“The fruit of your own inner work is non-transferable. You can’t make your eyes radiate kindness by trying to copy it from the outside. The kindness will come as an alchemical product of the way you live your life.” Cynthia Bourgeault

[This Impression took a while for me to pull together. The idea sat with me for months. There are quotes that resonate, but none of them carry the theme from beginning to end. The theme that I am reaching for is that we humans live in a realm that is largely transactional. Yeshua’s teachings are clear, however, that transaction alone cannot carry us into the Kingdom. The path that I am trying to walk in the following quotes is that there is a progression from transaction to transformation to revelation. Valentin Tomberg talks about our efforts rising and grace descending. Cynthia Bourgeault says the lamp oil in the Parable of the 10 Virgins stands for something that can only be produced by the fruit of our own inner work—not borrowed, bought, or transferred. For me, the path from the earthly realm to the realm of the Kingdom is the core teaching of the Wisdom path. I hope this Impression will resonate with you! WB]

Prayer and Revelation, Effort and Grace

“The process of prayer (which ‘ascends from earth to heaven’) and that of revelation (which ‘descends to earth’)—i.e. human endeavor and the action of grace from above—unite and become a complete circle which contracts and concentrates to become a point where the ascent and descent are simultaneous and coincide. And this point is the ‘philosopher’s stone’—the principle of the identity of the human and divine, of humanism and prophetism, of intelligence and revelation, of intellectuality and spirituality.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p607.

Valentin Tomberg talks of “the rapport of personal effort and of spiritual reality.” 
“It is a matter of daring to ask, of the will to seek, of being silent in order to knock and of knowing when it is opened to you. For knowledge does not happen automatically; it is what is revealed when the door is opened. This is the formula of the synthesis of effort and grace, of the principle of work and that of receptivity, and, lastly, of merit and gift.

“It is ‘unceasing prayer’, established in the psychic and vital bodies, which forms the currents directed above in these bodies, and which can lead to the formation of wings. I say ‘can’, because the formation of wings demands something still further, namely a current from above which moves to meet that from below. Wings are formed only when the two currents—that of human endeavor and that of grace—meet and unite.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p384.

The Transactional Mind

“Essence is what you are born with: personality is what you acquire. And what you are born with, or as, is changed by all these things that you acquire and accept and consent to and believe in and identify with. A new person therefore grows around the original essence. This is personality. Now in consequence of the formation of personality your center of gravity of consciousness shifts from essence (in childhood) outwards into the personality acquired from the particular circumstances you are brought up in and the particular things that have interested you on the one side or have attracted your vanity on the other side. In this way you lose your original basis and become something acquired, something invented.” Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries, p274

“Have you ever noticed how the quest to perfect yourself is so damn boring and wearisome? Every day it’s up and at it. Every day it’s, God, like I got to get up at 5 AM, and I got to do my exercise, and I’ve got to do my time of centering prayer, and I got to get to the gym, and now there’s this yoga thing, and there’s this book. You’re at it all day, this efforting to improve yourself so that you can acquire this radical shift of identity.

“And the bitch of the whole thing is it doesn’t work from the bottom up. It only comes from the top down. This is what people actually mean when they talk about grace versus work. No matter how much efforting you put in to improve yourself, as you know it, which is the only self you know, you’re fighting yourself. Because it’s not that self that’s going to improve. It’s that self that’s going to give way to reveal the other self.

“It was always and all along quietly doing its seed thing behind it. So I’m not saying that the effort is useless, but I’m saying don’t torture yourself. Because the more you pile on in your dutiful or yearning episodes to improve yourself, the more it’s like banging yourself in the head with a hammer.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 22:28 05d – Thurs pm Teaching Evil.

“True concentration is a free act in light and in peace. It presupposes a disinterested and detached will. For it is the condition of the will which is the determining and decisive factor in concentration. … Concentration without effort is the transposition of the directing center of the brain to the rhythmic system—from the domain of the mind and imagination to that of morality and the will. … Concentration without effort is the state of consciousness of perfect calm, accompanied by the complete relaxation of the nerves and the muscles of the body. It is the profound silence of desires, of preoccupations, of the imagination, of the memory and of discursive thought. One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p9.

The Limit of Transaction

“We want to move from having a transactional relationship to an open or unconditioned one. What’s the proper psychological word for a non-transactional relationship? Open-ended. But in other words, we’re not using it to get something.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 57:10 02 Silence Fri am teaching.

“Centering prayer is really about creating the space in which to form a relationship, a meeting place with that deeper ground, which normally gets blocked by our overly wordy and transactional and concept laden images of God. We think of prayer as petition and praise, basically, that’s what we’re taught to do in our tradition. So to understand that it can be a silent relationship, not communicated or experienced in words or theories or transactions, but in just a common inter-being, is new.” A Fresh Perspective on Centering Prayer, with Cynthia Bourgeault By Heather Ruce and Jeanine Siler-Jones. 

“In the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the ones who forgot their oil asked the others to share. But the oil stands for something that can only be produced by the fruit of your own inner work. It is non-transferable. You can’t make your eyes radiate kindness by trying to copy it from the outside, because the kindness will come as an alchemical product of the way you live your life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 47:00 RT 05 Morning Teaching 9:27.

“It is thanks to the light of the Hermit’s lamp, which is the holy instrument where the light of the Word is united with the oil of human intellectual endeavor.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p204.

Transformation As The Bridge

“All practical esotericism is founded on the following rule: it is necessary to be one in oneself (concentration without effort) and one with the spiritual world (to have a zone of silence in the soul) in order for a revelatory or actual spiritual experience to be able to take place.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p11.

“If you take the simple, very simple practice that in absolutely every situation, there’s a deep innermost place where you can give and yield. And I’m not talking here about outermost effects at this point, I’m not talking about changing any external things internally. You can brace against the pain and fight it, or you can yield into it. The pain continues, but the yielding into it is as if a trapdoor opens in the bottom, and you go down into a place of deeper revelation, deeper love. To the extent that you resist, the trapdoor doesn’t open. And you learn over and over and over and over that the last gesture you finally may learn to make with your conscious mind is, with your conscious heart, is give and yield.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 2:20 disc 4 track 13

“Don’t try and play it clean. Dive into your anguish. Dive into your sadness. Don’t regret a minute of it. But transform, transform, transform. As Jacob Boehme said, pain is the ground of motion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 35:26 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14.

“What Jacob Boehme specifically says is that pain is the ground of motion, and that anguish and the capacity for things to fall apart is also the birth of the self-reflective principle that reaches enlightenment through alchemy, not through elimination of one of the terms.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, disc 6 track 12 Jacob Boehme

“Love, in Jacob Boehme’s intensely mystically process-oriented math, is transformed anguish. Pain is truly the ground of motion, and what it creates in this fiery refiner’s fire is something that didn’t exist before.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, disc 7 track 10 Anguish And Love 

“There is throughout the inner tradition, this strong, strong teaching that the recognition of the exceptional fish, the hidden treasure, the pearl, brings with it the obligation to buy it at some cost. In other words, you have to pay for it. This is very, very keenly built into the tradition, and the paying for it, whatever we mean by that, is part of the recognition. I think that a lot of us do get in trouble on our early phases of the life by not recognizing and not kicking in soon enough with the understanding that something has to be exchanged to create room for the new to continue to grow.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 4:40 Divine 02-10.

 “There’s a wonderful passage in Jacob Boehme, in one of his early essays about the pearl of great price. And the seeker is talking with Sophia Wisdom about the pearl. And she says to him, in this life you can glimpse it and taste it, but I can’t let you have it or you’d mess it up.

And it’s true because the moment that you think of it as something that you can grab and put in your hip pocket, your ego self has taken it right back over. So we have to just take it that that’s one of the operating difficulties of where we human beings live right on the cusp between the infinite and the finite. But you’ll taste it, you’ll know without knowing when you hit that vibrational current of your own aliveness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, 03:42 03-11.

Revelation—The Gift

[I am not asked to abandon effort for passivity. It’s about effort that becomes prayer—effort that creates the conditions for revelation without trying to manufacture it. WB]

“No real truth in the world has ever been revealed apart from revelation. And revelation always comes from outside of time, not from inside of it.” Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 5:34 disc8 track3 Origin Of The Enneagram

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. “

“I would say that love is [The Cloud of Unknowing author’s] word for this new mode of knowingness. It exists only within that field of non-dual awareness, within that mode of diffuse awareness that he calls the cloud. But within the cloud we can know by love.  We can know by this participational other way. It’s that kind of knowing which is the night vision that kicks in when you’ve turned off the flashlight of your perceptual mind and something else filters in. He calls it love. He calls it love, I think, for very intuitive reasons. First of all, it has something to do with mind in heart. Lift up your heart in a meek stirring of love. 

“While he doesn’t develop any kind of taxonomy of heart knowingness, he does keep gravitating towards that. The kind of energy that runs, the kind of attentional pattern that flows within this field of direct knowingness, non-dual knowingness … it is a way of knowing by sympathetic resonance, by the capacity to enter the inside of something and come into true instantaneous alignment with it so that its field and your field become one continuous interabiding field of knowingness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 2 track 8.

“So here is, [Logion 8] in the Gospel of Thomas, a parable on exchange. Part of the recognition involves the throwing back the little fish. Something has to be exchanged back, doesn’t it? To me, that’s just a description of centering prayer in that the little fish is all the thoughts, that circulates in the mind, and the big fish is the focus where the truth is. Applying that teaching, it does describe, stay with your big fish. Your big fish being the hidden and exceptional quality of open, empty availability.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 2 track 10.

“To stay with a spontaneous awareness from some deeper place within you. Or at least to notice that it comes from a deeper place within you. When that beautiful, precious awareness is dawning in you, that is the place where it is so crucial to throw back the other fish, whatever that means to you, to make some space in your life that begins to honor and live out of this new, dawning recognition.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 2 track 11.

“You have to throw out the little fish. Exactly. And grace is really an abiding state. It should not be an exceptional occurrence. It should be the recognition. It’s how life feels when you’re living within that flow, within that abundance. Everything is giving and everything is receiving. And there’s no lack that would need it to be amended by some extraneous intervention. The flow itself is full and caring and comprehensive.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Divine Exchange, disc 2 track 13.

“The heart, properly understood in spiritual tradition, is the vessel, the sacred vessel, that mediates between our own deepest essence, our own decent who we are as a created being, and the ability to hear, to respond to, and to be oriented in the holy, in the divine. So our heart is really the organ in us that bridges the gap that mediates between our finite being and that infinite that loves us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Conscious Love, 1:45 disc 3 track 13.

“The vow of poverty is the practice of inner emptiness, which is established as a consequence of the silence of personal desires, emotions and imagination so that the soul is capable of receiving from above the revelation of the word, the life and the light. Poverty is perpetual active vigil and expectation before the eternal sources of creativity; it is the soul awaiting that which is new and unexpected; it is the aptitude for learning always and everywhere; it is the conditio sine qua non of all illumination, all revelation and all initiation.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p112.

Effort and Grace Dance Together.

“With respect to the magnificent quaternary of traditional magic: ‘to dare, to will, to be silent and to know’, it is formulated—mutandis mutatis—by the Master in the following way:

Ask, and it will be given you.
Seek, and you will find;
Knock, and it will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks receives,
And he who seeks finds,
And to him who knocks it will be opened.
(Matthew vii, 7–8)

It is a matter of daring to ask, of the will to seek, of being silent in order to knock and of knowing when it is opened to you. For knowledge does not happen automatically; it is what is revealed when the door is opened. This is the formula of the synthesis of effort and grace, of the principle of work and that of receptivity, and, lastly, of merit and gift. This synthesis enunciates the absolute law of all spiritual progress.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p134-135.

“True effort of the will, i.e. one hundred percent effort, true work, is also a prayer. When it is intellectual work, it is prayer: Hallowed be thy name. When it is creative effort, it is prayer: Thy kingdom come. When it is work with a view to supplying for the material needs of life, it is prayer: Give us this day our daily bread. And all these forms of prayer in the language of work have their corresponding benedictions or graces. The law of correspondence between the column of prayer (problems,
suffering, effort) and that of benediction (illumination, consolation, fruits) is found expressed by the Master in the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p101.

“Plato, as did St. Thomas Aquinas, arrived at the ‘spiritual poverty’ which is necessary to become a ‘cup’ … i.e. to become a receptacle for the revelation of Being, and then to become an active cooperator.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p657.

“We have to create trust not out of a transactional reaction because others are trustworthy, but because trust is needed as an element in the ingredient of the world. And I must act with trust because that’s what human beings need to do. And I must act with courage, and I must act with hope. Even if I’m feeling hopeless. You don’t generate things out of your feelings. You generate them out of your yes to the need that’s manifest.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Encounter With Evil April 2023 NC, 33:25 02c-Monday Eve Q-A Evil.

[Final note: This progression from transaction to transformation to revelation is not a linear ladder to be climbed once and left behind. As Yeshua describes in Logion2, these are rhythms we live within, recognitions that deepen and return. We encounter our transactional habits again and again—and each time, if we’re willing, we can yield into transformation and open to revelation anew. The synthesis of effort and grace is not a destination we arrive at, but, as Cynthia often describes, a dance we learn to live. Like a spiral, we circle back to familiar territory but at a different depth. We are always beginning again. WB]

---

Logion 2
Yeshua says…
If you are searching, you must not stop until you find.
When you find, however, you will become troubled.
Your confusion will give way to wonder.
In wonder you will reign over all things.
Your sovereignty will be your rest.

---

Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.

Read the Impression on Meditations on the Tarot.

Follow us on Substack