constitute the other pair of opposites on the cross of man’s instinctivity. Here it is a matter of the transformation of combative courage into moral courage—into the courage of conscience. For the instinct that we call ‘moral conscience’ is the effect of inspiration on the part of the Angel, and it is by elevating instinctual courage, i.e. the desire for heroism, adventure and struggle, that the latter is united with conscience and becomes the moral courage that we admire in martyrs and saints.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p259.

The Marriage of Activity and Passivity

“Hermeticism knows the law of the ‘marriage of opposites’ and it knows that inspiration is the marriage of activity and passivity in the soul.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p396.

“The marriage of opposites is a principle of universal significance. This is not a compromise that one contrives, but rather the cross and the magic of the cross. It is thus that the ‘true Self’ is united to the ‘lower self’ in the human being, where the ‘lower self’ is the cross of the ‘true Self’ and the ‘true Self’ is the cross of the ‘lower self’. The two poles of the human being then live in the presence of one another, the result of which is an alchemical process of gradual approach to one another.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p454.

Sole Hope for the World

“It is the same again with the conflict between science and religion, both in the East and in the West. They will have to suffer one another. And the result will be that there will always be more Einsteins and more Teilhard de Chardins—believing scientists and scientific priests. The magic of the cross, alchemy operating in the ‘marriage of opposites’, is therefore the sole hope for the world, for mankind and for its history. And it is precisely this principle of the ‘marriage of opposites’ which underlies Hermeticism.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p455.

Alchemy of the Cross

“We all have the mission of finding and bringing back to the flock (i.e. to the soul’s choral harmony) the lost sheep in ourselves. We are missionaries in the subjective domain of our own soul, charged with the task of the conversion of our desires, ambitions, etc. We have to persuade them that they are seeking the realization of their dreams in a false way, by showing them the true way. It is not a matter of commandment, but rather of the alchemy of the cross, i.e. making present an alternative way for our desires, ambitions, passions, etc. It is a matter, moreover, of the alchemical ‘marriage of opposites’. The practical way of doing this is meditation. It is deep meditation which makes present every ‘lost sheep’ in us.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p455-456.

“It is always the cross which realizes the marriage of opposites—including that of the formal knowledge of intelligence and the material knowledge due to revelation from above.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p510.

Birth of the Christ Self

“My life and time, with its psychological stuff, the divine creative intelligence. You stand firm on both of those axes, feet planted in being. You don’t just run off into psychological consideration. On one moment, something shifts. And you’ve been shot free out of the orbit of your whole psychological terror into being. That’s more than healing, that’s new creation.

“Something has coalesced in that moment that never existed before. It’s your Christ self, which is the real wedding of the opposites in you … fully present to both the pain and suffering of your being with no attempt to change it, diminish it, dissociate from it, fully present to it, fully present to the divine is the Christ child being born in the manger of your own human life. It’s precious, and it carries you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Awakened Mind Awakened Heart, 6:41 disc4 track6

Bearing Paradox Without Resolution

“Our tendency to think in either-or … this great discomfort being in the tension of opposites. It’s really a hard place to be. It’s not a natural environment for the human psyche. And so what we tend to do is immediately to collapse the tension in one direction or another. And the capacity to stand firm in that which is every which way is an acquired taste and it’s acquired soul skill. Only when we’re able to begin to do that do we have much chance of anything else happening. The capacity to bear paradox without the need to immediately resolve it is an essential midwife in a situation. The more we can do that, the longer we can wait, the more profoundly we can hold that tension, the more we present ourselves as a locus where something else can arise.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 3:00 5-06 True Self – Holding Tension disc5 track6

Flowing Rhythm

“Light and darkness are not separate things. They are not opposites. They are a flowing rhythm. Life and death. The whole thing is a flowingness. And you can’t have one term without the other.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 16:17 3.2 Vigilance.

“God is beyond the opposites. You cannot find God if you cling to one side of a pendulum at the expense of another. That’s unitive thinking.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 10:42 disc1 track3 1-03 03 Revisiting Christian history.

Standing Between: The Just Man

“The Greek word for righteousness (įȓțȘ) has the original meaning of being upright and so, between the opposites. The ‘just’ or ‘righteous’ man, both of the New Testament and of the Socratic teaching four centuries earlier, and of the teaching of Pythagoras as early as the 6th century B.C., is the ‘upright’ man, the man who stands balanced between the opposites and is neither of them. This is a very difficult idea to understand.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p326.

“The just man is between the opposites, in a state of equilibrium. Why is it so important to get somewhere into the centre of the pendulum and not swing to and fro? Because here,  between the opposites, lie all the possibilities of growth. Here influences from higher levels reach us.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p329.

“When we reach a point in which both liking and disliking and all their thoughts do not govern us, we become insulated from the ordinary power of life over us. Remember that this is not indifference but is a state of becoming conscious between the opposites that are always swinging our life to and fro as on a pendulum. Indifference is mechanical but keeping between the opposites is conscious.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p605

The Language Between Opposites

“Truth lies between the opposites. Therefore, it is impossible to express it formatorily. Language uses either one opposite or the other  opposite, but we do not know that there is another language which lies between the opposites, spoken by Higher Centres: one that we can by training listen to a little, but not put into formatory words—one, indeed, that often clothes itself in dream allegories or parables.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1659.

“Try always to think what mercy means, because it lies between the opposites.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1375.

Third Force: The Relating Force

“Third Force lies between the opposites and so we can picture it as the mid-point of the pendulum-swing. … Here in the middle is the place or state where Real ‘I’ is. Real ‘I’ or Master comes from ‘above’ —that is, from a higher level. We cannot reach it from one or the other opposite.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p330

“This unity of opposites, this reconciling force, is a third thing, a Third Force, connecting both opposites and yet different from either. Let us recall one of the definitions of Third Force which lies between the two opposite and mutually destructive forces called active and passive. It is defined as the relating force. It is a force which partakes of both sides of any question, and brings them into a new relation, into a synthesis, and yet is neither of them.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p686.

Connection, Not Division

“[Jesus’] task was to connect Man with God—the natural with the spiritual—and not to cut asunder into opposites what are not opposites at all, but different levels and scales.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, p43.

“When you remove judgement, what’s left is compassion, not indifference” Cynthia Bourgeault, Vocabulary of Wisdom

---

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.

---

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll refer to Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise. 

Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Page numbers for Maurice Nicoll’s The New Man refer to Martino Fine Books, Eastford CT, 2019

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.

Read the Impression on Meditations on the Tarot.