Spiritual awakening: “Heaven is not a place that you die into, but a place that you awaken to, and you awake now, and you awake in the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment.” Cynthia Bourgeault
The Foundation of Spiritual Awakening
“The obedient mind has an awake and cultivated sense of obedience, i.e. the spiritual hearing of the will, which renders it capable of recognizing the voice of truth and distinguishing it from other voices.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p639.
“We are born awake and without inner contradictions. It is all very tiny. We grow up among sleeping people who have ceased to see their own contradictions.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1203.
“A little child is awake although of course it is all on a very small scale. The Work says that children are born awake and that they are born into a world of sleeping people and very soon they fall asleep themselves in the Work-sense and they lose a kind of integrity that belongs to small children. In small children there is a kind of Real Conscience, but very soon this is overlaid by the action of life and the Personality begins to be formed.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p755.
The Subtle Nature of Awakening
“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.
“[Humanity] cannot keep awake to the full meaning of the teaching given them. Many things are said about being asleep and keeping awake in the Gospels. Often the disciples are described as being asleep and it is not literal, physical sleep that is meant. And there are many references to the necessity of being awake in order to understand the Word of the Kingdom. Christ often says: ‘Watch’, which in the Greek means ‘Be awake’. Christ says: ‘What I say unto you I say unto all, Be awake’. Again, he says: ‘Be awake for you know not when the master of the house cometh, lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.’ (Mark xiii, 35. ) This refers to a state of inner awareness or awakeness in the house of one’s own being at a certain critical time.
“When a man is overpowered by the world of the senses, by life as it appears, by all the events and tasks and frictions of daily existence, the teaching about inner evolution and a higher level of Man fades from his mind and appears remote and unreal. The outer swallows up the inner. He is then asleep, in the sense of the Gospels; and what he understood when he was awake internally he loses sight of or mingles with other meanings.” Maurice Nicoll, The New Man, chapter 11, part 3.
The Practice of Staying Awake
“The [Hermetic] teaching—or the ‘body’ of its tradition—consists of spiritual exercises and all its arcana (including the Arcana of the Tarot) are practical spiritual exercises, whose aim is to awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p91.
“Stay present, stay collected, don’t fall asleep, which means don’t go on autopilot. There’s many ways of falling asleep, though. There’s ways of falling asleep in expectation, in daydream, in, in anger, in rage, in boredom. And the, the foolish handmaidens all went to sleep in one sort of way, and the staying awake means to be three-centered, aware, present to the situation, ready to spot what’s available in the moment and work with it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 52:00 09 Monday eve QA.
“Being awake means being alert, receptive, and coordinated in all three centers, being present in a certain kind of way. And for Gurdjieff, it was an unbroken loop. To be asleep meant to be working in one center only, or maybe one, and in a habitual way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:08:30 3.1 Verition.
“It begins by not allowing your attention to be grabbed again and again by objects out there. As we begin to learn to draw the living pool of attentiveness within, we discover that yes, the measure is within, and the light of God is within. … And the texts all say, whatever else they say about staying awake and this quality that we’re going to call vigilance, keep awake, it has to do with this centrifugal motion of your attention so that it comes under your voluntary awareness and is not just leeching out this way or that way so that it’s not running to the surface. Profound teaching. And it’s another teaching that can only be accessed through sensation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 2:55 3.2 Vigilance.
“What does it mean to be awake when you work? What is presence? How do you find it? How do you notice when you’ve fallen out of it? And even more important, how do you get back into it? So in the work is this extraordinary body of knowledge and skills relating to transformation of presence. Or in other words, raising the state of your being so that you become receptive to higher meaning.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 16:07 0.1a First Evening Welcome & Introduction Part 1.
The Recognition of Awakening
“You have to be awake yourself to spot someone who’s awake.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 8:40 Day 4.6b Evening Teaching Part 2.
“To feel something as real in the measure of its full reality is to love. It is love which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of the world and to the reality of God.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p126.
The Lived Experience of Presence
“The more you get stabilized in your integral consciousness, the more you see things spatially rather than in linear sequence. So heaven is not a place that you die into, but a place that you awaken to, and you awake now, and you awake in the next moment, and the next moment, and the next moment.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:15:37 Advent-Session-with-Cynthia-16Dec2022.
“Here is one of my all-time favorites of Thomas Keating’s teaching. It flows directly out of that one, where people ask him, what is this presence like? What does it tell you? What does it give you? He says, this presence, once established in our inmost being, might be called spaciousness. There is nothing in it but a certain vibrancy and aliveness. You’re awake, but awake to what? You don’t know. You’re awake to something that you can’t describe and which is absolutely marvelous, totally generous, and which manifests itself with increasing tenderness, sweetness, and intimacy.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence as Presence Feb 2025, 23:35 02 Silence Fri am teaching.
Logion 4
Yeshua says…
A person of advanced age must go immediately
and ask an infant born just seven days
about life’s source.
Such asking leads to life
when what is first becomes last.
United they become a single whole.
Logion 37
His students asked him,
“When will you manifest yourself to us?
How long will it be
before we see you as you truly are?
Yeshua replied,
“On the day you strip yourselves naked
like those little children,
and take your clothes and trample them
on the ground under your feet without shame,
then you will be able
to look upon the son of the Living One
without fear.”
Logion 46
Yeshua says,
Among those born on Earth,
beginning from Adam to John the Baptist,
no-one has reached a higher state than John –
and you should bow in honor before him.
Yet I tell you this:
whoever of you becomes a little child
will not only know the kingdom,
but will be raised to a state higher than John’s.
Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.
Our friendship is made of being awake.
Rumi
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
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