”Being” Is Not Something You Are…” with Cynthia Bourgealt | #FOF2019

well we're woken up now yeah so how do I stand I think my body needs to do this not just by top half but I want to not just turn my back to my distinguished elders we're right with you all right so okay what I'm gonna do is basically just say everything you've said both of you but in a slightly different frame and in a mash-up way I'm speaking from the Christian inner tradition please don't take anything that I'm about to say as Orthodox Christianity or we'll all have an unhappy time when or is it even straight-up contemplative Christianity but it's informed by the wild men and women of the Eastern Orthodox tradition Sufism and some of these out pockets of Celtic and other mysticism where they've dived deep down the rabbit hole so up in the traditions that I've been working on and in this word BA is not something you are usually in the philosophical tradition being a sort of a synonym for existence this thing has being but in the inner tradition being is something you have it's an energy it's a gathered presence it's a mindful fierce attentiveness in your body ground it in your feet centered lower than your head in the region of your heart and your torso here feet deeply in contact with our mother the earth head in contact with the skies but here in the belly in the heart and in this configuration not only are you truly present but that presence is an energized presence it communicates it has a force it beams out it gives and receives it as its own kind of sonar and a person who has BA can walk into a room and say absolutely nothing and everybody knows that person's there such as the force of being all of your tradition knows it well all of our tradition is almost clueless but we did it in our own sort of ways so in the Eastern Orthodox tradition it was implicitly understood that this being gathered that the name they called for this was attention of the heart or in the heart and they kept saying you must bring your attention into your heart your mind must be within your heart come down come down and it's clear in the text they're not just talking about a nice little attitude about oh let's just be in touch with our feelings they mean if the physical level of sensation to be able to ground and shift your attention in this mid reason as a whole alert presence and when that happens more energized more alive more awake gradually a new operating system of perception kicks in and the real I the really the reason it hasn't kicked in earlier the reason why we keep slipping back into the mind with its constant dual izing is because that's the only being energy we have enough to run it's not until we can gather our being in a more gathered presence that we have the higher finer more intense vibrational field that allows these other beautiful mysterious and more subtle and energized faculties of to kick in when William Blake was talking about we are here on earth a little while to learn to bear the beams of love that's what he's talking about those beams but when that happens when the mind comes into the heart a different kind of knowingness happens and you know you can label it and you can borrow from from Western versions of Eastern terminology and caught non-dual that's the name has no force it's in a description by negation in in the traditions from which comes its called sometimes seeing with the eye of the heart seeing from the noose and the Greek the in the noose being the eye of the heart it's sometimes called contemplation and contemplation doesn't mean resting and emptiness the original definition was knowledge impregnated by love interesting try that in the halls of higher science knowledge impregnated by love in other words actually working in a whole different vibrational field and a way in which you're no longer using the mind which unfortunately runs the the egoic operating system the middle hardwiring is perception through differentiation that's why we keep slipping back and do dualism because that's the way the mind proceeds it has to split the field to make inside/outside me it subject-verb as you said do under this do unto that because that's the way that's the operating system we run and when we run that operating system whose whole basic algorithm is perception through separation how in the live hell are you going to perceive unity and outruns the operating system you just can't do it because to to perceive to actually perceive unity you have to perceive from unity and to try to perceive unity using the mind meaning the rational facility is like trying to take your old underwriter Underwood typewriter if you could still remember what those are and asking it to run the internet it can't do it it out runs the operating system it's not because of the sinful self will of the typewriter it's just because it can't do a unity with the programming that it relies on separation mmm-hmm so it's not a matter of shooting the mind lobotomizing the mind it's the matter of bringing the mind into the heart so it entrains for this deeper field and in that knowledge reaching out and actually perceiving by a kind of sonar by a sympathetic vibrational intertwining which allows you to get on the inside of everything suddenly you see and what you see is inter be a okay you see first of all horizontally and what you see when you look out on that horizontal axis with the mind and the heart with knowledge impregnated by love grounded and present is you really do see oneness directly not as a vicarious concept not as an ideal called non dualism as an actual luminous web everything connected to everything else within one glowing and very dynamic feedback field that's what jesus saw when he walked the planet is probably the first representative of this the West and said love your neighbor as yourself not as as much as yourself we added as much as yourself in with that old typewriter operating program that says I have to love me first and then I could love everybody else love your neighbor as yourself virtual particles interchangeable within the field okay can you do that not with the mind yes with the mind and the heart and when he told us that's the most brilliant and difficult of his parables about the laborers in the vineyard remember the guys that show up at 5:30 in the morning and get the fire to work the guys get to show up 12 hours later and when they get paid they don't get paid the same you know when you're in your mind you will immediately say it's not there because what are you keeping track of more or less right that's the mind when you're in the heart you see that what the landowner sees is a participation 'el field in which being invited into the vineyard has nothing to do with getting his crops harvested or earning a living or beating out the other guys with the competitive edge it has to do with creating a participation field why are you standing idle he asks and they say because no one has hired us you to go into the vineyard go into the field go into the collective inner being Buddha nature which is divine consciousness made manifest in form and their dance and give and take and see and be so we see horizontally and I think that it's only when our mind is in the heart that we will ever see it the reason I believe that Christianity has made a hypocrisy of itself for 2,000 years is because we keep trying to do this this beautiful vision which is totally non-dual totally fully inter being oriented with a mind that separates that perceives scary and lacking competition so we wind up making fools of ourselves but it's not because the message is wrong it's because the message hasn't been lived yet except by these beautiful few that we remember as the ones who truly had being on this path and who passed it on we also see you when we look through these eyes we see worlds within worlds within worlds when you were talking so beautifully about all these spirit worlds and things that that these shifty-eyed white people didn't even think existed oh they exist yes and all the sacred traditions wisdom traditions have affirmed they call them by different names they call them the subtle world the spirit world the thin places liminal spaces my own languaging for it is the imaginal realm and it's a realm that surrounds and in Velvets ours like a beautiful placenta involving the womb of our little ply night planet and in this information and substance and nutrients are exchanged and we receive help and we give back help we find our place and we transform the fruits of our lifetime into other things things were tasting here generosity forbearance truth goodness light joy and these become substances which nurture our planet and when we fail to do that as human beings and then wouldn't instead what we put out into the planet is greed and isolation and separation and competition and you know we're putting poison into the planet spiritual poison which is as toxic and as positive as the lethal poisons we put in with our gas of our pollution and everything else it is our human place when we understand the worlds within worlds to participate in the generation of these one things they're called in the Christian tradition the fruits of the spirit which are our alchemical contribution the life the health the beauty of this wonderful body of interbeing that we are and only in making that contribution can we find our place our meaning our wholeness and our relatedness with everything but we need these maps that are large enough to tell us that you're not going to get it in traditional faith you're not going to get it in traditional rational science we need groups of practitioners like this that have the the boldness to go back and find the new old indigenous wisdom maps boldly shift them from an individual perspective which dominated the axial age into this new genuinely higher collective vision imagine Buddha nature salvation emergent properties of the whole not available in the individual self except as we participate wonderful wonderful way of thinking how we belong together but these are just kind of little things I want to throw out for you to tease you with and to affirm how what's being said in so many different ways and voices by so many gifted teachers from these traditions is really good true profound liberating reorientation for our own age and what I'd like to do if I can is to in my little segment of this by calling pull that back up on the stage again I hope they didn't take away your mic there it is and I what I want us to sing that the streams of my father's love again but I want you all to stand as you do it and plant your feet on the ground like we did this morning if you can remember back that early and the text the streams of my father's love that flowed daily through me from the holy fountain of life from some great vast thing to the seed that's D at the end the seed throughout the whole creation there's this art of exchange of giving and receiving of nurturance virtual horizontal it flows right through the awake human heart and as we sing at this time and sing advise see if you can actually sense that in yourself see if you can sense that even right here and now you are part of a vast cascading dynamic web of exchange whose final name is love okay my dear streams of my father's love daily the streams of my father's love run daily through me from the holy fountain of life to the sea throughout the whole creation the streams of my mother's love run daily through me streams of my mother's love run daily through me from the holy fountain of life to the sea throughout the whole creation and may that seed bear fruit in each one of us and in our one cosmos thank you back to the deck thank you Cynthia you spoke about the operating system that is as Gerardo pointed to so habitual that divides and separates and mostly that's what we're walking around in and yet you created an experience for us in which maybe we had a taste of a different operating system and there was a personal practice part of that involved dropping our consciousness to our heart and there was a collective practice of that involved and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to what you see as possible through gatherings like this where there's a an intentionality to change our habitual ways of perceiving and practice and a container held that supports this dropping can you speak a little bit to that yeah I think I would say in the first place that that we sometimes put the emphasis on the wrong thing and we kind of build or so beat ourselves up and shame ourselves about well I can when I change my habit change my habit I think if the final analysis it's an energetic issue more than a moral issue or even strictly speaking a perceptual issue because until you have gathered and collected your presence sufficiently you're going to run the old default system because it runs at a lower energy it's all you can do and so until it until a certain reservoir certain critical threshold of beingness is generated and maintained it's impossible to escape the gravitational field of dualistic egoic middle rational thinking and the problem with our Western world is we've just said that that's the only thinking there is we've we've refused to acknowledge there's any other fields out there but so I think that that experiences like this traditionally this kind of energy boosting and gathering in centering has been done through a sacred devotion and ritual you know that and it happens even very quietly in meditation and it happens really profoundly and some of the more exuberant rituals from Sufi turning to you know the sweat lodges to all sorts of all sorts of wonderful things I've I got to go to spend some time with the Bhutanese Buddhist not long ago still playing on the vast torrents and the banging of the drums and and just something in the whole being wakes up mm-hm and so I think that in the collective gatherings with the intention to essentially raise our energy field not just to have a spiritual high but to make something possible in perception that we can remember and walk out of you know we can't disregard energy we can't disregard the life force that runs through our our connection with humanitarian ection with all sentient beings and we think we can cut ourselves off from the life force and just observe it and talk about it we're fools you

Channel: Festival of Faiths

Views: 29,396

Rating: 4.8873239 out of 5

Keywords: Christian, Sufism, Eastern Orthodox, interbeing, #festivalofaiths, #fof2019, #faithandscience Faith and science, Festival of Faiths, 2019 Festival of Faiths, Sacred Cosmos Faith & Science, Universe, Vibration, Thomas Merton, Science, Cosmos, Cosmology, Talk, Conference

Id: 5ALAgUlzxX0

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019