“When you move into Imaginal causality and into Integral consciousness, time takes on the dimension of an intensifying factor, rather than a linear metronome.” Cynthia Bourgeault

Not Collapsed Into Same-As

“Is integral consciousness the same as the imaginal realm? And the answer is no. Nothing is ever the same-as. The minute you hear that question, you know that it’s going to be a question that lends to a dead end. Because everything exists in its own suchness. And it’s often the polarities and the differences between things that make them interesting. We want to collapse them for the sake of efficiency. But there’s definitely a dialogue, a resonance between them. And the resonance is interesting to look at. And I found at least five points in which this resonance is really strong.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 2:42 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

First Resonance: Chiastic Causality

“The first one is in the level of causality. Both integral consciousness and the imaginal realm are talking about, essentially, chiastic causality. In the imaginal realm, causality, rather than flowing from earlier to later along the line of chronological time, flows from a center of purpose out, like concentric rings, into time in both directions, like a pebble dropped into an ocean. … everything is always hovering around and in dialogue with Origin. And origin in integral consciousness doesn’t mean the first point on the timeline.

If you want to use Gurdjieffian language, it’s the ‘Do’ of each new octave of unfolding. And so in integral consciousnesses, as in Boehme, or as Gebser picks it up, we’re living in a much more intimate dialogue. … It doesn’t mean linear future. It means causal sources of the arising. So in this sense, they both share a much closer sense of causality.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 2:42 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

Second Resonance: Time as Intensification

“The second [resonance between Imaginal and Integral] is temporicity, in that our world, of course, runs under a metronomic drumbeat. It’s the way the game works in this world. The whole Western tradition of logic and causality is based on it. The earlier things cause the later things, and not the other way around. And time basically functions as the space in which something unfolds, or the regulator of the beat, or, as Gebser points out, the divider. It chops up the day, the sections, marked by those three great liturgical events, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Which are basically there to keep us from getting bored to death.

“But when you move into Imaginal causality and into Integral consciousness, time takes on the dimension of an intensifying factor, rather than a linear metronome. It shapeshifts. T.S. Eliot, who got this a lot in his poetry, talks about going into another intensity. And Gebser says over and over and over again that the new integral consciousness is not an extension of consciousness, but an intensification. He says that the integral emergence is really fundamentally about our being able to sustain a fundamentally different relationship with a fundamentally different character of time.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 5:57 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

Third Resonance: Diffusive Selfhood

“Both imaginal consciousness and the imaginal realm and what Gebser is speaking about, about integral consciousness and the self that emerges out of it, are on exactly the same page in which the self that we’re now working with represents the high watermark of what you might call perception through alienation, through standing outside, through separation. And when the new consciousness emerges, it gives way to a sense of selfhood which is more diffusive, more interpenetrating, less boundary, less separated from the whole.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 12:35 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

Second Body Threshold

“Is it fair to say that integral consciousness, the long-awaited integral consciousness, can only be achieved in the second body?” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 16:00 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

“And if my own calculations are right, if second body gives you access to the imaginal realm, it also gives you access to the integral level of consciousness. The structure of consciousness, because they’re basically two slightly variant ways of naming essentially the same animal.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2022 Second Body, 32:00 5-gebserian-integral-gurdjieffian-imaginal.

Three-Centered Awareness: Sharpening the Instrument

“Gurdjieff insisted that the things that we’re going to be practicing in the conscious work and the movements and the exercise are not just sort of tools for personal therapy, but they are sharpening the instrument of perception in you. And what makes this interesting is that as I read Gebser, they are sharpening it exactly along the lines of what he says supports the emerging integral consciousness, the next structure of consciousness, which seems to me to be founded completely on three-centered awareness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 35:12 01-Sunday Teaching Evil II.

Learning to Inhabit Your Own Skin

“To notice that when we fall out, into a cacophony of our various centers going in all sorts of directions, and to bring ourselves back into a fundamental inner alignment. And as that happens, the rest begins to unfold. Little by little, you come to learn how to inhabit your own skin. And you come to learn to actually perceive that second, more subtle body, already alive within your first body. And to trust where it’s going. And to learn to dialogue with its movements.

“That’s the essence of the wisdom work that we will be undertaking. Because with people who can hold that configuration, have what’s known in the inner traditions as being. And being is transmissible. It’s powerful. It’s palpable. And as we grow being, we will grow the new nest for the integral consciousness to arise. When to finally, one hopes, reach that critical threshold. So that it takes off and really carries us to where human beings have been pointing for a long time now.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 48:18 04 Sunday pm Teaching

Diaphaneity: Radiating Divine Presence

“If you wanted one image to convey what Gebser is talking about in the integral consciousness, I would propose that one. His integral consciousness is not a new capacity, a new trick that we can do. It is a new dimension. But it’s a harmonizing dimension that radiates, integrates, and holds increasing luminosity of divine presence within a finite form. That’s what we’re talking about.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 50:04 2.1 Diaphaneity.

Rebalancing

“The access to integral consciousness does not come through suppressing or repressing any of the gifts that have accrued in the unfolding…. it’s not a matter of strangling something, which immediately sends you into a repression to a lower level of consciousness. It’s a matter of rebalancing.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 36:25 3.1 Verition.

Jesus: The Inaugurator

“I believe that Jesus is the inaugurator in our line, the David, so to speak, that inaugurates the integral structure of consciousness. Two thousand years later, and we’re still struggling up the pike to get it, there was nothing ready in the culture to absorb it, to understand it, and hasn’t been for thousands of years.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025 CA, 59:34 08 Wed am Prayer Together 5-28-25

When Light Bursts Through

“For me, integral consciousness is basically what happens when the structure has become strong enough, sturdy enough, and pure enough that the original light can burst through it and reveal in that bursting through what the heart of God is really all about.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Stonington 2021, 1:20:34 19 – Thursday Morning Teaching.

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Logion 30
Yeshua says…
Where there are three divinities,
God is present.
Where one or two exist,
I am there.

Logion 113
His students asked him,
“On what day will the kingdom arrive? “
“Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside,” he said.
“You cannot say, ‘Look, it’s over there,’
or, ‘No, here it is.’
The Father’s realm is spreading out
across the face of the earth,
and humanity is not able to perceive it. “

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Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
T.S. Eliot, From “East Coker”, from *The Four Quartets*

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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.