“Only when you have come to know your true Self will you be fully known—realizing at last that you are a child of the Living One.” Yeshua, Logion 3, Gospel of Thomas

The Ancient Call to Inwardness

♪ ♪ “Keep within, keep within, and when they say look here or look there is Christ, go not forth, for Christ is within you, and all who try to draw your mind away from the teaching inside you are opposed to Christ. For the measure’s within, and the light of God is within, and the pearl is within you, though hidden.” ♪ ♪ George Fox, 1652, chant by Paulette Meier.

“May my peace reside with you. Guard carefully that no one misleads you saying, ‘Look, he is here,’ or ‘He’s over there,’ for the Son of Humanity already exists within you. Follow him, for those who seek him there will find him.” Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Dialogue 1.

The Quality of Gathered Attention

“So that’s an important song from one of the great Quaker designs, and it’s talking about a certain quality of attention, and it’s not so much a story about where truth is. … It’s talking about, and you can sense it in yourself, keep within. Don’t let your attention go running this way and that way and that way and that way, whoring after everything. Keep it gathered, present. This is something that the Eastern Orthodox tradition knows as vigilance or attention of the heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:55 3.2 Vigilance.

“In Gurdjieffian terms the pity is we are receiving assistance all the time. And we are too stuck in our drama to notice it. And the reason we are stuck in our drama is because our attention is scattered all over everywhere. That’s why we started with this Keep Within. The vigilance of the heart, as the Eastern Orthodox tradition calls it, guarding the heart so that something stays that isn’t just getting when our attention runs out this, that and the other. If you play with this correlation between time and attention where you are going to wind up is you are out of time. You are breathless. You are multitasking. You are scattered all over the place.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:11:28 3.2 Vigilance.

The Practice of Sensing Your Atmosphere

“That atmosphere surrounding me and moving on all sides, above, behind, below, beginning to familiarize myself with the taste of it, the smell, the sensation, the quality, I feel it, I notice whether it’s wavy, whether it’s being pulled out beyond that limit, my thoughts or associations, frustrations, feel, sense the edge, that semi-permeable membrane, like a spell, surrounding me, I sense it from the inside out, and if I have trouble with that, I can bring my attention outward more, outside the room, and then slowly towards myself, noticing if I can meet that from the outside in, sensing, feeling, this self, and allowing myself to remain within, to keep within, notice what pulls me out, and rather than being troubled by it, I release, return, familiarize myself, even more, with the feeling, the sensation of it, my gathered, collected presence, and in so doing, I trust, that as I am collected, I’m never not connected to the whole body, to every other self, I don’t think about that, it just is, no matter what may be happening in my atmosphere, whether it’s calm or wavy, somewhere deep within is a place of stillness, in the midst of movement, quiet, in the midst of sound, an inner, ‘I am’.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil Feb 2023 CA, 11:40 Gurdjieff Exercise Day 1.

The Real I

“Gurdjieff called it the Real I. And I like that self, that time, because the witnessing self sounds a little bit dissociative. But what it means by witnessing self is that you’re just not grabbing on everything. You have that capacity to keep within, that we’ve talked about. But it doesn’t always come out feeling like that, when you look at it as a witnessing force, you try and self-detect, no thank you, I don’t want that, I don’t want to be on the benches, I don’t want to be on the bystands, I want to be in there acting. And Gurdjieff’s capacity of the Real I, who is the real owner of this courage, seems to talk more about a concentrated and directed force, that there’s somebody there, but that the capacities and the capaciousness of the presence has vastly increased, and it’s not finding itself by telling a story about itself. It’s finding itself in a whole different way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 40:31 3.2 Vigilance.

The Warning Against Spiritual Dependency

“There’s this real imperative to keep within, turn within, and learn to trust that which is at your heart of hearts. And it’s a good warning. Gurus and teachers are useful. We’d be nowhere without them. But when we start hiding under them so that we’re not doing our own work, or taking everything they say on strict obedience and then giving up our own power of critical discernment, then we’ve betrayed the contract, both to our teacher and to ourself.” Kanuga Nov 2015, 14:13 Day 3.5 Afternoon Teaching Gospel of Thomas, Logion 3.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 106
Yeshua says…
When you are able to transform two into one,
then you will become a “Son of Humanity,”
and it will be possible for you
to say to a mountain, “Move,” and it will move.

Logion 3
Yeshua says…
If your spiritual guides say to you,
“Look, the Divine Realm is in the sky,”
well then the birds will get there ahead of you.
If they say, “It is in the sea,”then the fish will precede you.
No, divine Reality exists
inside and all around you.
Only when you have come to know your true Self
will you be fully known—realizing at last that you are
a child of the Living One.
If, however, you never come to know who you truly are,
you are a poverty-stricken being,
and it is your “self” which lies impoverished.

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

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.