Cynthia Bourgeault The First Four of Eight Points on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage

hello wisdom seekers in our particular wisdom school lineage and those curious and those in small groups and large groups and no groups at all we're filming this from the heart of our second mega wisdom skull on the divine exchange the introductory wisdom course part 2 at Canoga retreat center in North Carolina we've got 200 wisdom seekers gathered around this and it's a wonderful upwelling of energy and and hope and enthusiasm and what's really become a pretty strong and quickly flowing branch of the great wisdom River the so every once in a while we've now been about 20 years at this point in trying to restore and cultivate and nurture wisdom along this particular pathway or riverbed of lineage transmission and as often happens when you get 20 years into things you begin dealing with a new group of people who weren't there at the beginning and we have many places and many groups where people are coming on to boards or into wisdom management places that have no idea of how this particular tradition got formed how it came together what its core kind of founding guiding principles are and what distinguishes it from any other of like 500 or 5,000 internet sites with wisdom in the title what are we up to and where do we come come from so wisdom is very much a generic term in in classic kind of spiritual discourse and it can cover a wide multitude of sins ranging from things like kitchen soup wisdom on the one hand just taught of folk knowledge to very precise esoteric schools and I would say that the wisdom tradition has been a great underground stream feeding and nurturing the life of all traditions and like all if you imagine that what flows through a stream is water water is colorless and formless but it requires some sort of vessel in container in order to hold it together so it just doesn't spill out onto the ground or evaporate into the air so each of the great wisdom traditions are like that vessel and the vessel or container imparts its own certain quality and flavor to the water and our wisdom lineage is no exception so it's you can't just say that you can separate it out the container that it comes in and still have the water because there's an active feedback loop between the particularity of the way a tradition is received and the color and flavor and fragrance it actually bears of the universal wisdom schools these these streams or tributaries of the wisdom school art in competition it's more like the classic story of the five blind men describing the elephant that each particular branch tries to describe and and capture the flavor of one particular and authentic combination of knowledge 'as and resources and practices and our lineage is no different from from any other so sometime over the past winter the conversation got going amongst wisdom students in various groups where did this come from where do we get this practice what are its what are its components what's our stream all about and I responded to that in a rather quick off the top of my head listing of eight points or what you might call foundational principles that are particularly foundational for our lineage they're part history as we look at these principles I can also share with you the story of where we came from and how the thing came together in the particular form it came together in but they also serve as guiding principles and measures for how the transmission is working and whether people's individual sort of Pro creations of this tradition are remaining on course or whether they're wandering off in a variety of different directions so their guidelines and measures part autobiography part part stirring stirring veins and I share them with you very much as as beginnings to conversations that what I'm hoping is that in each of your groups in the small clusters as you look at this as I may write about this and unpack it more that that you begin to tap conversations about what's unique about this lineage what's a sort of stable point and what's what's moving and subject to continued change in trance transformation so I wanted to share with you just in this video me speaking to it from my mouth and from my heart about the journey of where we came from as I see it as it informs these eight core principles so I'll lay out the principle and then I'll look a little bit about what each one was what its founded around I should say very briefly just in terms of my own history that the the lineage stream that that we're working in now came to the ground as a full-blown form in 1999 in British Columbia and salt spring island actually where I was serving a wonderful seven years as sort of resident hermit and wisdom teacher for a great organization called the contemplative society which is really the flagship in our wisdom flotilla and it was there on the banks of Ganges Harbor that we put together our first wisdom school and began to develop in the small groups there the practice that has grown now to this wisdom school with 200 people here in in North Carolina so essentially our lineage came apart and came together as a fusion of two strands that I'd been I'd been exposed to first of all the great of Benedictine monasticism with its regular deep lineage of rhythmic circulation between aura at libera prayer and work as a wisdom vessel not just as a way of arranging your sked schedule but as a real sort of wisdom format in which people gradually deepened and steadied and stabilized so I had that in my background from way back I'd been a monastery Benedictine monastery hopper since about 1980 and was deeply formed in that tradition and can continue to be the other major stream that was the the riverbank in this was my 10 years of very deep work in the gur G Fork the teachings and practices and wisdom tradition coming out of that Armenian spiritual teacher GI gorgeous who taught early on earlier on in the 20th century a wonderful path of what we would now adays probably call mindfulness how do we bring presents how do we bring conscious attention to things so that we don't just go through the motion losing energy and living in a daydream of ourselves and both of these were sort of no riverbanks of my own work but I never knew exactly how to get them together so I went I went to Snowmass monastery and little in early 1990 to study and be present to centering prayer to work with Thomas Keating and there I found not only centering prayer which proved to be the catalyst to the whole thing but also a monk a hermit monk at the monastery who had been working on his own in his own mystical heart to bring the Gurdjieff tradition and the Benedictine monasticism tradition together into an integral comprehensive pathway of lineage transmission so I took one look at that and said that's the real deal that's where my heart's going sold everything I had gave it to the poor and came and followed him and in the two and a half years that he remained on the planet he taught me this particular fusion of Benedictine stability with conscious a weakness with the open heart that we find in the deep contemplative prayer and those became the cornerstones that became of our particular expression of the win it wisdom lineage so with that as a back story let me get on to these four points the first of them that's that's really unique and constitutive about our particular stream of wisdom transmission is that were founded on a daily practice of sitting meditation predominantly but not exclusively centering prayer anchored within the overall daily rhythm of aura at labora as set forth in the rule of Saint Benedict so in other words the first and most important thing to say about our lineage is that it's a practice driven practice based lineage it's not about speculation it's not about cognitive knowledge it's not about books of esoteric doctrine it's about sitting on the cushion subjecting yourself to the rhythms that our tradition has passed on as the great vessels in which transformation happens so we're grounded in the daily sitting there ways that I've come to discover and appreciate almost in retrospect that centering prayer while it's not you know it's it's not required in this lineage certainly during prayer is particularly congruent to what we're doing because as a practice it's founded on the continuous letting go a thought letting go of content letting go of issues agendas letting them relax unclench release its stranglehold on objects of of imagination and thinking and this daily practice of letting go echoes so much with the cannot ik art of Jesus the practice that Jesus taught the practice that he lived that the practice of centering prayer in and of itself strikes a resonant note with the core of the teaching of the Christian tradition and begins to prepare and pattern people to really put on not only the mind of Christ but the heart of Christ so it's a very very good ground we're a school that they call in in some traditions am esoteric school in other words we connect the exoteric the external this structural the institutional church if you will with the esoteric the deep inner meaning and understanding the contemplative understanding of things and the the classic wisdom traditions have said you can't just leap from the exoteric to the esoteric you have to go through that ground of practice so that something actually changes and you as the conscious perceptive perceiving unit and until that change happens esoteric will just become more and more fancier more complicated exoteric you have to change the heart you have to change the way the teaching falls into the prepared being so that's what we're really about we're practice driven lineage whether we have in wisdom school a seminar we always take the time at the beginning of the day in the middle of the day and at the ending of the day to say enough talking we don't try to cram every spare moment full of more content we make space for prayer for meditation and also the wonderful input into transformation that carried in the chatting the music and unconscious mindful work and we believe that wisdom is not about knowing more but knowing deeper knowing with more of you engaged with more of your perceptual understanding awaken online and the real purpose in our lineage is to bring that kind of awakening about so that would be point 1 point 2 we are rooted in the Christian mystical and visionary tradition understanding contemplation in its original sense as luminous seeing not merely a meditation practice or a life talk style we believe that silence is not just a place you go to but a way of knowing in and of itself and without this silent way of knowing that that knowledge itself begins to become too cognitive cerebral and confrontational propositional so a little bit of backstory or commentary on that nowadays in one of the things that's happened as a result of the great contemplative awakening that really gripped Christianity in the latter half of the 20th century and was carried forward by people like Thomas Merton Thomas Keating my own teacher Don John main one of the things that happened in that was the beginning to associate contemplation with with nothingness with an emptiness of content with silence with stillness in and of itself in the very in the very often quoted instructions of Thomas Keating contemplation is resting in God and that comes not just from Thomas but way back in the tradition from Pope Gregory the first who uses that line unfortunately that line is not just an Indian itself he just doesn't say contemplation is resting in God nothing else it's context 'add within the much broader and more ancient understanding of contemplation the contemplation is a luminous seeing very often it's described as a pure beholding in other words a direct perception it's sometimes described as knowledge impregnated with love that was one of the famous early definitions I think from st. John Chrysostom so that in the early if you read the patristic fathers in the first four or five centuries of the church there's this very strong sense the contemplation is not content free it's not emptiness it's not going into a place of total zero movement in order to seek restitution stillness regeneration but contemplation merely stills the outer senses what got to be known in the tradition in the course of its development as the faculties our memory our reason our imagination our rationality our will and just silences those pulls the plug on those sort of coarser and more earth tide ways of perception in order to open a place where a different and far deeper kind of knowing can begin to fill in in us one of the images I often use of this is when you learn to see in the dark and as long as you're grabbing for your little flashlight you can maybe see three feet ahead of you and you've got some sort of seeing but it's only by turning off the flashlight waiting for about twenty minutes until your eyes are climatized to the dark that you actually discover you can see you can see by a whole different sort of perceptive faculty but you see and you don't just get cooped up in little three three feet ahead of you you get a sense so that so that once you get the hang of it you can walk perfectly confidently into what looks to be dark and really see where the path is leading so I think that's a pretty good rough analogy for contemplation if using our faculties to think and reason and figure things out is in any way similar to using that little flashlight it does really really a good job to illuminate that 3 feet around you but for the deeper body the whole forest and the night and the spacious canopy of heavens that surround you it's going to keep you cooped up in something that's too small to take it in so the idea is there's nothing to do but turn off the flashlight and wait till those other senses fill in so contemplation and contemplative prayer as it's now understood is all about turning off the flashlight and in that it's good we got to turn off the flashlight err we're never going to get beyond the mind but on the other hand it has lost its emphasis on the fact that something else fills in and it's not a kind of content or cognitive knowing like I know this about that but it is a knowingness that's so deep and an authentic and whole that it can't be unknown that people emerge from times of contemplation with a different knowing and a different way of knowing they can't be translated immediately into life tell me what you learned in contemplation today but it comes forward in a different way of being present in the world a different way of positioning our energy and our presence in the world and a different way of knowing that something is known and moving out of that knowing without having to have lesson plans and cards and agendas and quotients and all the good stuff we use to manage the conceptual world so we're firming and and and identifying our tradition with that dream of the great visionary mystics from Saint Paul to Jacob Burma to PRT our de Chardin to William Blake to the ones whose deep contemplation was directly related to a seeing of something of the heart of God that's brought back and transmitted into our planet aha and it's and and that's where we go so while we follow a practice you know of daily meditation it doesn't set up like a little centering prayer retreat in which we're doing three periods of centering prayer three times daily and working our way through the contemplative outreach program and we're not in any sense glorifying a contemplative lifestyle I think the term is an oxymoron myself that that what we're rather doing is is placing ourselves opening ourselves to both the disciplines and the gifts that happen when silence is a way of knowing becomes the whole of our life so the third point is this and I think this is a very very distinctive feature of our our lineage perhaps the distinctive feature if I had to pick just one out of the pile and talk about what distinguishes us a little bit from some very very close close look-alikes for example the Living School at the Center for action and contemplation very very close but a little bit of a difference and the difference lies in the fact that we incorporate a major emphasis much more so than in conventional contemplative circles on mindfulness and conscious awakening informed here particularly by the teachings of gie gorgeous and by their parallels and antecedents in the great sacred traditions particularly in Sufism so in other words our emphasis is not on just learning the practices from the outside in doing the practices because they're traditional or because they're pious we're interested also always in how they interface with awakening and awakening as described in this great inner tradition particularly as it was taught to me and the teachings of gorgeous mindfulness non identification 3 centered presence not falling asleep it's a whole discipline of a being present when you're in the discipline and you won't find that in most monastic transmissions most monastic communities not in most contemplative circles where the practices are tend to be looked at as ends in their own right creating an ambience whose whose final product is his piety or devotion the transformation that we're looking at comes a lot closer to awakeness enlightenment a whole different consciousness that becomes stabilized and interiorized in us this was of course the piece I brought in from the Gurdjieff work was the piece then that was perfected by my teacher Rafe have been working on this same material in his hermit Cabot for years and years and years to try and wake up in the monastery so that it wasn't just a matter of you keep the rule and the rule will keep you but it was a matter of not snoozing through your life even in the name of piety so we work with with principles one of the things that radically transformed our original British Columbia group and in one sense part of the waters was when we brought in and started working with kabir hal Minsky's living presents a wonderful wonderful book kabir was a very good friend of mine began his journey in Catholic Jesuit schools went to Buddhism spent a long time in the ger chief work finally found his home in Sufism and wrote this wonderful book back around 1992 where he took these practices that come to us from the Gurdjieff work and Sufism and them in a very simple form so they could be practiced as people with conscious as conscious awakening practices so our little group in British Columbia dived into that and by the time we got to the end of it the the people that were interested in simply Benedictine piety had dropped astern and the people who had the bit in their in their teeth to wake up what does it mean to be present what does it mean that we snooze away our life we're raring to go and we began to add in practices that are never taught out in the exoteric world self observation non identification external considering all of these become core mainstay practices conscious work with an inner task that keeps you awake today we were actually practicing levitation not meaning flapping our wings and raising up to the sky but bring your attention to the upstroke when you raise your arm or when you walk as a way of cutting through automatic postures and positions and the tendency to get heavy and automatic when we walk so there's always this kind of characteristic inner tradition play that lets people live in a different way in their own skin and is pushing them relentlessly backing them into the corner from which there's no way out is up to transform so it's a it's an inner school in that sense a it cut a baby fourth way school if you'd like to call it that in our lineage so that leads more or less directly into the fourth point which is up which is around that that very very scary term Gnosticism and say the fourth point is we are an esoteric or gnostic school to the extent that these terms have come to be understood as designating that stream of christian transmission through which the radically consciousness transforming teachings of Jesus have been most powerfully transmitted and engaged but we ask you as jus we reject us at Eris ISM as simply mental or metaphysical speculation and we affirm the primacy of the scripture and tradition as the cornerstones of Christian life in other words we're stating first and foremost that we're interested in transformation and the word Gnostic which is now used when you say the word it sounds like most people it says oh this is a whole bunch of secret information that that that's not Christian because it's exclusive and elite the word Gnostic or gnosis originally meant knowledge it's a perfectly good word it's all over st. Paul and the only reason we don't know that is because we don't read Saint Paul in Greek anymore so we are a gnostic school to the to the extent that we're interested in the knowledge of and the actual practice of putting on the mind of Christ in other words learning to mirror to interiorize and to live more closely and clearly out of the place that he came from and the teachings that have been that the the early sacred scriptures that have most faithfully recorded that and been interested in that too received early on the rather unfortunate title of the Gnostic Gospels they were named that in in Elaine Pagels groundbreaking 1979 book by the same same title the the Gospel of Thomas the gospel you know the gospel fill a set of about 46 texts that were found yep safely stashed away in an urn in the deserts and in Upper Egypt and represented this incredible case of essentially wisdom teaching which means teachings that caught this wisdom transformational thread that was coming clearly and strongly out of the teachings of Jesus Jesus being a great master of the transformation of consciousness change your mind change your heart change the way we look at the world we're interested in that message in Christ far more interested in that than in in the exoteric practice of believing in him knowing the right things about him we sensed that the gospel has the power to change the world not so much by being something that people memorize and go to church about but by something that transforms their center of being and sends them out in the world as as as a stream of energy of life of Christic force and presence so we're interested in that as st. Paul says you you also should have in yourselves the mind of Christ and that's what we are aiming to take on to take up that invitation to the extent that the ancient and perfectly true word for that was Gnostic great we're Gnostic but we have nothing to do with the modern interpretive meanings of this that that tend to say that we believe in an opposite doctrine that maybe Dionysian in nature that certainly is elitist that certainly is anti Church then in some sort of mythologies today it's there's the story gets spinning that there was a there was a Catholic Orthodox Church and then there was this Gnostic Church and the Catholic Church orthodoxy squashed the Gnostic church but The Da Vinci Code preserved its secret and you know it went to live in southern France and all this kind of kind of Voodoo and and it's the the perception that Gnostic that were if he call the word Gnostic that we're not Christian we reject that that the this practice is rooted very very solidly in the in Scripture in tradition and in a thoroughly Orthodox way of understanding the presence of Christ we're not in any sense sensing to either replace or oppose the institutional church and I prove I personally have never had any second qualms about the valley I swore it by ordination the belief I agreed to that I do believe that scripture contains all things necessary to salvation I drew that without even crossing my by my fingers behind my back we're in where what what what Richard Rohr would call outer inside and we participate consciously in solidarity with the exoteric church that we believe strongly that once again if you come back to this threefold path with exoteric meso Tareq and esoteric that one of the sicknesses and one of the the pathologies of the heart of contemporary exterior Christianity is it's lost its middle it's lost its meso Taric tradition where people who hear the good news can actually come in and begin to go further in incarnated that and because the Christian Church has seemed so singularly uninterested in it it's been interesting how that whole transformational piece has tended to get get picked up by para church institutions things like AAA things like the Enneagram movement things like recovery all of these things give people tools to begin to do what the human soul evolving wants to do which is to move from just book learning and belief and to something that's actually beginning to stir and transfer form the heart so we we see ourselves as working in tandem with in in service of in solidarity with the church and with the great work that goes on in the church of bringing people in keeping the sacraments alive forming a foundational ethics and compassion and morality within them we're not opposed any of this we're in service of it and we have many many people within our ranks that are ordained pastors in many denominations we even have a few bishops more than a few bishops who see in this a lot like we do not a competing organization that's trying to scuttle the church but a resource for the renewal of the whole life of the church so it's really important to say that our particular lineage is inclusive for sure that I myself have been informed particularly by the teachings of Sufism by the Gurdjieff work and by some branches of Buddhism and I worked for many many years and a wonderful sort of inter spiritual contemplative organization known as spiritual paths so our our view is boundless and embracing but we know very clearly that our roots are in the Christian tradition and our light holder and master and living pivot point is Jesus Christ to whom we in our various ways and according to our own capacities to do so learn to bow than in knee of the heart

Channel: Wisdom Way of Knowing

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Length: 34min 38sec (2078 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019