Cynthia Bourgeault: A Mapmaker for the Soul
Cynthia Bourgeault is an Episcopalian priest and modern day mystic, who is one of the most fascinating thinkers on the planet today. She has written many, many books—books that have re-ordered my understanding of the world and what we’re all doing here. Her book on Mary Magdalene—The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity—reconceived the way I understood early Christianity, and then The Wisdom Jesus, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, and the Eye of the Heart have each brought me deeper into an understanding of consciousness. Ultimately, Cynthia is a map-maker—a map-maker who can put context around experience and point us toward where we all need to go. While she leads retreats and lectures, in her earlier life, Cynthia was a student and then a colleague of Father Thomas Keating, the founder of the Centering Prayer movement—Cynthia worked intently with this pioneering tradition, which seeks to unite wisdom traditions and teachers from across the globe. Cynthia is an emeritus faculty member at Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation. Her mind is complex, so listen closely—she is incredible. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.
MORE FROM CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT:
Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm
The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity
The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
Cynthia’s Website
The Center for Action and Contemplation
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I have to say, Cynthia, I am overwhelmed in thinking about how to use your time well and efficiently. I have read you deeply and I love all of your work. So I'm like, do we go towards Mary Magdalene or do we go towards Eye of the Heart or do we go to The Wisdom Jesus? But maybe we start here, this is from The Eye of the Heart where you talk about, in 2015, receiving a powerful cosmic nudge, and you went into Pierre Te Dardan and you talked about how you felt it was essential to join work with other schools at a similar vibrational level in order to help hold a collective energy field sorely needed on a planet about to undergo a major contraction. Quite prophetic. I don't even know if we're in the contraction, but it seems like we're heading towards the contraction. So maybe we start there. Like, whatever feels urgent to you, and I agree with this need to collect, everyone feels essential.
CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT: Yeah, I think that's a really good starting point, because it allows me to also put a context around some of the work that I've been doing. Which, if you're just approach it as an isolated piece. It can often sound really esoteric. I mean, I don't know how many people are gonna wanna tune in from way off when they've got, you know, pressing, pressing things to do in their life to listen to imaginable realms and Gurdjieffian teaching. I mean, it sounds a little abstract and so I think that what's really, really needed is to set the very, very specific and urgent social planetary and environmental concern in which I’m in which I'm bringing this teaching forth. Because it's not just to fill up the airspace with exotic, esoteric possibilities, but because I really sense that there's some tools implicit in these teachings that we don't have accessible to us in the culture and are driving us deeper and deeper into a hole.
ELISE: Yeah.
CYNTHIA: So the prophecy, cosmic nudge part A, began with that prompt to start to find out about what he's doing, his cosmological take on things. And it really, really hit, it was not just a cosmic nudge, it was a cosmic being hit by a 2X4 the night before the 2016 presidential election. I happened to find myself that day, I think it was November 7th, 2016, in Wales, I was wrapping up the end of about a three week British tour of teaching with my contemplative and wisdom students and my host said, you ever been to Tender Abbey? I said only one in my English sophomore English class when I read word Wordsworth poems on lines composed above Tender Abbey, does it really exist? Yes. Yeah, it's about a half an hour from here. You wanna go see it? So I hopped in the car with her and come to find out somehow in all my English literature approach to this, I'd never really quite realized before that this was a Trappist monastery, you know, the same order that Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating and all these great spiritual Catholic giants came from. And that it, it had been one of the most powerful spiritual sitters in the whole sort of greater British isles for four centuries. And it was destroyed in one evening of wonton rage as part of the, the Henry VIIIs, essentially, desecration of the monastery is his program to remove traces of all things Catholic from the British hierarchy.
So the troops fell upon this monastery, burned the roof, carried off monks into, you know, hang some on the spots, built some into Servitude, smashed everything, the sacred vessels of the altar. And so there it sat for a while with a gaping hole in the roof and a ruin. And that was the tragically romantic building that William Wordsworth found so appalling, you know, whether it's vines and, you know, overgrown looking very, very Druidic. I walked in, it's open for tourists to go some partially through it, and they've rebuilt large structures of it, although the roof is still not on it and it's all grassy, but there's the remains of a high altar and then the big what was once the stained glass window behind that altar now opened the sky. And as I walked up to this on this grassy carpet that was, had now replaced the stones, I felt more and more the this urging to get down on my knees. And finally I found myself full prostrate, before the altar. The message came that that basically said terrible things happen, and that because good has achieved a high watermark, does not mean that it can't be taken down in a single act of violence. And it says, we are into rough times. That hearts will be broken, that are not sturdy enough to withstand. Because the desecration is real and brutal and horrifying. And she says, but look, something remains. We’re speaking to you now, and you hear that there's something of the impresser of work well done and faithfully in places where goodness has been T. S. Elliott talked about going to sites where prayer has been proven valid, and he says, this sign is continuing to broadcast into the planet, and you are picking it up. You know that's not because you're a psychic intuitive, it's because it's broadcasting on a different bandwidth.
And that that bandwidth is really accessible to human beings and that we need to engage and resume our place in the rightful of order of things, not only in this planet, but in a great overarching nest of worlds, within worlds that has been described in our mystical traditions since the get-go from which we receive help. And to which we owe a certain accountability, that's produced through our living out of the highest paths of courage, transparency, and generosity. And when I got up from my muddy high alter step there, I had no doubt how the election was gonna go. You know? And many of my friends were shocked, but I knew it already. We were in for the great winnowing. So it's been, it's been a 8 to 10 year journey into collective madness, into polarization, into insanity, into not even knowing what truth is anymore. And at the same time, we're seeing in ways that are just unmistakable, the accelerating fruits of global warming. You know, my kids and my grandkids in a boarding school in California have been evacuated several times from a combination of mudslides and, and firestorms. And the weather patterns are erratic. The polar ice caps are melting. What do not we understand, we're at the age of a 2,500 year domination of the middle structure of consciousness, as John Gibber would call it, on which Western civilization has arisen and is now falling. And we don't know how to midwife our way into the next iteration that some people talk about it in great inflated terms like the integral age and non dualism.
They throw all these big terms around and make it sound like a panacea that we're almost achieving, but the rates of mental disease, pathology, trauma, suicide are skyrocketing, particularly among young people that say, why have babies? How can you responsibly bring people into a sinking ship? So it's against the stark background of what I've called the tin turn oracle. With its breadths of promise and sternness, there is help, but the situation is dire. We are in a time where everything that we think we have taken for granted in terms of human achievement, human conscience, human goodness are being turned upside down. To reclaim them, you know, to reclaim them is an act of courage, personally, but also depends to an extent on having a roadmap broad enough and receptive enough to receive the help that's coming to us from a wider world that we're not even aware of anymore. That for which this planet is, in its own funky way, the eye of the needle. There's something really precious and really painful, really difficult about our walk here, and everybody knows it, but we can reach for hope. A lot of my work, Elise, has been this year in offerings. We launched a series of workshops, a wisdom inquiry into evil: What is it? How does it come from? We had our first playing in West Virginia at Claymont Center. We'll be running, you know, in California in February and back in the American Southeast in North Carolina in April. So we're working on that. Where does it come from? Not philosophically, but you know, how does it materialize out of a variety human pain. I just finished one called the right use of sexuality as a transformational agent and we've had a group that's explored the U.S. Constitution from the point of view of evolutionary consciousness.
So a lot of the work I've been doing has been really practical; trying to bring wisdom tools to bear on these realities that if we don't shift them well we're cooked, you know.
ELISE: Yeah. Alright, so there are three big directions I wanna go with you based on that: one, that vibrational frequency that you mentioned and in reading you and reading Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and reading Richard Rohr, and it feels to me, and I'm curious about your perspective here, obviously, but historically, all of that light, all of that access was mediated through institutions like the church, primarily masculine structures, patriarchal structures, intentionally or not and I won't take us on a massive Mary Magdalene tangent, but your work on her is beautiful and stunning, and now we're starting to recognize those structures need to crumble, right? It's distributed through an available to all people, or anyone who chooses to try to a awaken or elevate their vibration or consciousness in order to tap into this level of bandwidth, so there's that point that I wanted to make. And then the fact that you're going into evil, I'm very interested and I know everything about your work is non-binary. It's not good and bad. It's a different level of awareness where these things, shadow, and light must coexist and it’s our job, right? To mix this darkness, go into the shadow and do this work, really getting my hands going here.
But is your construct the way that you think about spiritual power, evil, darkness, density and is it predicated on that Gurdjieffian world where we're along an axis or cord that gets progressively lighter and ruled by fewer laws and then progressively when we go down denser and heavier, are you still on that track?
CYNTHIA: Well, that map is not exclusively Gurdjieffian in origin. It belongs to the great chain of being things, and we see the earliest signs of this, or we, you know, they're back in the headquarters of civilization. But what Gurdjieff brought to this mix when he tried to do his was that the old map was a completely what I'd call a Redshift model, things got as you went down, which meant more and more into form, things got heavier, degraded in consciousness, more moving towards dissolution, Gurdjieff really in a kind of clever way, introduced a blueshift model, you know, in which something is returned upward as well, through what he called the third force.
It's not just down, up, down, up, that's got that dialectical symmetry of traditional. Models that are all generated in the middle structure of consciousness. And he saw that there was a new dimension, which you called the reconciling force, which was not just the solution when two opposites get, you know, it's not like when you’re trying to decide and a jury who's right and who's wrong, but it's like when you can hold the tension between the two opposites, something is born out of that spark, which then takes shape as an independent force, which allows the other two to come into harmony. It's often called in the work. Third force and Gurdjieff was able to show that how by working with this, that the lower realms, if you wanna call it, were not lost and fallen and forbidden, but had a definite part to play in and through their very worseness in hanging back something else up that brought through the process, not through the product, a dynamic equilibrium that allowed the whole thing to keep on chugging along.
So it basically basically knocks it off of a binary model, off of a binary platform into a spherical platform. You know, it's three-dimensional now, and it also gets rid of a couple of old confucian that have attended these old kind of platonic maps, and that is that coarseness is associated with form. So the more incarnate you get, the more filled with form, the less conscious you become. These maps implicitly link consciousness with dematerialization, which has left us absolutely hands tied in this world, literally. Because as long as we're saying the problem is the body the problem and we gotta liberate the, the spirit from the dense, heavy world of matter. Well, the planet can just go blow itself off.
ELISE: Right.
CYNTHIA: And you are able, we’re to able slowly see that this isn't the case, that you can go down in terms of becoming more physically embodied without that requiring a drop in your consciousness. Levels of consciousness and levels of incarnation do not have to be the same thing. And it's a common shorthand that we use very, very dangerously in our spiritual practices. It’s almost a universal assumption.You know, when people say, how do I become more spiritual? You get the picture. You know, you never see a person say let's get more spiritual. You see 'em getting down into, in a cesspool and shoveling up the, you know, the cesspool stuff. You never see that because we haven't been able to think in that kind of broader way. So some of the most spiritual people bail out without even knowing they’re doing it because their map doesn't really tell them how to integrate embodiment and care, deep, deep care and respect for the preciousness of this realm. We keep calling it fallen.
ELISE: Mm-hmm.
CYNTHIA: We wonder why we try and escape it.
ELISE: And transcend.
CYNTHIA: Yeah. One of the things that Gurdjieff does that I love that we work with with the group is toward the end, he takes these up down models, which are known officially as evolution, which means to go up an involution to go down, and he turns them on their head or he, he throws 'em into a Tumblr so that. Involution for him, which we usually use as synonymous with degrading, for him the same thing that God did in Jesus when he sent his beloved son into the world. It's like it's the gift of manifestation. You flick things out into form so that they could show their nature and evolution occurs when you, you expend the, when you finally squandered all the life force there, and at the maximum point of feeling, lack and separation, you started crawling your way back up to the source. And so he mixes them all up. And we nowadays use evolution in such a quasi reverent way to say we must evolve, you know, if we're gonna be saved as a species, as if, and evolving always means going to the higher, and that always means spiritualization and leaving. So the whole direction is just still pushed in.
And, and he had him wrapped in a double helix. Every evolution includes its evolution and at the end on either side, you know, it's oneness, but by very different roots, and they're both good medalists. One by complete self concentration and implosion that you've become one at the top by this. All of a sudden, all the pretenses that that created, the convention of separation are gone and you implode into the oneness that was always there and at the bottom end by the complete self-giving, which is in one sense complete dissolution. But the word dissolution has also been used in the monastic traditions and the mystical traditions to mean complete self-giving.
ELISE: Thinking about this idea of transcendence and lightness and, you know everyone doing psychedelics and blasting their way to source and sure to each their own. And those certainly, I’m fan plant medicine where, where used judiciously. But I see a lot of people bypassing, right? And it feels like what we're being called to do is to take this vertical and spill it into the horizontal. It's not about escaping, it's about existing. Bringing this into our daily, very ordinary lives and no longer compartmentalizing. You know, you see people who are like, well, here's my spiritual life and then here’s my Merchant of Doom Life, you know, and I go and pay for this over here. And instead, how do you live it, how do you live it every day?
CYNTHIA: Well, that's exactly true. And one of the things that I've been working on is as I look at this, you know, wonderfully intertwined in evolutionary map that Gurdjieff provides us, is that to realize that in evolutionary spiritual practice, that's the ones that pulls it up, the emphasis tends to be on equating the goal with having an experience of the goal. So, you know, you attain, you know, the proof pudding. It's an interior path, as you concentrate yourself and you have an experience of oneness. And on the involutionary path, which is the path of outward pouring into the world, oneness is always attained as an integrated act of conscience with the inward and the outward in harmony. In other words, it's a dance between interstate and external demand. And so as Thomas Keating used to say, so famously, about centering prayer, the fruits of centering prayer are found in daily life. And he offered that as an anecdote to people who saying, you mean I just sit on my chair and I don't have this wonderful experience of bliss and oneness? That would be a thought and I'd have to let it go? And what if I get a message from above? And Thomas says, let them go. And, and they say, how can this be prayer? I'm not feeling one. Sometimes I'm doing nothing but battling thoughts left and right. And Thomas said, the fruits are found in daily life. In other words, you may be sitting on your prayer cushioning having this subjective experience of how terribly you are at all this, and yet your spouse comes up to you and says, how is it that you've suddenly gotten so much easier to live with? Or how is it that you've suddenly slowed down enough to notice that there's a old person with bags crammed at the back of the subway car there while you're sitting and having a seat there. You know, you get your head outta your own interior estate and notice, and so the involutionary path is by nature because it demands, it's proof of the pudding in unified action. It's an integral path.
ELISE: So you mentioned help, this frequency, this vibration, and help. So how do you think about that in the context of what is going to happen? What's the difference between free will or collective free will or lessons that we seem to need to be learning together and apart versus what it should ideally be? Is there a distinction or, I don't know if I'm articulating that very well, but how much of this is essential devolution, I guess, and how much of it is something that we coul not experience if we were a little more awake?
CYNTHIA: Yeah. Well, it's exactly that, we try and solve these problems with our philosophical mental mind. By nature that’s a binary structure. And it was the great gift, you know, again, I'm always talking about Jean Gipper, this wonderful guy who gave the basic platform for Ken Wilber's evolutionary roadmaps, but Gipper's is much richer and fuller in context in cultural transformation. He noted that what really got the whole modern West started, you know, modern West, beginning with Plato, was this capacity of the mind to stand outside itself and make strategic models. And with it, we started dividing things into two categories. I don't know when good and evil entered the planet, you know, chronologically, but I know it entered as a concept at the beginning, at the headwaters of the mental structures of consciousness or about 3000 bc. Before then, people weren't thinking in terms of good and evil. They were thinking in terms of power and proximity and polarity and you know, so we're locked within the concepts that we use.
And the problem is that the mind, it's a very good tool, but it's fundamental perceptual mechanism is based on separation. This is not that. So it makes it very, very hard to perceive. Tunis, or, you know, to anything in three dimensions. And it's from the opening up of the other three-dimensional senses in harmony with the mind that the capacity to perceive help registers. You know, and we aren't taught this, so the solution is not getting a better model, but bringing more of us online. And I'm not talking about these airy fairy, well, you know, my psychic senses, my etheric body, my, you know, look at me, I can read crystals. I’m talking about the basic capacity to be in what Gurdjieff called three centered awareness to be with your body as it moves to be alert to sensation, alert to feeling, and the difference between a feeling and emotion and your head. It doesn't require you to lobotomize your head. And when you're balanced in this kinda way, then it's amazing. You know, without any sort of extraordinary, mystical experiences, you simply pick up more of the universe and you see the interwoven-ness of everything and you begin to sense that we are somehow contained in a purposeful and compassionate intelligence within a coherent field. And you can't put these in philosophical categories because they immediately get wrecked there.You mean we're talking about God. You know the old man with a beard? No. You mean we're talking about the Blessed Virgin? No, you mean we're talking about the great transcendent source? No, because that’s an it.
And one of the reasons we can't throw away what gets heard is in gender, exclusive language is because in gender, in our way of talking and seeing is contained the personal. And in the personal, you touch the intimacy. And so we begin to experience when there are three simple centers are online and working together, we experience it for some silly reason the world is not indifferent, cold or chaotic. We live within a sort of purposeful, coherent, compassionate, intelligent field, which we are invited to participate holographically. In other words, the heart, the part and the hole, and the hole and the part. My best analogy for this that I used way back in my mystical Hope book, you know now two decades tech, two decades ago since I first wrote it, was the notion that the analogy of sailing in the fog, which is something I do all too much living here on the coast of Maine. So the idea is that on a bright, sunny day, you look at the lighthouse five miles out and say, oh, okay, I set my site here, no problem. But when the fog sets in so thickly that you can't only, not only can you not see the lighthouse, you can't even see the bowel of the boat. Now what? And at first for everybody, there's a moment of total panic.
It's like, help, help. Where am I? You can't get oriented. But then you begin to realize that in order to find your way in the fog, which nobody likes, but many people do very well, even before there were instruments, GPSs to guide us, you bring in the underutilized census. If you listen, you can hear the difference in the water when it's coming close to shore. When there's rocks, there's the crashing sound. You know, you can tell the difference in the current when you’re in a deep sea swell or when you're at a choppy sea. There was a guy, a friend of mine, who sailed his sailboat in thick fog, the whole length of the Maine coast, and had to get around this treacherous point, and he said, well, he would tack in towards it and then tack out whenever he smelled the sheep.
ELISE: Wow.
CYNTHIA: And the smell, you know, the smell of pungent pine trees. If you smell the smell of a spruce tree in the middle of a foggy thing, guess what it means? Land is near. So in other words, you begin to make your way, not by reference to where you are supposed to go, not like out there where the lighthouse is, but by reference to where you are and the underutilized senses help you to sense exactly how you are situated in a now which can be felt and which also has its intelligence. And one of the strange things about it is that it feels intimate.
ELISE: Hmm. Yes.
CYNTHIA: So that's the kind of analogy that we have. Ever since the beginning of the mental structure, of culture, we've been sailing for lighthouses. Miles away, setting goals, going to 'em, dividing things into concepts, making new plans. And because it's a head alone, we can't smell, taste, and feel the sea swells of a kind of divine coherence. And I use the word divine simply to mean that it's larger and more pervasive than our theological concepts. But the world did not just come about randomly, nor is there a tight master plan, you know, drawing us back. There's freedom, but it's freedom within a field that hangs together.
ELISE: Hmm. Do you feel, I mean, I did not grow up within religion at all, and so I approach and I recognize this is spirituality. This is a totally different dimension, but considering that this is a patriarchal culture that we live in with strong religious inclinations, do you think that, and you think about someone like Mary Magdalene and her gospel or that teaching being cast out, but this gnostic sense of God is inside, God is with you. It's part of you, it's baked into you, it's an internal process instead of this external figure, you know, as you said, man with a beard somewhere else. Is that the primary separation wound to keeping people from engaging with this internalized awareness?
CYNTHIA: Well I think the political cultural perception of that these days has formed a powerful barrier for quite a few people. As we watch up, you know, the dying shreds of a patriarchy, which has betrayed itself in all sorts of ways, and people are angry and people are angry at the way that that feminine power has been co-opted and colonized and dominated and suppressed. But it isn't as simple as that because it's really not about power itself and I don't think it has anything to do generically with maleness or female.
ELISE: Agree.
CYNTHIA: Because I've seen female power structures, recapitulate male structures and wind up looking just as ugly.
ELISE: Yep.
CYNTHIA: It has to do with a level of consciousness, and all along there have been mystics of both male and female gender, who’ve said the same thing who've pointed to that God within. And at the same time that you have inquisitors and, and imperial popes in the church, you've also got the, begins, you know, the people in 14th, 15th century Germany with the most way out there, non-dual mysticism that you've seen. And our contemporary Catholic church spawns, Bernadette Roberts, you know, go figure. And, then you have the males like George Fox teaching the light of Christ in every man. You know, the man is how they said it. Then Meister Eckhart. As you move up the ladder of consciousness into what, what I think is appropriately called integral consciousness, if we could only agree on a definition, it's not like gender is canceled out or fused into one or unpologized, like these are the only polls you know, you know, God is either male or female, but the legitimate validity of each gender is upheld without being competitive. You begin to see how the separations that have, that have grown up in all the structures are valid because there's, there's different flavors of wisdom of spiritual gender generativity that for a long, long time interact with physical femaleness and maleness. They aren't finally the same as, but they ride these horses for a long time.
ELISE: Yeah.
CYNTHIA: And in our quest for liberation and equality for all people, we've in a long way muddied in and neutered the generative forces that allow the, the kind of transformation to another thing to happen.
ELISE: Yeah. And is that Gurdjieffian, the masculine and feminine present in me, the interplay, not the binary, but the interplay or where they meet is, that propulsive? That's the magic?
CYNTHIA: The birth of something else, you know, and people language it in different ways, and it depends on where you are. It's not exclusively an internal struggle. That's what Jung tried to do. You know, you play the whole thing out as an inner drama. There's the male in me and the female in me. Yeah, that's true. But there's also the male outside me and the male inside me, and they're different ways of going at these fundamental polarities and they work in and manifest in all sorts of different ways. But I think the big problem with the patriarchy as it’s sorted out, is that what it tends to defend is a level of consciousness that's too small.
ELISE: Yes.
CYNTHIA: Fully incorporate the mystery that could save it. And even today we're seeing it. I mean, I saw it big time during Covid when the church that sits in possession of a mystical treasure of courage that says whether I live or die. The Lords immediately panicked and, oh, oh, we gotta maintain safety for all the people you know, and this is a really, really good thing. But they got right in the middle of this World 48 fear, and had nothing to say of real hope and the churches have tended to be the last holdouts with other people. I mean in Boston Logan Airport, people were sitting in the public house drinking their glasses of wine. And in the church they were still withholding communion because of fear of contamination. You know what is it? Why have we not been able to access within the mystical body of Christ, the good news of eternal life lived in our human flesh?
ELISE: Yeah.
CYNTHIA: So it's loss of a level of consciousness. And when you lose a certain level of consciousness, maleness and femaleness is gonna play just like it has in the history of Western civilization as a power struggle.
ELISE: You mentioned World 48. Would you mind doing a quick overview of the world, I know it's hard to do a quick overview of the worlds, but what World 48 is and the potential of World 24 and how that works?
CYNTHIA: It's a shorthand. It's a Gurdjieffian inner track of the old map of the great chains of being and the great chains of being maps, as I said, which are ancient, you know, 3,000 to 5,000 years old. They all depict creation, emerging, like a big bang out of the heart of a god, of an absolutely fiery wholeness. And then coming down into different realms, you know, they get progressively coarser and denser. It is just to language them in numbers, you know, the other things call them the cosmic world, you know, so there are levels of consciousness, but they're also the levels of of materialization. The conditions that play out in each world and our world. World 48 is toward the bottom of the chain. With, with a couple of worlds beneath it that grow stronger and stronger in the direction of heaviness and inn just above us. Above, you know, we gotta use that map shorthand. It isn't really above, but we'll speak in those terms. The next one up on the Skewer Ball of Worlds, is called by various names, but the name that is settling is the imaginal realm, which is the lighter area, and more unbounded inner being interpenetrating.
This is of everything that fires in and out and animates the bits and pieces of our regular everyday world. Just like light shining through a stained glass window takes all the bits and pieces that are all separate and pulls 'em together in a single. So it's a lighter kind of awaken, coherent, vibrant field. Just what we've been talking about earlier, that penetrates and infuses the otherwise dull, separated bits and pieces of nature, of this reality. So it pulls it together as a harmonizing principle. Again, like light coming through a stained glass window. It's not intended to destroy the window. It’s intended to let the window show forth what it truly is.
ELISE: And is that World 24 a space that you visited in Tintern Abbey? Is that, are those the moments when we're in conversation with the universe?
CYNTHIA: Yeah, that was a World 24 visitation. And when Jesus uses the phrase “be in the world, but not of it,” I think he's referring to that. You know, be in your world. Do the things you have to. This brings us back to the conversation about action in the world we had earlier, but let it be conducted in a spirit of the light flowing through this. And this is not by faking a bunch of behaviors that you think are spiritual. It's by being really open in the whole of your being to the possibility that it is spiritual. The people that taste that oneness, you know, in some way or another glow and levitate. These iconic, spiritual traditions and art like to portray that glowing light that emerges from beings, that's supposed to be a sign of holiness and sometimes you see them rising up. Well, these are just ways of talking about and depicting visually that they somehow are moving in this world with this sort of lighter, radiant uplifting energy coursing through them. And we all know people who do this and they're often very, very normal, ordinary people that are, you know, serving you coffee at the McDonald's, but they get it in a deep way and they're blessed to the world by the very quality of their presence.
ELISE: Yes. And then World 96, I feel like we have some sense of that, right? Like are we slipping into World 96?
CYNTHIA: World 96 was what the American nation and officially became the day after the Trump election. You know, it had been tending that way for a long, long time. I mean, it was founded in World 48. The founding fathers were, you know, some of them were hypocrites and connivers and racists and, you know, slaveholders and all the things we hurdled at ‘em. But they were also thoughtful human beings who listened to one another. Enlightenment thinking is really quite amazing. It's intricate, it's rational. And so they devised a brilliant structure. of government governance at the high watermark of what was, you know, what was capable in the time. And then they horse traded and bludgeoned their way into existence with it. But at this point in our collective American journey, we've given up thinking for thought bites and we've traded content for pizzazz and deliver and we hurl epithets at each other and think in labels and acronyms. Somebody asked me today on a phone call who my PCP was and I go, who? What? You know, I can't keep of all these things. So it's this know, thought bite behavior that is always clashing with each other and the incapacity to form even civility, let alone unions of reason. When you see the senate stonewalled, unable to form policy coalitions around, well, even who's a speaker of the house for sake. You know, it's like power mongering and political polemic for nothing other than to polarize. That's, that's an abortion of the human capacity for thought, reason, and healing. And, you know, Donald Trump became its patron saint and the country always plays along because it makes money. And so to pull our country back to a place where we can have civil discourse with each other would be a great accomplishment. I mean, maybe the best we can shoot for at this point in our common life.
ELISE: Yeah. So when we think about this tension and I recognize that people aren't necessarily even super awake in World 48, but when we think about sort of the downward trend of what we're experiencing and then I think it's definitely woken up some people to reach for 24. And is the idea that we're sort of energetically holding on and trying to pull the collective, pull each other up, is that what's being asked of us? And do you feel optimistic about this?
CYNTHIA: I think that what you're saying there is that yes, there is a demand coming upon us for a higher collectivity. The next level of action, which will be a unifying action, is a higher collectivity, but we don't get what this means yet because we look at the collective as somehow opposite of the individual.
ELISE: I know.
CYNTHIA: And so our models immediately take us either to communism, you know, or take us to bureaucracy where, you know a thick blanket of mediocrity separates people from their bright ideas. We just don't understand, a part from, in some, you know, rare occasions, what genuine collectivity is and higher collectivity. And the best example I can give you comes in an orchestra or a choir where you have all these wonderful individuals who each individually have voice and vocal training, and then you have some sort of piece of music like a Bach canata begging to be sung and people come together to sing it and they have a common aim, which is to deliver the music as beautifully as possible because only that common aim is what they all want, but they can't arrive at it individually. You could be the best baritone in the world, but unless you've got a soprano and an alto there, you're singing to yourself.
So we have to collaborate in order to make the music, and it's because we love the music. And we commonly love the music that we become capable of deferring. And during World War II, of course the gun to the head of Nazism in the countries of the world on all freedom disappearing was enough to forge a common aim and in America, the World War, you know the old Rosie the Riveter pictures and people joining willingly in participating and having their hands clipped with rationing and things like that because they all gave to the common aim of freedom and of a world that could live in goodness. And it's kind of interesting for the World War II vets that are still alive still remember, this is great, the greatest era of their life, because what they were drinking in was the sweetness of the love and the virtue and the nobility that is accessible to human beings when we can form these higher collectivities. But you can't get to 'em by starting on World 48 and you know, just keeping raising a platform, how you can't legislate a platform that gets us to a higher collectivity. It just becomes repressive to over legislate people, which is the problem. You know, it has to come from a deeper common awakening, and this is really hard to put your fingers on because it’s, by nature, unmanageable. But you can begin to practice your way into it and I think that's what this resurgence of people embarking upon spiritual practice, even just starting with meditation, is helping to carve a space where a higher collectivity may be able to organize itself once people are able to let go of their assistance on the lower collect activity.
ELISE: Yeah, it’s a beautiful idea and, and just this, I think, you know, when people get into this, oh, we're all one. And, but then I have my own ego and it's me. And, you know, this is so difficult for people, but the idea of the orchestra and that common goal, as you said, and yes, you have your part to play, like the music is incomplete without the full participation of every musician. And so seeing yourself as distinct and part of the collective, I think that metaphor really helps people understand the ask.
CYNTHIA: Yeah. And you devote less of you by doing that. You become more of you. And the the problem is though, the limitation is right in the operating system of per perception, cause we’re, more than any other age, in any other structure of consciousness, sees everything from the eyes through the eyes of the separated individual self-realization, and we even go at our spirituality that way rapidly in the new age. My personal self-realization because it's a filter of the way we set up the playing field and it’s my ego, who's gonna transform? We don't get the idea because it overrides the operating system of perception. No, no, no, no. It's your structure of perception that's gonna melt. And along with it, bye-bye ego and all your goals and all your images of yourself, but you'll still be here and you'll be conscious and you'll be free, and you'll be larger and happier than you've ever been.
ELISE: Beautiful. Cynthia, thank you for everything. Such a joy to be with you again. I mean, I could talk to you for a really long time. Are your workshops on your website?
CYNTHIA: Yeah.
ELISE: I need to try to get there. I wanna understand evil.
CYNTHIA: And most of them now, as usual, some of them fill up. There's still a few places as of this particular date in the April retreat in Valley Cruces, which is in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. But we're putting a Zoom component on almost everything these days just to accommodate more people. So if you can't, if you can't get there on the ground, you can get there online.
ELISE: Amazing. Well thank you again and thank you for all of your books.
Wow. To live inside of Cynthia Bourgeault’s brain, which we got to visit. Even as much as she’s pushing us towards a non-brain conception of the world, a fuller sense of our wholeness, her brain is quite impressive. And it was hard to even know where to go, because I could honestly interview her for 10 to 20 hours and feel like I’ve only barely scratched the surface of her understanding and teachings. I highly recommend her books, some of them are more difficult than others, but they are all beautiful and I’ll work on creating notes for each of them on my website, which you can find on eliseloehnen.com. I wanted to touch again on the Worlds quickly, because I think that this conception, even as she mentioned it’s part of the great chain of being and it shows up in different cultures in different ways, but the ways that she articulate Gurdjieff, I find Gurdjieff really, really difficult, I’m not advanced enough to understand him directly. So she is a wonderful interpreter, but I just wanted to touch on this, she writes: “According to Gurdjieff, the two vehicles par excellence for actualizing this inner transformation are conscious labor and intentional suffering. Conscious labor is basically any intentional effort that moves against the grain of entropy, i.e., against that pervasive tendency of human consciousness to flip into auto pilot. It means summoning the power of conscious attention, to swim upstream against that pervasive lunar undertow drawing us towards stale, repetitive, mechanical, patterns, the siren call of World 96.” And then, intentional suffering, she writes: “If conscious labor increases our capacity to stay present, intentional suffering radically increases the heartfullness of that presence. Operating in a slightly different quadrant of the human psyche, but with the parallel strategy of reversing the direction of flow, intentional suffering goes head to head with that well habituated pattern to move toward pleasure and away from pain. It invites us to step up to the plate and willingly carry a piece of that universal suffering which seems to be our common law as sentient beings in a very dense and dark corner of the universe. The size of the piece does not matter. What does matter, however, is that the suffering must be intentional, i.e., conscious, clear, and impartial. He is not talking about the useless and completely avoidable suffering caused by the frustration of our neurotic programs and illusions; he is talking about it as a very high practice.” Well, that was a lot, and thank you for digging deeper into all of this will me. I will see you next week.
