I am also appreciative of Cynthia’s work. She is a great communicator for our age. It’s uplifting for me to see how she can pass old esoteric knowledge and vivify it with mercurial lightness and eloquence. But I would like to emphasise that to my sensibility what makes her views truly significant and compelling is a solid background of spiritual praxis. It is not a coincidence that she has been profoundly influenced by Christian monastic tradition. In other words, her outward communication rests on a very rich and cultivated inner soil, that allows one to be in touch - directly - with the inexhaustible, ever rejuvenating source.
Moving to a wider, collective level, I too am fond of Chesterton’ quote “Christianity isn’t a failure; it just hasn't started yet”. Underneath a witty formulation there is plenty of material for contemplation.
It reminds me of a key moment of inflection I experienced as a young person when I first opened myself to Christian teachings. Until that point, I had been raised to be consistently dismissive and suspicious of religions—especially Christianity. I found myself considering that the message of Jesus had likely faced the most distortion, vilification, and undermining of all major spiritual traditions. And I remember a thought coming to me: “And isn’t that… interesting?”
That was the beginning of my journey, which also feels far from over.
Thanks Elsa. I’m also struck by the sense of someone who has spent a lifetime searching and listening and studying and practising; and the ‘inner soil’ that has cultivated. Her communication is remarkably clear, even when what she’s exploring is esoteric or scholarly. And she invariably sounds like she’s having fun as she goes along…like it’s a kind of play.
I’m so moved that a teacher I also found through her books and online talks has so deeply touched others and Jonathan, you clarify and articulate for me what so resonates in Cynthia’s teachings. I was raised catholic on the social justice side (Dorothy Day was a friend of our parents and stayed with us during treks across the country). After “losing” my faith as a young adult, I’ve worked my way through mostly eastern Vedanta teachings to arrive at Cynthia’s work, which sustains me daily. She is the real deal.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece, although I cannot claim to understand half of what was said but Cynthia’s work keeps popping up as a recommendation and invitation to go deeper. The Wisdom Jesus and her book on Centering prayer are both in my unread kindle collection for when the time is right.
I appreciate the both/and - both Christian and not Christian - as this is a wonderful non-dual way to express my own current spiritual orientation. I can relate to finding a home in Buddhism and Taoism and the kinship worldview of Native American traditions and Te ao Māori, with us being the youngest siblings of creation and deeply interconnected 🫶🏼
Thanks Robin. As you can see there was too much to say for one post somehow, and it’s all a bit condensed, but I’m glad it meant something to you. And I like the “youngest siblings of creation” line!
Cynthia has been an important teacher for me for a long time. Having attended several of her retreats and teaching events, I assure you she is indeed ‘the real deal’ - one who teaches from her own direct knowledge. I appreciate your characterization of her work as being rooted within the Christian mystical path but not constrained by rigid beliefs. I am a Christian, but I couldn’t be if I had to understand it as the only path. It’s a language, with dialects, trying to describe reality.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Realization Festival because its evolution and flourishing is surely a manifestation of a new and beautiful cultural gift to the world that will hopefully be emulated, and probably is already, here and there, when beautiful and creative hearts and minds gather.
Your joy in discovering Cynthia Borgeoult’s work made me think you were feeling, “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Please find an introduction to Bernadette Roberts a remarkable woman who stably Realized the non-dual nature of Reality. She grew up and practiced within the Catholic tradition but outshined all of its dualistic dogmas.
This reference introduces her books the most remarkable of which is the 516 page The Real Christ in which she thoroughly examines and deconstructs all of the key ideas, dogmas, etc etc of the Christian tradition
Thank you for the candid and personal way you narrate your encounter with Cynthia Bourgealt’s writing and through it introduce people to a much less well-known stream of mystical, contemplative Christianity. As you capture so well, Cynthia has a courageous and bright personal and intellectual spirit and is unafraid to cross disciplines and boundaries, seeking for example to integrate the esoteric understanding of Gurdjieff, with modern science and evolution, and the wisdom from the gospels both the authorised ‘canon’ of the Bible and the more recently discovered ‘non-canonical’ gospels. And these intellectual insights are grounded in wisdom practices, which she describes as seeing with the eye of the heart. In her many books she reclaims the heart of Christianity: “it’s not about right belief; it’s about right practice” (p.29 The Wisdom Jesus).
What may be surprising for many readers is that there is an ancient and distinct stream of Christian contemplative wisdom practices, which includes centering prayer mediation, lectio divina (contemplative reading of the Bible involving extended period of silence), chanting, psalmody and celebration of the Eucharist all of which she goes into depth in the book, The Wisdom Jesus. Cynthia refers to philosopher Ken Wilber when she points out that “the same religious practice can look a different animal when articulated at different levels of human consciousness". And Cynthia offers a non-dual reimagined view of the practices of Christianity.
What I’ve found so liberating in Cynthia’s writing is her countering of the claim of theistic Christianity that the central, defining purpose of Jesus’ life (death and resurrection) was to save us humans from our sins. It’s worth noting that this anthropocentric view of Christianity developed at a time when our science was rather different and people believed that the world was created in six days and the earth’s history was around 6000 years old. Cynthia places Jesus in the context of a wider cosmic vison and an unfolding, unfinished story of 13.8 billion years of evolution and a realisation that love is the strongest force in the universe, “the physical structure of the universe is love” (p34,Eye of the Heart). This understanding “envisions the steady and increasingly intimate revelation of divine love that was there from the beginning” (p91, The Wisdom Jesus).
And what is the nature of this kind of love? In the Wisdom Jesus Cynthia sets out this unfamiliar, confounding embodiment of ‘kenotic’ love, revealed in the life of Jesus, as extravagant, wasteful, abundant, self-giving, self-emptying love, counter-cultural then and now. And yet this love may transform us all and give us a taste of the ‘kingdom of heaven’ in the here and the now. This is why soul matters in Perspectiva’s ‘trinity’ of soul, systems and society.
Thanks John. I’m glad to see you are so familiar with her work. I am glad I read The Eye of the Heart first. It helped me that my way in to her thinking was not explicitly Christian.
This is glorious. Thank you for bringing Cynthia's beautiful work, this essential understanding and experience to this platform. Blessings and gratitude.
Many thanks for this. 25 years ago as I sat with my Dad in his last weeks I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a renewed connection with a Christ-centred spirituality through another quasi-Christian cousin of TM, in the teachings of Fr John Main. Many digressions later I've come back to it, with the odd sense that like it or not, I need 'church', or perhaps congregation, but that the volatile fight-or-flight impulses in me around my birth religion can only really sustain either one so long as nobody speaks. Fr John's recapitulation of the silent Prayer of the Heart has offered me a kind of discreet side door to faith, which I'm lastingly grateful for. Cynthia's complexity and Gurdjieffian thinkiness (?) led me to shy away from The Eye of the Heart after the first few chapters. I decided to wait for this before now picking it up again. You've helped to place her voice and maybe her laughter in my mind's ear as I now do so, thanks.
Glad to hear all this Mat. I think I was lucky to read The 👁️of the ❤️ first because it was the kind of “this is how it all fits together” speculation I’d been looking for, and my intellect relaxed enough for me to be open to everything else she had to say.
Thanks for this. I look forward to checking out Borgeault’s work. Meditations on the Tarot is an amazing book and that quote is a great one. Inspiring that you’ve found someone’s vision you connect with so deeply.
Thanks Joel. I’ve had that book for years, though mostly as another teacher I’m not quite ready for. A couple of years ago I tried to get through it one morning at a time and made it about 50 pages in, but then life had other ideas. I’ll take your comment as an impetus to try again now.
I also found Meditations on the Tarot through Cynthia and it took a year to read but has become a solid companion. I keep an Cynthia's audio program 'Encountering the Wisdom Jesus' on constant repeat (with Braiding Sweetgrass & John O'Donahue). I took a CAC course from 'her' (it was video of a live retreat) which was just ok. She's well positioned in the spaces of creativity and ideas and practice and submission that I'm drawn to.
Thank you for highlighting this remarkable woman, especially in the Liminal Web. She seems to have made peace with Solitude—something we could all benefit from ourselves these days.
Yes, and her solitude sounds like a place that is good company. In The Eye of the Heart especially you sense that her solitude is also a way to be with others that we cannot normally reach.
Delighted to find this appreciation of Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching here. Twenty years ago, I first heard her articulate the imaginal realm and something fell into place that resonates today. And overall, she opened the pathway. Thank you, Cynthia.
Thank you for this discovery of Cynthia’s work, what a delight. On first superficial reading I am amazed how the Law of Three connects to the process of change that I have been contemplating recently. Affirming what is there, bringing in what has been excluded/denied and opening up to the neutral space (empty space of possibility that was fully hidden before denied is brought in) is a pretty visceral description of how a new state is born, through integration of the three. I will get into her work. Thank you.
A great piece, thanks Jonathan! I'm grateful that you write so personally.
If you're taking recommendations, Richard Rohr is worth a look as a complement to CB. They sometimes work together.
And if you're taking requests, I'd love to read more about this at some point: 'What I can say is that considering the relationship between World 24 and World 48 has helped to make sense of my life, especially by normalising those moments where it feels like the universe is winking at me and I have to figure out how best to wink back.'
Thanks for this very rich and detailed piece! Two quick responses: one boring and technical, the other very open.
1. In the interests of accuracy, the synoptic gospels are Matthew, Mark and Luke. Perhaps you mean the canonical gospels?
2. I focus on your deep central paragraph:
“What I sought, and what I believe Cynthia offers, is a credible and beautiful metaphysics that transcends and includes Christianity; offering a worldview that is not Christian in a conventional sense, but not not Christian either. This creative tension is why I feel comfortable saying Cynthia Bourgeault feels like my spiritual teacher, even though I would not describe myself as Christian. The non-Christian elements of her Christianity do not feel synthetic or gratuitous or merely diplomatic; rather they have grown out of decades of dedicated contemplation by a disciplined mind and perceptive heart. Cynthia Bourgeault offers a way of situating the Christian religion within a larger cosmological vision that is capacious and inclusive by design. ”
What I enjoy about about an open view of Christianity is that the teachings of the embodied person we know as Jesus themselves point way beyond what is conventionally known as Christianity. To me, this is hardly surprising, as each of the Gospels and other supposedly Christian writings have their own perspective … each of us may struggle to define our own personal boundaries of what we include, and what we cannot include. None of us is going to get it right for other people, only at best – and only if we are blessed – it can be right enough for ourselves to live our lives by.
Thus, to be "a Christian" can mean an adherent to some branch of "Christianity", or it could mean (and I would prefer it to mean) someone who sees beyond the structures and creeds and practices of human "Christian" churches, and finds both inspiration and truth in what is revealed to them (and to others) in contemplation of the meanings behind the texts, the liturgies, the creeds, the practices.
I salute Cynthia and you for finding and expressing something you can live by, or at least live with. If I had a practice of prayer (which sadly I don't) I could imagine myself praying that we all take the inspiration and the discipline from the Word as we hear it to embody our own way, and share it with others to help them find their own, in our shared community of (spiritual???) practice.
I would love that! Right now I'm doing ZaMM material to support the Robert Pirsig Assn, due to the 50th of publication this year, so you're good if you want to focus on ZaMM! lol hint hint
I feel like a fresher trying to keep up with a masters student who is looking up to his professor! This is deeply intriguing and hits so many notes that vibrate through me. Do you have a view of which of Cynthia's books is a good start ("the first " I hear you say!) or do I just dive in?
I started with The Eye of the Heart and that worked well for me because it is one of her more recent books and wildly ambitious in some ways and quite personal in others; it also perhaps the least Christian of her books, and that probably helped me overcome my allergies there. However, she also has a wonderful short book called At The Corner of Fourth and Non Dual which is a very succinct expression of her theology. For most people I’d say start there.
I am also appreciative of Cynthia’s work. She is a great communicator for our age. It’s uplifting for me to see how she can pass old esoteric knowledge and vivify it with mercurial lightness and eloquence. But I would like to emphasise that to my sensibility what makes her views truly significant and compelling is a solid background of spiritual praxis. It is not a coincidence that she has been profoundly influenced by Christian monastic tradition. In other words, her outward communication rests on a very rich and cultivated inner soil, that allows one to be in touch - directly - with the inexhaustible, ever rejuvenating source.
Moving to a wider, collective level, I too am fond of Chesterton’ quote “Christianity isn’t a failure; it just hasn't started yet”. Underneath a witty formulation there is plenty of material for contemplation.
It reminds me of a key moment of inflection I experienced as a young person when I first opened myself to Christian teachings. Until that point, I had been raised to be consistently dismissive and suspicious of religions—especially Christianity. I found myself considering that the message of Jesus had likely faced the most distortion, vilification, and undermining of all major spiritual traditions. And I remember a thought coming to me: “And isn’t that… interesting?”
That was the beginning of my journey, which also feels far from over.
Thanks Elsa. I’m also struck by the sense of someone who has spent a lifetime searching and listening and studying and practising; and the ‘inner soil’ that has cultivated. Her communication is remarkably clear, even when what she’s exploring is esoteric or scholarly. And she invariably sounds like she’s having fun as she goes along…like it’s a kind of play.
I’m so moved that a teacher I also found through her books and online talks has so deeply touched others and Jonathan, you clarify and articulate for me what so resonates in Cynthia’s teachings. I was raised catholic on the social justice side (Dorothy Day was a friend of our parents and stayed with us during treks across the country). After “losing” my faith as a young adult, I’ve worked my way through mostly eastern Vedanta teachings to arrive at Cynthia’s work, which sustains me daily. She is the real deal.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece, although I cannot claim to understand half of what was said but Cynthia’s work keeps popping up as a recommendation and invitation to go deeper. The Wisdom Jesus and her book on Centering prayer are both in my unread kindle collection for when the time is right.
I appreciate the both/and - both Christian and not Christian - as this is a wonderful non-dual way to express my own current spiritual orientation. I can relate to finding a home in Buddhism and Taoism and the kinship worldview of Native American traditions and Te ao Māori, with us being the youngest siblings of creation and deeply interconnected 🫶🏼
Thanks Robin. As you can see there was too much to say for one post somehow, and it’s all a bit condensed, but I’m glad it meant something to you. And I like the “youngest siblings of creation” line!
Cynthia has been an important teacher for me for a long time. Having attended several of her retreats and teaching events, I assure you she is indeed ‘the real deal’ - one who teaches from her own direct knowledge. I appreciate your characterization of her work as being rooted within the Christian mystical path but not constrained by rigid beliefs. I am a Christian, but I couldn’t be if I had to understand it as the only path. It’s a language, with dialects, trying to describe reality.
“It’s a language, with dialects, trying to describe reality.” - well put. It also has a kind of grammar, idioms, metaphors etc..
I’m so glad you mentioned the Realization Festival because its evolution and flourishing is surely a manifestation of a new and beautiful cultural gift to the world that will hopefully be emulated, and probably is already, here and there, when beautiful and creative hearts and minds gather.
Your joy in discovering Cynthia Borgeoult’s work made me think you were feeling, “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Please find an introduction to Bernadette Roberts a remarkable woman who stably Realized the non-dual nature of Reality. She grew up and practiced within the Catholic tradition but outshined all of its dualistic dogmas.
This reference introduces her books the most remarkable of which is the 516 page The Real Christ in which she thoroughly examines and deconstructs all of the key ideas, dogmas, etc etc of the Christian tradition
http://bernadetteroberts.blogspot.com/p/booksmanuscripts_22.html
Thanks Jonathan. That's not the first time someone has mentioned Bernadette Roberts to me, so I'll take a look before long.
Thank you for the candid and personal way you narrate your encounter with Cynthia Bourgealt’s writing and through it introduce people to a much less well-known stream of mystical, contemplative Christianity. As you capture so well, Cynthia has a courageous and bright personal and intellectual spirit and is unafraid to cross disciplines and boundaries, seeking for example to integrate the esoteric understanding of Gurdjieff, with modern science and evolution, and the wisdom from the gospels both the authorised ‘canon’ of the Bible and the more recently discovered ‘non-canonical’ gospels. And these intellectual insights are grounded in wisdom practices, which she describes as seeing with the eye of the heart. In her many books she reclaims the heart of Christianity: “it’s not about right belief; it’s about right practice” (p.29 The Wisdom Jesus).
What may be surprising for many readers is that there is an ancient and distinct stream of Christian contemplative wisdom practices, which includes centering prayer mediation, lectio divina (contemplative reading of the Bible involving extended period of silence), chanting, psalmody and celebration of the Eucharist all of which she goes into depth in the book, The Wisdom Jesus. Cynthia refers to philosopher Ken Wilber when she points out that “the same religious practice can look a different animal when articulated at different levels of human consciousness". And Cynthia offers a non-dual reimagined view of the practices of Christianity.
What I’ve found so liberating in Cynthia’s writing is her countering of the claim of theistic Christianity that the central, defining purpose of Jesus’ life (death and resurrection) was to save us humans from our sins. It’s worth noting that this anthropocentric view of Christianity developed at a time when our science was rather different and people believed that the world was created in six days and the earth’s history was around 6000 years old. Cynthia places Jesus in the context of a wider cosmic vison and an unfolding, unfinished story of 13.8 billion years of evolution and a realisation that love is the strongest force in the universe, “the physical structure of the universe is love” (p34,Eye of the Heart). This understanding “envisions the steady and increasingly intimate revelation of divine love that was there from the beginning” (p91, The Wisdom Jesus).
And what is the nature of this kind of love? In the Wisdom Jesus Cynthia sets out this unfamiliar, confounding embodiment of ‘kenotic’ love, revealed in the life of Jesus, as extravagant, wasteful, abundant, self-giving, self-emptying love, counter-cultural then and now. And yet this love may transform us all and give us a taste of the ‘kingdom of heaven’ in the here and the now. This is why soul matters in Perspectiva’s ‘trinity’ of soul, systems and society.
Thanks John. I’m glad to see you are so familiar with her work. I am glad I read The Eye of the Heart first. It helped me that my way in to her thinking was not explicitly Christian.
This is glorious. Thank you for bringing Cynthia's beautiful work, this essential understanding and experience to this platform. Blessings and gratitude.
Many thanks for this. 25 years ago as I sat with my Dad in his last weeks I found myself unexpectedly drawn into a renewed connection with a Christ-centred spirituality through another quasi-Christian cousin of TM, in the teachings of Fr John Main. Many digressions later I've come back to it, with the odd sense that like it or not, I need 'church', or perhaps congregation, but that the volatile fight-or-flight impulses in me around my birth religion can only really sustain either one so long as nobody speaks. Fr John's recapitulation of the silent Prayer of the Heart has offered me a kind of discreet side door to faith, which I'm lastingly grateful for. Cynthia's complexity and Gurdjieffian thinkiness (?) led me to shy away from The Eye of the Heart after the first few chapters. I decided to wait for this before now picking it up again. You've helped to place her voice and maybe her laughter in my mind's ear as I now do so, thanks.
Glad to hear all this Mat. I think I was lucky to read The 👁️of the ❤️ first because it was the kind of “this is how it all fits together” speculation I’d been looking for, and my intellect relaxed enough for me to be open to everything else she had to say.
Thanks for this. I look forward to checking out Borgeault’s work. Meditations on the Tarot is an amazing book and that quote is a great one. Inspiring that you’ve found someone’s vision you connect with so deeply.
Thanks Joel. I’ve had that book for years, though mostly as another teacher I’m not quite ready for. A couple of years ago I tried to get through it one morning at a time and made it about 50 pages in, but then life had other ideas. I’ll take your comment as an impetus to try again now.
I also found Meditations on the Tarot through Cynthia and it took a year to read but has become a solid companion. I keep an Cynthia's audio program 'Encountering the Wisdom Jesus' on constant repeat (with Braiding Sweetgrass & John O'Donahue). I took a CAC course from 'her' (it was video of a live retreat) which was just ok. She's well positioned in the spaces of creativity and ideas and practice and submission that I'm drawn to.
Thank you for highlighting this remarkable woman, especially in the Liminal Web. She seems to have made peace with Solitude—something we could all benefit from ourselves these days.
Yes, and her solitude sounds like a place that is good company. In The Eye of the Heart especially you sense that her solitude is also a way to be with others that we cannot normally reach.
Delighted to find this appreciation of Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching here. Twenty years ago, I first heard her articulate the imaginal realm and something fell into place that resonates today. And overall, she opened the pathway. Thank you, Cynthia.
Thank you for this discovery of Cynthia’s work, what a delight. On first superficial reading I am amazed how the Law of Three connects to the process of change that I have been contemplating recently. Affirming what is there, bringing in what has been excluded/denied and opening up to the neutral space (empty space of possibility that was fully hidden before denied is brought in) is a pretty visceral description of how a new state is born, through integration of the three. I will get into her work. Thank you.
A great piece, thanks Jonathan! I'm grateful that you write so personally.
If you're taking recommendations, Richard Rohr is worth a look as a complement to CB. They sometimes work together.
And if you're taking requests, I'd love to read more about this at some point: 'What I can say is that considering the relationship between World 24 and World 48 has helped to make sense of my life, especially by normalising those moments where it feels like the universe is winking at me and I have to figure out how best to wink back.'
Thanks for this very rich and detailed piece! Two quick responses: one boring and technical, the other very open.
1. In the interests of accuracy, the synoptic gospels are Matthew, Mark and Luke. Perhaps you mean the canonical gospels?
2. I focus on your deep central paragraph:
“What I sought, and what I believe Cynthia offers, is a credible and beautiful metaphysics that transcends and includes Christianity; offering a worldview that is not Christian in a conventional sense, but not not Christian either. This creative tension is why I feel comfortable saying Cynthia Bourgeault feels like my spiritual teacher, even though I would not describe myself as Christian. The non-Christian elements of her Christianity do not feel synthetic or gratuitous or merely diplomatic; rather they have grown out of decades of dedicated contemplation by a disciplined mind and perceptive heart. Cynthia Bourgeault offers a way of situating the Christian religion within a larger cosmological vision that is capacious and inclusive by design. ”
What I enjoy about about an open view of Christianity is that the teachings of the embodied person we know as Jesus themselves point way beyond what is conventionally known as Christianity. To me, this is hardly surprising, as each of the Gospels and other supposedly Christian writings have their own perspective … each of us may struggle to define our own personal boundaries of what we include, and what we cannot include. None of us is going to get it right for other people, only at best – and only if we are blessed – it can be right enough for ourselves to live our lives by.
Thus, to be "a Christian" can mean an adherent to some branch of "Christianity", or it could mean (and I would prefer it to mean) someone who sees beyond the structures and creeds and practices of human "Christian" churches, and finds both inspiration and truth in what is revealed to them (and to others) in contemplation of the meanings behind the texts, the liturgies, the creeds, the practices.
I salute Cynthia and you for finding and expressing something you can live by, or at least live with. If I had a practice of prayer (which sadly I don't) I could imagine myself praying that we all take the inspiration and the discipline from the Word as we hear it to embody our own way, and share it with others to help them find their own, in our shared community of (spiritual???) practice.
I love her...Thanks so much!
Good to hear, Sevilla. Let’s talk Pirsig sometime? I’ll need to re-read Lila first!…
I would love that! Right now I'm doing ZaMM material to support the Robert Pirsig Assn, due to the 50th of publication this year, so you're good if you want to focus on ZaMM! lol hint hint
I feel like a fresher trying to keep up with a masters student who is looking up to his professor! This is deeply intriguing and hits so many notes that vibrate through me. Do you have a view of which of Cynthia's books is a good start ("the first " I hear you say!) or do I just dive in?
I started with The Eye of the Heart and that worked well for me because it is one of her more recent books and wildly ambitious in some ways and quite personal in others; it also perhaps the least Christian of her books, and that probably helped me overcome my allergies there. However, she also has a wonderful short book called At The Corner of Fourth and Non Dual which is a very succinct expression of her theology. For most people I’d say start there.
Many thanks