Incarnational cosmogonic Christian mysticism: The divine fragrance requires both manifest and unmanifest in mutual embrace.

The Core Question

Why does anything exist at all?

“What in the world is cosmogonic mysticism? When we put that title on it, it’s like, huh? You may have heard of the word cosmic, but what is cosmogonic? Well, I’d never heard of that term until I stumbled on it many years ago in Jung, and I began to realize after it had taken me three months or so to parse out what it meant, that it actually is a very interesting term. Cosmogonic has to do with the beginnings, the origins of things, really cosmically. How does anything get here in the first place is the core question that cosmogonic mysticism is always dancing around.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism 2025, 11:00.

“Cosmogonic mysticism is a kind of mysticism that really preoccupies itself, camps out around the question of origin. Why did anything get here in the first place? Why did the uncreated light not just stay uncreated? Why should anything exist in the first place? And if so, how did it happen? Jacob Boehme, another great cosmogonic mystic, said, how did the endlessness bring itself into somethingness?” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 13:00 07 Silence Mon am teaching.

“In his own late years, Thomas Keating, founder and originator of the Centering Prayer movement, gravitated himself more and more steadily towards the same cosmogonic mysticism that we’ve talked about. That we’ve seen in so few others, Jacob Boehme, Meister Eckhart on his better days, Bernadette Roberts, G.I. Gurdjieff, why does anything exist at all? And everybody who develops a taste for cosmogonic mysticism realizes that the reason that this is going on, it’s not a nerd specialty. It’s because you have to go right back to the origins, the very origins, to trace some of the subtle threads that simply won’t resolve themselves when you get further down the Ray of Creation. But when you see how much is there in the very beginning, it allows you to understand and forgive and align better.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2025 Jan, 3:04 14 – jan 17 friday morning teaching.

Not Just Origins—Continuous Origin

“What gives cosmogonic mysticism its real guts and blood is because everybody who gets to the point of how did this origin happen realized that it’s repeating in every moment of our life, that the same kind of figuration that may have originally launched us on the Big Bang and before is, in each second of awakening and breathing, being refreshed in our own lives. So everything in micro detail recapitulates the origin. And as we understand that, we can dance it creatively.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Secret Embrace Holy Isle 2025, 23:05 08 Day 4 Morning – Manifest and Unmanifest.

“Ta Panta-ing”: All-ness as Process

“There’s no final steady state of the all-ness of God. Because as soon as you make it a steady state, the all-ness disappears. There’s only, as soon as you make it a steady state, the all-ness disappears. Because the all-ness is released and unfolded in the Ta Panta-ing, in the very process, in the very dynamism of the cosmogonic mysticism itself. Does that make sense? Now the next question is, can you allow that to make sense in your own life? The reason that we’re on this journey is not so every stage of the journey we get better and better, but so that we’re forced to participate in the Ta Panta-ing, in the is-ing, which is the only place where our being is going to come alive. And when it comes alive, it glows with whatever is shining through it at the moment.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Secret Embrace Holy Isle 2025, 36:39 08 Day 4 Morning – Manifest and Unmanifest.

[“Ta Panta”] (τὰ πάντα) is Greek for “the all” or “all things.”

The Secret Embrace: Manifest and Unmanifest

“The all and all of God, does not lie just in the unmanifest. It lies in the whole thing, the manifest and the unmanifest, joined together in a reciprocal exchange, in a giving and a supporting and a mutual upholding and unveiling, which allows through that very process something else, which requires both of them to take form and shape and majesty. What if it were that? And so that the tapanta resides not in the sheer transcendence, in the sheer unmanifest, but in what Thomas would call the secret embrace between the manifest and the unmanifest, which is intended and willed in the heart of God for the sake of love, so that this precious fragrance of the divine being that requires both the manifest and an unmanifest to make sense, can make sense and have a life. So, this is incarnational cosmogonic mysticism. This is what Jacob Boehme came to. This is what I believe Jesus came to. And this is what Thomas Keating came to in the end.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism 2025, 1:38:00.

The Torn Veil: Cosmos as Vehicle

“When Christ died on the cross, the veil tore in the Jewish temple, the veil that is that hung before the Holy of Holies. For Jewish mysticism, and subsequently in the Christian interpretation of this mysterious happening, the veil of the temple represented the whole universe as it stands between God and man. The veil was torn in two at Christ’s death to show that at the moment when Christ’s act of redemption was consummated, the whole cosmos opens itself to the Godhead. In his triumphant descendant into the innermost vastnesses of the world, the Son of God tore open the whole world and made it transparent to God’s light. Nay, he made it a vehicle of sanctification. It’s a beautiful sort of mystical rhapsody right in that moment.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2022 Holy Isle, 39:33 mystery of death day 4 monday afternoon.

Unity in Diversification

“It comes to the basic Teilhardian evolutionary principle. And this is not only an evolutionary principle for Teilhard as a scientist, it’s also his basic spiritual principle, guiding his understanding of mysticism, his understanding of love, and his understanding of the human person. And this basic principle is unity in diversification.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 34:26 002-Teilhard teaching on consciousness.

“As Jesus said, in my father’s house there are many mansions, and science is beginning to clamor for that now, but Christianity, Jesus can only take his own full wingspan over the whole ray of creation, and Thomas’s late cosmogonic mysticism really teaches us not to get hung up sweating the small stuff.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Exploring Father Keating’s Cosmogonic Mysticism 2025, 2:08:34.

The Tools We Lost

“You see that as we flatten, when we threw out religion, when we threw out mysticism, when we debunked everything, we lost the tools we needed to reach out to the whole ray of creation.” — Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2025 Jan, 1:10:00 04 jan 14 evening teaching.

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Logion 18
His student said to him,
“So, tell us, then, what our end and destiny will be?”
Yeshua answered,
“Have you already discovered your origin,
so that you are now free to seek after your end?
It is only at your source that you will find your destiny.
Blessed are those who come to stand
in their place of origination,
for it is there that they will know their end–
never tasting death.”

Logion 108
Yeshua says…
Whoever drinks what flows from my mouth
will come to be as I am
and I also will come to be as they are,
so that what is hidden will become manifest.

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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.

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