WB: This Impression is a very deep, rich, and advanced curation of Cynthia Bourgeault’s synthesis of three massive cosmological systems (Boehme, Gurdjieff, Teilhard) around a single fundamental question in spiritual work: What is the energy of love? A previous Impression covered the every day practice of love.

Love as Cosmic Foundation

“Love is what God, the divine unity actually looks like when it’s playing on a ground of separability and division, which in turn implies the possibility of consciousness, reflective consciousness. Now, the implications of that, and I think this is absolutely staggering as well, is that love is not a property of the divine endless unity that can become manifest apart from the ground of separability and division, motion. But just as you can’t have consciousness, consciousness isn’t the last thing you can say about God, but everything happens in it. 

“So, love is the first counterstroke of the divine endless unity. It’s what God looks like when it’s playing in a field of moving parts. Is this making sense? And so what you can say is those old theological premises that said God is love, that out of the effulgence of love, God created everything, don’t make sense metaphysically. Because love is not, according to this map, a preexistent capacity of God. It may be a preexistent potentiality of God. But that potentiality can only become real and come into play when you first set up a playing field in which dynamism, i.e. separability, i.e. consciousness is the medium.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 18:51 6b.Sunam.TeachingGWS14

“With love we get to the core building block from which all the rest of the world, visible, energetic, psychic come. Jacob Boehme calls it the holy element. Love is the basic building block out of which all things in the visible realms can happen. Love is what God is in the dimension of knowing through what Boehme calls separability. And this isn’t as hard a term as it seems, it means knowing in the bits. I love the image of the stained glass window here. Light as we just saw to interact with it is invisible, but when it hits an object and resistance it breaks and shows forth what’s in itself, the color spectrum which we call the rainbow. The rainbow can be seen to be light knowing itself in separability or in divisibility. It’s what the light looks like when you break it down into its parts. So love is what God looks like when you break it down into its parts and it’s the parts that make the world. … Love is that which is the ground and sustenance of the divisible created the world in all its diversity. It’s directly equivalent to light revealed as colors. It’s the same light but now in the dimension of separability.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 0:29 disc3 track9

“Love is the counterstroke of the endless unity. In other words, it’s the same thing as, but in the dimension of perceptivity, or separability.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 4:22 disc4 track7

“Boehme’s deep humanity, as well as his spiritual genius, lies in his understanding that will, desire, pain, anguish are all the raw materials through which something more wondrous is fashioned. Love is itself the triumphant issue of a process whose eternal, hidden building blocks are desire and anguish. So the whole idea in this for me is that just what we saw, just how we saw that as he pictures that God has to go through constriction, experience anguish, and somehow break through that into a transformation which yields light.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 1:26 disc4 track1

“Boehme will say over and over and over again that pain is the ground of motion. That the compression, the tension, the anguish is the precondition. And what emerges out of that, what we will see as the next property—as the light, the knowledge, the wisdom the reflected consciousness—what we’ll see as the love is an alchemical byproduct of that first stage which is compression, pain and tensioning.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 46:33 5b.Satam.TeachingGWS14

“All forms of love (charity, friendship, paternal love, maternal love, filial love, brotherly love) derive from the same unique primordial root of the fact of the couple Adam-Eve. For it is then that love—the reality of the other—issued forth and could subsequently branch out and diversify. It is the warmth of love of the first couple (and it does not matter if there was only one couple or if there were thousands of them—it is a question of the fact of the first qualitative issuing forth of love and not of the number of simultaneous or successive cases of this issuing forth) which is reflected in the love of parents for their children, reflected in turn in the love of children for their parents, reflected again in the love of children amongst themselves, reflected lastly in the love for all kinship of human beings and beyond immediate kinship, by analogy, for all that lives and breathes…

“Love once born as substance and intensity, tends to spread, ramify and diversify according to the forms of human relationships into which it enters. It is a cascading current which tends to fill and inundate all. This is why when there is true love between parents, the children love their parents, by analogy, and love each other; they love, by analogy—as their brothers and sisters by “psychological adoption”—their friends in school and in the neighborhood; they love (always by analogy) their teachers, tutors, priests, etc., through reflection of the love that they have for their parents; and later they love their husbands and wives, as their parents once loved one another.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p127

The Central Paradox: Eros and Impartiality

“As you work on the spiritual path, the biggest question that we have is longing. It’s pretty hard to reconcile with impartiality. And for Gurdjieff, what gives us conscious love is impartiality. Love without a dog in the fight. Love without a particular object of desiring. A love that can be universally, objectively present, that lives in some sort of equilibrium. But this feels like it’s opposed to the primordial force that runs through everything, this force of primordial desiring, which is based right in the charter of it. And as we give up our desire, we also find out that what we’re doing is numbing out our spiritual vivification-ness. Vivifying-ness, you know, the life. And there’s many, many spiritual communities that try and handle this Shiva-like force of sex by simply numbing it out. Never talking about it, never any instructions, never any direct evocation of it. As a matter of fact, if you make things boring enough, everybody will go to sleep and forget they even wanted to transform in the first place, you know. 

“So it’s this fear that when we step back from the desiring, we step back from the fundamental state, shape of the thing that’s the divinifying principle in everything. And we find our own lives too easily growing gray and dull and stale. Bring in the ardor of the lover, bring in the beloved and just train it away from earthly things to heavenly things. Well, this is all well and good if you can sustain a dichotomy between earth and heaven. But when you learn that everything is all webbed into everything else and the paths of canonic service that are right there in the Christian Jesus heart demand bestowing the world. What do you do with it? I mean, you know, we’ve watched a lot of people that just turn their backs on earthly things so that they think that they can attain their salvation. And it always runs off the rails. 

“The only way to resolve this tension between the impartiality, which is, for Gurdjieff, the baseline definition of love. He’ll say over and over and over again that sex is not love. Eros is not love. And we discover this in our life over and over and over again, usually painfully. It feels like love. Desiring, because of all its infatuation and its aliveness feels like love. Love is something else.

“My take on this is that the reconciling force is creativity. But it’s not creativity the way we like to think about it. I think what actually gets transformed, the creative alchemy of Eros, is the alchemy of Eros into agape. I’ve talked about that before. That the reason for this whole mess and what the Sintia is, what the great science, what the knowledge, what the hidden heart of God is that was latent at the source from the beginning, is in fact agape, conscious love, impartial love. And that’s true. But it doesn’t exist in a raw state in nature. It has to be fashioned in the blood and marrow of our own human contribution to the niche through the conscious transformation of Eros into agape through the canonic, through the involutionary practices, basically.

“[comment from Wisdom School student: “Which places the sexual energy at Origin, not the beginning.”] Yeah, exactly. And somehow, each and every moment we’re being created. Yeah, yeah. And from there can we be… And what it also says, Jonathan, is that you’re not going to find the real goal of this journey, the real point of the Sintia, at either end of the onenesses. You know, whether it’s the involutionary oneness or it’s not in the coming back into that state. It’s in this spiritualizing principle that allows the other two to exist and that allows manifestation to keep going on in a dynamic equilibrium. And that only happens when the double helix of Eros, of involution and evolution is joined in this spiritual helix. So it’s not just up and down.

“But the new thing that’s created is a field in which this erotic yearning can release and be transformed into a different kind of love. And it’s the love when it’s transformed. That’s what fuels the creativity when somebody is painting or writing or, you know, the artistry of a life. That’s alchemy. And so I think it takes courage. We are called upon to transform. But the fruit of that transformation is not going to be our private individual enlightenment. Our self-realization. Our place in the next heavenly kingdom. And you know, even getting your second and third bodies should you be so lucky is not about you. It really isn’t. It is so that you can serve at even more excruciating levels of manifestation of love.

“I don’t know whether that clarifies or muddies the water, but hopefully that’s what we can come back to working with when we ask ourselves the fundamental question of what are we doing this for? And even the questions of all the additional bodies you get and the great higher consciousnesses and all, what are we doing the evolutionary path for? So that the evolutionary path can continue and the two of them can continue to manifest in the world what the point of the whole thing is, which is love may manifest the heart of God alive all over the world and in all worlds, in whatever way it wants to manifest. And you can do that as a cockroach if you need to. Nothing is lost. It doesn’t depend on the elevation of your consciousness so much as the willingness of your own soul to be part of that whole and to give and take and receive and give back from within that inscrutable whole knowing that it’s like that from the very, very center of the heart of God out. And that our sexual energy is a reverberation of that big bang running through all levels of the cosmos from the fundamental self that becomes a self by the principles of attraction and aversion. It runs through everything.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2023 March, 1:06:51 02 day 1 sat afternoon teaching

“In love it has to do with a quality of benevolent equanimity which can be bestowed out into the world as blessing. It’s like really you don’t have a dog in the fight. It’s not being driven by a hidden agenda, by a preference. It’s a willing okayness with things as they are. And that’s the state of impartiality as we sort of move towards it. It doesn’t mean apathy in the way we use the term today, meaning indifference or numbing out or genuine lack of feeling. But it means that the feeling doesn’t have the specific object and only this object will do and nothing else will do. It’s not insistent. It’s not urgent. You know, St. Paul was talking about that when he says, love is kind, love is patient, love does not insist. He’s talking about impartiality there.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2023 March, 16:47 08 tuesday afternoon teaching

Love and the Evolutionary Principle

“In some inscrutable way that we haven’t really wrapped our being around, the part feeds the whole, so that love is full from both sides. And out of this, what Teilhard would later spin as his vision of hyper-personalization. But that remember unity and differentiation. And he insists strongly that one of the features of love is that it differentiates. It doesn’t turn people into a glob. It doesn’t turn them into dissolve one or into the other. But it develops in each one of them a capaciousness, a depth from which they can give more love. So because that’s the way things work in love, it doesn’t make you less yourself, but more yourself. Teilhard understood from that, the universe, by preserving both unity and differentiation, which for him is the core, core evolutionary principle, remember? We talked about complexification consciousness. A universe that does that has got to be ultimately a personal universe, not an impersonal universe. And a personal universe is one in which love is possible. And not only in which love is possible, but one in which love is actually felt and enacted. Love is exercised in the sphere of the personal, in the capacity to differentiate and unite.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 1:00:14 09 – THU PM Teaching

“This is what Teilhard really means by unity differentiates and differentiation unifies. And it’s why when he talks about love as an evolutionary force, [Teilhart] says that love is the evolutionary principle. Because it alone, based on this icon of what happens to two beloveds who really, truly touch the marrow of each other, what happens is that you begin to discover from the inside the basic principle of complexification consciousness. That unity differentiates. Differentiation unifies. And of course, Rilke was on to the same point in that beautiful, beautiful reflection in Letters to a Young Poet, where he says to truly love another is not the task of the young. It requires a lifetime, because he says there’s a tendency to merge prematurely and let the whole thing collapse into codependency. But he says that the real fruits of love are when someone has brought forth something in themselves. Has called forth a being, an essence. When one has, in that sense, individuated. And it’s those that can flow together. And what flows together is not a muddy watercolor picture. But a paroxysm of harmonized complexity. And we know this. Again, taking a touchstone in a memorable personal experience of love. You know that in a healthy love, in a healthy partnership, a healthy marriage, the two partners in deferring 100% to each other don’t become less themselves. Somehow, in a funny way, they become more themselves.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 33:29 016-Teilhard and the personal

“Love makes possible the transfiguration, the alchemy of the being, in the only mode, in the only real format that it can happen, which from a religious point of view is in devotion, that it’s only the fire of love expressed in words such as adoration, devotion, oblation, that carries the force of that heart yearning, that feeling yearning, to a strong enough heat and intensity to melt the chains of egoism in a person.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 40:24 016-Teilhard and the personal

“The damnably frustrating and brilliant thing about love is there is no universal principle of love. It’s multi, instantaneous, repetitive, complete particularizations of love. And in that form and only that form it reaches us, respecting our own particularization and calling it forth into the holy conjunction with the all.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2020 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard II, 1:14:41 016-Teilhard and the personal

“Mysticism is fire without reflection; it is union with the divine in LOVE. It is the primary source of all life, including religious, artistic and intellectual life. Without it, everything becomes pure and simple technique.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p72

The Path Through: Conscious Love as Spaciousness

“Conscious love is a path that comes from spaciousness in yourself, and its proper and normal goal trajectory is to call forth spaciousness in another. And it’s spaciousness because they don’t feel that they’re being coerced, manipulated, insisted on, you know, shoehorned into somebody else’s image of them. So it’s like spaciousness meets spaciousness. And this is the destiny, and this is the full use of conscious love, the full maturation of the term.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2023 March, 36:08 08 tuesday afternoon teaching

“It’s ultimately your willingness to give everything and get nothing back, simply because you’ve come to realize that in that stance there’s something that resonates with the highest you know of love, of good, and of truth. … We give it back to God. It’s a free gift of the creature back to the infinite. The most remarkable thing is that it counts. It may not count to better our place in heaven, but we don’t even care about that anymore. It counts because the purity of the love is itself a taste, a fractal of the divine love. That’s one of my favorite quotes there from Raimon Panikkar. He says, I am one with the source inasmuch as I too act as a source by making all I have received flow again. In intentional suffering we exercise our own divine creativity, our divine agency. We do something that is beyond the balance of what human beings can do and are expected to do. We taste the pure taste of source and one nanosecond of that taste will really do you for the rest of your life.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 38:17 07 – WED Q&A

“It’s not just a personal mystical experience. The whole cosmos is on a journey which we understand in our soul, and which has given shape and power to evolution over the duration and creates a tremendous reserve of energy for transformation which we can access, harness the energy of love is how [Teilhard] famously put it. If we have the courage and the vision to do it. So essentially what I see Teilhard is doing is he basically repotted Christianity.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2019 Oct Gurdjieff-Teilhard, 39:32 04 – TUES PM Teaching

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Logion 22
Yeshua noticed infants nursing
and said to his students,
“These little ones taking milk
are like those on their way into the kingdom.”

So they asked him,
“If we too are ‘little ones’
are we on our way into the kingdom?”

Yeshua replied,
“When you are able to make two become one,
the inside like the outside,
and the outside like the inside,
the higher like the lower,
so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,
but male and female become a single whole;
When you are able to fashion an eye to replace an eye,
and form a hand in place of a hand, or a foot for a foot,
making one image supersede another —
then you will enter in.”

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Read other Impressions in the Series on Love.

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.

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