“The witnessing selfhood, or Imaginal selfhood, is of a lighter density: contained, non-identified, collected, balanced, and gathered.” Cynthia Bourgeault

A Missing Name for Subtle Selfhood

“There is a selfhood, just as there is subtle perception, there’s also subtle selfhood. And we’ve talked about it, but the western tradition doesn’t even have a name for it. To my knowledge, I’ve looked and looked and looked to see if we can find an authentic western spiritual name to describe subtle selfhood. And I don’t think you can. I mean, we finally have to borrow the term which is used in the eastern traditions with witnessing selfhood or the observing self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 19:05 Wed am teaching.

Witnessing Self: World 24 Consciousness

“But the witnessing self is a selfhood of a lighter density. It’s a World 24 selfhood. So its chief features in this realm are: it’s contained, it’s non-identified, it’s collected, it’s balanced, it’s gathered. Gurdjieff called it man number four, the conscious balanced man. And the sense of selfhood that comes out of that is fundamentally different from the sense of selfhood generated at the levels below it. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing talked about it saying, pay attention not to what you are, but to that you are.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 19:55 Wed am teaching.

Capacities Beyond Like and Dislike

“It’s your Imaginal self. And it has a very, very different property to it, a very, very different quality. It lives beyond like and dislike. It is capable of forming genuine webs. Not webs based on the feeling of emotion and loneliness and connectivity and bonding and absence, but on representing, which means being able to extend your attention at this quiet, gathered level to include the others. It can live in a web. It can create a web. It can withdraw into a deep and tight sense of I am-ness and extend out from that into a profound and unboundaried inclusiveness in which the true and full incorporation of another into one’s world doesn’t hurt and doesn’t diminish. These are extraordinary capacities of this other self, this witnessing self.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 21:13 Wed am teaching.

The Prerequisite: Stabilized Imaginal Selfhood

“It’s not hard. It’s your Imaginal self. And it’s who you are in World 24. And the bottom line is this, that Imaginal perception can only be reliably undertaken by a stabilized imaginal selfhood. Otherwise what you get is glimpses and visions brought back. It falls back to the psychic level. And you live at that for a good long time. I would say that most of our spiritual life is spent in that level of confusion. And one of my great frustrations with the spiritual industry today is that it fosters and in some sense perpetuates that level of confusion, inviting us to have all these wonderful spiritual experiences and then journal about them voluminously, making them part of our selfhood.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 22:57 Wed am teaching.

It Only Costs Everything

“I would want to make very clear with regard to our present concern that Imaginal causality can only be reliably read beginning at the level of witnessing selfhood and sooner or later demands that one join it at that level. In other words, you can do your sneak peak game for a while, but it’s not that difficult to become perfectly fluent and even masterful in imaginal causality. It only costs everything. And the problem is the price is too high. And we’re not prepared to pay what’s required to gain what we most want. And so we keep ourselves tied to the hearth fire, throwing our logs on the fire without realizing that if we stepped outside it’s already 70 degrees and the sun is shining.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 24:35 Wed am teaching.

A New Operating System: Heart Perception

“That there’s a strong, strong teaching, most strongly developed, I would say, in the world, in the sacred traditions of the world, in the Sufi and in the Eastern Orthodox traditions, that basically says that the shift to a new seat of selfhood requires a new operating system of perception. And this new operating system of perception both demands and confers a far higher and more subtle energy. And until you’ve shifted to this new operating system of perception, you know, you are going to default to your egoic self, because that’s the only thing you can run.

“So, it really is a matter of moving to a whole new system of perceptivity. And in these two aforementioned traditions I spoke of, Sufism and Eastern Orthodox mysticism, this is called heart perception. And the classic Eastern Orthodox slogan is putting the mind in the heart, which means not getting all emotional and fuzzy, it means entraining the vibrational field of the mind with its cognitive mechanisms, its brilliant cognitive mechanisms, to the far stronger vibrational field of the heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 27:53 Wed am teaching.

Vibrational Shift: When Being Energy Stabilizes

“And we’ve all been over this, I’ve been teaching this for half a dozen years now anyway, so this won’t be new to most people, but what may be new is the context I’m now trying to insert it into. That the reason that we keep reverting back to this level confusion between psychic and subtle, and we keep reverting back to trying to bring everything back to our nucleated egoic narrative self, is because we haven’t, in some sense, stabilized or accumulated the being energy within to run this other system. And once that happens, the rest will go like this. Once your being energetic, vibrational field has reached and stabilized and attained at a certain level, you can’t not live in your witnessing self. Because anything else just seems to you like fingers on a chalkboard. It’s too harsh, it’s too grating, it’s too manifestly fiction.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 29:47 Wed am teaching.

Two-Fold Work: Deconstruction and Construction

“And so the real work in the spiritual path is a two-fold work. One is deconstruction, and the other is reconstruction or construction. The deconstruction has to do with the illusions, the myths, the associative chains, plugging the energy leaks that keep drawing us back to the egoic self as home base. So that’s the deconstructive work. And you’re probably more familiar with that because most spiritual practice works harder there, you get it sooner. The constructive work is the actual work of engaging the attention, stabilizing the vibrational field, accumulating within oneself so that one can contain it and not leech it all out. A reservoir of this deeper and higher and finer spiritual energy, grounding it in the body, grounding the three centers so they’re in dialogue with each other.

“In other words, building the incarnate platform, building in the lower chakras, a system, a sturdy platform that will allow us to stably run this. So we know a lot about the deconstructive practices. They’re essentially the surrender practices, they’re the inquiry, they’re the self-observation practices that allow us to see through the myth, they’re the devotional practices that Centering Prayer does in such a beautiful, simple way that place our hearts quietly on the altar of God. We work these practices, and this is good.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 31:15 Wed am teaching.

Missing Piece: Constructive Practices

“They’re very, very good practices. But we know very, very, very little about the constructive practices. They haven’t been emphasized. They were not emphasized in the West at all. Until we got Gurdjieff and the Buddhists working here, we knew very, very little about attention, about mindfulness, about God knows what Gurdjieff is talking about, about three-centered awareness, about moving attention voluntarily around the body and holding it in a place in order to nurture and infuse and build up that. We didn’t know these things. We didn’t see their spiritual value. We didn’t see how they fit the program. The only program we understood, which was humility, is feeling completely a feeling of how low I am, worm theology. We didn’t know anything else. Frankly, the attention-based practices have tended, for good reason, to be taught one and one.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 33:35 Wed am teaching.

The Heart’s Pattern-Reading Capacity

“Kabir Helminski quote: We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect lies a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities, intuition, wisdom, a sense of unity, aesthetic, qualitative, and creative faculties, and image-forming and symbolic capacities. Well, if we pause right there, what you can see right there is that if we talk yesterday about the Imaginal causality being patterned, what comes screaming out at you in this first quote is that the heart is the instrument that reads the pattern. Okay? It’s prime to do that. He says, though these capacities are many, they are operating best when they are in concert. In other words, working harmoniously together. They comprise a mind, moreover, in spontaneous connection to the cosmic mind. Now, that’s a pretty jaw-dropping statement there. That is to say that if this heart of ours is true, you know, is a real heart, it’s a fractal of the divine heart, and is in spontaneous global connection with that divine heart.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 39:27 Wed am teaching.

Joined at the Hip: Heart and Imaginal Selfhood

“As the heart comes online, and we begin to learn more and more to steer, to perceive, to work through the eye of the heart, then the Imaginal selfhood comes right along with it because the two are really joined at the hip.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 0819 IWS Wednesday PM Teaching.

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

Logion 111
Yeshua says…
Heaven and earth will completely disappear
in your presence,
and the one who lives by means of the Living One
will not see death,
because, as Yeshua says,
‘The cosmos is not worthy
of the one who discovers the true Self.’

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Kabir Helminski, Living Presence: a Sufi Way to Mindfulness and the Essential Self, (TarcherPerigree, 2017)

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