“Jacob Boehme says the soul begins in the fire principle and as we are willing to submit to the alchemy of transformation, that’s how something emerges.” Cynthia Bourgeault

From Friction to Self-Perceptivity

“What [Jacob Boehme] is calling anguish, if you took it down into pure sensation, it would be friction. It would be the physical sensation of things rubbing against each other which is experienced in the emotional level as anguish. That’s its counterpart when it plays in the emotional center. And then he takes this magnificent leap. and much of his writing depends on this. He says that anguish is also the beginning of what he calls self perceptivity. Or in other words there’s someone there to register the anguish. You know that I’m in anguish. It’s the beginning for him the headwaters of what you would eventually call reflective consciousness which will grow up in us many many eons down the evolutionary trail as the ability to step back from our life from a deeper witness and presence and feel very keenly that we are a viewing platform perceiving reality and blessing reality in a way by blessing by reflecting on it that whole thing which is really the crown jewel of the human mind—self reflective awareness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 45:39 5b.Satam.TeachingGWS14.

The Emergence of Fire from Friction

“We left it hanging at this beautiful point yesterday where we had the friction between the desiring and the inflammation of it, the anguish. The next thing that Boehme envisions, which is basically his fourth property to emerge, is fire. And again, this emerges in exactly the way that when you’re rubbing two sticks together, all of a sudden, you know, the friction gets so intense that a spark is loosed and that becomes his fourth property or fourth form.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 13:24 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14

“And it’s the light world that we’re really principally concerned with in Boehme in this journey towards divine unfolding. Because it is the alchemical transformation of darkness. And it’s what’s required in the darkness, the dark world, the fire world, the friction, the anguish is required in order for something to emerge out of it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 16:57 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14

Love Born from Separability

“So what emerges out of it? Well, just to talk about one of the most powerful things that Boehme says at one point … he says that by submitting itself to this constriction, tensioning, anguish, flash of perceptivity, and moving on into something, he says, for so, the eternal delight becomes perceivable. And this perceiving of the unity is called love.

“Do you get what that means? The implications are staggering. That what we’re really saying is that this light world is what Jacob Boehme will call, being a shoemaker, a counterstroke of the endless unity. It’s what the endless unity actually looks like when it begins to play, when it comes forth on the ground of separability and division, which are the required terms for consciousness. The other implication, and I think this is absolutely staggering as well, is that love is not a property of the divine endless unity that can become manifest apart from the ground of separability and division—motion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 18:16 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14

The Luminescence of Love Under Tension

“This is a profound statement whose implications are staggering. And for me, as a Christian mystic wannabe, what I see just in the short, quick and dirty version of them, is each of the realms and each of the reiterations, as the Trinity turns, allows this quality love, which is joined at the hip with consciousness, it allows it to materialize and take form and take shape in more subtle and profoundly luminous realizations and so on. Okay? And the more, in a funny way, the more you put love under tension, under the constriction of form, the more luminescent and tender it glows. That love within the boundaries of complete finitude, which is the most impossible tensioning of the opposites you can imagine, has a quality to it that breaks your heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 21:28 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.

The True Self Created in Fire

“So we’re launched. The light world comes out of the dark world because the light world is an alchemical transubstantiation of the substances in order that the product of it can be love. The first iteration of that. So that’s what Boehme is saying. And this has major, major implications all around, all down the board. Because remember with Boehme, as in the macro, so in the micro, this tells us a lot about our own life. That our transformed self, our true self, is not an art restoration project. It’s not like there was some original divine thing and all we have to do is sort of scrub away all the false self. It’s also not avoiding pain. Not if Boehme is right. The true self doesn’t a priori exist. It’s created in the flames and the fire of this small self.

“Jacob Boehme says the soul begins in the fire principle and as we are willing to submit to the alchemy of transformation, that’s how something emerges. Gurdjieff was onto that when he said that our personality becomes food for our essence. But you’ve got to have this sojourn and the constriction and the tensioning and the tightness to really for the fruit to come forth.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 23:22 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.

The Counterstroke Map: Not Diminished Copies but New Realities

“The point is that the journey we go through in time, here in this realm, in which we start in the fire principle and through the process of our own spiritual enlightenment, awaken to and inhabit the transforming version of ourself, is something that has to happen here and didn’t qualitatively exist before. Very often in the great metaphysical emanationist maps, you use the word that each of the worlds as you go out down the great chain of being is an emanation and an image of the original. And of course you know what’s happening if you’ve ever used a copying machine. Each image gets less clear, less sharp, less alive, more kind of derivative.

“So we get the idea that the real lies up here somewhere and that we’re just a very kind of rubbed copy of it. The counter-stroke map says something really different, that each of these realms is not an image of an original perfection, each one getting less and less energized, that this is a real new playing field. This here is what love doesn’t just look like, but actually is. The fullness of God, this is what the fullness of God looks like when it’s playing on a field defined by temporality and duality. Okay? So it’s a real deal.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 26:51 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.

The Wrestling Path of Involution

“Gurdjieff always says that it’s out of that friction, out of that struggle between the yes and no that something is crystallized. it’s been my time in the Gurdjieff work that’s that’s shaped my own teaching and my own life experience to not be afraid of struggle and not not wish to run too quickly to use my spiritual practice to collapse the tension.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 56:45 13 – Wednesday Evening Q&A.

“In the friction between these two perspectives within you, something needs to come forth as a third force within it, and it’s that that finally becomes the holy cosmic food that is transferred up. It’s not your perfected soul, it’s the process, it’s whatever is released in the process of the struggle and the wrestle, the awakening, that in that instant, like a flame that goes on, is the food.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:16:44 10 – FRI AM Teaching.

“Create in yourself that little friction machine that transforms everything. Jacob Boehme has that wonderful quote: ‘here now is the right time to wrestle before the divine face. If you stand firm, if you do not bend, you will see and perceive great wonders. You will see how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts.’ It’s a wonderful, robust quote. Gurdjieff could not have said it any better. It’s a wrestling. The path of involution is accomplished through wrestling. And, if you stand firm, if you don’t bend, that means if you don’t run off into self-justification, defense, or just screaming out the door, if you take it, if you stand there on the movement’s floor and can do nothing more than just stand there while the rest of the thing swirls around and you feel like a complete idiot, if you stand firm, you will see and perceive great wonders, that Christ will storm the hell in you. Something will enter and the state will shift. But it’s the work of friction that’s created it, a willingness to sacrifice your consummation at one level.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2023 March, 1:06:00 04 sunday afternoon teaching.

---

Logion 82
Yeshua says…
Whoever comes close to me
dwells near the fire.
Whoever moves away from me
remains far from the kingdom.

Logion 58
Yeshua says…
Blessed are the troubled.
They have seized hold of life.

Logion 67
Yeshua says…
If you come to know all,
and yet you yourself are lacking,
you have missed everything.

---

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.