“Our experience seems to be governed by the law of linear time and linear causality and so it looks like things come to us from some place that doesn’t exist yet which we call the future.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Beyond Linear Time: The Spatial Reality

“When you get deeply settled in your witnessing presence and can hold the bigger picture, you begin to discover that linearity and linear causality is merely a tiny little subsection of something that at the next level of consciousness appears spatial. And what we experience as stuff coming to us from the future is actually the emergence into our own space time continuum of that larger spatial related level of awareness. It’s just that we move towards where it is.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 3b.Thursam.TeachingConsciousGWS14.

“This particular dimension that we work in that we call space-time our planet our experience seems to be governed by the law of linear time and linear causality and so it looks like things come to us from some place that doesn’t exist yet which we call the future but when you really get deeply settled in your witnessing presence and can hold the bigger picture you begin to discover that linearity and linear causality is merely a tiny little subsection of something that at the next level of consciousness out appears spatial and what we experience is stuff coming to us from the future is actually the emergence into our own space time continuum of that larger spatial related level of awareness and so it comes to the extent that in our ordinary consciousness we get sucked right back into linearity and we don’t see it but it doesn’t come from something that is really outside or that doesn’t exist yet in some dimension. It’s just that we move towards where it is.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 3b.Thursam.TeachingConsciousGWS14

Origin Downloads: Not Past but Above

“The traditionalists, who like to go back to get the real teaching by going back to the first point in time, are forever off track. Because origin doesn’t lie in time. It lies outside time. … it’s the ‘Do’ of each new octave of unfolding. And a lot of the Teilhardians that have gone off in wonder after us, using the phrase, the future is coming to meet us, and living from the future. But they’re still using a language that belongs to and is generated on the horizontal timeline. The future is merely the Imaginal or the Origin downloading into time. It doesn’t mean linear future. It means causal sources of the arising.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building Second Body June 2022, 4:40 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

“Gurdjieff’s orientation is not towards behind, but towards what you might call above. And when above downloads into this world, we perceive it in time as the future. So if you want to take that transposition, you can say that the work, the orientation of the work is not toward the past, but toward the future, the becoming, the next generations, the new expression of truth which is always objective, but can only be expressed in the forms of every, in the forms and the language and the drapings of every culture in time. So you have a fundamental different orientation. The traditionalist movement tends to go rigid.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 18:00 03 – TUES AM Teaching

“To try and hold the future captive by time, is again another hallmark of Perspectival thinking, which is, of course, the mental egoic. The future is rather the direct download from the origin into manifestation. So the future is not the next point on a pre-existing temporal sequence. It’s the unfolding, manifesting, the ever-present unfolding.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 42:09 003-Modern perspectives on development of consciousness.

Ongoing Revelation Through Present Being

“When the timeless realities that actually define the parameters of this world appear, they can come into space-time from the timeless realm. And that will look like, when we download it here, the future. And so what I’m going to say, and this is what you almost never hear in the Gurdjieff work, that the work is not generically oriented toward the past. It’s oriented toward the future, accessed through a wider ability to stay present in the present. And it’s this point I’m fighting for because the tendency has been in 50 years of trying to live as students of Gurdjieff to turn it into a Gurdjieff mausoleum. Again, because of this overemphasis on the fact that it’s in the past. What he’s really trying to do is to show us the practices that make us amenable to ongoing revelation. And when ongoing revelation happens, and it happens when a level of being is accessed.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 24:13 03 – Monday Morning Teaching

“In every society, there is a small group of people who wake up to the terror of the situation, as [Gurdjieff] calls it, see their actual state, and work both alone and together to bring forth something new from the future, from above into the now in an ongoing evolution of the planet.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 18:00 03 – TUES AM Teaching

The Living One in Our Presence

“The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 52, his disciples said, all 24 of the prophets spoke about you. And [Yeshua] says, you look to the past and ignore the living one in your presence. If the mind and our heart is working properly, we start from the ability to recognize the living one in our presence. And we value that above all else in our spiritual grab bag. Cultivate it, discern it, distill it, test it, so that recognizing the living one in our presence, we’re then able to properly wield and fashion and orient towards both past and future.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 17:43 04 – TUES PM Teaching.

Held Together from Above

“[Teilhard] realized over the course of his life that he was looking in the wrong place to find out that although you would think that the thing that holds everything together is at the bottom, the foundation. … the densest structure matter, he learned it was that things held together from the top, from what’s above is the future. It comes into us, into time, pulling us forward to a radical completion, which is both personally and cosmically experienced.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 39:32 04 – TUES PM Teaching.

“Notice what [Teilhard] says, I don’t want to harp on this, but ‘one more star has just been born, this time a planet, imprisoning the human future within its globe and motion.’ Notice the word imprison. This comes back to Teilhard’s really deep sense that until the conditions of being constricted, placed in captivity, as it were, so that you can’t just keep flying on out into endless expansion, until that happens, the whole path to actualization of what’s latent can’t happen.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Dec Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 34:00 08 – Tuesday Morning Teaching.

Through Matter into New Forms

“[Christian Wisdom] has its own imperative that plunges it incarnationally into the world and sees the future as not something going in the wrong direction, but as the downloading of the new possibilities in an evolving, evolutionary, validly earthy cosmos. So the threads that we find in Teilhard de Chardin, the threads we find in Jesus’s embracing of the body, in Jesus’s embracing of the full-fledged incarnational reality, and the threads that we find in that Gurdjieffian strain that give us tools such as the law of three to say that the direction in which the divine is manifest in this world is not by sucking us back into an eternal spirit, but by birthing ever new and more complex and more intricate and messy forms. The journey is always through matter into new forms, not beyond and up.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage.

Being Within: Neither Past nor Future

“Neither past nor future will save us. But only this other dimension, which is a dimension which can only be grown within the individual soul by growing Being.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 47:37 006-Teilhard optimism and Gurdjieff’s pessimism

The Mental Construct of Future

“There is no future. The future is an intellectual, ordering principle, an abstraction imposed upon a series of flowing nows. And it’s an artificial construct. I don’t mean by that that this moment doesn’t evolve or flow into something else. It always does. That’s the nature of things. But the idea of trying to get it outside ourself, look down on it, label it the future, then give it the right to determine the now, it’s a useful survival thing if you’re trying to figure out where the motel is that you’re going to stay in tomorrow night. It’s a good operational convenience, but to pin your state of being, which is real and intimate and alive on something that’s to begin with outside of yourself, and second, located in something which is entirely a perspectival trick of the mental structure of consciousness, is self-imposed slavery.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Guelph 2024, 37:00 05 – friday morning.

“The kind of hope you have is really slavery for two reasons. First of all, because it pins an inner state on outer circumstances. In other words, it projects the capacity to act, to call something forth onto circumstances outside ourself, rather than looking within to the sources of that capacity. And second, it projects it onto an abstract thing called the future, which is entirely a creation of the mental structure of consciousness. And if you doubt me, go looking through the history of the evolution of consciousness in the planet. Look at the other structures of consciousness—magic, archaic, mythic, and you will not find future. It was created and came into being with a mental structure of consciousness that could project a point on the horizon and organize toward it. Even in the mythic structure of consciousness, there’s no future. There’s circular, people talk about it, rhythmic recurrence, as one gives to another.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 13:11 11 Tuesday am Teaching.

Present to the Present

“You know, outcome can be anything but it’s within. And it has to do not with the future, not with the meaning of future, but with the present. Or if you want to put it at the next small step, with presence, which means being present to the present.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 26:02 11 Tuesday am Teaching.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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Logion 52
His students said,
“Each of Israel’s twenty-four prophets
spoke about you.”
Yeshua said,
“You ignore the one living in your presence
and talk only about the dead.”

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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.