“Wait in patience until light arises out of darkness and leads thee. And light does arise out of darkness somewhere in the soul.” Cynthia Bourgeault
Mother of Will
“Gurdjieff said: ‘Patience is the Mother of Will.’ That is, Will, passing through patience as Third Force, attains what it wants.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1017
Possessing Your Soul
“The undeveloped soul does not wish in the least to perform its proper function. It wants to go on looking out of the window. Intractable things, like naughty children, need patience. The soul acting in the self-love possesses us. That totally misunderstood saying ‘In your patience possess ye your souls’ (Luke xxi.19) properly translated is: ‘It is by patience that you will secure possession of your souls.’ When the soul turns round it finds its proper place and begins to exercise its proper functions inwardly, which, have to do with the reception of meaning from Higher Centers.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p1695.
“♪ ♪ Unknowing, abide. In stillness, abide. In patience, in patience, possess your soul. Unknowing, abide. In stillness abide. In patience, in patience, possess your soul. ♪ ♪ “ Familiar Wisdom School chant.
Spiritual Substance
“The main ongoing work of the conscious circle is to reduce the psychic smog and where possible to rebalance it with a direct infusion of those other elements which we have been referring to as Fruits of the Spirit. Namely, love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These two are powerful psycho-energetic nutrients for both the noosphere and the biosphere. … You need to put patience under eye of the heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 19:13 018-Evening Questions.
“The other work we’ve been doing, and it’s been a large part of my portfolio of teaching, has been to come back to these core fruit of the spirit, as they’re described in the epistles, and the core virtues, faith, hope, love, trust, patience, gentleness, forbearance, peace, steadfastness. You’ll find them all in Galatians. These are not just admirable moral qualities. They are actual, subtle, spiritual substances. And when they’re present in an atmosphere, a different possibility is there. … This, I think, is supremely the bailiwick of wisdom students. To simply stand present, stand collected, not to allow yourself to be scrambled, not let your atmosphere be raped in all directions by your reactivity, but to stand present and, as you can, generate and bestow these gifts of faith, trust, gentleness, patience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 17:03 04e-Wed pm Teaching Evil.
Active Allowing
“The Latin verb patior is the passive sense—it means I am acted upon, essentially. And it gives rise to a bunch of words that really look to be different for each other. It gives rise to the word passion, it gives rise to the word passive, and it gives rise to the word patience.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 44:03 4.1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.
“There’s this allowing oneself to go into that luminous darkness, that womb, and let it be. And so when you work with that, you come back to this funny word we went over—patience. And, you know, patience is all over Advent. We wait in patience. It comes from patior, I allow. And I would say that patience, as we understand it, and we bump into it in Advent and the spiritual teaching, is the bridge and the practice that allows us to move from mechanical patior to this cosmogonic, freely bestowing, engendering, allowing. … Patience is the beginning of moving from involuntary patiore suffering, from mechanical passivity to active letting be.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:10:41 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency.
“So patience is the first watchword. That active, alert, patior, including a lot of the dimensions that I wait, I’m intelligently passive.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 6:23 5.1 Apocalypse or Unveiling.
Standing Still Until Light Arises
“Why did Jesus die for our sins and we all proclaim the resurrection and still there’s gun violence in schools once a week? You know, if the world was changed, why does nothing change? You know, and we look at it and say, what’s wrong with this picture? Why won’t it, why won’t it help it? Well, the reason is what, is what happens is a subtle chemistry in our own self. As we learn to stand—deep, objective, compassionate—stand still and act not, and wait in patience. Until light arises out of darkness and leads thee. And light does arise out of darkness somewhere in the soul, if you know that that’s gonna be the fruit of it. And it joins with this light that Christ has already placed there in world six.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 45:35 04e-Wed pm Teaching Evil.
“♪ ♪ Art thou in the Darkness? Mind it not, for if thou dost it will feed thee more. But stand still, and act not, and wait in patience, till Light arises out of Darkness and leads thee. ♪ ♪ “ James Nayler (1659) chant by Paulette Meier.
The Sisyphus Moment
“I’ve watched people that are the Sisyphus poster child, who for 50 years of a spiritual journey, keep patiently pushing the rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again. And up they go again, and the patience of these. And then finally, at some point, God knows why, that moment has passed. And there’s a push, and the rock goes up. And all of a sudden, they’re in a different place. They speak from a different center. It doesn’t shift back.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 51:20 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.
Offering What We Don’t Feel
“You may wake up in the morning feeling totally wrecked and dispirited, fragile yourself, and yet you can stand up to the plate and do this work. ‘I will offer patience’. And because you’re offering it, not taking it, somehow it works. You don’t have to be strong to do this kind of work. You just have to be willing. You have to get over the story that says you’re too fragile to do anything to help. And the idea that we can proactively generate these elements, that they don’t have to be earned, is a whole wonderful way of participating once again in the image and likeness of God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 58:25 Final Teaching Day 5.
Anti-Entropic Force
“Patience is the way you bear with a situation, one of the capacities, but it’s a higher thing. So, begin to look at these things and begin to feel each one of them, not just as a virtue, but an agent, as a stream, as a kind of signature kind of way of action and substance and tincture. … All of these are agents that when we work with them unconsciously can bring a field which is disordered and disconnected into a higher degree of relationality and order. In other words, we’re talking about an anti-entropic force. And this is what the fruits of the spirit really are.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 56:02 11 Tuesday am Teaching.
The Serene Faith
“In the world there are therefore two different kinds of arriving at a conviction: one can be illumined by the serene clarity of contemplation, or one can be swept away by an electrifying flood of passionate arguments aiming at a desired end. The faith of the illuminated is full of tolerance, patience and calm steadfastness. The faith of those who are swept away is, in contrast, fanatical, agitated and aggressive—in order to live it needs conquests without end, because it is conquest alone which keeps it alive. The faith of those who are swept away is greedy for success, this being its reason for existence.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p271.
Until Our Comfort Zone Is Threatened
“We’re corpses, Imaginally speaking. And we’re looking at a world of dead men walking, which is why we may be so desensitized to it. And you can’t just wag your finger and take the moral high ground. Because if you have a shred of honesty about it, you see that you’re as complicit as anyone else. And that the whole facade of peace, kindness, gentleness, civility, patience, forbearance, only lasts until your comfort zone is threatened. After that, hell hath no fury like a woke liberal spurned.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 2nd Body, 22:16 2-the-generation-of-spiritual-substances.
Logion 83
Yeshua says…
Images are revealed to humanity
while the light within them is hidden
by the brilliance of the Father’s light.
It is God who is being revealed,
but the image of God
remains concealed by the blaze of light.
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
Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.
Read the Impression on Meditations on the Tarot.
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