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

DAY 1 OF WISDOM SCHOOL

Day 1.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer Day 1.2 Morning Teaching The Three Centers of Intelligence* Day 1.3 Morning Conscious Practical Work Day 1.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1*

Notes:

The Gospel of Thomas Logion 10 Yeshua says, “See, I have sown fire into the cosmos, and I shall guard it carefully until it blazes.” —The Gospel of Thomas, Translation by Lynn Bauman

[01:00] [Chant with Darlene Franz on harmonium: Speak Through the Earthquake] Speak through the earthquake The wind and the fire Oh-oh Still small voice of love

[04:35] [bell for meditation]

[31:13] [bell to end meditation]

The Gospel of Thomas Logion 10 Jesus says, “Behold, I have sown fire into the cosmos, and I shall guard it carefully until it blazes.”

[from] Logion 82 Jesus says, “Whoever is close to me, is close to the fire.”

[32:01] [final bell]

Notes:

Day 1.1 Morning : Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer 2 Day 1.2 Morning Teaching The Three Centers of Intelligence

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Part 1: Introduction to Three Centers of Intelligence, page 2 Part 2: The Moving Center, page 5 Part 3: The Intellectual Center & The Emotional Center, page 9 Part 4: How the Three Centers Interrelate & An Introduction to Conscious Practical Work, page 11

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Introduction to The Three Centers of Intelligence (Part 1 of 4) So this morning, we’re going to talk a little bit further about Wisdom and about a topic which is really foundational to how we’re going to proceed in Wisdom School and a little bit different environment from what you might get in more sort of traditional renditions of the Christian contemplative path. I started last night with a quote that comes out of the Gurdjieff work, The Fourth Way tradition. “As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases. As your being decreases, the old meanings return.” This may take a little bit of decoding—“What’s this mean, ‘my being increasing?’” You know this really, really simply. You can tell in yourself when you’re in a bad state and “As your being increases, your receptivity when you’re in a better, I ask you to remember right now, to higher meaning increases. As your take about ten seconds and recall yourself in the worst being decreases, the old meanings kind of state you get in: angry, neurotic, intense, urgent, return.” —Maurice Nicoll whatever it is, and really kind of feel that inside with sensation; how you are there. Then compare yourself, think about how you are when you’ve just come out of meditation or seen a beautiful sunset, or somebody’s told you’ve done such good work. You’re going to get a raise. And sort of ease in to how you feel inside there. Okay. Can you feel the difference between the two and yourself? Okay? So use that as your own internal measure for what it means: the difference between being in a bad state and a good state is, when you’re in a bad state you have very little being. Okay? If that time when you’re like that, your three-year- old kid or grandkid comes along and says, “Tell me a story.” Or, “Let’s play, there’s a castle under my bed and let’s crawl under.” And you go, “Aah! Leave me alone kid!” Whereas, if you’re in a slightly more relaxed state, you accept the invitation. This is all right in your normal life. To take that and then translate it back into the statement; when your being is like this, when you’re agitated, when you’re tensed, when you’re self-preoccupied, you don’t pick up the opportunities. You don’t take advantage of what’s there in every moment for wonder, for joy, for creativity, for connection with something that’s much more mystical and much more uplifting. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

And when you’re in a larger state, a more profoundly settled one, you’re able to run with possibilities, and to see possibilities you couldn’t see when you were trapped beneath your own event horizon. Really, in short, the business of virtually all spiritual traditions is to help raise your state of being so that you become open to things that are there anyway, but that you don’t see when you’re too sort of shattered and tense, and off-balance. It’s really fundamentally as simple as that. Another story—to take it in a slightly different direction about being in higher states—About 15 years ago now, a monk died at the monastery of Snowmass, my spiritual home away from home. Father Theophane, who was a wonderful, wonderful fellow who actually looked like the Buddha dressed up as Rasputin: shaggy hair, beaming eyes, this friendly, playful nature. One of the great gurus of the planet and gave everybody joy. Well when Theo died, they did the usual protocols at the monastery. They laid him out in his Trappist robes in the middle of the congregation. They came to do the requiem mass to send him off. At the end, it was really interesting, people walked out of that church and there was a couple of completely different meanings. It’s like they’d been in different funerals. Some people said, “Oh, it’s so sad. He was so alive and now he looks so stony and gray lying there on his pallet. Isn’t a tragedy?” And others said, “That rascal, he was playing with us all the time.” What was the difference? Simply that some people only saw his physical presence. Others could pick up his imaginal presence, his energy still there in the room. So, that’s another way of looking—a slightly more esoteric way of looking—at this question of being increases. The ones that had enough being to pick him up and really be there with him at that energetic level had a whole different experience of what was happening. He was not absent or dead. He was present and dancing. Another way, as our being increases, our receptivity to higher The call over and over again in all meaning increases. spiritual traditions is: wake up; awaken; increase your being; wake up. Be here. A couple of other names for “being,” higher being, more being. When we’re in a state of being, we can also say we’re present. And another term that’s used consistently in all over everywhere in the inner tradition including very, very strongly with Jesus, we’re awake. The call over and over again in all spiritual traditions is: wake up; awaken; increase your being; wake up. Be here. In approximately two weeks, the trumpet shall sound and the clarion call shall again tumble from the pulpits: it’s Advent— awake, awake! Be watchful. Be vigilant. It’s the theme of the season we’re coming up to liturgically in the Christian Church. But the catch is, nobody tells you how to wake up. You hear people yell, “Awake!” It’s like a little alarm clock just went off. You just go back to sleep more nervously. How do you wake up? And what does presence even mean? Sometimes, it looks like just doing everything in slow motion. “I am present. I lift my feet so mindfully.” Is that presence? I don’t know. But the problem is and I think anyone, if the truth be told, really starts searching for this, the problem is we’re faced with an imperative that’s urgently given to us with absolutely no clue what state we’re aiming for or how to get there. No wonder people keep going around in the same sort of tracks. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

One of the things I find most useful about the little schematic I’m about to share with you is that it gives you some quantitative measurements you can work with about when you’re awake and when you’re asleep, when you’re present and when you’re not present. And it gives you some really specific things to do to change the state when you evaluate that you’re not present, that you’re not awake. In that way, it becomes a wonderful, wonderful tool for moving toward a state of greater objective presence. I think it’s also the curricular foundation of the Wisdom School. This is the Gurdjieff notion of Three-centered Awareness or, as he often calls it, Three-brained Awareness. The assertion here is that human beings have not simply a single system of intelligence in them, but actually three major centers. That there is certainly the intelligence of the Three Centers of Intelligence: 1. Intellectual Center. This is joined by the intelligence of two other centers: The 2. Moving Center and the 3. Emotional Center. Three-brained intelligence is intelligence of the intellectual center, the moving center, and the emotional center. And these are seen as constituting three discrete meaning c-r-e-t-e, three separate but interrelated systems of intelligence, which in a person who is truly awake, are all online and all informing each other. What we’re going to see as the foundation in the Gurdjieff Work then is that being asleep is technically and what you can call experientially related to being in one center only. In other words, it’s like you’ve only got one of them online and the system will only work when all three are online. Hold that thought, we’re going to come back to it. Three Centers of Intelligence: But of course, the first thing we need to do is say what are these three centers? And then we’ll look at how they 1. Intellectual Center interrelate. 2. Moving Center First of all, don’t spend too much time going down the 3. Emotional Center neuroscience pathway. “Where are these centers? Do they correspond to the parasympathetic nervous system? Can we actually document neurologically that they’re there?” Don’t fight the form that way. I see myself, and I think there’s increasing corroboration from science that, yeah, as we look at it more that Gurdjieff, as is so often the case, beneath what people take as metaphor, is actually talking harder objective science than people are prepared to meet. But the point for now is that it is a very useful tool. Whether or not you can objectively correlate the intellectual center with some specific nervous system in the brain is less important than the fact that if you work with these, understand what they are from the point of view of the work and of conscious transformation, you have tools, and very effective tools, for quickly changing your state. Recognizing when you’re straying into autopilot and bringing yourself back into remembrance. So, it works. I would encourage you, as in all Wisdom teaching: nothing is to be taken just because I’m speaking it. There’s no top-down memorization of dogma. No dogma. Test it out in your own life. If it’s useful, work with it. If it’s not useful, discard it. But betcha, betcha, betcha, you’re going to find this useful when you actually start working with it. So, intellectual center, emotional center, moving center. You could say, “Oh, yeah, we do that today in psychotherapy. That’s head types, heart types and gut types, right?” Not quite. They’re close. They’re like parallel riverbeds, but don’t just say it’s the same. Because in the Gurdjieff system, there’s some very, very significant differences. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 4 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide The Moving Center I’m going to start with the moving center first because it’s the one that’s by (Part 2 of 4) all accounts and balances least known in the West, least valued, least worked with. It’s the unknown territory for most of us. And the second reason to work with it is that as you start really going down the path of inner transformation, you’re going to discover more and more—betcha betcha betcha—that it is within a deeper capacity to work with and within the moving center that you really begin to discover the secrets that make conscious being possible and help you to realize the things that your head yearns for and even your heart yearns for, because it’s through the moving center that you’re going to be able to start to walk the path of sensation and the path of sensation is going to take you way closer to where you’re yearning to get than almost anything else we have. In the general cultural parlance, what we call the “gut types” has to do with the primitive feelings of emotion: anger, the churning nervous system. In the Gurdjieff Work, and in the definitions we’re using in our Wisdom School, the moving center basically is about intelligence through movements, through movement. It’s the way that our body is able to put its tentacles out and explore, and gain information from the world. It includes a wide range of skills, ranging from simple things, like knowing how to walk up a step of stairs without having to look at every step. Something in your body knows how to measure and gauge distances. Knowing how to walk at night. To the wonderful skills of imitation that allow you not only to learn to dance, but to learn to master a language, or learn an accent. It’s that whole realm of things that we don’t do directly with our intellectual rational brain. But that really deeply engages, and as we look at it, it’s a center of Wisdom. You drive a car, you ski down a hill, you sail a boat. It gets in your body. That kind of intelligence, which we mostly underuse, is a huge reservoir of connectivity and information with the world. One of the real problems that we deal with in our culture—in our Western tradition in general and in the whole post-perennial philosophy, axial conscious—is that we don’t trust the body. As a matter of fact, when you look at the shocking history of religious culture, right back from the first axial awakening over 2,000 years ago, we got set up with this notion that the body is course, dense, heavy, the seat of the sinful self-will. And that reaching spirit requires a separation from—a training of it at best, and sometimes a mutilation of—our body. And that kind of training is implicit in our culture. You can’t go anywhere before you bump into—spirituality is essentially an escape from the body. It’s a very, very bad habit. Eckhart Tolle called the question on that. He says you can do that all you want but, if you’re going to get enlightened on this planet, nobody gets enlightened except in their bodies. But we have this long, long tradition we’re pushing out and how Christianity gets away with it, I don’t know, because we’re supposed to be the religion of incarnation. Yet even by the third century, people were merrily castrating themselves so they could get to heaven. Go figure. There’s been long, long paths in religious tradition in which people awake at night and flagellate themselves. This intensive and, for me, completely inaccurate © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 5 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide description that the body is the seat of sinful self-will and desire. And it’s the body that has to be mastered or, if not mastered, at least over-ridden before we can have any hope of spiritual attainment. That’s an ancient, ancient kind of orientation in the culture, and I think one of the things that we’re beginning to see nowadays is that it’s simply isn’t correct. And that one of the things that’s been rising up to meet us already in the second half of the 20th century—and I think is going to be one of the real challenges in workplaces for those of you that are shaping 21st-century Christianity, if the term itself isn’t an oxymoron—is that we’re going to have to go back and look at theology, The body actually carries in and look at our spiritual practice from the point of view of through the moving center what in the embodiment rather than disembodiment. I think this is Gurdjieff work is called “first force holy going to be terrific because that’s where it belonged all affirming.” The capacity to initiate and along. It opens up the possibility of making Christianity to bring in wonderful information that finally coherent and consistent. gets the journey started and sends it forward. And, in particular, the body More to that later but I think what Gurdjieff saw—that carries the language of understanding people still haven’t gotten on the plate with—is that the transformational cues that the head far from being the source of sinful self-will and that misses again and again. which drags us down, that the body actually carries in and through the moving center what in the Gurdjieff work is called “first force holy affirming.” The capacity to initiate and to bring in wonderful information that gets the journey started and sends it forward. And, in particular, the body carries the language of understanding the transformational cues that the head misses again and again. The body implicitly knows, through the moving center, the language. It gets the gesture of some of the great spiritual concepts which, at the level of the head, remain dense and impenetrable. I want to unpack that with you just a little bit now because it really is, in and of itself, a core turning point. There’s a famous, famous story—I quote it in The Wisdom Way of Knowing. It was told first by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, a great Russian Orthodox abbot. “Metropolitan” they call them when they’re the abbot of a large territory of people, big bishop. Anyway, a fellow comes to see him—I picture always a young Ivan Karamazov—and says, “Abba Anthony, my problem is I have no faith. I say these creeds and they sound like impossible propositions. How can anyone believe this? How can you say the Nicene Creed? It’s ridiculous.” I’ve heard that once or twice before. [laughter] Anthony’s response to this was not what you might expect. He didn’t sit down and say, “Now, now, dear son. I am going to tell you why each of these things makes sense. Let me explain to you what it means, et cetera.” What he did instead is say, “Go home, and for a month do one hundred prostrations a day and then come back to see me.” Now, in the Orthodox tradition, a prostration is not for the faint of heart. It’s not that embarrassed little bob and curtsy that we do, we call genuflection, at least in the Episcopal Church. It’s a daring gesture. It takes guts and it takes even physical prowess so I’ve asked the head of my intern crew, the co-head, to demonstrate. Bill, show us a full prostration [Bill Redfield demonstrates].

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 6 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Thank you. Thank you. Not for the faint of heart. [applause] Thank you. When the fellow came back a month later, ten pounds later and in good physical shape, his eyes were glowing with faith. Anybody know why? If you don’t know why, practice some place. Go into your inner chamber and see what happens when you take that position. It’s absolutely revolutionary. That what he had absolutely discovered in there was the gesture of oblation, in its dual and very interesting components—that as you lie yourself out like that, it’s a position of utter humility. And yet, it’s a position of utter safety. Rather than teetering, precariously trying to stand up, you’re there. The ground holds you. You’re making contact. You’re learning the language of self-offering and that something inside your body knows how to do that, and wants to do that. That was the missing piece. When he came back and he began to experience where faith lives in the moving center, then he realized that it wasn’t the chore that he thought. The chore that the intellectual center sets up. It wasn’t about having to examine all these individual propositions in the creed and decide whether I agree or not. That would be the view based on the intellectual center. The moving center taught him that there was something deeper going on under it, and it was that gesture that he needed before he could decode the language. So in the same way, I’ve looked for myself and I’ve told this story before, but everything I ever needed to know about surrender—a very, very difficult and counter-intuitive concept for most people—I learned when I was nine-years old trying to learn to float. You know, I was a little kid and like most people, when they throw you into a swimming pool, you kind of pull yourself in and go turtle and you sink right to the bottom of the pool. Finally, a beautiful swimming teacher says, “Don’t worry about your legs, just put your head back, put out your arms and fill your chest with air, and you won’t sink.” My goodness, she was right. And I began to discover that motion, and that motion has carried me all my life. You put out your hands, you keep your chest in the air, you won’t sink. And that going right to the bottom comes from clutching and going turtle. A powerful lesson. I could never have learned it in seminary class. I would’ve come up with something saying, “Well, this surrender is just a leftover from the victimization of women by patriarchal misogyny. [laughter] That’s what it would’ve look like from that center. But if I had thrown away surrender because it didn’t check out on my political correctness list, I would have lost the chance to begin to go through the eye of the needle of putting on the mind of Christ in the body. In the same way, everything I really began to learn about inner guidance, inner authority, I really learned from learning to ride my bike the first time, seven- years old. My daddy takes off the training wheels, gives me a little push, and off I go. How many of you can remember the first time you ever rode your two- wheeler by yourself? It’s a kind of thrill that you never forget because it teaches you that you can find your balance from the inside. That sense that, “Yeah, I can do this. I know the balance so I can find it.” It’s profound. I think it’s even mystical. And it’s a moving center thing. And that all this “Oh, I’m looking for my inner guide up in the sky.” You begin to learn there’s something in here that can find its balance. Moving center. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 7 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Perhaps one final example when it comes to moving center is a day I had with my daughter on the ski slope in Telluride, Colorado, when I was … when I’d sort of gotten myself up to a single blue-level intermediate, and she wanted to do a single black. So I’m up there at the top of the hill saying, “You want me to go down this?” Taking the best of what I could remember of my beginning skiing classes, I was traversing the hill very closely back and forth, back and forth. She finally waited for me down at the first stopping point and says, “Mom, if you do that, you’re not only going to take forever and scare yourself to death, but you’re going to hit all the icy patches where everybody else has turned.” She says, “If you want to go there, you simply have to look at where you’re going and ski down the hill.” Whew, I felt that in me, but it’s right. That constant self-checking motivation that gets you starting and then you’re scared to run for it, and you go back, and you … So I realized that in my body skiing, I was learning to follow the movement of the intention set in motion. Whew! What a wonderful thing. You get the idea? That your body knows the language of gesture and the great movements in the spiritual journey are encoded as gestures, not as concepts. I think one of the great woes to which Christianity has come, beginning certainly by the fourth century, is to try to translate the language of gesture into the language of concept. And then to try and do it with our heads rather than with our moving center. It’s doomed to failure.

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 8 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide The Intellectual Center & The Emotional Center (Part 3 of 4) The intellectual center is a very, very good tool. It’s a profoundly useful tool for exploring and navigating the world, and it allows us to do things that separate us from the rest of the animals. It really is what makes us a three-brained creature and not a two-brained creature. We have a good neocortex. But the program it runs is perception through separation. Okay? Consider yourself a computer programmer. This is the program that the mind uses to pick up reality. We identify something by its characteristic distinguishing characteristics. I know that Darlene is not Bill because well, she’s female and he’s male: she’s sitting here and he’s sitting there, et cetera, et cetera. So we pile up these little individual characteristics, and then we compare them: What makes this one different? What makes this one different? It’s a grand separating, evaluating, and measuring tool. But it can’t “do” because of the limitations built into its operating system. It can’t ask two questions: “Who am I, and who am God?” because these questions can’t be measured by an operating system that depends on separation. We’ll see more of what that means. I have sometimes said that doing the journey towards mystical union, toward that fullness of being, toward nondual attainment or enlightenment—or all these things we want—trying to do it with the mind is like trying to play a violin with a chainsaw. It’s not because the chainsaw is bad, but because it is its nature to destroy and separate the thing that it’s trying to make music on. It’s built into the operating system. We don’t have to beat up on poor old Descartes, but it is, “I think, therefore I am,” and its implicit identification of the essence of the human being with the intellectual center really doomed the West to a fatal sleep. I’m using the word “sleep” technically and precisely in the way that it is used in the Work, which is being in one center only. We’ll be back to that again. But really, if we are trying to do life with our intellectual center alone, we are going to be, to some extent or another, cut off from life—isolated, outside, and therefore, lonely and anxious. Okay? And everything is going to look slightly suspicious because that, again, is the legitimate function of the mind. It really carries the denying force. “Okay, let’s look at this. Let’s see.” So you begin to see the problem; it’s a wonderful tool but it is not beyond a certain point, like 33.333%, useful for being awake. Okay.

The Emotional Center A quick look then at the emotional center. The emotional center has been beautifully rediscovered nowadays, but we very, very quickly call it “the heart.” If you’ve been to any of the classic psychotherapeutic workshop pop-culture stuff, the heart center types are the emotional types. And we know what that means: they’re effusive, they’re in touch with their emotions, they’re warm, they cry easily. You got the picture as it’s painted. One of the things that we’re going to be working on right here is that in the classic definitions that come out of the Fourth Way tradition, the heart and the emotional center are not © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 9 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide identical. At least not at first. We’re going to see more and more that the heart, as it matures, doesn’t really have anything to do with emotions as we experience it now. But things have to grow up before we see that. The emotional center is the capacity to explore and receive information from the world through empathetic entrainment. In other words, it’s the capacity to know things from the inside by matching your vibrations with their vibrations. You can see why the stuff we call “heart” is appropriate; it’s pertinent here, why people would think they’re the same. The emotional center is the capacity to It’s the capacity to explore the world by what you might call explore and receive information from the vibrational resonance. Okay. world through empathetic entrainment. In other words, it’s the capacity to know And so when you use this capacity, you are able to get things from the inside by matching your inside of things by simply collecting yourself in a certain vibrations with their vibrations. way and really sort of training in on their vibrations, and the setting up of a feedback loop. You do this, those of you that are good intuitive spiritual directors, that’s what you do when you sit down with a person. All the time you’re listening to what they’re saying with their mind, you’re entraining, using these wonderful capacities with this other faculty. Gurdjieff was very precise in locating it in the solar plexus. And I think he was really, if we translate it into the science of our day, he’s talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems working together and coming together. He says that the emotional center is really spread throughout your body but kind of has its nexus right here, just below the heart. Hold that thought for about four days. [laughter] Of all the centers, the emotional center moves the fastest. It’s, as you all know, you get the impression instantly. You don’t have to parse it out. The intellectual center is slowest, because it has to submit everything to this laborious process of taking it apart, linearizing it, comparing it, evaluating it, drawing conclusions from it. And the emotional center and the moving center are there dancing on his gravestone by the time it finally arrives. [laughter]

The Solar Plexus

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 10 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide How the Three Centers Interrelate The first and clearest thing to say is that everybody has all three centers in (Part 4 of 4) them. Now, in our usual unformed, raw state, most people are born into the world, or very quickly acculturated, to favoring one center or another. If you hear these head types, heart types, gut types, that’s what’s it’s talking about. That we learn to make one what you might call our dominant center for our own orientation to the world. And in the Western culture, I would say that’s overwhelmingly, shockingly, the intellectual center. If you look around the world, particularly at Westernized culture, you’ll have a small group of people who are kinesthetic types—you know, moving center, kinesthetic. A slightly larger number who are emotional centered and we sometimes call them right- brained. And then this vast majority of people who are plunging and plodding through the world using their intellectual capacities. Of course, you know in school that that’s the capacity we train to. With maybe a little bit of space left for kinesthetic for moving center and sports programs, and virtually nothing for the emotional center. Any budget cutback and what leaves? Arts and music. The primary channels through which the emotional center is still trained. So we come out in the West a heavily lopsided intellectual- center-oriented being. That’s what we start from. Now, here is where the work makes a bend and a turn from what popular culture will say. In pop culture, we say, “Well, find your center, acknowledge it, and live in it.” In the Fourth Way, in the inner tradition work, it says, develop your under-utilized centers. If most of us come in over-balanced in our use of the intellectual center, then the work lies in bringing our emotional center and our moving center fully online, and integrating them. Just as a sort of parenthesis or footnote here, but it’s an interesting one: As many of you know, Gurdjieff brought the Enneagram to the West for the first time, but he didn’t bring the typology of nine different types. For Gurdjieff, there were basically three types: intellectual center, moving center, and emotional center. And the idea was not to discover your type, either by narrative or by facial gestures, or by any of those kinds of If most of us come in over-balanced in online tests to discover your type and improve it. our use of the intellectual center, then the work lies in bringing our emotional center It was to discover your starting position and reach out to and our moving center fully online, and incorporate the other two so that they were fully—and in integrating them. a balanced way—a part of your perceptual center. Okay? Slightly different instructions there. Whatever you may find yourself to be, don’t detain yourself on it, because it immediately sets you out your job of discovering where the other two are hiding inside yourself and bringing them online. The reason for this is that it’s only when you have balanced the three centers as it used to be called “man number one,” “man number two,” and “man number three.” Kinesthetic moving center, emotional center, or intellectual center. Only when you found them and balanced them and integrated them can you become “man number four,” woman number four, in our own day and age. This person, the first transformed human being, is the person who is conscious, who is awake. Gurdjieff called it “conscious man”. So you got to get them all there as a good, strong tripod before you’re really awake. The classic and most © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 11 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide powerful inference here, and the definition I was talking about at the beginning of this talk, is that in the inner tradition specifically as it’s come down through this line, when you are working in one center only, you are asleep. Period. End of question. You can be holding forth brilliantly on the most intricate degrees of post-Nicaean theological philosophy, but if you, at that moment, don’t know where your feet are, you’re asleep. That’s what I meant when I said that so much of what’s going in Western culture for the past 500 years has gone on in the state of sleep. Not because it’s dull, not because … It’s often brilliant, but it’s unbalanced. It’s coming from one center only. And if you’re in one center only, no matter how brilliantly you’re there, you are technically, from the state of spiritual transformation, asleep. I remember very, very keenly—when I was talking about that “where are your feet thing,”—the classic kind of training that I had to do when I first entered inner work, and I was about as hard a nut to track as there ever was, because I was a brilliant poster child of the unbalanced culture I’d grown up in. A little talking head with a Ph.D. and a brilliant sense of the stuff I could hold in my head was bigger than most people could hold in their head. So I thought I was enlightened and everybody told me I was. When I came to the inner work tradition, I think I was running this inner program of enlightening them. [laughter] So I would ask a leading question in a little group and then I’d immediately turn it around to my own advantage and begin a discourse about what was really meant by this. And one day, I was holding forth with rhetoric which would’ve left Plato gasping, and somebody just said, “And where are your feet?” [laughter] And I looked at it as rude. I took a deep breath and recomposed myself and off again, and, “Where are your feet?” And it took a long time, and about five years in the work and two teachers who nearly ran me out, before You simply bring another faculty, another “And where are your feet?” finally came home. center, online. And the one which is always there at your disposal, polite and That what I was doing was brilliant but unbalanced. And humbly waiting to be discovered, is your once you see it, you see it everywhere. You see it in the moving center. opinions that are ricocheting around on the internet. You see it in the articles written. You’ve seen it in the way people hold discourse when they come to meetings and convocations and are trying to solve their problems with rhetoric and emotional manipulation. “Where are your feet?” Just as importantly then, as it gives you this benchmark of what sleep technically means, it also gives you a wonderfully simple, but I would say 100% effective, tool for waking up. For bringing yourself slightly more into a state of presence. That’s to be that if you realize, if you can sort of reach around and feel around inside yourself and realize, damn, you got stuck in your head again. And feel that as an energy thing, just like a big balloon that’s suddenly exploding here. Then it’s so obviously what you do to wake up. You simply bring another faculty, another center, online. And the one which is always there at your disposal, polite and humbly waiting to be discovered, is your moving center. Learning to bring the emotional center online is a little trickier, but the moving center, it’s so simple. As simple as returning to your feet, returning to your breath, bringing your attention to your hand and watching with wonder what happens when the active attention hitting your fingers suddenly seems to © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 12 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide bring them, fill them, with tingling life, with sensation. What’s happening there? What’s this power? What’s this feedback loop between my attention and sensation? And how could I use that tool to envitalize my own being, grounding me and, at the same time, reconnecting me to the higher states of being? So that basically is the core of the curriculum. We’re going to be looking tomorrow at the great Wisdom tradition that comes down to us in what St. Benedict called his “School for the Lord’s Service.” And I would say, in a nutshell, it’s the most brilliant proto-Wisdom School that the West has ever developed. A profound framework for doing Wisdom in, but it lacks this one piece: three-centered awareness. And with that, you can begin to develop—you have a huge population of sleeping monks because you need earnest sleeping monks, yes? Because that question, “Where are But the capacity to awaken, the capacity to bring what your feet?”—and the connection with by wager is the receiving mechanism you need for inner sensation, and through sensation, to spiritual work, is presence, is being awake. three-brained balanced awareness— is the gateway on which we’re And until you really begin to attend to how to wake up, actually going to be able to realize, how to notice when you’ve drifted into a state of sleep, and the foundation on which we can and how to bring yourself back through a distinct and realize, a more attained enlightened measurable energy shift within your body of vitalization. consciousness. Until you’ve learned that, not even the most exultant, elegant, programs will work. Because, yeah, you can fall asleep in paradise. So these are tools. We begin very simply in Wisdom School, like a child, literally, taking her first steps. Because that question, “Where are your feet?”—and the connection with sensation, and through sensation, to three-brained balanced awareness—is the gateway on which we’re actually going to be able to realize, and the foundation on which we can realize, a more attained enlightened consciousness. So that’s why we’re looking at this piece today in the specific way we are. One of those kinds of what you might call esoteric secrets. You know, and I promised not to give you secret information, but this is kind of secret information. It’s actually as plain as the nose on your face but, according to that first principle, you have to be in a certain state of being to know what it means. What really happens is that that state of being in one-centered awareness, being completely identified with the view from one viewing platform only, from one center of intelligence anyway, is it’s a real low energy state. It’s a kind of entropic, dissipated state. You’re scattered. Your attention is all over everywhere. And when you begin to pull, pull it together, what we call consciousness, enlightenment, presence, being, all of these names for that thing that we actually recognize by smell more than by concept. All that is exists at a higher energetic state, at a higher state of vibrational presence within you. And in order to discover, “What is oneness?” “What is compassion?” To see the field of mercy, to see that the veil between life and death is thinner than that. To see the bands of love forming coherently around a world that looks like it’s infinitely broken, is all right there, but it requires a higher state of being to see that. And that means a higher state of vibrant presence, known in our Christian tradition by the code word “vigilance” or “recollection.” And that is gained partly by attitude, but mostly by plugging the energy leaks. How do we stop © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 13 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide running off our energy trying to chase after things that are small-self mirages. That you aren’t going to take with you anyway when you die? That the working off our success, our building, our fame, our annuities, our stocks. What they do beyond pay for a few months in the care facilities when we come down with Alzheimer’s? Where does it go? What is our attention for? What are we here for? These What is our attention for? What are are the questions that need to be held in our heart, but to we here for? These are the questions be holding them in our heart requires a gathered enough that need to be held in our heart, but to attention to hold them there. And as long as we’re chasing be holding them in our heart requires our egoic desires of improving ourselves, achieving a gathered enough attention to hold ourselves, dealing with our pain, dealing with these likes, them there. dislikes, chatter, chatter, chatter. It’s like trying to hold water in a leaky bucket. So the work here is to begin to draw together that three-center base, foundation of presence, with which we can then begin to touch the mystical reality that is there, but just right above our heads energetically. Okay? That makes sense?

Introduction to Conscious Practical Work Well, that segways into what we’re going to do. You’re about shortly to go out and do your first work period, where we’re actually going to shift the scene into practical work. And as you go there—and I’ll give you just a little rundown on the logistics in a minute, don’t worry I’ll take care of that—think about what we’re doing in terms of the talk we’ve just had on three-centered awareness. What center would you say you’ve been mainly in during this talk? Yeah, can you sense it buzzing a little? Okay. If nothing else, moving out into the work is going to give you a chance to engage the moving center. To participate directly

in shifting your awareness so it becomes a little bit more balanced again. So the sheer physicality of this is going to be useful. Most tasks that you’re going to be doing are rhythmic. A lot of practical work is raking, weeding, rubbing © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 14 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide windows, and rhythm, of course, is right in the domain of the moving center. It’s a wonderful pathway for healing, for integration. And just being outside and filling your body with the air, with the sights, with the impressions of this place, which is still new and unfamiliar to most of you, can kick the emotional center online, too, as you become really, really truly alive in here. What we’re walking out into is not a break from this talk. It’s a continuation of the work in another center. Okay? That clear? And you will get something out of it to the extent that you participate in it in that spirit. That we’re not goofing off. We’re not, “Oh, now the fun’s over I can close a notebook,” but that, “I am really inviting, lovingly, my moving center—my body—to join in full participation in this work of inner transformation.” That’s the first thing we’re going to be doing out there. The second thing to keep aware of is that it gives you a chance, if you want to, to participate in the foundational skill of self-observation. In other words, if you look at all—and if you’ve got the courage and guts to look—you see very quickly how there’s something in us that really doesn’t like to stay present. We say we want presence, but then when somebody puts you there and says, “Well, here’s presence, go for it,” you The great monastic tradition says, say, “No, no, no I’d rather prefer that I use this time to “Stay in your cell and it will teach you just sort of go through the motions raking while I think everything.” And our cell is really the about. …” Gotcha. In other words, I had a work teacher “now.” It’s about that three seconds on who once said that the chief feature of the ego is that it’s either side—slice—of present before it never here. We’re always either leaping ahead into what’s drops into past or future. coming next, dragging back into, “Oh, this reminds me of that.” Or, lost in some sort of game of like and dislike: “This appeals to me; this doesn’t appeal to me.” Commentary: “This person’s doing it wrong.” “Oh, I know how to do it more efficiently.” You know that constant stream of chatter. We’re constantly running away from our own cell. The great monastic tradition says, “Stay in your cell and it will teach you everything.” And our cell is really the “ n o w.” It’s about that three seconds on either side—slice—of present before it drops into past or future. And if we can learn how to truly inhabit it without running off into thinking, thinking, thinking, imagining, daydreaming, fantasizing, comparing, manipulating, all of which belongs to which center? Intellectual. Yeah, you got it. Then we can give three-brained awareness a chance. But you will discover if you’re honest that it’s hard. Virtually no people fall into conscious presence automatically. Simply because you can’t go from a lower state of being to a higher state of being automatically. It doesn’t happen. Yes, there are the odd mystical experiences that, combined temporarily, change things. But in order to move from a scattered and more dissipated out-of-yourself, out-of-your body thinking-about-what’s-next, judging-this— welcome-to-the-human-life—from that kind of state, to this more recollected one, we had to consciously engage our willingness and our will to be there. It’s work. We’re going against the grain of our own entropic disposition. See that and realize that in yourself. To become conscious, you’re a salmon swimming upstream against the great autopilot of mechanical behaviors. And where the rubber is going to © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 15 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide hit the road on that beautiful thought is when you’re out there and you’re thinking, “Well, how long till lunch?” “Then what can I do?” “Boy, this is boring, and I’ll bet they’re having more fun on that other …” And with a quiet, gentle laughter, “Aha, here we are again.” Forgive yourself immediately because this is built into your finite, physical carrier. That doesn’t mean you’re intended to stay there forever, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. This is how every single one of us is. This is where we not only start from, but have to return to again and again, and again, and again. And to bring that will into the moment. To bring the higher possibility. To work against that—so easy to drift into automaticity, so easy. That’s why we call it automaticity. Okay, that’s what we’re doing. The idea is to see if you can, to some degree, begin to form an energetic unit as you help each other to stay on task with not just the outer work, which is unimportant really—it doesn’t need to be done—but the inner work. Can we stay present to why we’re here? Can we come back and can we help each other come back when we all drift off into our own personal oblivions? Okay? The ground rules are that your co-leaders will give you an inner task. You’ll start together and—hey, this is really important—you end together. Your co-leaders will tell you when the session is over. The session has been calibrated to be over in such time as to give you time to put your tools away, wash your hands, and go up to the lunch room. Ending is ending, it doesn’t mean you finishing that last window or pulling out that last weed. And this is really important because many of us suffer in the West from workaholism. Addiction is when you can’t leave something. Leave it. Okay? We cannot be addicted to finishing—okay?—and still be conscious. That’s the basic ground rules. You’ll work together. Depending on what your leadership team wants to do, there may be times called for a stop when you, just for a moment, put down the tool you’re working with and pull yourself back consciously into recollection. Connect with being as it feels like being to you from the inside, and then move on. But that’s what we’re going to be doing each day. In the course of the week, I’ll fit in what work looks like from the Benedictine perspective, but if we got to that point in the lecture before we started to work, the work would be packing your bags to go home already. [laughter] We’re going to throw you into the stream. Hang on to sensation, hang on to three-centered awareness, hang on to coming back.

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 16 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Day 1.3 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 1.3 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 1.3 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 1.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work 4 Day 1.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders)

Group co-leaders: Alan Krema, Laura Ruth, Brie Stoner, Darlene Franz Brie: Good afternoon. We’re going to start with a chant this afternoon, Veni Sancte Spiritus, which means, “Come, Holy Spirit.” There are, for those of you who know it, two parts to this chant that create a beautiful dissonance. We want to invite you to feel that dissonance vibrationally in your bodies. And if you happen to know the third part, we just ask that you wait until we introduce it, so that we can really lean into that vibrational dissonance as a whole group first. [01:08] [chant] Veni Sancte Spiritus … Veni Sancte Spiritus [05:16] [chant ends]

Laura: Please Come Home [05:50] Please come home. Please come home. Find the place where your feet know where to walk And follow your own trail home. Please come home. Please come home into your own body, Your own vessel, your own earth. Please come home into each and every cell, And fully into the space that surrounds you. —excerpt from Please Come Home by Jane Hooper, from The Wisdom Way of Knowing by Cynthia Bourgeault

[06:40] [bell for meditation] [27:53] [bell to end meditation]

Notes:

Day 1.4 Afternoon: Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) 2 Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Part 1: History of Thomas, An Early Christian Sacred Text, page 2 Part 2: First Four Centuries of Christianity and Christianities, page 7 Part 3: Thomas Sayings: Context, Format & Framing, page 10 Part 4: Gospel of Thomas: Logion 1, page 16

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide History of Thomas, An Early Christian Sacred Text (Part 1 of 4) What I want to do this afternoon, at least for the first maybe two-thirds of the time we have together, is to introduce the Gospel of Thomas, which I have here in two versions. This one is a real treasure because it dates from 1959. It’s almost the earliest English version of The Gospel of Thomas I’ve ever seen. So, how many of you already have some familiarity with the Gospel of Thomas? Okay, great. Nearly everybody. Who’s coming to it cold? A few. Okay, good. So what I want to do is to give you a general orientation so that we’re all on the same page and begin to talk a little bit about why this has proved to be such a vital tool for Wisdom work. As you can see, we are devoting quite a fair amount of time to Thomas during the course of this School. It’s basically going to be the afternoon teaching track. So you might ask, “Why is it that important?” “Why aren’t we reading the Bible, or Gurdjieff, or some other text?” I wanted to begin to address that because it really is a key question. The Gospel of Thomas—and of course I should say, “gospel” is a name that we have put on it. When we found it in the manuscript it wasn’t titled “The Gospel of Thomas.” Okay? It’s an editorial description, and I think a fair and pertinent one, but don’t let it distract you too much from the fact that what it really is is Thomas, an early Christian sacred text. Don’t let the gospel question—“Is it a gospel, is it an epistle, is it or not?”—throw you too much off course. It is manifestly an early Christian sacred text. It was found, after a long absence, in an urn in a cave in a desert, in Egypt, in upper Egypt. The Nile flows from south to north, so upper Egypt is a south region. It’s closer to the headwaters of the

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 2 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Nile. It was found there just in the winding down time of World War II. The question of how it got there in the first place is a very interesting question, which I’ll try and brush by later on in this kind of introduction. It belonged to a collection, lettered of course on papyrus, of what proved to be 46 texts from the early Christian community, from some early Christian community, written in the Coptic language. And what Coptic is is basically Egyptian written in Greek. You follow that? It’s the Egyptian language but written in the Greek characters. And that makes sense because it was in Egypt. Nag Hammadi Codices Coptic was the language of the land. So, immediately having found it, it fell into about ten years of international intrigue, which would make The Da Vinci Code look like Dick and Jane. [laughter] There were blood feuds, there was all sort of stuff and, for a while, it was sequestered in the Jung Library, which is why some people still know it as the Jung Codex. But its proper name is the Nag Hammadi Codex because that’s the area that it came from in the desert where it was found, the region of Nag Hammadi. And, no, it is not the same thing as the Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re different texts. A lot of people get them confused and it’s quite understandable why they do, because these two sacred texts were rediscovered very much at the same time: the Nag Hammadi Codex in ’45, the Dead Sea Scrolls in ’47, I believe, but they belong to two different streams. The Dead Sea Scrolls are very clearly the sacred texts of an esoteric Jewish sect, the Essenes. They’re basically Jewish texts, and they have huge crossover to the Christian texts, but they’re not; they are Jewish texts. The Nag Hammadi texts were manifestly Christian texts. But what kind of Christianity was this that people were looking at? That proved to be the question. First page of Thomas It could be said that they were sequestered away for about twenty years after they finally got out of the blood-and-dagger phase and began to be accessible for scholarly interpretation. The first real scholarly introduction of these texts came around 1979 with the [James] Robinson [12-volume] collection and publication [The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices], the scholarly edition of these. Then within the next twenty or so years, popular additions began to emerge. In other words, texts that were intended for folks like you and me. So there we have it and along with it, came Elaine Pagels’ famous ground- breaking book, The Gnostic Gospels. Published in 1979, won the Pulitzer Prize, and really was properly the coming-out party for these texts. But the titling of the book was, in one way, very unfortunate because—as if these texts didn’t already have a tough road to hoe gaining appreciation in the Christian © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 3 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide community—that title has virtually damned them for the how many years has it been since 1979. They already, when they were found, had stepped into a boogie-man costume that had been constructed for them 1,600 years earlier, and was just awaiting their rediscovery. That they were somehow or another contaminated, flawed texts representing a Christianity of a different stripe. An organized subversive Christianity called Gnosticism. And almost always, you will find two assumptions, which scholars made instantly when they saw the texts. One, that they’re late. In other words, they come so far after the fact of Christianity’s original formation that they aren’t first-hand witnesses. That was the first assumption that was made. The second was that they were somehow flawed. That they bore the marker of a defective theology, and that the reason that they had been exiled and condemned was that they were infected. Somehow, if you actually start talking with people today, they’ll think they’re still infected. That if you get too close to them, you’re going to get the virus. Maybe that’s true. But at any rate, these were the two scholarly suppositions and, very interestingly, they’ve been slow to fall, and the two places that have caved in most slowly are the institutional Church and the seminaries. On both of the other ends, we’re onto a whole new page. Scholarship has now been able, at the leading edge—textual Biblical scholarship—to really pretty much substantially take apart the myths that have made it so difficult to see these texts. The poor scholarly assumptions and kind of outrageous circular logic that kept them as being pariahs. So scholarship, if you follow what people like Karen King have been doing, really the top-of-the-line textual scholars, you’ll see that religious scholarship per se is saying, “Let’s come back and have a second look at these texts.” And on the other hand, us, we’re lapping them up. It’s very, very, by public ascent: Thomas is in. Once people start working with it they say, “Where has this been all my life?” Because it’s helpful, it’s useful, it’s a growing edge. But there is still this stonewalling attitude in the Church that they’re somehow not real. They’re somehow not traditional. There’s something the matter with them. We have to protect our people from them, and heaven thinks we could never read them on a Sunday morning. There’s that. So I want to talk a little bit about what goes into making this up because almost guaranteed, if you’re a practicing church-going Christian and you let some of your other fellow Christians, particularly if they’re clergy, know that you’re doing this, you get this, “What?” And sometimes a refusal to let you hold your Thomas class in a church basement because we still have this idea that they’re … “Neh, what’s wrong with them?” That they don’t belong to us. They belong to some rival Christianity, which is itself a boogie man. Okay? There never was, nor will there ever be, a church of Gnosticism. It never had a formed theology, clergy, et cetera, and it never had a little library in the desert where Gnostics came to read. [laughter] It’s a myth we’ve created because of a misassumption in the first place, which I’ll get to in a minute. But first of all, the easier assumption with these texts, they’re not creditable because they’re late. And we say, “Well, Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, well they were written right in the time of Jesus. They were eyewitness accounts.” © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 4 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Well guess what? Scholarship has pretty much by now conclusively proved that there is no gospel that’s an eyewitness account. That, too, is a myth that the communities that wrote the gospels in like to spin because, of course, it gives credibility. But they are one step removed and the people that are the Johns and the Marks in the gospel are not the ones that are actually writing these down, despite what they say. So these texts in the urn we know very well that the latest date that they could have been written was the late fourth century because that’s when they seem to have been placed in the urn. But the date that a manuscript gets written down is the end of the line. It’s not the date of composition. And virtually all sacred texts have a history of transmission stretching back, in some cases, several hundred years before the date the manuscript actually gets written down. Nowadays, based on pretty good textual evidence, really strong philology, that branch of scholarship, there’s a pretty good estimate that when the Gospel of Thomas came to be written down, the original language it got written down in was Syriac, which means it was Eastern, the area around Antioch, those places. It had gone East. That had been put together on the basis of—it has what scholars call Syriacisms in it, ways of phrasing things that have a characteristic Syriac flourish to it. It’s pretty much been dated, on that kind of scholarship, that it can’t be later than the second half of the second century. Well that already brings it a big step closer to the event since the date of composition, final composition, for John is now given as pretty much the first half of the second century. But there’s a very interesting piece of body of scholarship—not by all means unanimously accepted by scholars, but significant and interesting—by a woman by the name of April DeConick, a professor at Rice University. She applies the discipline of oral history—of listening and analyzing the text bytes, the kind of language the colloquialisms uses, the phrases used across traditions—to say, “What era were they speaking like that in?” You know how that works. If I said, “Wow, this is a really groovy place,” [laughter] what would you do? You’d look at me and say, “’60s.” Exactly the same principle. So on the basis of this, April DeConick © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 5 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide you’re able, by looking at comparative bodies of oral history, to see where the language is coming from. And on the basis of that, April DeConick has had a very interesting reconstruction of the Gospel of Thomas. She says that there are four layers of it. She calls it a rolling Thomas, and it’s easy to roll because it’s just a collection of sayings. Add them in, take them out. She says you can establish on that oral history ground by how the language in use compares with language in use in other texts in that era that the earliest core of Thomas dates from 30 to 60 AD or CE. Now, think about that: 30 to 60. Remember when the crucifixion is imputed to be. So you’ve got in this case, if she’s correct, a text that is definitely as close to ground zero as anything else out there. And it’s a strong scholarly argument. She traces from there its transmission. She locates it in Jerusalem, in the Jerusalem Church, and then sees it being displaced eastward toward Syria after the fall of the Second Temple in AD 70. So that’s her story. But, begrudgingly, scholars have had to come around and say, “You can’t dismiss Thomas because it’s old,” I mean because it’s after the fact, because it’s too recent, because it’s not eyewitness. It really is date-wise, increasingly looking like a core text.

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 6 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide First Four Centuries of Christianity and Christianities (Part 2 of 4) And then the question is, “Well, why are all of these things looked at as tard, as somewhat deviant?” And it was Karen King that put the pieces together on that in one of my most favorite all-time books called, What is Gnosticism? It’s a tough read unless you’ve done graduate school, in which case is a slam-dunk. But it’s a really profound piece of intellectual history where she takes apart this 1,600-year vicious circle of circular logic.

Karen King, image by Bill Greene, Boston Globe staff

And, essentially, what happened is this. You have to begin from realizing that for the first four centuries of Christianity, Christianity had neither a creed nor a canon. The Nicene Creed was a product of 325 AD—the Council of Nicea— and what we now call the New Testament that those of a more fundamentalist persuasion really believe was literally dictated from the hand of God, like the Ten Commandments only in King James English. [laughter] What we find is we had no such book for the first four centuries of Christianity or, even properly speaking, five centuries. By 367 AD, Bishop Athanasius had made a cut, a shortlist, which proved to be pretty close to what was going to be the final shape of the 26 books or so that are in the canonical New Testament. And the some that were out are probably the texts that wound up in the urn in the desert in Nag Hammadi in the territory that Bishop Athanasius held sway on, and that was also the site of the largest complex of Christian early monasteries. This was no Gnostic library. If it was going to come out of any library at all, it would have been at the Pachomian Monastery right in that area, the one founded by St. Pachomius. The Gospel of John was in and out. The Gospel of John made it into the New Testament by the skin of its teeth. It was only because Irenaeus championed it so © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 7 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide thoroughly. And Revelation was in and out for another century or so. We didn’t get the final definitive form of the New Testament until the mid-fifth century. So these texts are fairly clearly the ones that didn’t make the cut in the midst of tightening standards of orthodoxy. And right here is the very interesting point: “in the midst of tightening standards of orthodoxy.” Because up until very, very recently, the story that almost everybody had in their mind is a variation of what’s called the “master story,” which is an evolutionary origin- of-species kind of thing that says things start from simple and them move to more complex forms. So the idea, basically, is that Christianity started out as a simple form, a simple, unified, unbroken transmission from the hand of Jesus through his first apostles who hung onto a story they’d been told, to a teaching they’d been told—the whole thing is celebrated in Acts. And that only later Gnostic heretics—and they were called heretics, incidentally, not Gnostics back in those days—tried to attack this castle of sacred sobriety and common sense. So that’s the story we’re told in its simplest versions and you could laugh at it, except you’d better laugh nervously, because it’s really believed there—you ask the average Christian lay-person and they’ll say that Jesus, who is a Christian, came to the planet to form a religion called Christianity. And that at the last supper, he took his twelve male disciples to the upper room, consecrated them as priests, and gave them the liturgy of the Catholic Church. Okay? It sounds a little silly when you put it that way, but you want to believe that that’s the story that people actually believe, that people actually feel is true. That that’s what Jesus is doing. And there is this sense that people somehow received a pure, unbroken body of doctrine from Jesus that’s known as the gospel Kerygma—which they mistake “kerygma” and “curriculum”—and that the apostles took it out unbroken. And what made them apostles was that they faithfully transmitted it and then only later the tares got into the wheat field and began to corrupt it. But the good strong Church fathers stood in unison against this monster of heresy and chased it out again, preserving the pure doctrine of the Christian Church. Hogwash. What we know rather, and what we’re beginning to see now, is that the Christian Church began an incredible diversity. That when the Jesus event fell like a meteor into the middle of the near-Eastern region and people said, “What? Who is this person? What weed is he smoking?” [laughter] that they grappled, each in their own way, to make sense of this extraordinary teaching that they’d heard. And different people heard it in different ways. It’s always the case. If we were to confiscate the lecture notes from this week of Wisdom School and read them, people would think that you’ve been maybe not to 200 different Wisdom Schools, but I’ll bet they’d think you’d gone to at least 100 different Wisdom Schools. People don’t hear in the same way. People are at different levels. Remember “as your being increases”? There are cultural differences, language differences, transmission differences, but the general thing that is now beginning to be clear to scholars is that Christianity developed in incredible plurality and diversity. That there were Christianities, plural as Bart Ehrman properly pointed out, and that what we now call Christian orthodoxy is not the original version, but the successful competitor. Okay? © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 8 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

And true, what would be the successful competitor has its roots in there early. It was there from the beginning, and is generally identified as the stream that comes down through the Luke-Acts corridor of the gospel and was largely carried forward by the Peter-Paul alliance. That, in various ways, became the dominant form, essentially wiping out at least three other known, but distinctly different, species of Christianity. That story is still being told and that really is extraordinarily good news for Christianity in the 21st Century. Because you know what happens to a plant when it’s growing well and it gets pot-bound and it can’t ground anymore, can’t grow anymore, and it looks like it’s gasping and dying in this little pot? You put it in a bigger pot and it says, “Oh, thank you,” and spurts off again. I believe seriously that Christianity’s only problem, really, is that it has become doctrinally and culturally pot- bound. That by the fourth century it got very strongly planted in that Roman Imperialist model. You have the Holy Roman Empire, you have the Roman Empire, you have that Roman skew towards confusing unity with uniformity. And at that point, everything tightens and the story begins that there was an original Christianity that was contaminated by heretics and it doesn’t look like others. What this real find in the Nag Hammadi Codex lets us see is properly interpreted that there were many Christianities dealing with many issues, many ways of putting on this thing and trying it out for size. There were Wisdom Christianities. There were healing Christianities. There were much more matriarchal Christianities than have survived to tell the tale. And this was all okay for the first four centuries because nobody was running around with a measuring stick trying to get everybody herded into one set form. Nobody would ever have thought to do that. But as times change, these texts fell out. Was it a time capsule in the desert to be found only when civilization was either ready or desperately needy for them? Who knows? But I think if we’re smart we can certainly use the text this way, to help transplant the pot and grow a Christianity that has more room to spread out what really is the incredible potential, which is there in its roots and its DNA.

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 9 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Thomas Sayings: Context, Format & Framing (Part 3 of 4) So that’s the basic story that the texts were most likely part of the collection of the library of texts that all had status as sacred texts that had all come from earlier Christian communities that worked with these texts, found them enriching, transformative, and which informed their Christianity. So we have them again. Now, to begin with, and it’s really important to say that all the texts in the Nag Hammadi Codex are not at equal levels of sublimity. What a surprise. Do you say that all the texts in the canonical New Testament are at the same level? Only if you’re a pretty dyed-in-the-wool evangelist. Some are really clearly written from a higher place than others, and you watch it in Paul. When he’s good, he’s very, very good, and when he’s bad, he’s horrid. [laughter] There are many, many levels and so there are in this text. But Thomas is one of the most high-level texts. It was known. It was talked about in the early centuries. It went missing. People thought they’d never see it again. People reconstructed usually boogie-man versions of what it looked like in the great heretical polemics of the times. And when it came back, the first thing that people see when they actually look at it is, “Hey, they don’t look that much different from the Gospels we’re used to.” And I think that’s an important find because it isn’t really that much different. I’ve checked the material and I could actually check it with the computer and statistics in hand—the information is easily available. But my impression is that there’s roughly a two-thirds overlap with material directly familiar from the four canonical Gospels. It may be higher than that, but it’s definitely at least there. You may not be in your home country, but it’s more like going to Canada than it is like going to Timbuktu or Venus. It’s still working the same territory. In format, it consists of 114 sayings, a few of which are directly repetitive, many of which build on each other and re-echo themes from each other. But what makes it really kind of interesting in form is that simply these sayings, which are the transformative teachings of Jesus or so it’s claimed to be, that it all says this is what Jesus says. The presenting format in this text is that Jesus said these sayings, and that someone by the name of Judas Thomas the Twin wrote them down. So they consist of the teachings of Jesus beginning almost certainly as oral teachings as remembered and eventually, at some point, getting written down. What distinguishes them from the other Gospels is that there is no narrative frame. You don’t have the three wise men, the shepherds, the angels. You don’t have the crucifixion. A lot of people say that there isn’t even any awareness of the crucifixion and resurrection in this gospel. April DeConick argues— and I think she’s right—that that’s not quite so, that if you look at a couple of statements in the teaching, you can’t help but see allusions to the Paschal Mystery. But it’s not right there. It’s not explicit. What you’re having is simply a compendium of the teachings of Jesus. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 10 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

So that makes it really interesting. The other thing is that, in some sense, you have less theological frame, or at least less obvious. You can see very clearly when you work with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that each one of them comes with its own angle, its position. It’s reflecting the view of the community in which it’s in. Matthew has a heavy kind of Jewish emphasis about what’s orthodox, what’s not. There’s an emphasis on the law, just as an example. And John has this great mystical overlay that everything goes back to proving that the eternal pre-existence, as it was, the logoic Jesus. In other words, they all have their axes to grind. The axe in Thomas is way less clear. It stays closer to the surface. It shows signs of less editorial tampering, which is one of the reasons why it strengthens the case that this is an early text. A remembering of the sayings. “Just the script, not the interpretation of the script, please.” That’s what we’re dealing with formalistically. The question of why it’s good for Wisdom study … How many of you have actually participated in Thomas work and in Thomas groups somewhere or another? A fair number of you. Over and over, one of the things that has been going on in Wisdom circles for about twenty years now is planting little Thomas groups. And people find that this is just wonderful. They love them. I hope that as we launch you in this Wisdom school Thomas group, you’ll find out the same. There’s three or four main reasons why it really is so conducive to study in a Wisdom School, or in any little group. One of them is that it’s just familiar enough to be reassuring, and just different enough to wake you up. As you can see, you’ll find a lot of the material familiar. Most of your old- friend parables are all right there. You’ll find the sower and the seed. You’ll find the leaven. You’ll find the treasure buried in the field. You’ll find all these wonderful stories. The mustard seed, they’re all there. And so it’s, in that sense, familiar ground. But even in this teaching, it has a slightly different edge to it. The emphasis is a little bit different from the emphasis you’ll find in the other sayings. And when you put it in the context of what’s there for rest of the one- third of it, it really increases it. What doesn’t make it across, by and large, into the canonical Gospels are the sayings and the teachings that are strictly transformational, that are strictly Wisdom that have to do with changing your state of being, with maintaining present-moment mindfulness, with coming to a state called singleness. Which clearly—from the textual clues—means something like “enlightenment” today, and which has been translated disgracefully as being a monastic celibate. An eremite. If you look at the textual clues, it has nothing to do with celibacy at all. It has to do with the fusion of consciousness, but that wasn’t seen for a while. So what tended to get edited out is actually the most interesting part for people nowadays: the mindfulness teaching, the presence teaching. The fact that he’s pulling us into this bandwidth of awareness that now, about 2,000 years later, with a lot of help from our Buddhist friends, we’re finally being able to name it. “Oh, that’s what it was!” There’s a wonderful saying in Thomas that I can’t resist throwing in just for fun. Let’s see if I can find it. Listen to this one, it’s a classic one, Logion 52. © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 11 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Logion 52 His students said, “Each of Israel’s twenty-four prophets spoke about y ou .” Yeshua said, “You ignore the one living in your presence and talk only about the dead.” —The Gospel of Thomas: Wisdom of the Twin, translation by Lynn Bauman

Get it? What part of present-moment mindfulness do you not understand in that one? They’re saying, “Oh, you’re great because all the great prophets spoke of you!” He’s saying, “What’s this? You’re looking backwards instead of just paying attention and taking your cues from the present.” And this whole subtext of taking your cues from the present, learning to become present, to notice what’s there in the “cell of your now” is a powerful theme throughout this book. And really, it clearly establishes Jesus as teaching a path that depended on the transformation of consciousness, and teaching a way of conscious transformation. So that’s one of the reasons that this gospel is so important because it links our own Christian heritage to the emphasis that’s going on—everybody knows that what is up nowadays is the whole theme of mindfulness, nondual attainment, singleness enlightenment. It’s out there everywhere. Hey, we had that in our beginnings, and it’s a strong tradition because it comes from one of the great nondual masters and we lost it because people didn’t get it. And they edited it out gradually until it was forgotten, but here it is. That’s one reason. A second reason why these texts are wonderful is because they’re short. [laughter] lYeah. They’re epigraphic. They’re in a form which the Buddhist would immediately recognize as koan format. They’re slightly puzzling cryptic statements, like the one we just heard, that you have to go, “How’s that again?” and find some different way of listening to them. But they become powerful, they’re And this whole subtext of taking your ready-made for lectio divina. cues from the present, learning to become present, to notice what’s there That wonderful way that we’re going to talk about more in the “cell of your now” is a powerful tomorrow, so if the term is new to you, don’t worry. That theme throughout this book. And really, it wonderful Christian, monastic practice of deeply reading, clearly establishes Jesus as teaching a ingesting, pondering, meditating, sitting in the presence path that depended on the transformation of small bits of sacred text until the thing breaks open in of consciousness, and teaching a way of your heart. So, they’re ready-made for lectio, and that’s conscious transformation. another reason. People can come into groups, set a tone, ring a bell, read the Thomas text, listen in silence, ring a bell, read it again, listen in silence, and then speak from the heart about what reverberates and resonates. So they’re wonderful, wonderful texts to draw you into that great sacred practice. The final thing is that since they are texts that talk so much about the spiritual journey and the points of transmission and transformation in your own life, they tend to be a magnet for personal experience and stories. When people realize that the way to break these texts open is not by scrambling to some scholarly commentary, but to say, “How does this resonate in my own life? What does this touch off for me?” Again and again, these sayings will—if © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 12 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide you learn how to hold them at a certain angle—mirror back your own face. And people discover that and are thrilled with that discovery and so discussions go on. In our Aspen group, it took us three years to go through the Gospel of Thomas— “Thomas on Tuesdays.” We didn’t work every Tuesday, but sometimes we would literally spend three hours on a single logion, because it elicited such, “Oh, that reminds me of … !” It’s Lectio Divina: That wonderful Christian, participatory. Like all sacred Wisdom literature, there’s monastic practice of deeply reading, no right answer. There are some that are righter than ingesting, pondering, meditating, sitting in others and there may be some that are patently wrong, the presence of small bits of sacred text but you can’t even tell that. The proof in the pudding lies until the thing breaks open in your heart. in the working with it, the struggling with it, and because it’s been so wonderfully and blessedly ignored by scholars for so many centuries, you can’t immediately run to a wall full of commentaries and get the right answer. You have to dig it out yourself. That all makes this text absolutely a gold mine for Wisdom work. I wanted to say just one other thing about translation before we begin because it’s a really important issue when we deal with texts that are in any language other than the one that is our own mother tongue. That is that translation is not a science. It’s an art. There is no word in any language that can be directly, algebraically, imported into another language. It’s because of the little problem that words have not only denotations but connotations. And not only do they have denotations and connotations, they also sound different. And so when they’re falling into you, they fall in in different ways. I’ve often quipped that when I meet the moment of my death, I hope it’s in Germany because I so much am more reassured by the beautiful sound of “tod” than the English “death.” You know? Words leave a phonic trail, and so they have resonances that are just unduplicable in other languages. So every translator has to make intelligent choices between what do you preserve and what do you give up. How do you stay close to the original meaning of the text without rendering it dead? If there are two perfectly good meanings in the original text and only one of them will translate into English, which do you choose? And no translator translates value blind. Every one of them has their agendas, some of them conscious, some of them merely unconscious, but you don’t have anything that you would call objective text before you. So what’s the solution? Well, learn to read Coptic, and then Greek, and then Hebrew. [laughter] The final solution is always to read the original texts. But if you’re not going to do that, the next best solution is to have a bunch of different translations. I have four different Thomas translations, which I have going all the time. I have this little one that came to me as a beautiful gift. This is one that was published in 1955 by originally Dutch scholarly consortium. It’s in a raw and literal translation into English with a Coptic text on the side. It’s leaden, but it’s very close to a raw text. Pretty reliable. I have the Marvin Meyer translation close at hand. I have an early Elaine Pagels translation, which I brought along. The Lynn Bauman translation, which we’re going to work with as our core text in our exploration here. And when I say © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 13 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide our “core text,” I do mean that I favor it over the other editions, but favoring it doesn’t mean that I’m 100% committed to it. What Lynn did, and Lynn was really the one who sparked the Thomas revival in Christianity, I think. He had his eyes on this text back in the ’90s and began teaching it in Texas and British Columbia as an intelligible text. And while the scholars were still sitting

Four of the Thomas translations Cynthia uses around saying, “This is cryptic. This doesn’t look like Mark or Luke or. …” Lynn, who had spent many years living in the Middle East, instantly recognized it as a familiar Middle-Eastern genre of Wisdom teaching that made sense. And he approached it from the point of view that it’s a coherent text and that coherence comes through. The other thing is that Lynn is a natural teacher, and he had only begun to teach it before he was creating study guides to it. And he has it set up in such a way that it’s self-teachable. That any kind of group using the bigger editions will have the raw academic text, notes on difficult translation things, his own dynamic translation, which goes a little bit off the text sometimes to try and put it in a punchy form that can make an impact on a modern ear. And then questions for reflection and discussion that get a good group discussion going about things. So people, armed with this book, can really take it—as Diane Elliot took it to the center of Indianapolis, Indiana, sit down with the group of Protestant housewives—and unpack the thing in a wonderfully creative way. It’s there. You don’t need a scholar to be looking over your shoulders. So, that’s why we’re going to launch it this way. There are some places where the translation feels forced to me, where he’s trying to, I think, impose a Persian philosophical template on it that didn’t exist at the time. But I think it’s by far the most graceful entry into it. So we’ll be using our core text from that. I’m going to encourage you, if you have a text, to bring it along with you, particularly different translations. Because one of the ways we can really have fun when we’re breaking these texts apart is to listen to how it sounds in three or four different translations. We’re going to do that. For the next few days, we’re going to get as far as we get in this big group with the Logia in Thomas, starting at number 1 and getting to maybe 5, if we’re lucky. There’s no agenda whatsoever to cover a certain amount of ground. What I’m much more interested in is modeling with you a way of being with Thomas and breaking it open that combines some of the techniques—if you © WisdomWayofKnowing.org

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 14 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide want to call it—some of the tools that emerge from a lectio divina approach to it. With some of the tools that emerged from what the good old French prep school education called “explicacion de text.” Or, in other words, a close reading of the text so that you can look and you can isolate the passages that are causing you trouble, that are confusing you, that are throwing you off and rather than just backing away from them, you can go right into them and say, “What’s the problem here? Why am I not getting them? What do I need to know in order to be able to solve that?” And if you can bring those questions to the text, very often you get what you need to know instantly. So we’re going to model a way of breaking this text open with the hope that you will go back home and continue to break it open in your own personal work. And even better if you can grab some of your friends and sit down and work with it, because it will, in and of itself, inseminate new life into Christianity. It’s at least on the way to being a bigger pot.

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1 15 An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault—Course Transcript & Companion Guide Gospel of Thomas: Logion 1 Let’s see. We are 10 to 5. So maybe what I’ll do is simply read the first logion. (Part 4 of 4) Logion 1. And the word “logion,” incidentally, is simply the Greek word for “a saying.”

Logion 1 I who write this am Thomas, the Double, the Twin. Yeshua, the Living Master spoke, and his secret sayings I have written down. I assure you, whoever grasps their meaning will not know the taste of death. —The Gospel of Thomas: Wisdom of the Twin, translation by Lynn Bauman

I’m going to read it again and as I read it, allow your attention to be drawn to something in the passage that strikes you, confuses you, or troubles you. Not a big idea, but a word or a phrase. Just listen to it again.

Now, I’m going to read the same thing but in the much more raw, academic translation.

These are the hidden sayings which the living Yeshua, Jesus spoke and I, Didymos Judas Thomas the Twin wrote them down. He says, “Whoever discovers the meaning of these words will not take a taste of death.”

So is there anything in this little short passage that particularly interests you, that strikes you? What? Yeah, Clare? [Clare] “I assure you, whoever grasps their meaning will not know the taste of death.” Yeah, “will not know the taste of death.” Does he say “will not die”? No. Interesting difference, but yeah. If we were going to be unpacking it at lectio divina, that would be an interesting one to start with. Why? What is it? Is this secret longevity codes that Dr. Oz should know something about? [laughter] Or, “What’s going on here?” What else? Yes. Let’s go out there first. What’s your name? [Kalindi] Kalindi. Okay, Kalindi. What do you see? [Kalindi] The thing that’s most intriguing to me was the phrase “the Living Ma s t e r.”

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“The Living Master.” [Kalindi] Because obviously, as he was writing them down, he was in com munication with the Living Master. Interesting thing you point out. Yeah, the Living One. And Jesus, over and over again in this text, is referred to as the Living One. It’s very interesting and it becomes progressively more interesting to your own faith. Remember, “as being increases, higher meaning becomes possible”? What if he is the Living One? It simply is that our level of being is too low normally to encounter that bandwidth of life. Interesting. Liz? [Liz] The word “secret.” “Secret.” She says the word “secret.” Now, I did want to talk about that because this really gets us off on the wrong foot, doesn’t it? And this is what fuels it. If a scholar is just reading this looking for trouble, this word “secret” is going to be a big problem because you’re going to hear in the back of your head, back in elementary school, “We have a secret,” which always means exclusion, doesn’t it? When somebody has a secret, it means that there’s an in-group that has the secret, and there’s an out-group that doesn’t have it. And this is what has fueled the kind of impression that these texts are “Gnostic” and that the Gnostics are the secret-keepers, and that they “As your being increases, your receptivity have this elite information that the rest of us are screened to higher meaning increases. As your out from, and that say, “Oh, well these are going to be being decreases, the old meanings esoteric teachings.” But the fact is that the word “secret” return.” —Maurice Nicoll is really simply synonymous with another word, and you’ll find it translated this way in many translations: the “hidden” teachings of Jesus. And I think this is a much more value-neutral translation to begin with, because when you say they’re hidden, it doesn’t deliberately mean that somebody is trying to keep them away from you. We’re used to things having hidden meanings. You just have to dig deeper. And the explanation of this really comes clear in the light of what we talked about way back this morning: “As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases. As your being decreases, the old meanings return.” What keeps these secrets hidden, or these teachings hidden, according to this text, is not that somebody’s trying to cover them up, but that our level of being, our capacity to pay attention, to recognize, is too low. And this is a really, really powerful theme that goes through the whole of the Gospel of Thomas. The next to the last logion [Logion 113] hits it big time where his students are asking, On what day will the kingdom arrive?” and he answers, “Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside,” he said, “You cannot say, ‘Look, it is over there,’ or, ‘No, here it is.’ The Father’s realm is spreading out across the face of the earth, and humanity is not able to perceive it.”

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Logion 113 His students asked him, “On what day will the kingdom arrive?” “Its coming cannot be perceived from the outside,” he said, “You cannot say, ‘Look, it is over there,’ or, ‘No, here it is.’ The Father’s realm is spreading out across the face of the earth, and humanity is not able to perceive it.” —The Gospel of Thomas: Wisdom of the Twin, translation by Lynn Bauman

So you’re absolutely right to flag this question of secret or hidden, but as we get into the text—and if that doesn’t just be a button that stops you right there—it opens up a huge line of inquiry. Why are we unable, typically, to perceive a reality which is more close to us than as Saint Augustine once said, “our own juggler”? Why can’t we see it? What stands in the way? And that’s going to be a pervasive theme of this. I’m going to keep coming back to the gentle suggestion that it has something to do with your level of being. To the one that sees, to the one that’s present, the world gives itself like an open book. But when you’re not there, you miss the show. We’re going to begin to see more and more that this hiddenness is: we’re the ones that are hiding because we’ve closed our eyes. And that it’s quite clear in this saying, too, that there is some relationship between this, that the one who grasps their meaning—in other words, who can move them from hidden to unhidden—will not taste death. Why? Because you’re going to attain personal immortality? Maybe. Or maybe you discover some current of life that’s actually flowing To the one that sees, to the one that’s now. present, the world gives itself like an open book. But when you’re not there, Anyway, that’s a very, very good start for a beginning you miss the show. intro to Thomas. We will continue with this. We’ll pick up tomorrow when we do Thomas in the big group. Any questions you have with that, I invite you to sit with this text and ponder it, and bring anything that may have occurred to you tomorrow. And then I think we’ll probably be spending most of the time that I’m with you with the very interesting Logion 2. And anything that we don’t finish unpacking in the big session, we’ll go and continue to do in the smaller group.

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