This sparks such an interest in me for something more...a hesitant side tells me that at 79, it's a late start (although the 'start' began 50 years ago). I have pursued so many paths that never fulfilled what I wanted or sought.
I admire this so much! It’s never too late to be present 😉 Have you ever read “Science and Health with key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy? It has been my “something more” and I can’t imagine navigating questions of mortality, immortality, consciousness, love, purpose, and health/healing without it.
Absolutely. The world needs wise elders now more than ever. As a complement to the above, I suggest Bill Plotkin's book Nature and the Human Soul, especially his chapters on elderhood. And, he explicitly addresses our need to recover our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Thank you Cynthia for your own personal Wisdom story and the path to it. My own path has been through marriage, home, and family life. My greatest teachers have been my husband and children. For 6o years we have all been walking each other home, kicking, screaming, but totally committed to never leaving or giving up until we realize its all one Life and one Onederful unconditional Love.
. The Gurdjieff path is a path of concentration; the overarching aim is to “crystallize” something in oneself in order to build a permanent individuality that can survive one’s physical death. To avoid at all costs becoming “food for the moon.”
This is exactly what Tomberg discusses in *Meditations on the Tarot* - distinguishing 'radiance' from crystallisation.
Of course G claims this is the purpose of all religions.
Barely mentioned by the foundations.
G mentions this in 'Life is Real...' a book Pauline de Dampierre thought it should not have been published...incomplete..
Family trying to make a $
There is something weird with the foundations and their mansions and pretentiousness.
I learned so much in my 10 years with the Gurdjieff Foundation. But there were obstacles of several sorts. The strain was properly intense, but led many into false simplifications and especially spiritual ego, and even away from G and his alchemy of everyday work and self remembering. They were kept too separate and the circulatio often lost in a permanent separation between understanding and life. (My group seemed especially troubled, so New York kept sending help - a good bit of it showing up with the same dichotomies which shut down the original alchemy. But all you need is one good teacher.) Literally painting a room while only paying attention to your left foot? Not organic. You must see yourself in the whole project - including your left foot of course. So I went into the work as a thief. And finally left when my group seemed permanently stuck in their loyalty to simplification and separation. But the Work was a missing component I had not found elsewhere. G had an alchemy that could be an art, but some groups were too busy maintaining their contemplative purities, shutting down the organic, processive movement. But still I am grateful and came away with a missing component I still work with. And still toasting my own idiot.
And just to be clear, I love Cynthia's understanding of Gurdjieff and look forward to more integration. For the best explanation of Gs Law of Three I always send folks to her book on the Trinity.
This is just beautiful. I am so in love with your Wisdom Jesus, and I am not a Christian - it's the concept of kenosis that grabs me. On the other hand, I have a strong allergic reaction to all things Gurdjieff and usually bolt when I see any reference to him. But, I see the value you laid out in the polarity between letting go and concentrated attention. You’ve made me curious to see how you wove these strands together. Thank you!
Well said, Penny “the polarity between letting go and concentrated attention”. For me, the Welcoming Practice is another fruitful, powerful practice for conjoining these. And, Cynthia, it’s always so good to hear how it is that you are moved.
Cynthia, thank you for this. Your description of "bumping into" Centering Prayer and the Gurdjieff Work reminded me of my own turning point many years ago. I had written to Tom Morris (author of Philosophy for Dummies) with a question I’ve since forgotten, but one line from his reply about grace stayed with me: "We work for that which no work is required."
As someone who was often told I "think too much" - and who grew to believe that meant something was fundamentally wrong with me, those words felt like a massive, if odd, permission to simply be.
I didn't hear Tom telling me to stop being myself; instead he was showing me a path where the problem wasn't the "work" itself, but my "holding on" to it. It was an invitation to hold the scaffolding lightly enough to start noticing the territory.
That opening eventually led me to the CAC and your work on Mary and the Trinity, and a way to relate to "God" as a dynamic movement rather than a static… noun.
In the context of your post, I see now that the "still point" of contemplation, that self-emptying, is not a dissolving of the Self, but a clearing of the scaffolding so the space between observer and observed can vanish. As that space dissolves I was surprised to notice that compassion arises naturally, and from that the "work of concentration” became... no work at all.
It feels like the ultimate paradox that only by emptying the constructions of the self can an act be truly free. And I find myself wondering about this crystallization you mention.
Thank you for giving us the language to finally describe this "win/win" for the soul.
Thank you for mentioning Needleman‘s Lost Christianity. It was instrumental in returning me to the Christian religion and the Fourth Way, and a dive into Centering Prayer, Contemplative Outreach, and Thomas Keating. Perhaps with the polarity there might be a synthesis to a third new creation.
Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings also bridge your schizophrenic gap of stillness with, activity without.
Although I attended the Boston Gurdjieff group during the late ‘60’s, the Work didn’t resonate with me then. I didn’t find my spiritual home for another 25 years.
thank you for this background. I have attended some of your wisdom schools and participated in webinars. I find the work so complementary to Spirit’s work within me. Then Reiki became a practice for me and that to has become a dancing partner in all you say. Thank you
Cynthia, your formulation is perfect for me. Thank you so, so much. For many years in the Gurdjieff school of Willem Nyland I have felt the lack of the communion, the emotional aspect, buried someplace beneath the rigor and effort of the Work. As a Gurdjieffian trying to become a Christian, I swim in a different lane in the same stream. Your guidance and most importantly, your validation of my inner compass is enabling the erasure of the 'lane markers.' Heartfelt gratitude. Dale
Isn't Gurdjieff's model, for all its clear sophistication, at heart a reworking of the ancient Greek idea that mortals fade after dying unless they have proven themselves and, like the ancient heroes, are worthy of immortality?
Gurdjieff (or is it Needleman?) says something like the soul is not a given. We achieve it through self-awareness (which is not abstract, but actually flirts with humiliation if undertook without seeing that humiliation is one of the reactions we must see in ourselves fairly soon in the effort). But I wouldn't say that immortality is the heart. Just a little sidebar. We didn't pay much attention to it. More importantly perhaps was the understanding that the soul is the part of us that CAN see ourselves objectively without guilt, but often with remorse (the lost possibility in the past) - if we can make the distinction. When the self-awareness derailed, the "mantra" was to "begin again." But also that the eye through which we see ourselves (see, not imagine) is the same eye through which God see us.
And by the way, I love your writing on Owen Barfield. Thanks for that. Often thinkers don't understand each other - I don't think OB understood G. Always a little sad, but I don't blame him for not seeing the resonance with his own thinking. Understanding complex thinkers requires dedication and time we don't necessarily have especially dedicating so much to the work we have been given to do. Translation problems are a big obstacle. The deeper feeling behind the words is where I find the resonance.
For me, what you speak about illuminates once again the perennial matter of the relationship between Effort and Grace. I was also very struck by Needleman's "Lost Christianity"; at the time it landed on my bookstand, it was a profound confirmation of much of what I had come to up until that point. Something needs to be created in us through inner efforts before submitting to Grace becomes possible and meaningful. More than this, without an appeal to Grace, one becomes stuck after a time, and no further effort will help. The acknowledgment that I need help - help from Above - is a defining moment in one's spiritual journey.
And this is actually in the Gurdjieff Work, but those who may have only studied Ouspensky and Gurdjieff's early talks would likely know little of this. It was from Beelzebub's Tales onward that Gurdjieff became more explicit about the matter of appealing to higher forces... or "Ideals," as he put it. While throughout his career, he was very careful to linguistically reframe religious ideas, there is ultimately no question about the religiosity of his Work, e.g., he reframes the three face of God as three "forces"... reframes the power of intercession by the saints as "Ideals"... the power of prayer, as overtly elaborated in the elements of the Jesus Prayer... and so forth. His entire cosmology rests on a hierarchy of angels - evolved beings - with HIS ENDLESSNESS as the Supreme Being. Christ is represented through the mysterious "third force"... "O Holy and Immortal God"... and so on.
As for Christian contemplation practices - inner silence, giving up one's usual "self" - this is very much contained in Gurdjieff's third interval in the octave, "Harnel-Aoot." Interestingly, this third interval only appeared in Beelzebub's Tales, not before. Ouspenskian's either don't know of it or tend to ignore it as a literary fancy or something, not realising that it points to the necessity at a certain point in our spiritual journey of submission: "Into your hand, I commend my spirit." Without this, the second body cannot be completed. We do our inner work up to a certain point, and then we lay ourselves down, bare, empty, offering ourselves up to the Above, and we are then "worked on" and "remembered," as I wrote in my latest Substack post here. Madame de Salzmann knew this, although the direction her Work took after this is still subject to scrutiny.
And this pattern or Effort followed by appeal to Grace repeats at every next "higher being-body" until the ultimate and highest act a human can perform... with developed human Will, giving over to Divine Will... "behind Real I lies God," said Gurdjieff. Of course, in many Gurdjieff circles, this represents a kind of blasphemy! But I cannot help that. In my experience, Gurdjieff's Work is ultimately a mystical path that leads us inexorably back to God. There. I've stated it overtly. Wasn't it Gurdjieff himself who once stated, "God helps me"?
Thank you for your contributions, Cynthia. We have been blessed to have worked together and to have discovered parallel paths. God bless.
Before you spoke of the Fourth Way Benedictine: "Have you heard the birds singing of late? Their jubilee outside your kitchen window? If these 'birds of heaven' are aware of our troubling state of affairs, they are certainly not worried—they’ve returned in season to trill on."
Here in the Virginia Piedmont I set out my Merlin Bird Song App for half an hour and recorded twenty four species. For me, an unheard of variety! Are the birds coming to the safer shores of the East fleeing the droughts and fires in the West? That's what many of the the climate change models predict.
It's a reminder that the Earth is vast and changing. Some decades ago I worked on a global satellite broadcast. During it we featured a simultaneous sunrise and sunset. The Earth is never all dark nor all bright.
Beautiful and affirming! So wonderful to have a teacher who can give so clear expression to the things I experience, and am not able to clearly articulate.So grateful for you, Cynthia!
Thank you for explaining more about Gurdjieff. You mentioned him briefly at your last 2 Garrison retreats. And I have been curious since then. I’m taking an exceptional online Gurdjieff movements class with Heather Ruce. It’s hard to put into words, but there is something very comfortable about the subtle shifts of time and space that occur when doing the movements. Thank you for all you and your students do!
The image of Ora et Labora as the hidden link between the Benedictine and Gurdjieff traditions — both insisting that transformation cannot happen in abstraction, that consciousness must be worked in the friction of ordinary time — feels like a recovered truth rather than a new one. Jacob Needleman's phrase about asking stones to sprout wings has stayed with me for years; what you describe here suggests that the contemplative and the Work paths are two different ways of cultivating those wings, each correcting the other's tendency toward either dissociation or grim striving. I wonder whether the 'unjudging love' you quote from Dylan Thomas is itself the ground that makes the polarity livable — not a synthesis, but a mercy large enough to hold both the surrender and the crystallization.
This sparks such an interest in me for something more...a hesitant side tells me that at 79, it's a late start (although the 'start' began 50 years ago). I have pursued so many paths that never fulfilled what I wanted or sought.
Where would I begin again now, at this age?
It’s never too late to bring beginners mind to our practice. Every day we are born again with opportunities to become who we already are! 🙂
I admire this so much! It’s never too late to be present 😉 Have you ever read “Science and Health with key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy? It has been my “something more” and I can’t imagine navigating questions of mortality, immortality, consciousness, love, purpose, and health/healing without it.
Absolutely. The world needs wise elders now more than ever. As a complement to the above, I suggest Bill Plotkin's book Nature and the Human Soul, especially his chapters on elderhood. And, he explicitly addresses our need to recover our relationship with the more-than-human world.
Reverberates with me. Thank you. Still on a path at yes 79. 🙏
Thank you Cynthia for your own personal Wisdom story and the path to it. My own path has been through marriage, home, and family life. My greatest teachers have been my husband and children. For 6o years we have all been walking each other home, kicking, screaming, but totally committed to never leaving or giving up until we realize its all one Life and one Onederful unconditional Love.
"Onederfull" = love that!
. The Gurdjieff path is a path of concentration; the overarching aim is to “crystallize” something in oneself in order to build a permanent individuality that can survive one’s physical death. To avoid at all costs becoming “food for the moon.”
This is exactly what Tomberg discusses in *Meditations on the Tarot* - distinguishing 'radiance' from crystallisation.
Of course G claims this is the purpose of all religions.
Barely mentioned by the foundations.
G mentions this in 'Life is Real...' a book Pauline de Dampierre thought it should not have been published...incomplete..
Family trying to make a $
There is something weird with the foundations and their mansions and pretentiousness.
But you know that 😏
I learned so much in my 10 years with the Gurdjieff Foundation. But there were obstacles of several sorts. The strain was properly intense, but led many into false simplifications and especially spiritual ego, and even away from G and his alchemy of everyday work and self remembering. They were kept too separate and the circulatio often lost in a permanent separation between understanding and life. (My group seemed especially troubled, so New York kept sending help - a good bit of it showing up with the same dichotomies which shut down the original alchemy. But all you need is one good teacher.) Literally painting a room while only paying attention to your left foot? Not organic. You must see yourself in the whole project - including your left foot of course. So I went into the work as a thief. And finally left when my group seemed permanently stuck in their loyalty to simplification and separation. But the Work was a missing component I had not found elsewhere. G had an alchemy that could be an art, but some groups were too busy maintaining their contemplative purities, shutting down the organic, processive movement. But still I am grateful and came away with a missing component I still work with. And still toasting my own idiot.
And just to be clear, I love Cynthia's understanding of Gurdjieff and look forward to more integration. For the best explanation of Gs Law of Three I always send folks to her book on the Trinity.
Iain McGillchrist is also profound re: Trinity.
This is just beautiful. I am so in love with your Wisdom Jesus, and I am not a Christian - it's the concept of kenosis that grabs me. On the other hand, I have a strong allergic reaction to all things Gurdjieff and usually bolt when I see any reference to him. But, I see the value you laid out in the polarity between letting go and concentrated attention. You’ve made me curious to see how you wove these strands together. Thank you!
Well said, Penny “the polarity between letting go and concentrated attention”. For me, the Welcoming Practice is another fruitful, powerful practice for conjoining these. And, Cynthia, it’s always so good to hear how it is that you are moved.
Yin/Yang = opposites are parts within the Whole.
Cynthia, thank you for this. Your description of "bumping into" Centering Prayer and the Gurdjieff Work reminded me of my own turning point many years ago. I had written to Tom Morris (author of Philosophy for Dummies) with a question I’ve since forgotten, but one line from his reply about grace stayed with me: "We work for that which no work is required."
As someone who was often told I "think too much" - and who grew to believe that meant something was fundamentally wrong with me, those words felt like a massive, if odd, permission to simply be.
I didn't hear Tom telling me to stop being myself; instead he was showing me a path where the problem wasn't the "work" itself, but my "holding on" to it. It was an invitation to hold the scaffolding lightly enough to start noticing the territory.
That opening eventually led me to the CAC and your work on Mary and the Trinity, and a way to relate to "God" as a dynamic movement rather than a static… noun.
In the context of your post, I see now that the "still point" of contemplation, that self-emptying, is not a dissolving of the Self, but a clearing of the scaffolding so the space between observer and observed can vanish. As that space dissolves I was surprised to notice that compassion arises naturally, and from that the "work of concentration” became... no work at all.
It feels like the ultimate paradox that only by emptying the constructions of the self can an act be truly free. And I find myself wondering about this crystallization you mention.
Thank you for giving us the language to finally describe this "win/win" for the soul.
Thank you Cynthia, your intent and energy helps me remember my own.
Thank you for mentioning Needleman‘s Lost Christianity. It was instrumental in returning me to the Christian religion and the Fourth Way, and a dive into Centering Prayer, Contemplative Outreach, and Thomas Keating. Perhaps with the polarity there might be a synthesis to a third new creation.
Paramahansa Yogananda’s teachings also bridge your schizophrenic gap of stillness with, activity without.
Although I attended the Boston Gurdjieff group during the late ‘60’s, the Work didn’t resonate with me then. I didn’t find my spiritual home for another 25 years.
May every person experience that sublime joy!
thank you for this background. I have attended some of your wisdom schools and participated in webinars. I find the work so complementary to Spirit’s work within me. Then Reiki became a practice for me and that to has become a dancing partner in all you say. Thank you
Cynthia, your formulation is perfect for me. Thank you so, so much. For many years in the Gurdjieff school of Willem Nyland I have felt the lack of the communion, the emotional aspect, buried someplace beneath the rigor and effort of the Work. As a Gurdjieffian trying to become a Christian, I swim in a different lane in the same stream. Your guidance and most importantly, your validation of my inner compass is enabling the erasure of the 'lane markers.' Heartfelt gratitude. Dale
Isn't Gurdjieff's model, for all its clear sophistication, at heart a reworking of the ancient Greek idea that mortals fade after dying unless they have proven themselves and, like the ancient heroes, are worthy of immortality?
Gurdjieff (or is it Needleman?) says something like the soul is not a given. We achieve it through self-awareness (which is not abstract, but actually flirts with humiliation if undertook without seeing that humiliation is one of the reactions we must see in ourselves fairly soon in the effort). But I wouldn't say that immortality is the heart. Just a little sidebar. We didn't pay much attention to it. More importantly perhaps was the understanding that the soul is the part of us that CAN see ourselves objectively without guilt, but often with remorse (the lost possibility in the past) - if we can make the distinction. When the self-awareness derailed, the "mantra" was to "begin again." But also that the eye through which we see ourselves (see, not imagine) is the same eye through which God see us.
And by the way, I love your writing on Owen Barfield. Thanks for that. Often thinkers don't understand each other - I don't think OB understood G. Always a little sad, but I don't blame him for not seeing the resonance with his own thinking. Understanding complex thinkers requires dedication and time we don't necessarily have especially dedicating so much to the work we have been given to do. Translation problems are a big obstacle. The deeper feeling behind the words is where I find the resonance.
Yes. "The deeper feeling behind..." = the Whole/All/One.
For me, what you speak about illuminates once again the perennial matter of the relationship between Effort and Grace. I was also very struck by Needleman's "Lost Christianity"; at the time it landed on my bookstand, it was a profound confirmation of much of what I had come to up until that point. Something needs to be created in us through inner efforts before submitting to Grace becomes possible and meaningful. More than this, without an appeal to Grace, one becomes stuck after a time, and no further effort will help. The acknowledgment that I need help - help from Above - is a defining moment in one's spiritual journey.
And this is actually in the Gurdjieff Work, but those who may have only studied Ouspensky and Gurdjieff's early talks would likely know little of this. It was from Beelzebub's Tales onward that Gurdjieff became more explicit about the matter of appealing to higher forces... or "Ideals," as he put it. While throughout his career, he was very careful to linguistically reframe religious ideas, there is ultimately no question about the religiosity of his Work, e.g., he reframes the three face of God as three "forces"... reframes the power of intercession by the saints as "Ideals"... the power of prayer, as overtly elaborated in the elements of the Jesus Prayer... and so forth. His entire cosmology rests on a hierarchy of angels - evolved beings - with HIS ENDLESSNESS as the Supreme Being. Christ is represented through the mysterious "third force"... "O Holy and Immortal God"... and so on.
As for Christian contemplation practices - inner silence, giving up one's usual "self" - this is very much contained in Gurdjieff's third interval in the octave, "Harnel-Aoot." Interestingly, this third interval only appeared in Beelzebub's Tales, not before. Ouspenskian's either don't know of it or tend to ignore it as a literary fancy or something, not realising that it points to the necessity at a certain point in our spiritual journey of submission: "Into your hand, I commend my spirit." Without this, the second body cannot be completed. We do our inner work up to a certain point, and then we lay ourselves down, bare, empty, offering ourselves up to the Above, and we are then "worked on" and "remembered," as I wrote in my latest Substack post here. Madame de Salzmann knew this, although the direction her Work took after this is still subject to scrutiny.
And this pattern or Effort followed by appeal to Grace repeats at every next "higher being-body" until the ultimate and highest act a human can perform... with developed human Will, giving over to Divine Will... "behind Real I lies God," said Gurdjieff. Of course, in many Gurdjieff circles, this represents a kind of blasphemy! But I cannot help that. In my experience, Gurdjieff's Work is ultimately a mystical path that leads us inexorably back to God. There. I've stated it overtly. Wasn't it Gurdjieff himself who once stated, "God helps me"?
Thank you for your contributions, Cynthia. We have been blessed to have worked together and to have discovered parallel paths. God bless.
Before you spoke of the Fourth Way Benedictine: "Have you heard the birds singing of late? Their jubilee outside your kitchen window? If these 'birds of heaven' are aware of our troubling state of affairs, they are certainly not worried—they’ve returned in season to trill on."
Here in the Virginia Piedmont I set out my Merlin Bird Song App for half an hour and recorded twenty four species. For me, an unheard of variety! Are the birds coming to the safer shores of the East fleeing the droughts and fires in the West? That's what many of the the climate change models predict.
It's a reminder that the Earth is vast and changing. Some decades ago I worked on a global satellite broadcast. During it we featured a simultaneous sunrise and sunset. The Earth is never all dark nor all bright.
Both/And = just like human beings.
Beautiful and affirming! So wonderful to have a teacher who can give so clear expression to the things I experience, and am not able to clearly articulate.So grateful for you, Cynthia!
Thank you for explaining more about Gurdjieff. You mentioned him briefly at your last 2 Garrison retreats. And I have been curious since then. I’m taking an exceptional online Gurdjieff movements class with Heather Ruce. It’s hard to put into words, but there is something very comfortable about the subtle shifts of time and space that occur when doing the movements. Thank you for all you and your students do!
The image of Ora et Labora as the hidden link between the Benedictine and Gurdjieff traditions — both insisting that transformation cannot happen in abstraction, that consciousness must be worked in the friction of ordinary time — feels like a recovered truth rather than a new one. Jacob Needleman's phrase about asking stones to sprout wings has stayed with me for years; what you describe here suggests that the contemplative and the Work paths are two different ways of cultivating those wings, each correcting the other's tendency toward either dissociation or grim striving. I wonder whether the 'unjudging love' you quote from Dylan Thomas is itself the ground that makes the polarity livable — not a synthesis, but a mercy large enough to hold both the surrender and the crystallization.
Yes. Love is the Ground.