An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault Course Transcript & Companion Guide

DAY 2 OF WISDOM SCHOOL

Day 2.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer Day 2.2 Morning Teaching The Great Benedictine Monasticism* Day 2.3 Morning Conscious Practical Work Day 2.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 Day 2.6 Evening Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation*

Notes:

[00:19] From The Rule of Saint Benedict, early 6th century: If we wish to reach eternal life, … then—while there is still time, while we are in this body and have time to accomplish all these things by the light of life—we must run and do now what will profit us forever. Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service. In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome. The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love. —Prologue 42-49, from The Rule of St. Benedict, pages 18–19

[02:07] [Chant with Darlene Franz on harmonium: Bless the Lord]

Bless the Lord oh my soul Bless the Lord oh my soul

[06:32] [bell for meditation] [30:48] [bell to end meditation]

Body Prayer Introduction by Cynthia [Cynthia] I ask you to please rise. Find your feet on the ground. We’re going to participate now in a very short morning sacred movement that was developed by Lois as a very simple way to do an equivalent of walking meditation when there’s absolutely no space to walk. And you may take it if you ever get in that circumstances with your group. It’s also, in a wonderful way, a simple gesture, body prayer of praise and opening to the new day. We’ll do it three times. [32:20] [Body Prayer, led by Lois Barton, repeated three times] [34:35] [Cynthia] Blessings to you all. Feel the sensation in your feet and in your whole body from that exercise as we go up to breakfast. And see if it’s still there when you come back.

Notes:

Day 2.1 Morning: Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer 2 Day 2.2 Morning Teaching The Great Benedictine Monasticism

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Part 1: The Rule of St. Benedict as a Template, page 2 Part 2: Ora et Labora, page 7 Part 3: The Divine Office, page 13

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide The Rule of St. Benedict as a Template Today what we’re going to do is look at the other side of that stream. I talked (Part 1 of 3) about how our particular Wisdom lineage that I’m working in is made up of two streams, the one coming from the conscious work school, the other coming from the great Benedictine lineage that has really been the backbone of Christian monasticism for at least 1,500 years now. What happened in my own life is that it was given to me by the people I worked with, and the places I happened to be, to see how these things weave together. Yesterday we started with a quick tour through the whole idea of three- centered awareness as a mode of transformation, as a mode of raising your being, of waking up, or staying awake. Today I’m going to come back and look at the Benedictine tradition through that filter. There’s a lot of people that are really interested in the Rule of Saint Benedict and the whole Benedictine lifestyle, and it got really, really hot about, what now, almost 20 years ago, when Kathleen Norris wrote her book, The Cloister Walk, which became a bestseller, and put Benedictine spirituality front and center. People are really interested, and gather around the planet quite regularly in certain groups, to do Benedictine experiences. But the tendency is always to derive it from the outside, and I want to derive it from the inside, from the point of view of conscious awakening. I want to look at the Rule I want to look at the Rule first and first and foremost as a template, a template for inner foremost as a template, a template for transformation, and to see how the various structural inner transformation, and to see how the pieces in it serve that goal of inner awakening, and various structural pieces in it serve that how they actually correspond to the program of three- goal of inner awakening, and how they centered awareness. actually correspond to the program of three-centered awareness. We’re going to be working our way through that today and tomorrow, because we’re going to get through generating the template, looking at what is in each part of it, and then beginning to work those parts—both how it was originally understood in the tradition, and how it can be replicated today. Finally we’re going to look at how we can, if we want, take this template into any condition of life. Any place you are and come from, you can take this back and use it like a dress pattern. Put it on any bolt of cloth that happens to be your work if you get it right. You know the way you make a pattern work is you can put it on any bolt of cloth, make it bigger or smaller as long as you keep what right? The proportions. Got it! That’s how we’re going to approach the Rule of Saint Benedict, as a dress pattern, as a system of proportion that once you see what’s going on and how it’s going on, from the perspective of inner awakening. You can take any kind of life you’re dealing with, including as one of my students did in Minnesota, two parents who concurrently are struggling with Alzheimer’s, and make that your monastery. Okay, so that’s where we’re going. The corollary holds that if you actually go into a Benedictine monastery following the wonderful kind of Benedictine advice, “You keep the rule and the rule will keep you,” it can be a 60-year snooze. Good stuff will happen. As © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Gurdjieff says, you will really work hard with Man Number Two and awaken that beautiful emotional-centered intuitiveness, but until you’re in all three centers, you’re still technically asleep from where we’re going with this particular path of inner awakening. So that’s what we’re going to do. This kind of teaching is just beginning to be taught in Benedictine monasteries. I was actually invited to teach it to the good monks of Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts, when they invited me to lead their retreat a few years back. They sat there and said, “Huh! I never thought of it that way before. I never thought of it that way before.” I think the way of looking at it through the lens of the original purpose of this is really important. The Benedictine tradition is the strongest The Benedictine tradition is the strongest tradition tradition I believe we have in Christianity I believe we have in Christianity on which to create a on which to create a template of template of conscious awakening leading to what we conscious awakening leading to what would call in the West or in the East today, non-dual we would call in the West or in the attainment or enlightenment—full presence. It’s there, East today, non-dual attainment or and if you work with the Rule in a particular way, it enlightenment—full presence. pushes you inescapably toward that. You need that conscious awakening piece explicitly in there and explicitly geared toward knowing how three-centered awareness is being called forth, so you can recognize where imbalances are coming and right yourself back. That’s what we’re going to be about in the next couple of days. I don’t want to get sidetracked into a history lesson on the role of Saint Benedict, but I want to give you just enough background information so you can orient yourself in space-time.

Saint Benedict Saint Benedict looks like he comes out of nowhere. And, in a kind of funny way, we know less about him than almost any of the great people that are corner-turners and post-holders in our lineage. The only thing that seems to be known with absolute certainty is that he was born in 480 of the Common Era. We’re not exactly sure when he died. We think he was pretty much off the planet by somewhere around 530 or so. He didn’t live a terribly long life. We know he spent three years doing hermit preparation in a cave near Subiaco, and then he founded a number of monasteries. The most famous one was Monte Cassino, which is not operative today. It got pretty much destroyed in World War II, and it had already lost its traction as a living community. What we know about Saint Benedict mostly lives in a biography of him written by Pope Gregory the First, who was roughly a contemporary. Gregory was a great admirer of Benedict and wrote the biography, which like all biographies up until Boswell and Johnson, is not a factual account of a life of a person, but an inspirational account in which fancy and fact mingle in equal—if you’re lucky—proportion. Don’t take it as an eyewitness account of the life of Saint Benedict, but rather as the inspirational impact that Benedict made on Gregory. But it is something to go by. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

The other place that you can get a sense of Benedict is simply by doing lectio divina with the Rule—reading it gently, prayerfully, and, like monks, over a period of your entire monastic life, and gradually the features of this person will settle in. If you’re anything like me, you’ll begin to discover that what really is the characteristic feature of this person is that given that he lived in an incredibly rough, brutal, and chaotic age—he was born four years after the final crumbling of the Roman Empire; the barbarians were sacking the kingdom in great waves. The Roman Empire was crumbling under his feet and chaos ruled the land. So given that, given that it was a violent and chaotic era, and given that the people who entered his monastery were not the sort of individuated sensitive men that constitute male seekers nowadays, this was more like the football team. He had to specify in the Rule, “Please do not sleep with your knives on, still.” And try and restrain these men by saying, “Hey guys, one quart of wine is enough a day.” Given that baseline of the time, I think that you will still find that there is a remarkable kindness and sophistication and gentleness about the ways of transformation. He yearns for the becoming of the ones entrusted to him, like a father and like a mother. And his psychological savvy about how people— people who set out on a goal for transformation—fetch up on the island of egoic self-satisfaction and never move off. His yearning, his wisdom about that, and how you can take even a monastery and make it the absolute fiefdom of your ego’s terrain. He knows the turf. I think you find coming through this, a gentleness, a wisdom, and that’s what’s stood the test of time. You have to do translation because it is written in the language of the times. It is written through a Roman filter, and it is written very much through the paradigm that many of us just detest nowadays: if you don’t make the grade you’re going to hell. You can’t find too much that was written in this era that doesn’t work on those stipulations. So you just have to get through them, give them the benefit of the doubt of atonement theology, and move on. There is transformational wisdom here. So, despite that the fact that it looks like Benedict just emerged out of a vacuum, he didn’t. Remember we talked about the underground river of Wisdom. I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow account, but running straight out of Christ, out of Jesus, maybe through the Gospel of Thomas— certainly the Gospel of Thomas was prominently involved in this—there was a whole lineage of people that kept alive the invitation that fell out of Jesus’ lips, according to all the Gospels. “If you would be perfect, …” Perfect not meaning morally impeccable, but whole, alive. “If you would be saved, …” which in the Greek means “healed. …” Basically the line is, “Leave all things that you have and come and follow me.” There were people that responded to that, that believed strongly that he, Jesus the Living One, was inviting them into more abundant life now. And that he had taught a practice, or at least an attitude, which would allow them to step across the threshold and enter that realm, which he called the Kingdom, now. In living communion with the One who was, after all, resurrected, which meant not necessarily that he was running around in a physical body and physical space-time, but that his personhood was intimately available to everyone in © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 4 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide their own lives as they were able to raise their being to connect with it. There has been an underground stream that has been interested in that and it’s never lost the thread of that. Thank God, or we wouldn’t be here today. So the place where that great Wisdom stream came up and above water in our tradition then big time was around the beginning of the fourth century in the deserts of Egypt and Syria in response to that sudden, shocking imperialization of the Christian Church. In a period of about one year, Christianity went from being a forbidden religion, actively persecuted, to being the state religion. Many, many people experienced this as a loss, and found themselves drawn to the desert where the atmosphere was a little bit more clear for listening, for tuning into that bandwidth of living presence. All of a sudden, in the deserts of Africa and Egypt, emerged this phenomenon that just sort of burst out of nowhere in the fourth century, reached a kind of maturity just about the fourth/fifth, just over the century change, and then gradually dissipated and lost steam as a new cultural movement arose. So that was the Desert tradition, and it was really the first Wisdom School— bonafide Wisdom School—in Christianity. Transformation in everything. And it happened before the whole doctrine of Original Sin had clunked down like a heavy shackle around the feet of Christian aspiration. And so you still have people saying “yes” to becoming perfect, “Yes, I will go all the way!” Benedict’s monastery, Benedict’s tradition, lived basically at the time that original sin was getting itself formulated as a doctrine, and lacked that kind of exuberance of spirit that had characterized the earlier monastic school. But it had the heart of the tradition. And the reason it had the heart of the tradition, and was the next in their lineage, was because there were people that began taking the lineage West. The only name you really need to know here, unless you really want to be a historian of your tradition, is a fellow by the name of John Cassian. You could think of John Cassian as a honeybee, because what he did was to go from one flower to another gathering pollen. I’m just going to put his name up here so you can see him, Cassian. A lot of people nowadays are naming their sons “Kashian” and they don’t know how to spell it. It’s like that [Cassian]. It’s not like cashew. He was this remarkable person who was born actually himself in the East, worked first under the great monastic communities forming under Saint Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. Came West, worked in the desert under the brilliant mentorship of one of the desert monks named Evagrius, for whom is generally credited the founding of the teaching on the Seven Deadly Sins. Then he took the tradition and Cassian went around and began, like an oral historian, to collect the traditions and the sayings of the Desert. Then he brought them to the West where monasticism was just beginning to form on John Cassian the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in southern France, Italy, on the islands off the coast. He brought them there in the form of the Conferences, his recollections of the talks, and the institutes that governed the Desert tradition. That became the torch that got passed on in this kind of Wisdom Olympics. And the ones that picked it up were the monks of Provence and western Italy. That’s where monasticism began again in Europe. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 5 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Even Benedict, the evidence has it, was working off of an earlier Rule known as the Rule of the Master, which was a much more turgid and over- controlling, micromanaging rule. We still have texts of it. What Benedict did as a genius was—he didn’t sit down one day and just write the Rule— he took this earlier bulky, unwieldy text and pared it down so that it’s a real Wisdom vessel. Joan Chittister, if you ever read her book, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of Saint Benedict Today, she makes the real point that the word “Rule” does not mean “the law.” There’s a good Latin word for law, it’s law = lex. From that we get “legal” and “Lexus.” Right? Rule comes from regula, and it means something like a ruler that you use when you’re cutting a dress pattern, a measure. These are not so much the law of Saint Benedict, but the yardstick, the guiding measurements, the Wisdom guidelines that allow you to participate in this school for the Lord’s service. I read you a little bit of the end of the prologue to The Rule of Saint Benedict this morning in our morning sitting. That’s what he did. He really created what you can call generically a “Wisdom vessel” out of this cumbersome law book, and this Wisdom vessel has been passed down with extraordinary reverence through the ages. Benedictine monks will still daily read the Rule, both privately and publicly, the way the Jewish rabbis read the Torah. Really, this is our tradition. This is where we come from, and with that deep sense that there is Wisdom for life still to be mined here. It’s a really very classic text of the Christian tradition.

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 6 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Ora et Labora What I’d like to do is look at the way it works as a template. If you know, if you (Part 2 of 3) were at a Benedictine monastery and instead of being given a habit, you were given a T-shirt. What would it say on the front of it? Ora et Labora. Right! That is the slogan of the Benedictine tradition. Of course it means “prayer and work.” And for extra credit on this exam, which one is which? Ora is prayer, right? Agreed? And Labora is work. Okay, that stands to reason. But you have to make sure that people know the obvious. It’s amazing. Otherwise the lecture notes that get passed on can create some screwy bends in Christian practice. This is also the first great divide when Benedict downloaded his teaching into time and space. It becomes the first, and what I’d like to think of as, the vertical axis dividing Ora et Labora the monastic day. There was ora part in which the monks were profoundly and intentionally involved in prayer. And pray work there was the labora part in which they were working. And alone alone the rhythm between those two stays in balance. Admittedly, it’s a somewhat seasonal balance, and Benedict admits to this. He says out there in the spring and summer when you got to get the crops in, you’re going to err a little bit on the side of labora, but you’re going to pick it up in Lent when it’s dark and the crops are harvested. Over the long haul, the intention is to keep a balance between prayer and work. pray work Of course, that’s what Kathleen Norris found so compelling when she went to the monastery, Saint John’s Abbey, back in together together 1996 and had the experience that culminated in The Cloister Walk. She realized that instead of her old workaholic self that got up at four and worked on her book till seven and then went to bed, that The day was punctuated by a regular, intentional, rhythmic fluctuation between prayer and work, which kept both of them sane and balanced. We’ll talk about that more. So that’s the fundamental, and any Benedictine scholar or monk will tell you, “Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.” But there is also another axis running through the Benedictine grid which is the question of activities done alone, and activities done together. I think this gives us another pull that Benedict was very mindful that the earliest traditions in monasticism were eremitic ones. The first people were hermits. They went out into their deserts— Anthony, who was celebrated as the founder of monasticism in the West, was a hermit. He knew that there was great pride of place given to the solo expression of the monastic life. But he also realized that there was both solidity and sobriety in numbers, that the community gives you protection, certainly in that age. Community also, as you’ve probably already discovered in your small groups, creates a mirror. We’d all think we were enlightened already if you didn’t have to prove it to the other people. “Take the folks away and I’m fine!” It really pushes you up against the grinding and the evaluation in which the most important thing happens in the desert work: humility. Humility not understood as groveling, but Humility understood as an honest and flexible self-knowledge. That you understand who you are and who you aren’t. You know your strengths. You know your weaknesses. You know that you’re loved © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 7 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide through all this, and yet you know you’re responsible for not just going crazy and acting out your dream of yourself. And every time you try and act out your dream of yourself, someone’s there in your face because it gets in the way of them acting out their dream of themselves. Anyway, there’s that wonderful kind of polishing, like diamonds, that goes on in community. Benedict felt finally that the communal form was the most trustworthy, was the best, the cenobitic. You’ll find that he respects and develops an intentional rhythm, sub-rhythm in the day, between activities done alone and activities done together. I think this grid, this four-cornered template comprises what I like to think about as the four quadrants of Humility understood as an honest Benedictine spirituality. The idea was that there were a and flexible self-knowledge. That you set of activities that were done in each of these quadrants understand who you are and who you every day, and we’re going to fill in the blanks of what aren’t. You know your strengths. You know they are in just a minute. your weaknesses. You know that you’re loved through all this, and yet you know Before we do that, I just want to look at the crucial part of you’re responsible for not just going crazy this, which is that nowadays, we would go around the room and acting out your dream of yourself. and say, “You know, what’s most efficient is to have experts, and have a quarter of the monks doing this, a quarter of the monks doing this, and a quarter of the monks doing this, and a quarter of the monks doing this. And hey, let’s decide who by Enneagram type! Let’s put the introverts up here. Let’s put the fours and the nines up here doing this, and let’s put the eights here, and let’s put the performers over here.” That whole idea we have today, praying by types and doing by types, and specializing for some sort of efficiency. … Forget it. That’s not what the Rule of Saint Benedict is all about. The idea is that every day, everybody would go through, shuffle through all of these quadrants. And that the whole interest was in the consciousness of the person growing right there at the cross tree of it. The idea of a balanced person is that you could move out into any quadrant—from deep prayer to changing the tires on the monastery buggy—without going through different changes of identity, different roles, different persona, without triggering a hiccup. The one who’s one moment in deep prayer of celebration, offering up the sacrifice on the Eucharist, is the next moment cleaning the monastery toilets. And it’s the same person. That’s the one thing that you can’t get in a highly specialized culture. People tend, in a highly specialized culture, to identify with their roles, to derive their being from their roles, and when their roles get taken away from them, they’re like little chickens before the Thanksgiving pluckings. What Saint Benedict was always doing was stripping away the roles with the questions of, “What’s behind it? Who’s the person?” Forcing people to find a flexible identity that could be so flexible because you were holding it at a level deeper than your outer function. That’s what a balanced human being looks like. That’s what an integrated human being looks like. And as we’re also going to see, that’s what a three-centered human being looks like. Because in each of these quadrants, in different combinations, there’s going to be not only an opportunity, but a necessity of working in all those areas that we talked about yesterday: with the moving center, with the intellectual center, with the emotional center. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 8 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

That’s why the Benedictine template—for all its abuses and misunderstandings and people going away from it and coming back to it, it still, over the course of a long life—does tend to deliver people that are balanced in a deep way. Flexible and humble abbots who can also cook or rake the leaves, or that are, “Oh, we have a need here? We can do it.” Instead of, “Oh, that’s below me!” We don’t get that. Forcing people to find a flexible identity We get flexible, low-maintenance human beings who that could be so flexible because you know how to help. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s were holding it at a level deeper than your the product of a Wisdom School. outer function. That’s what a balanced human being looks like. That’s what an So with that in mind, let’s take a look at seeing what fills integrated human being looks like. And up all of these quadrants. Traditionally in Benedictine as we’re also going to see, that’s what a monasticism, Ora, prayer alone, was what? Anybody three-centered human being looks like. know? Lectio divina. Right. As a matter of fact, it was Saint Benedict who invented the term lectio divina. It’s sacred reading, divine reading, that’s what it literally means. It’s right there in the Rule describing how monks are to spend their time during Lent. And that’s the first time that this term makes its appearance in Western literature. But it doesn’t mean the whole full intricate system of praying through scripture that we’ve developed nowadays, but it implies that. What it means is a sacred, prayerful reading of small parts of a sacred text. And I would say just for the information of it, in Benedictine monasticism, the sacred texts were not just the Bible, the books of the Bible, because it hadn’t yet become customary to put all the books together and call it the Bible. They were separate books. It was not just that source that they read, they also read Ovid. They read Virgil. Because in order to be able to do lectio divina, you got to be able to read, don’t Ora et Labora you? One of the obligations of Benedictine monasticism was to teach these football players who were hulking in off pray work of the Teutonic shores how to read. Ovid for Dummies. alone alone That’s one of the ways that Benedictine culture or monasticism saved Western culture. It maintained the link between the ancient world and the modern world through the transmission of reading. The sacred texts were the biblical texts, and also the wonderful classics. They read, as well, what were beginning to be, or even at that time, known as the Patristic texts, the writings of those great, pray work great Fathers of the Church, such as Jerome had the pride of place in those days. Later on as distance elapsed, Augustine, together together but the ones we now know as the great Fathers. Origen was read for a while until he was put off limits. That’s what had happened, and the idea is that you would go to your room— lectio was classically done in a monastery, and still is, as an individual activity. Although very frequently, it’s individuals in a single room doing the work together. There you would be working on your text. You would read it first out loud, actually. If you ever have tried to replicate a monastery scriptorium where people are doing their lectio divina, you’ll hear this little mumble of words. … And then just a little passage, stop, allow yourself to be drawn to something © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 9 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide in the text that calls you, just like we were doing with Thomas yesterday, that disturbs you, that challenges you. It’s almost like what I call dowsing scripture, where you let your little divining rod go over the text until it finds something that’s like living water for you. There you stop and you begin to work it. You put your spade in and start digging. Why is this doing this? What does it associate for me? You play with the words. You work it. You go back and say, “What does this remind me of?” You let archetypal memory kick in. You let free association kick in. Anything that will unpack and get you closer to this place where you spotted water. You work it that way and then at some point during the process, you move towards prayer. Sometimes the prayer will emerge spontaneously out of the text. If you’re reading a text which is so moving—“If I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not love, I am but a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal” (—1 Corinthians 13:1). How can you read that and not be down on your knees already? Some of them just pull a prayer right out of you. Others, if you’re reading through the genealogy of the prophets before Jesus, you may want to contribute a prayer from your own data bank of prayers. The idea in classic lectio is that there’s a point where all that kind of mental, cataphatic, work of trying to break open a text comes to sitting with a text in something like prayer. Then from there, you let go of even that, and simply rest in the text. As the monks were fond of saying, quoting Psalms 131, “… like a weaned child in its mother’s arms;” so you just rest in the text. Not thinking about it, not pushing it, not trying to do it, and not even rocking it, letting it rock you. That’s the part that grew into, in the West, what it meant when you shifted from prayer into contemplation, which was really just being with at a level deeper than any of that faculties: your memory, your reason, your emotion. Monks would and still do work this way on a text. Back and forth, and back and forth, never more than a paragraph. Frequently never more than a sentence. And they work it until it’s done. It’s not a race. You don’t get a new sticker from your abbot when you finish another book of the Bible. And if you finish the whole Bible, you go back and start again. So, that’s lectio. It was typically done in the early morning, right after the first service of the day, Vigils, which happens even darker than morning yoga here. Monks would disperse back to their room, work lectio for an hour or so. And they might come back and do it later in the day. That still goes on. At Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, which I alluded to earlier, the monks do it twice a day between right after their early Vigils and the service of Lauds, and then in the evening just before Vespers. The real emphasis is getting to know scripture almost like it’s a play, that you’ve memorized the script so well that you actually have become Hamlet. You’re not just playacting it anymore. These words are your words. This text is your text. This life is your life. That’s the understanding here.

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 10 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Three-Brained Awareness and Ora So, what parts of the three-brained awareness do you think are going to get called into play in this quadrant? Emotional center, certainly. Yeah. Particularly where? In the movement into Ora, right? In the movement into prayer, but in all sorts of ways, yes. There’s this deep responsivity. How does the intellectual center come into play? Obviously. That’s where you start with the … “What is this text? Why is it giving me trouble? What does this word mean? What does this remind me of?” These are the wonderful operations—meditatio is what that stage is called in the classic language of lectio divina. You meditate a text. It’s not meditate on a text. You meditate a text, which means you submit it to your cataphatic faculties— your reason, your emotion, your intellect, your will. Okay. Now here’s a more interesting question. How does the moving center get engaged? Remember what I said before? Saying it out loud. Yeah? Very often, the whole term “meditating scripture”—one of the great commentators on The Rule of Saint Benedict pointed out to me, meditating it—means deeply memorizing it. There’s a really fascinating paper and I hadn’t been aware of that. It’s in the … I can never get the two parts: The Love of Learning and The Desire for God, or vice versa. A wonderful book on the Benedictine tradition, written by a Benedictine monk and scholar Jean Leclercq. I don’t need to give you a note on that, you won’t read it. He pointed out that meditating scripture has a very powerful meaning in the medieval era of memorizing it. Taking these things as you’re working over them and not just working them with your mind, but bringing them in. Remember how I talked about how the moving center is involved in the imitation, in the speaking out loud, in the taking things in? As you speak the text, a word to the wise: do that in your lectio divina anyway, but particularly if you are a preacher and are going to have to preach on the Gospel on Sunday morning. For God’s sake, meditate your text out loud. When you’re working on it to prepare your sermon, don’t just read it and say, “Oh yeah, I got the picture.” Say it. I need a glass of water up here and I’m not sure where it went. It’s right behind me. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Otherwise I’m going to be reduced to silence. Thank you. All right. Anyway, what has happened to me more times than I can tell, is I’ll read the text, think, “Oh, I got it.” I’ve got my sermon all prepared. I go down in the Gospel procession, read it out, proclaim it loudly before the faithful, and all of a sudden I say, “Oops.” There in the passage that I’m reading aloud is exactly what I should have preached on. That there is a way that things are processed into the data bank when you use the moving center, that they don’t go in when you just use the eyes. As a matter of fact, I would have to say with fear and trembling, that in the road to three-brained awareness, our eyes are our biggest obstacle because we use them to quickly take a surface impression of reality rather than going into it in depth. We use them to end run sensation until we go blind. “Oh I know. That’s a fence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s wood or plastic. It’s a fence and it’s there.” We got a picture, “Yeah. Been there, done that. I understand that.” And when we look with things with our eyes, it goes into a very different © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 11 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide processing system in the brain, or a different part of the brain than if we were actually learning them by heart, if we’re taking in by our voice, our emotions, by conscious impression. The idea in Wisdom is knowing deeper, and we have to train our eyes not to take these surface snapshots and call it good. But to really look. And when we’re dealing with sacred text, this is extraordinarily important because you’ve all been through at least high school. Some of you have been through God knows what in the eight years beyond graduate schools and postdocs and everything, and you learn a certain academic way of using your eyes and your brain to relate to information. You need to unlearn that if you’re going to do lectio, because it’s a whole different route by which this information falls into your three-brain being. So that’s what they do there (pointing to the Ora alone quadrant). All centers are engaged and we begin to bring it in.

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 12 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide The Divine Office (Part 3 of 3) Well, that will give us just enough time to break the back of this next quadrant. In the classic Benedictine map, what corresponded or what filled the place of prayer together? The Office. Yes! The Divine Office, which doesn’t mean your own suite on the top of a penthouse in the financial district of New York. That’s not the Divine Office. The word comes from the Latin word Opus. Divine Office is a translation of the Latin Opus Dei, which I hate has been shanghaied by conservative Catholic organizations. Because the origin of this term really lies in Benedictine spirituality, and it means “the Work of God.” And Benedict specifically understood that the Work of God was to chant the Psalms and sing praises, raise the voices in thanksgiving and prayer to God like angels. That was the Work. TheOpus Dei is the name, or the Divine Office is his name for the system, the regular system, of what you might call “spiritual pit stops” punctuated into a day to trip up that tendency to just work until you drop. And to call yourself back into conscious awakening and attention to what I’m here for. The Office is what you might call the Benedictine version of the “Stop exercise” that you’re all doing in Work, where you have to pause, recollect yourself, and begin again under the limelight of “Why.” “Why am I doing this?” “Here I am. What am I here for?” The big questions. Rather than just getting totally myopic, tunnel- visioned on the task. One way of looking at the Benedictine Office is to say, “Whoa, that’s a lot of time spent in church!” Because he did divide the thing into seven little daily pit stops, plus a longer one at night. I think you approach this better—rather than thinking, “Boy, that’s a lot of time in church,”—to go at it from the other end and to think about the original norm that the Desert Fathers and Mothers were really trying to Ora et Labora seek and attain was prayer without ceasing. And as they understand that to be on two levels at once. It was certainly pray work the level of being able to hold a conscious field of attention, alone alone but it was also in a deep and powerful way, the capacity, the actual saying of Psalms and chanting of Psalms. What Saint Benedict talks about is that the original Desert practice, as it was remembered, the original Desert liturgical practice was to be chanting the Psalms non-stop. There’s a Rule. There’s a wonderful place in The Rule of Saint Benedict that I could find if I wanted to waste time flipping pray work through it. “For monks who in a week’s time say less than the full psalter with the customary canticles betray extreme together together indolence and lack of devotion in their service. We read, after all, that our holy Fathers, energetic as they were, did all this in a single day. Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are, can achieve it in a whole week.” He basically says, “Hey you guys, if you think this is a lot of psalms, and you think that it’s a burden on you to do 15 or 20 of them a day, this is really incredible slackness. Because it’s told that our holy forefathers and

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 13 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide foremothers in their zeal did all 150 of them a day.” There is a strong collective memory in the tradition that the earliest spiritual practice in the desert, the earliest Wisdom lineage practice was the recitation of all 150 Psalms in a day. Benedict smoothed it out so that you could do them in a week, but he said in no case drop it any less than that. If we approach the Office, not in terms of “wow, that’s a lot of time in church,” but, “wow, that’s a lot of time not in church”—you come closer to what the original sentiment was. Yes, the classic understanding was that the basis of the Divine Office is chanting the Psalms. You say, “Chanting?” I say, “Yes,” because the word “psalm” means “song,” and a spoken psalm is an oxymoron. It’s like a three-legged bicycle. That the psalms were sung, that they were chanted. We’re going to talk about why this is such an important aspect of the transformational program. What Benedict did was to sort them into seven little services during the day— “pit stops” as I call them, but it helps to see the function—which would be a singing of a certain number of Psalms, pre-selected and written in the Rule, circulating through, combined with some ritual prayers, some very simple. The Lord’s Prayer was always in. In the morning and evening, you also did, respectively, the Divine Canticles, the Benedictus in the morning, the Song of Zachary, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel.” And in the evening, the Magnificat, the “For monks who in a week’s time say less Song of Mary. So that’s the basic structure of it. Some of than the full psalter with the customary the Offices were very simple, lasting not more than five canticles betray extreme indolence and or ten minutes. Others were very complex, lasting for lack of devotion in their service. We read, more than an hour when you come to the great night after all, that our holy Fathers, energetic service of vigils. Why seven? as they were, did all this in a single day. Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are, Perfect! “Seven times a day, I will pray to you.” Here can achieve it in a whole week.” is your biblical or your monastic trivia test. When in —RB.18.24-25, The Rule of St. Benedict doubt, look for the reason for something in Psalm 119 that was taken as the model of the perfect monk. And so they go back and … It’s a kind of proof texting. He says “Seven a day we praise,” so seven times a day we praise. Off you go, but that’s typical. These are the Offices. The big ones to know about are … if we look at this—I need my able assistants to flip my charts. It looks like this just basically. I don’t think this is trivia, but a fundamental introduction to things. At night, you have vigils, and the word “vigil” of course stands on its own. “More than the watchman longs for morning, my soul longs for you [Psalm 136].” The image of the watchman is absolutely archetypal in Jewish and Christian imagination for the spiritual seeker. “I am the one that watches in the dark.” With that combined meaning of “holding the post.” The watchman holds a post, keeps the people safe, takes up a position on behalf of the community he or she is watching for. The watchman is also the one who is yearning, whose eyes are out to the future like the prophet, looking for the dawn. It’s a beautiful, powerful role, and The monastic service ceremony of vigils is intended to hold the watch through the thin places of the night on behalf of the whole world.

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 14 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

It’s, I think, really, really assuring even today when the world is so broken and fractured. To think that there are those, every night, getting up to hold the space through those thin times. In the morning, you start right off with Lauds. If you’re lucky, it’s the service of daybreak, but for most of the year, it will come when it’s still well in the dark. It’s the service that along with—Lauds in the morning and Vespers in the evening— are probably the most natural, spontaneous, archetypal times of prayer. Peoples all over the world gravitate to daybreak and sunset as times of prayer. These two have got real pride of place, and in Lauds, the wonderful and a slightly more complex service, you get also the Benedictus, the great canticle, Benedictus. Then you get a bunch of little Offices during the day. These are the really tiny little pit stops, which are numbered. Prime, First Hour. Terce, Third Hour. Sext with a ‘T’, which corresponds to noon, the noon Office right before lunch. None, the Ninth Hour, which is usually around 3pm. Of course there is really, really kind of archetypal resonance in these if you let them. Because this will always, in a deep way, recapitulate Christ’s ordeal on the cross, which took place—between the times according to the Gospel account on Good Friday—between Sext (noon) and None (3pm). This will often, particularly on Fridays, be celebrated in a particularly intentional way in the monastery. There’s a bandwidth of Christic intentional suffering energy there that can really be tapped for remembrance. Then you get Vespers at night, again, at traditional sundown. Here, in a beautiful way, as we move—Magnificat—into the more yin time of the day, the more in- gathered, we sing the great song of the feminine, the Magnificat. Just as we started with the yang of the male, which sends us forth in the morning with the Benedictus. And then in the evening, the final service before we retire to the Great Silence, and which we kind of replicate here at Wisdom School, is called Compline. It’s the gathering of all and entrusting it back into the night. There we classically sing the song of Simeon, “Lord, you now have let your servant go in peace.” We pray for the blessings of the night, and really, really interestingly and beautifully, and certainly in the Trappist part of the Benedictine tradition— but across the Benedictine tradition as a whole—you get the tending to end the day with a gathering before the window of Mary and singing the Salve Regina, Hail Mary. So that the day in a Benedictine monastery ends with a salutation and a giving back to the Mother. It’s something that would never be seen just by the academic eyes alone. They say, “Well, it’s patriarchal monasticism!” But the way the feminine actually lives in monasticism in real space-time is shocking, and is revelatory to a lot of people, but you got to be there to see it. Anyway, we’re about at break today, and I’ll pick up with this again tomorrow. I just wanted to say as a new The monastic service ceremony of vigils group of you begins to go to music, that you can see that is intended to hold the watch through the what we’re doing here as we’re working with chant, is to thin places of the night on behalf of the replicate a key piece of the monastic Wisdom program. whole world. And really, monks would spend six hours a day, in some cases, in choir.

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 15 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

The Divine Office and Three‑Centered Awareness So, here’s the question: Apart from all theology and devotion, from the perspective of three-centered awareness, what’s getting exercised here? [Male]: Moving center. [Cynthia]: Moving center, yeah! You can’t make music without movement. [Male]: Emotional center. [Cynthia]: Emotional center. Certainly, as the things become beautiful. Intellectual center. But back to the moving center, to get even more specific, we’re working in a very, very powerful way with a breath yoga. Have you ever noticed that the singing is all done on the out-breath? I was a singer for many, many years before I noticed this obvious truth. What it means is if you’re singing, you’re going to go (breathing as she sings), “Bless the Lord, oh oh oh oh my soul” (sharp in-breath!). What that means is that you’re working with an altered breath rhythm. Right? Right? You’re learning patterns and—particularly when you’re chanting in Latin and when you’re singing these beautiful melismas (singing)—you sometimes have these wonderfully altered. … It’s a yoga. It’s a yoga of breath, on top of which is layered a yoga of sound. Again, this becomes particularly vibrant when you’re chanting in Latin, which I think is one of the reasons why Latin hung around for as long as it did in the monasteries. Because the syllables that Latin is really rich in, the “Ah’s” and “Oh’s” and “Ooh’s,” are fundamentally there, and the “Mm’s” of Maria and Magnificat. These components: “Ah,” Salve, Hallelujah, Amen. “O’s,” O Magnum Mysterium. “Ooh” and the “Mm” are the components linguistically of the great syllable “Om.” Ever think of that before? They contain an actual energy that feeds the subtle body, the “etheric body” if you like that terminology. There’s a powerful story that’s actually attested, of when monks in a certain community in Southern France had their Gregorian chant taken away from them in the ’60s as part of Vatican II. They got sick. It was something that kind of corresponded to chronic fatigue syndrome. And it was when the chant was restored to them that they recovered, because in this really tight-tolerance environment of spiritual transformation they built, they were all of a sudden literally malnourished. They weren’t getting their “Ah,” their Vitamin “Ah,” and their Vitamin “Oh,” and their Vitamin “Ooh,” and their Vitamin “Mm.” Think about it. I’m not just making funny fantasies. This is actually real. And the more our body gets fine-tuned spiritually—so we can match that bandwidth where the eternal presence of Christ is right there, and live in that presence— the more sensitized we get towards that, the more this becomes a factor. So the monastery, in a deep way, the yoga is in the choir. What we have been trying to do and why it’s so important that every one of you in Wisdom School gets a chance to chant. And why we’ve been working with these simple, wonderful chants that you can pick up so fast and get right into it without having to read music or memorize complex patterns. It’s so that you can jump right into the heart transformation that goes on, and the energetic transmission that goes on, and the collection and deepening of attention when chant happens. That’s what’s going on down in that second quadrant. Okay? © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism 16 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Day 2.3 Morning Conscious Practical Work

Inner & Outer Tasks Within a Wisdom context, a time for conscious practical work is typically included as part of the daily rhythm. The specific assignment will include both an inner task and an outer task. The outer/work task is usually assigned to a small group to work on together and, depending on the specific set-up and setting, could include activities such as preparing meals, performing housekeeping chores, tending to gardens or grounds, building, harvesting, painting, etc. One benefit of approaching the task as a group is to notice the degree that one energetic unit can begin to form through the mutual intention to consciously work together. However, anyone can engage in conscious practical work, alone or in a group setting. An essential component of the outer task work assignment is to avoid a focus on “getting the job done,” even though the work may be useful and practical. Why is this important? So often when we take on a task and aim for some pre-determined end result, we can become over-identified with our role or our sense of accomplishment and we end up running on conditioned or reactive patterns and habits. Of greater value is to use the work period as a time to engage with the task as a transformative practice for greater consciousness. The conscious work period is not about completing a task, but about inner seeing, and staying open with curiosity and willingness to see what we can learn. Cynthia (on ladder) and others painting as the outer task

The Inner Task: A Focal Point for Our Energy The application of an inner task offers a vital opportunity to anchor our attention and provide a focal point for our energy while performing the outer task. The inner task is essentially an invitation to interrupt “business as usual,” to notice unconscious habits and patterns of behavior, and to remember ourselves in all three centers of intelligence. (More about the three centers

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide in Day 1 morning teaching). Through practicing the inner task, we develop the skill of conscious self-observation and strengthen our capacity to stay present throughout the work period, and in life. To be most effective, the inner task will be specific enough to bring our attention out of our heads and into a kinesthetic, visceral experience in sensation, and greater awareness that “I am here.” Sometimes a designated team leader for the work group will use what is a called a “stop exercise” by periodically ringing a bell or simply calling out “Stop.” Upon hearing the “stop” command, you stop whatever raking as the outer task you are doing and simply notice your body, your gestures, your state of tension and ease, and any thoughts and emotions you are aware of. During the stop, you have an opportunity to take a quick scan to notice what has been happening for you, where your attention has been—to just observe without judgement. The instruction during the stop may be to return to sensation in your feet, and to come back to presence and remember why you are here. When the leader signals the end of the stop exercise, each person can recompose at whatever pace is needed, and then return to their work.

Ending the Work Period The work period is usually set within a specific time frame, and when that time period is complete, you are to stop, no matter what you are doing or how far you’ve gotten in your work assignment. Instead, consciously notice how it feels to stop, even if you have not “completed” your task. When working in a group it is important that ALL start and end together. To close the work period, you may be invited to stand in a circle, facing each other for a moment as you recollect yourself, and then to return any tools you used for your work.

window-washing as the outer task

Day 2.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

The Purpose of the Inner Task: Instructions Cynthia gave at a Wisdom School at Valle Crucis, North Carolina The purpose of the Inner Task is something you can use, almost like a tool or a benchmark or a yardstick, to bring you back into presence. It’s natural when you start working, particularly after you’ve been overstimulated in the intellectual center, to immediately goon thinking and thinking and not be here. It’s really important as we work … to notice your mind running off and getting into thinking or getting into planning, or any sort of thinking, to come back. Just bring your attention to your feet. And really let your attention rest in your feet until you can actually feel your feet tingling… make an actual connection with your feet with sensation. Try it. Can you sense the difference between doing that and simply saying, “Oh, yes, my feet”? It’s okay during the work periods to stop and pause, nothing really has to get done. As many times as you notice that you’re wondering off into thinking; or like and dislike; or opinions; or, “What’s for lunch?”; or, “What am I going to do next?”; bring your attention to your feet and reestablish that sensation by saying, “I am here.” It’s all about the return. It’s not about trying to maintain a steady state of consciousness. You can’t do it so don’t even try. Just come back when you notice you’ve wandered off. We’ll work for precisely an hour and then it’s over. Don’t pull that last weed; it will be there tomorrow. Don’t finish cleaning that last window pane. Don’t finish painting that last few inches of the stacking wood as the outer task porch post. We’re also working against workaholism … so simply spaciously work. You will have team leaders and if your team leaders feel a need, they will call a stop. If they do, simply stop what you’re doing, take a little bit of time to come back into your feet and presence, and then move on. If you are working in a group, try to organize quietly so you can keep attention. Now off you go.

Day 2.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Some Inner Task Suggestions to Help Get You Started • Bring your attention to the sensation in your feet, and whenever you notice your attention wandering, bring it back to sensing your feet. • Notice your feet making contact with the ground and allow that to bring you back to the direct experience of the present moment. • If you are using a tool, be attentive to the weight of it in your hand. • See what happens when you use your non-dominant hand to hold your tool or perform an activity (a playful option!). • Deliberately vary the tempo of your work. • While you’re working, place your attention at the point where two surfaces meet, such as your broom and the ground if sweeping, for example. • Notice the ground rising up to meet your feet (or your knees, if kneeling) as you work; acknowledging you are held; you do not work alone. • As you are walking or moving about, bring your attention to the up- stroke of your foot—a way of viscerally receiving assistance—through sensing the “up stroke.” • Work from stillness; use only the body parts that are really needed for the task at hand. • Listen to the sound that your work (or tool) makes. • Be alert to and catch any impulsive actions you make, then stop, and decide whether you want to consciously stay with that impulse. • Notice your inner judgements and reactivity to “like” and “dislike,” such as your preference for a particular task or set of working conditions. And when you notice a like or dislike, gather your attention back to being present by sensing your feet. • Introduce playful elements, such as having everyone hand their tool to the person next to them. • Sense the energy of the group. Create a scenario to deliberately lighten the tone of the work period, and to bring the group members into a greater sense of their collectivity.

Day 2.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work 4 Day 2.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders)

Co-leaders: Phil Rogacki, Robin Cameron, Gloria Cuevas-Barnett, Darlene Franz Darlene: The chant that we’re going to sing has two endings. It’s a new one, it’s a little bit longer. I just encourage you to listen for those two endings. It’s going to sound like it repeats, but the first ending goes up a little bit. The second ending goes down a little bit. I think you’ll settle into the melody quickly with that knowledge. The words are from the Gospel of Thomas. Come to know the one in the presence before you and everything hidden, all will be revealed. Come to know the one in the presence before you and everything hidden, all will be revealed. [01:05] [bell]

Phil: “Whatever the state in which I find myself at this moment, … the opportunity … is my first voluntary act, becoming available to a reality that changes my purpose for living. I am here in order to hear this force, not to expect something from it or appropriate it. I am here to understand the action that will create the possibility of a responsible life.” —Jeanne de Salzmann, from The Reality of Being: The Fourth Way of Gurdjieff

[01:45] [Chant led by Darlene Franz: Come to Know the One] Come to know the One in the presence before you and everything hidden, all will be revealed. Come to know the One in the presence before you and everything hidden, all will be revealed. [06:37] [bell for meditation]

[26:55] Gloria: “Remember yourself always and everywhere.” —G. I. Gurdjieff

[27:10] [bell to end meditation]

Notes:

Day 2.4 Afternoon: Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) 2 Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching gotThe Gospelthomas? of Thomas: If you are searching, Logionyou must not stop 2 until you find. —Logion 2 got thomas? If you are searching, you must not stop until you find. —Logion 2

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

We’re going to work together for a bit, around an hour maybe slightly under, in the plenary session to begin to break open one of my all-time favorite logion in the Gospel of Thomas, number 2. I’m going to read it the first time and allow yourself to be drawn to it. I would really encourage you the first time to listen just with the ears of your heart because it goes in a whole different track. Then, I’ll read it again a second time and that time, I’ll leave a little bit of pause after it, and you can check it out on your paper, and let yourself see what it looks like visually. And then, I may read it a third time in a different translation, the ancient 1959 raw version. Then, we’ll talk about what interests you, what encourages you, what puzzles you here. I do know that the people down in the front of the room are going to have the advantage in blurting it out. So don’t worry, you’ll have time in your group to talk more. That’s why we put you in small groups for it because it really is hard doing the Gospel of Thomas with 250 people. You don’t all get to share as freely as you want, but it’s an experiment.

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.” —The Gospel of Thomas, Translation by Lynn Bauman

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.”

Now, if you want, you can look at it on the paper for a few minutes. And here it is in the raw text.

Jesus said, “Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds. And when he finds, he will be troubled. And when he has been troubled, he will marvel and he will reign over thee all.”

That’s the raw version. All right, as you begin to break open this, let’s hear some initial responses. What strikes you? Anything immediately grab your attention? [Speaker 1] “You must not stop.” Yeah, you must not stop. There’s an urgency in there and that’s there even in the raw translation. Yeah. What else strikes you? [Speaker 2] “You will become troubled.” Yes, I think that’s the core. That’s the big surprise that this thing kicks you with, isn’t it? Why should you be troubled? Isn’t it “seek and you shall find”? That’s how we’re used to it. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

What else do you notice? [Speaker 3] “‘Your sovereignty will be your rest’ is what hit me the first time, but then when you talked about ‘reign over the awe,’ it was even more powerful. It’s the same line, of course, but different.” Yeah, exactly. We’ve got this whole thing … How many of you are tripped up by the words, “sovereignty and reign”? Yeah, quite a few of you. We’ll need to have a little conversation about that one I think because it’s an issue and it’s not an issue. At least, it’s not the same kind of issue that everybody thinks it is, but it is a big point. What else strikes you? Pardon? [Speaker 4] “If” you are seeking … the way it starts with an “if.” What strikes you about that? [Speaker 4] “The possibility that I might not be.” The possibility that you might not be! Isn’t this interesting? It shakes up the game because it says, “If you are seeking, you must not stop and you will find.”You just might not like what you find. [laughter] There’s someone in the back that had a hand up that wanted to comment on something … yeah? Pardon? Just the same “if.” Yeah. Okay, well these are some interesting, interesting parts. I want to give you just a few little comments and starters on this before you go off. I think, as I began to allude, this certainly is an expanded taxonomy of seeking from what you get in the equivalence in the canonical Gospels, which say, “seek and you shall find.” Boom! And. presumably, when you find, you’re happy. It’s all done and into the question and all this. Instead, we have here a much more complex thing. You can’t stop until you find, but when you find, you’re going to become troubled. That’s the next step. 1. First you seek and find. 2. Find and you become troubled. 3. Then your trouble gives way to wonder. 4. And in wonder, you will reign. 5. And your sovereignty will be your rest. There’s a five-step taxonomy there. Incidentally, if you’re using the Bauman edition, it does fess up that your sovereignty will be your rest. That last little copula in the whole thing is not in the Nag Hammadi version of it. But he added it back in because it is in a parallel fragmentary text that comes from Oxyrhynchus. 1. First you seek and find. 2. Find and you become troubled. They found a Greek text—Oxyrhynchus is another of those little towns up the Nile—and they found fragments 3. Then your trouble gives way to wonder. of the Thomas manuscript about the same time. What he’s 4. And in wonder, you will reign. doing is simply a well-established scholarly procedure 5. And your sovereignty will be your rest. there and making a composite text. But strictly speaking, from the Nag Hammadi one, it ends with: “In wonder you will reign over all things.” If you like that better, you just say you’re not doing a composite text. Anyway, it takes you on a zing, zing, zing. It’s almost a kabbalistic journey because it goes wondering back and forth between points until it finally reaches a point, which is very, very different from what you might have thought would be your ending point when you started out. How does that ring true? I’m going to try and give away … Does it seem first of all, does that seem like it’s sort of more how it works for you? Does that ring any © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide bells? Yeah, I think it really does ring bells because it has so often, how it feels when we’re actually in the process of seeking. If you kind of go with the “forewarned is forearmed” model for it, I think you find that this is a much fuller definition. Back about 1969—it may have been a little earlier than that but it’s right there—there was a really groundbreaking book that appeared. It became a kind of cult book of its time called the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a man by the named Thomas Kuhn, K-u-h-n. It’s so wonderful. It’s a groundbreaking book in the history of science. Have any of you bumped into it? Yeah, good, yeah. I notice most of the older folks have bumped into it. [laughter] You millennials put it on your reading list. Thomas Kuhn In it, Kuhn challenged what was then the prevailing thing that said that science was incremental. Somebody discovered this and oh, wonderful, we thank you for this wonderful discovery, and now, let’s build something on it. He said, no, that’s not the way it works. That’s the fairy tale, elementary-school version of it. He says that science is always made possible by a paradigm. There’s a prevailing frame in which you look for the information and you ask the questions. It allows you—while it’s held in place—to do both of those things, to work the terrain well. But he says that what happens when you actually have a scientific change, a real breakthrough, it’s a revolution not an evolution. What happens is that at first, you have a good prevailing paradigm. Everybody’s happy with it. It’s owned by the academia, the establishment. Then there begins to be a period of what he calls paradigm malaise or paradigm distress. What this is characterized by is more and more anomalies. More and more things that don’t have to fit, don’t quite fit, so you have to keep making more and more exceptions, pushing it in different directions. It begins to get confused. You can feel it’s losing its absolute credibility. Then all of a sudden, out of left field—and almost always out of left field because if it didn’t start out that way, that’s where it’s going to go immediately—somebody will propose a different paradigm. And the response is that the prevailing paradigm circles the wagon and tries as best as it can to discredit, demonized, and et cetera, this person who has attacked the prevailing paradigm. And so, for a while, you’ve got paradigm breakdown. You’ve got malaise because the old paradigm is already gone punky but the new, that is coming, has not yet established itself. And so there’s warfare. And then what finally happens is that everybody just takes a deep breath, gets with the new paradigm and off we go again. Of course, you’ve seen that over and over and over again. You see—I’m by no means an expert in the history of science and I haven’t read Kuhn recently so I’m digging back far into the memory grab bag—that was what was happening when the theory of what was the basic fundamental element in the universe back about 120 years ago. People were assuming that everything transpired within something that was called “the ether.” That was the prevailing paradigm but they couldn’t get the data they wanted, and all of a sudden you get the folks that proposed electromagnetic energy. Was that Maxwell; I’m trying to remember the data? But all of a sudden, © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 4 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide it was “Boom! No, that’s absolutely wrong!” The scientific establishment says “No way, that’s stupid.” And yet, within 10 years, it was electromagnetic all the way. Of course, we don’t even have to mention Einstein. That college dropout, flunk-out postal clerk in some little postal basement in Switzerland who is writing scientific papers on this thing called “relativity,” where—God forbids— he proposes an elasticity to our universe, which everybody knows since Newton is stable and fixed. Of course, Einstein was an easy target because he wasn’t even in the establishment to begin with. The only problem was he was right. And so, you see it. And once you see it. You can look at Christianity’s problem in a nutshell. We’re in a period of acute paradigm malaise. There are more and more anomalies. From the outside, people are already beginning to propose alternative models. And you know a paradigm shift is a big thing. It’s not, “Let’s just fix this a little bit and prop up the whole thing.” It’s like, “No, smash it and jump to a new paradigm.” You can see we’re right in that era and it’s why the age is so distressing and confusing. Essentially, because we’re still trying to use the Newtonian cosmology to fuel our theology, it won’t work anymore. But I’m not going to go down that track. That’s not the point of this lecture. What it is is just to get you used to this. So, let’s take that and transpose it from the scientific paradigm to your own life and look at how many times what it actually feels like to seek. That you’re going along and you’re very, very happy, and happily a member of your local Episcopal parish and everything’s fitting and everything is all hunky-dory. And all of a sudden, there begin to be these questions. That doesn’t fit. Something troubles you, something knocks you off-course, but you keep still trying to make it work. You keep going back and going back. And then one time later, you say … you realize it’s broken. You’re out of the box and there’s this feeling of complete, “It won’t fit. Where am I now? I’m in free fall.” One of the most powerful stories of that is actually Lynn Bauman’s. Lynn, who gave us this book. And he tells the story—it’s one of the most beautiful enactments of this Logion 2 I’ve ever seen. Lynn was born into a very fundamentalist, evangelical sect in California, the Dunkers, who actually wear plain, plain garb. Very, very fundamentalist. From very early on, while he was sensing his vocation growing up with earnestness and zeal in this, he had this deep and growing sense that his mission was to go to Persia to convert the Muslim infidels. So in order to be able to convert them and converse with them in the language of their faith, he went to UCLA and began a master’s program in Persian so that he could get facile with the language, and expand his skillset that he’d learn at Concordia Bible College. [laughter] So off he goes, and he wins a position—because he’s a master’s candidate at UCLA—working as the teaching assistant to a fellow by the name of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (who’s now in this country after the collapse of the Shah’s reign; a lot of them got in this country), who is this imperial, wise, majestic, present being, one of the great scholars of Persian traditionalism in the planet, one of the great wise elders. And here’s this gnarly little Concordia Baptist spy. [laughter] And the irony of the whole thing is that Lynn looks Persian. This little guy with these gnarly [laughter] … So, anyway, the struggle begins. The paradigm warfare. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 5 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

And Lynn is sitting in the class being the TA to Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Hearing all these stuff is making him go like this (shaky, pushing against), “No, no, no, no!” And at night fleeing back to their Baptist Dunker convocation to seek resurgence and renewal, take refuge in the Lord. [laughter] And the warfare goes on! And he said finally one night, what they did, because others were going through—in his little Baptist bible fundamentalist, evangelical mission group—going through the same struggle. Finally, one night in an all-night prayer vigil, the boxes dissolved. And there they were in a new world. And their jaw dropped. Is this typical? Does this ring any bells in your own search? That it seems to have a period of—something in you knows, you’re headed in a new way. You don’t know where you are yet. And so at first you keep running back, running back, and running back to see if you can shore up the paradigm. It’s really important to do that and yet, like the old structure of scientific revolutions, it’s not. Sometimes, either dramatically or undramatically, it breaks. For me, one of the most interesting paradigm shifts and most painful in recent years was when the Roman Catholic Church decided to harden up on who could receive communion. All of the monasteries, all of the fine Benedictine monasteries in which I had been happily received at the body of Christ, all of a sudden, this was an issue. Most of my familiar homesteads tried to be very gentle about it. They put up the sign that says no communion for non-card-carrying Catholics and they said, “Well, we’re not going to turn you away from the communion table but. …” You knew there was pain for them. And I had to weigh, in my own heart, the two pains. The pain of hurting my friends and putting them in jeopardy by receiving, and the pain of being … I felt really in a deep way betraying the invitation of Christ by not receiving. So that became a real paradigm struggle and what it did for me is finally, it pushed me into free fall as it always does, where essentially, I had to begin to learn to draw Eucharist straight from the cosmos. That’s where it finally collapsed. It’s been wonderfully freeing. It’s opened me up to all my great imaginal and Quaker heritage again. I still celebrate and I still receive as you’ll see, but it broke a box, and I had to really squarely face in my own self that this is not the only place where the body of Christ is made real. It was intensely painful, and I would never have gone there. I would still be a happy daily communicant if it hadn’t been for being pushed through this tunnel. And I have to say that in my own life, the spiritual journey is like this and very often, the livest places in it are when you’re in complete free fall. Let’s go back and take that just as a conversation—and I hope you’ll have some more things to say about that when you get in your small groups. This is really a point around which the sharing of your own stories and other people’s stories you know really begins to hit the road. He says, “If you’re searching you must not stop until you find. But when you find, you will become troubled.” I think that the reason that becoming troubled is so typically the response is, essentially, something in you is already out ahead of you. I’m more and more wondering in the whole metaphor of seeking from which we think, “Hide © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 6 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide and seek, it’s missing. I got to find you. Where are you God?” It looks like it from this angle but I think from the other angle, we are being drawn along as relentlessly as a tulip is drawn along as it moves from shoot to bud, to flower, to wilting, to go. Something is pulling us toward our destiny, or pushing from within because it’s already embedded there. And our ego self is the last to learn about it. Actually, if you watch it, another really interesting, interesting reason for getting in touch with your feet is that your feet are walking where you’re going, long before your head knows it. Check it out, check it out in terms of the spiritual journey, you find yourself doing … When I first getting into the communion, the Episcopal Church, the Eucharistic relationship, which was heavy and deep, I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and I was mortified to be identified as a religious nut. [laughter] And yet every day, my feet walked me to the noonday mass at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on the campus. I sometimes felt like I ought to put a paper bag over my head to go there. “Why am I doing this and why don’t I stop off at the library?” But I always walk right by the library. There’s something that’s drawing us on. But you can pretty well expect in your journey that there’s going to be a place where that really appears like a rupture with all you’ve known, with your stable base. And sometimes, it’s a dramatic external rupture, like you have to break company with your friends and family, and the faith of your family. Sometimes, it’s a much less dramatic rupture, but you find that your core convictions and these ideologies that you so painstakingly constructed aren’t working anymore. And sometimes you don’t know that’s the problem. You don’t think they aren’t working anymore. You think the problem is you’ve just gotten stale and restless. So the thing to do is to go back and get yourself in gear, go make a retreat. Go back and pump it up again. And you go back and you find that it still falls flat on its face. Then, you’re really between a rock and a hard place. This is the thing and you’re starting in to free fall. And once you start into it, it is as irrevocable as the baby starting down the birth canal. And just as painful. [laughter] So you can’t go back. You can’t say, “No, no, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to deliver today.” You can, if you want, forestall it and numb it out. A lot of people do it for years, even. Like it’s too scary, it’s too hard, it’s too harsh. You get scared and you run, and you tighten, and you numb out. But what you’re numbing out is your whole life. And once it starts, the only way is through. Gently, patiently. Nobody has got a time clock on. It can take as long as it wants. And directly turning to God and saying, “I can’t really bear this yet. Can we get a little bit more time to get the foundation in place?” Those kinds of direct answers or requests are often lovingly dealt with. Of course, all that’s needed is for you to be honest with yourself about where you are. It does go that way and building a stomach for free fall is one of the really good survival skills on a spiritual journey, particularly if you’re going on a path that you’re bushwhacking Because it’s going to happen over, and over, and over. There are places where you just don’t know what’s up. There’s places where you keep trying to go back and fix it, and it won’t fix to the degree that your inner authenticity calls. And you don’t know where you’re headed. And frequently, it looks like you’re just throwing away everything you’ve worked so hard to put in place. But there it is. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 7 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

If you can stay the course there, it says, what is the resolution of this dilemma? “Wonder!” Isn’t that interesting? It doesn’t say “certainty.” [laughter] “Your confusion will give way to certainty and oh, what a happy fellow you are. …” But no, it gives way to wonder. So what is wonder? And I’m not talking about dictionary definitions. I’m asking, stop for a minute. Consult your own inner heart. What is wonder for you? “Luminosity,” someone says. … “Awe.” Awe is a very interesting word. You know the “numinousum tremendum,” that great one? You feel like you’ve touched the numinous. How many times have you gone out at night to weep because everything is broken in your life, and you weep until there’s no more tears left on you? And you look up on the middle of the patch of ground you’ve been lying on and you look, and there’s the stars and the half moon. Has anything changed? No and yes. That the resolution is not that, “Oh, my problem is fixed.” It’s that the capacity has deepened. All right. Isn’t it that way? Wonder. You’re in free fall and yet you hear in a kind of way that even the fall of the sparrow is in his hands. It may be in the fall of the sparrow that the awakening comes. “Hi, Karla. I just noticed you.” So, it’s this kind of sense that you don’t know where it is, but what’s happening, really, is the box just got bigger. And you don’t know your way around the box yet. You will, all too soon, but for a while, there’s this fresh beginner’s mind. “Oh, okay, it’s not going to solve, so what? Here I am.” I think it’s that dimension that continues to really touch people so deeply, and one of the top favorite poems of our century—Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese— which gets you right up to here. Here we are, we’re weeping, “Tell me about your sorrow, I’ll tell you about mine.” We can all commensurate. Overhead, the wild geese are flying, mysterious, free, “announcing your place in the family of things.” Not solving your problem, but announcing your place. Somehow, in the midst of all this, you belong. And that there’s a little fierce, laser piece of consciousness that knows it, that can retract right in and say, “I am here.” Sometimes it takes just the complete collapse of every outer paradigm for you to touch it, and realize you’ve just touched the pearl of great price. You follow what I mean? Yeah, I hear enough “Aha’s!” that this is your life. So that’s what he says. And then, “In wonder you will reign.” Well, I have to talk about reign, sovereignty, and all these words, because they are really tripping up modern, politically correct liberal, pluralistic consciousness where they sound like kings, and dominions, and hierarchies, and abuse. … Certainly, there is—not to argue—a whole rich and horrible atrocious history of planetary experience with that kind of reigning. We’re not going to question that. But there’s another way, where in the language of the inner tradition—this has to do with what Ken Wilber calls beautifully, holarchy rather than hierarchy. In other words, that when things form higher units, they can complexify and differentiate, and everything finds its place around a principle. It’s a principle that things need order and shape, and within this, “posts” have to be held. We talked about that with the interns [co-leaders] before Wisdom School began. That it’s not that the people that are leading your groups know anything more than you do, but they’re holding a post that has to be held to order the groups © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 8 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide and to keep things from becoming just chaos, and to draw out the shape of something. So there’s this natural ordering of things, and Paul spoke so beautifully in his quote about, “We are all members of the one body of Christ.” And within that one body, there is holarchic differentiation. The head cannot say to the hand, “I have no use of you.” And God-forbid if you try to get rid of your lower parts, you’re dead pretty fast. So he got that things have to specify, organize, in order to create a higher-being body. In the inner tradition, when you hear words about reigning, they’re not talking about an artificial power-imposed order. They’re talking about things finding their natural holarchy, in which true differentiation and synergy becomes possible. You can’t—if you reign by dominance, you’re not reigning. The reigning is the kind of thing that happens when Thomas Keating walks into the room and people go like that [bowing]. Not because he’s saying, “Oh, you lackeys, bow down to me,” but because we honor and we recognize a higher. We sense the scale of things and we honor that scale, and God help us if there were no Thomas Keating. That there are those that have to hold the post, and his post is a very difficult one. Because he has to be present to millions of people, and to put the teachings in forms that are simple enough that they can be practiced and accessed, and start people on their path. He has to stand up there and be a guru, and a beloved, and a projection target for the millions. It’s a tough post but someone has to hold it. If he hadn’t held it—Centering Prayer—it would be impossible to put a face to the Christian contemplative renewal. See what I mean? We’ve got to come to terms and we’ve got to work through our wounds around reigning and sovereignty, and our squeamishness about it. We want sovereignty. We just want it to be based on the natural organic principles. You’re all coming to Wisdom School because I’m in the post of being the teacher and you want to hear what I’m teaching. If I go away, you’d be disappointed, I think. [laughter] Maybe not. Maybe I just … [laughter] … So you get the picture. It’s because we have to differentiate in order to create beauty, meaning, and synergy and we have to differentiate not only horizontally but vertically. Some things create order for other things to move around it. They create a container. And we have to start working with this. So if you can work your way in through that portal, you can begin to say that, “In wonder, you will reign over all things.” For me, that means that it’s the sense of wonder with its awe, with its free fall, with the ego finally shut up for a few minutes and not asserting its dominion over everything, you sense your connection with everything. The wild geese, the stars up there to receive you after your weeping. You sense a field of belonging because wonder is the mode of perception, the authentic language of the heart. And so it throws the thing into a whole new ballpark. And finally, in that, because you once again are reconnected, because you’ve sensed through your heart the belonging, and stopped trying to manipulate and control, and order, and plan, and make your ideologies and your self- images come out right—finally, you rest. “I don’t know where I am, but it’s effortless.” Does that make sense at all? Okay.

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 9 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Well, I just wanted to prime the pump with that and as you go into your Thomas sessions this afternoon, stay with that as long as there’s water in the well. See if there’s anything you want to talk about that, any kind of questions that it raises, or troubles for you. And if you finish with it, you can go and start a new Thomas, which your leaders will bring you. But if you’re done, you’re done. Okay. Well, thank you.

Notes:

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 10 Day 2.6 Evening Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Part 1: Questions & Response, page 2 Is it ever possible to be both rushed and awake (present)? If so, how? page 3 What is the cost of awakening? / What are the costs of awakening? page 4 Part 2: Closing Chant and Meditation, page 7

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Questions & Response Gather ye ’round, Little chillin, the tent is about open for re-vival. [laughter] (Part 1 of 2) A couple of announcements. First of all, the most important thing is that we’re going to have a slightly different day tomorrow occasioned by the fact that it’s supposed to be pelting rain. We’re not going to go off in work teams tomorrow. Instead, we’re all going to be gathering in the gym with Lois, who as many of you have probably figured out, is a dancer and a teacher and a mover of dance. And we’re going to work together to dance the Elm Dance, which is a real sacred ritual of planetary healing. It was used first … I’ll scoop a little bit of Lois’ beans by just saying that one of the places where … It was used at Chernobyl to bring healing to a community that was just devastated because they were where the nuclear rain fell. Trees died, people were wounded. Whole teams of psychotherapists came in to try and get people talking and healing. Nothing

budged it until Joanna Macy and her crew came in and taught them the Elm Dance, whose beautiful simple rooted motions brought healing for the community, healing for the earth. I’ve danced it three or four times now and it’s just gripping. We’re going to do that as a group together as our offering for the planet, and to stay dry inside. [laughter] The other change that will take place tomorrow is that you won’t be meeting in small groups in the evening. You will have your Thomas group, but we’re going to have the plenary session. I should © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide tell you that I’ve read every single one of your questions at this point, divided them into three piles, pulled out a few, and there’s already more coming. We obviously are not going to answer every question that was raised, but I am holding them in heart and I’ll try to work some of them in—particularly the sort of simple informational questions—into the teaching. And then I’ll pull out a few. I’m going to try to just give us two tonight and then we’ve got a wonderful chanting thing that we’re going to do that you’ve heard a little bit of a prelude to, and then into silence. And tomorrow, we’ll have a combination of questions from the floor and questions from the box, and we’ll go on and do that. It’ll give us really a chance to meet together with all that. We’re going to be together a lot more tomorrow, which is probably pretty good for a rainy hump day.

Question: Is it ever possible to be both rushed and awake (present)? If so, how? A couple of questions which really struck my attention … I think just two is enough to bring us into a night summary before we move into chants. … Somebody asked, “Is it ever possible to be both rushed and awake, i.e., present?” I’d say no. [laughter] But it is possible to move quickly without being rushed. If you can move quickly without being rushed, you can very much stay awake, if it’s not a compulsive kind of quickly. As a matter of fact, a lot of our work exercises in the group I’ve done have been a deliberately slowing and quickening pace. We did a very interesting exercise one day in a work group that I’ve never forgotten. It asked everybody to establish, with one hand, a pulse … Dum-bump … And you can try this if you want. Then with the other hand, just do. … Now watch [demonstrating different rhythms with each hand and both feet]. Do you get the picture? See, as long as you keep the pulse steady, you can speed up or slow down in relation to it without getting frenetic. When the tempo requires things to move faster, as it often does in a Wisdom School or when there’s multiple demands laid on you, if you can keep connection with the basic pulse, you can speed up without getting frenetic or rushed. I hope that deals with the question. It’s often a state of hyper-awakeness. As a matter of fact, for those of you who’ve ever tasted the Gurdjieff movements—or are about to because you’ve signed up for our sacred movements seminar we’re doing next April in Claymont— © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide you’ll discover that one of the things that makes Gurdjieff movements unique is that it layers on these things. You’ll be starting with a very simple rhythm with your feet. Easy. Then your hands are going this way and your head is turning this way and that way, and your eyes are going up, and you’re saying “I am here.” [demonstrating movements as she talks] What happens is that you can’t keep track of all of them. Even the most rhythmically talented can maybe layer on two or three before you can’t carry it with that kind of intelligence anymore. And so you sit there and melt and fry on the thing. It’s like, “Good God,” and then you remember, “Oh, yeah, my feet. I can do that much.” Gradually, you learn that if you can find a place inside you that positively refuses to get rushed, panicked, or frenetic, that it will fill out again, and that you can actually expand your tempo and your range of things you’re holding in “the now” without a bit of frenzy, and that, really, is a state of hyper-awakeness. When you’re finished with it, you’re high. It’s like your body is almost vibrating from how much more of our brain cells can we actually use than we do. So it’s a very good question, and as I looked at the questions, it’s very, very clear that you’ve been working. All of you.

Question: What is the cost of awakening? / What are the costs of awakening? The other one I really wanted to address because it’s a beautiful summary of the day and the evening. Someone wrote “What is the cost of awakening?” Then they crossed it out and said, “What are the costs of awakening?” [laughter] What is the cost of awakening? Well, you’d start with that by saying, “What is the cost of not awakening?” To ourselves, to our life, and to our planet? I think it’s fair, and the person who submitted this said something really lovely at the bottom: “We yearn to participate in the evolutionary unfolding, but what is it likely to cost us?” Fair question. I can almost hear my teacher, John de Ruiter, saying, “Everything.” Basically, the easiest way of answering it, and it’s a little bit of a glib answer … It’s a quip, but it’s not glib … What it’s going to cost you is your drama. It’s going to cost you. … You’re right, if you wish to exercise it in this life, to establish your life along an ego axis that you control with a firm center of being, which is called your Self; and a history of moving along in time remembering a narrative of things that happened to you, computing it, bringing everything back to a personal center, and trying to control and manage a life that way. Gradually what’s going to happen, if you really want to awaken, is your sense of self-hood will move from being centered in your small self. We could call it © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 4 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide your ego self but that introduces a whole range of complexities: am I talking Jung here, am I talking Freud, am I talking Original Sin? It moves from being stuck in a small—what you might call the narrative—self: “Once upon a time, I was born and people did nice things to me and so it was happy, but then they did traumatic things to me and so I’m a victim, and here I have to go, and I go to my spiritual director and she says wait for the Holy Spirit, and then the Holy Spirit comes and talks to me and tells me I have a vocation to start a Wisdom School. …” [laughter] That! That’s what it costs you. And it costs it slowly. We love to hold the mirror up to our face and look at our self and say, “Oh, well done!” And at least to know that we have a fixed position. Gradually, as surrender deepens, as obedience deepens … Beatrice Bruteau, that beautiful spiritual teacher who lived right over in Winston-Salem [NC] until she died in November [2014], said, “What if true persons are circles whose circumferences are everywhere and whose centers are nowhere?” Well that sounds like fighting words. “Well we’re busy, we’re getting our center.” … But it’s this capacity to really interpenetrate, inter-infuse, inter-be, as the term is, which confers the capacity to lay down your life for your neighbor. To let your personal story meld into the great sea of the great human awakening, and go from being a big frog in your own little pond to being a tiny cell in the new higher collectivity. And I don’t mean by that to lose anything of the individual and personal, but always the “What if true evolutionary leap and the evolutionary cost is the same. persons are You sacrifice a degree of personal autonomy in order circles whose to gain a far, far higher level of function and range at circumferences are the next evolutionary level up. everywhere and It costs your impermeable egoic boundaries and your whose centers are weddedness to the story of your Self. That’s why we nowhere?” meditate as the start of it. Because for twenty minutes twice a day or however long you do it, you get used to being in a different corner of yourself that—in those wonderful words of Annie Dillard so many years ago—“isn’t spending every waking moment saying hello to yourself.” [laughter] As you gradually get used to that and are willing to become lower and lower maintenance so that you finally happily disappear, then the chance of being awake radically increases because you have less to snooze about. We’ve even kind of found that the need for physical sleep often goes down as you begin to drop those egoic boundaries because a lot of what goes on at night is just repairing the heavy-handed, brutal, fearful way that we live inside our own skins in our egoic world. That’s where it’s heading. I think it’s a profoundly good question, and one we should always be asking ourselves. “What does it cost?” I remember one of the most profound moments in a little conversation that was recorded with David Steindl-Rast, one of the great monastic wise men of our time. He was talking about awakening to your senses and conscious presence. Everybody thinks, “Oh, this would be lovely. I’m so awake. I can see the flowers. I can smell the …” He says, “But watch awakening to touch, because you can’t touch without being touched, and as you awaken to touch, the pain of the world touches your heart and you carry it, and you have to be willing, and much more than willing—ready—in your nervous system to bear © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 5 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide the river of pain, the collective pain body that is our planetary existence. And to bear it lightly, joyously, and sacramentally.” It costs something. You have to be strong and clear inside to do it, because if you bear it with drama, everything’s going to fry. You’re going to go [sounds and gestures of contraction] and you’re not going to help a bit. So, Clarity, strength, equanimity, balance. All these beautiful human skills that lie beyond the egoic level. To the degree that you’re willing to sacrifice your personal pleasures and your personal dramas “But watch awakening to touch, and your personal stories because you can’t touch without to instill and stabilize those being touched, and as you awaken to qualities, then you join the touch, the pain of the world touches great evolutionary flow. your heart and you carry it, and you Thank you for that one. have to be willing, and much more than willing—ready—in your nervous system to bear the river of pain, the collective pain body that is our planetary existence. And to bear it lightly, joyously, and sacramentally.” —David Steindl-Rast

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 6 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Closing Chant & Meditation Leading right in, we’ve got an absolutely wonderful chant that talks about that (Part 2 of 2) attitude of intentional suffering and willingness to own a part of this because Darlene put them together in Holy Week. Over to you, Ms. Dar [Darlene Franz] to lead us into the new chant. [Darlene] We have a unique opportunity here with this many voices, and I’m so happy to be assisted tonight by two of the intern staff who have beautiful voices. Phil and Brie are going to help me hold this chant. This has never been used in a Wisdom School before, even though it was written a couple of years ago in Holy Week. It has three layers, each with different words. We’re just going to take a few minutes to teach them to you, and then we’ll ring a bell and actually do the chant and see how it unfolds. The first part to lay down is very simple, as in the other multi-part chant we’ve been working on in class. Just one note, and the words are “Abide in my love.” Now Phil will be … he’s over on this side of the room and he has a microphone, so you should be able to hear him sing this even in the midst of things. Yeah, and Cynthia will sing it, too. [Chanting] Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Abide in my love.” Sounds like everybody’s got that. You can always return to that. That’s the root of what we’re singing here. The next line up will be held by Brie continuously, and the words to it are: [chanting] “Jesus remember me this day in paradise. Jesus remember me this day in paradise. Jesus remember me this day in paradise. Jesus remember me this day in paradise.” Abide in my love. Abide in my love. You may have noticed that on “remember me,” that’s Jesus remember me this day in paradise. a dissonant note. That’s one of those notes that pulls. Where I am there may you also be. When we put the third part in, you won’t feel that quite so much but it’s still there and I invite you to consider that the remembering with which Jesus remembers us and with which we truly remember God is the same remembering and it’s not quite our ordinary sense of remembering. So to have that extra energy there in that, I find really meaningful. Lean into those dissonances when you’re aware of them The third line, which I will hold, is the one that has the tricky rhythm, just like “Become a Whole World,” and the words to it are: “Where I am, there may you also be.” There is a rest before the word “be,” so just wait for it and listen a couple of times if you’re not sure how it’s going to go. [chanting] “Where I am, there may you also be. Where I am, there may you also be. Where I am, there may you also be. Where I am, there may you also be. Where I am, there may you also be. Where I am, there may you also be.” That word “be” is intentionally set off as the fact that being, real being, can surprise us and requires us to be awake to know where to place our being-ness. That’s it. Just those three layered together. [laughter]

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 7 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

[Cynthia] Find a way to be calm in it like we talked about in the first thing. And then when we’re finished and you let the song trail, we’ll go back into our usual ten minutes or so of silence to wrap the night up. [Darlene] We can rest in this if we rest in our feet on the ground, our breath flowing out and in of our bodies. In every moment, we are held, and I think we’ll experience that. We’ll layer these layers on and as you hear us dropping out, we’ll just remove them in the same order we added them until we’re back at “abide in my love” to end. I don’t know the timing of it, but that’ll help us to construct it and then end it, because chants like this tend to go on almost seemingly eternally.

[chanting]

Abide in my love. Abide in my love. Jesus remember me this day in paradise. Where I am there may you also be.

[bell for meditation] [bell to end meditation and into the Great Silence]

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation 8