A n Introductory W isdom S chool · Course Transcript & Companion Guide ix Community Support...

An Introductory

Wisdom Schoolwith Cynthia Bourgeault

Course Transcript & Companion Guide

Copyright © 2017 Wisdom Way of Knowing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without permission of the author.

Video CreditsPrincipal Teacher: Cynthia BourgeaultHarmonium & Chant Leader: Darlene FranzProducer, Director & Editor: Robbin WhittingtonVideographers: Robbin Whittington, Eric George & Steve Nathans-KellyProduction Assistance on location: Eric GeorgePost-production Editing: Steve Nathans-KellyProject Support: Eileen deVerteuil, Jeanine Siler Jones & Marcella Kraybill-GreggoGraphic Artist: Jane Ware, jbgraphics, inc.Musician: Rick Praytor

Course Transcript & Companion Guide CreditsCompilation, Editing & Design: Robbin WhittingtonPage Design & Composition: Rick SoldinLogo Design: jbgraphics, inc.Image Credits: Cover and interior images not otherwise credited: Robbin Whittington,

Eric George & Steve Nathans-Kelly

Note: Darlene Franz generously offers her original chants and music throughout the Course. For more chants to listen to and/or purchase, visit her website: https://wisdomchant.bandcamp.com/

Wisdom Way of Knowing, Inc., is a non-profit organization committed to providing experiential teachings and resources to deepen the understanding and practice of the Christian Wisdom tradition as taught by Cynthia Bourgeault and other Wisdom teachers. We support a world-wide Wisdom Community Network by providing trusted online resources, a master archive of Cynthia’s teachings, ongoing eCourses, and by hosting circles of connection and conversation for self-paced study, reflection, and practice.

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org iii

Contents Welcome & Getting Started viii

Course Materials & Resources viii

Course Videos & Audio (MP3) Recordings viii

Course Transcript & Companion Guide ix

Community Support Resources x

Course Rhythm & Structure xi

Suggested Setting and Formats for Using the Course Materials xi

Stay Connected xiv

Cynthia’s Personal Welcome to the Course xv

FIRST EVENING OF WISDOM SCHOOL

First Evening Welcome & Introduction to Wisdom School* (Part 1) FE–1

The Importance of Wisdom Schools in Our Era FE–4

Wisdom Lineage and the Fusion of Two Streams FE–4

Transformation Through Conscious Presence FE–5

The Rhythms & Components of a Wisdom School (Part 2) FE–6

Daily Periods of Conscious Practical Work FE–7

Talking Lunch and Personal Time FE–7

The Afternoon FE–8

The Evening FE–8

Closing Chant & Meditation FE-9

Reading: Logion 24

Chant: Lord as You Will

DAY 1 OF WISDOM SCHOOL

Day 1.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer 1 1–1

Reading: Logion 10

Chant: Speak Through the Earthquake

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence* 1 2–1

Introduction to The Three Centers of Intelligence (Part 1) 1 2–2

The Moving Center (Part 2) 1 2–5

The Intellectual Center & The Emotional Center (Part 3) 1 2–9

How the Three Centers Interrelate (Part 4) 1 2–11

& Introduction to Conscious Practical Work 1 2–14

*All longer sessions that are available as multi-part teachings are marked with an asterisk*

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Contents iv

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org

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

Day 1.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work 1 3–1

Inner & Outer Tasks 1 3–1

The Inner Task: A Focal Point for Our Energy 1 3–1

Ending the Work Period 1 3–2

The Purpose of the Inner Task: Instructions Cynthia gave at a Wisdom School at Valle Crucis, North Carolina 1 3–3

Some Inner Task Suggestions to Help Get You Started 1 3–4

Day 1.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) 1 4–1

Chant: Veni Sancte Spiritus

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1* 1 5–1

History of Thomas, An Early Christian Sacred Text (Part 1) 1 5–2

First Four Centuries of Christianity and Christianities (Part 2) 1 5–7

Thomas Sayings: Context, Format & Framing (Part 3) 1 5–10

Gospel of Thomas: Logion 1 (Part 4) 1 5–16



Reading: from The Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue 42–49

Chant: Bless the Lord

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism* 2 2–1

The Rule of St Benedict as a Template (Part 1) 2 2–2

Saint Benedict 2 2–3

Ora et Labora (Part 2) 2 2–7

Three-Brained Awareness and Ora 2 2–11

The Divine Office (Part 3) 2 2–13

The Divine Office and Three-Centered Awareness 2 2–16







Day 2.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) 2 4–1

Chant: Come to Know the One



Contents v


Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2 2 5–1

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation* 2 6–1

Questions & Response (Part 1) 2 6–2

Closing Chant & Meditation (Part 2) 2 6–7

Chant: Abide in My Love



Reading: Logion 8

Chant: Seek the Treasure

Day 3.2 Morning Teaching: Benedictine Spirituality: How the Quadrants Contribute to our Awakening* 3 2–1

Ora et Labora: “Prayer Together” Quadrant (Part 1) 3 2–2

Ora et Labora: “Work Alone” Quadrant (Part 2) 3 2–5

Ora et Labora: “Work Together” Quadrant (Part 3) 3 2–9

Taking the Rule of St Benedict Home (Part 4) 3 2–14







Day 3.3a The Elm Dance as Conscious Work 3 3a–1

Day 3.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 4–1

Chant: Pour Out Through Me

Day 3.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 3 3 5–1

“A” Influences and “B” Influences 3 5–5

“C” Influences 3 5–5

The Pearl is Within You, Though Hidden 3 5–6

You Can’t Separate the Dancer from the Dance 3 5–8

There is Something to Do in this Life There is Something to be Known 3 5–9

Gurdjieff and the Work: What is the Fourth Way? 3 5–10


Contents vi



Day 3.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation* 3 6–1

Questions & Response (Part 1) 3 6–2

Questions & Response Continue (Part 2) 3 6–7

Chant & Closing Meditation (Part 3) 3 6–14

Chant: Every Cell of This Body



Reading: Logion 68

Chant: Fall Fearless into Love

Day 4.2 Morning Teaching: The Wisdom Tradition as the Way of the Heart* 4 2–1

Inner Task: Be here Stay here 4 2–2

Christian Wisdom: The Way of the Heart (Part 1) 4 2–2

The Heart as an Organ of Spiritual Perception 4 2–3

The Heart as a Pathway to Nondual Consciousness (Part 2) 4 2–7

Passions Divide the Heart 4 2–8

Symeon’s Three Modes of Prayer and Attention (Part 3) 4 2–10

Symeon’s First Mode of Prayer and Attention: Trying to Kick-start the Heart by its Capacity to Emote 4 2–10

Symeon’s Second Mode of Prayer and Attention: The Dangers of Top-Down Mindfulness 4 2–11

Symeon’s Third Mode of Prayer and Attention: Attention In the Heart 4 2–12

Symeon’s Method for Putting Attention In the Heart 4 2–13







Day 4.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 4–1

Chant: Hallelujah

Day 4.5 Afternoon Teaching: Gospel of Thomas: Logia 4, 5 & 6* 4 5–1

The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 4 (Part 1) 4 5–2





Contents vii


Day 4.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Closing Chant & Meditation* 4 6–1

Eucharistic Celebration based on Teilhard’s “Mass on the World” (Part 1) 4 6–2

Final Three Questions (Part 2) 4 6–5

Closing Chant & Meditation (Part 3) 4 6–9

Chants: You the One Abide in My Love



Reading: From “Mass on the World” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Chants: Speak Through the Earthquake You the One

Day 5.2 Morning: Final Teaching* 5 2–1

The Heart as an Organ of Spiritual Perception and a Seat of Nondual Personhood (Part 1) 5 2–2

Symeon’s Method for Putting Attention In the Heart: Observe Three Things 5 2–2

1 Freedom from all cares 5 2–3

2 Conscience clear in all things 5 2–3

3 Complete absence of passionate attachment 5 2–4

Three Core Tenets of Jesus’ Path (Part 2) 5 2–9

1 Kenosis 5 2–10

2 Abundance 5 2–11

3 Singleness 5 2–12

Day 5.3 Morning: A gift for Cynthia 5 3–1

Day 5.4 Eucharistic Celebration based on Teilhard’s “Mass on the World” 5 4–1

Chants: Ephesians 1:3-10 Abide in My Love

Become a Whole World Hallelujah

Speak Through the Earthquake Every Cell of this Body

Afterword Cynthia Answers the Question: Where to From Here?




Welcome & Getting Started viii

Welcome & Getting StartedWelcome to our inaugural eCourse: An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault! By participating in this course you are joining a vibrant community of committed students who have experienced the profound and practical nature of these teachings, either having attended on-location when recorded at the Kanuga Conference Center in November 2015 or, like you, now participating virtually through this online course.

The course materials have been carefully designed so that you feel empowered and equipped with everything you need to reproduce the conditions of a Wisdom School in your own setting and circumstances. Following is a brief overview of what we’ve included in this course, as well as some suggestions for how you can best engage with the materials.

Course Materials & ResourcesCourse Videos & Audio (MP3) RecordingsThis course includes 30 teaching sessions that follow the precise order and flow as presented at the original Wisdom School event. In addition, for your convenience, all longer teaching sessions are also available in multiple parts (clearly marked with an asterisk; see image), which offer the option to engage with the content in shorter time increments.

Tip: When playing the videos we suggest clicking the “full screen” icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen to get the full visual effect.

A downloadable audio (MP3) of every session is also provided. You can listen to it immediately inside the online course platform or you can download it to your favorite portable device so you can listen anywhere, anytime.

Contents vi



Day 3.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 .6–1

Questions & Response (Part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 .6–2

Questions & Response Continue (Part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 .6–7

Chant & Closing Meditation (Part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 .6–14

Chant: Every Cell of This Body


Day 4.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .1–1

Reading: Logion 68

Chant: Fall Fearless into Love

Day 4.2 Morning Teaching: The Wisdom Tradition as the Way of the Heart* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–1

Inner Task: Be here . Stay here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–2

Christian Wisdom: The Way of the Heart (Part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–2

The Heart as an Organ of Spiritual Perception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–3

The Heart as a Pathway to Nondual Consciousness (Part 2) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–7

Passions Divide the Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–8

Symeon’s Three Modes of Prayer and Attention (Part 3) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–10

Symeon’s First Mode of Prayer and Attention: Trying to Kick-start the Heart by its Capacity to Emote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–10

Symeon’s Second Mode of Prayer and Attention: The Dangers of Top-Down Mindfulness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–11

Symeon’s Third Mode of Prayer and Attention: Attention In the Heart . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–12

Symeon’s Method for Putting Attention In the Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .2–13

Day 4.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–1

Inner & Outer Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–1

The Inner Task: A Focal Point for Our Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–1

Ending the Work Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–2

The Purpose of the Inner Task: Instructions Cynthia gave at a Wisdom School at Valle Crucis, North Carolina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–3

Some Inner Task Suggestions to Help Get You Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .3–4

Day 4.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders) 4 .4–1

Chant: Hallelujah

Day 4.5 Afternoon Teaching: Gospel of Thomas: Logia 4, 5 & 6* . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .5–1

The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 4 (Part 1) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 .5–2



Asterisk shows which teachings have multi-part

Wisdom School, Kanuga 2015 (photo by Eric George)




Welcome & Getting Started ix

Course Transcript & Companion GuideThis full-color, downloadable, and printable 250-page PDF Guide contains a full transcript of all of the sessions and teachings you will encounter as you move through the course.

Features of the Transcript & Companion Guide:

• Includes an extensive Table of Contents to provide you with a thorough outline for the course.

• The entire PDF Guide is fully searchable, making it easy to locate any specific topic, theme, term, quote, chant, or practice.

• The Guide follows the video teachings exactly as they were presented: By day (Day 1 of Wisdom School, Day 2 of Wisdom School, etc.); by time of day (Morning, Afternoon, Evening); and by topic (Reading, Chant & Meditation; Teaching, Conscious Practical Work; Questions & Response; Closing Meditation). We have used numbers to make it easy for you to locate each day’s teaching topics. For example, all of the Morning Teachings are identified with a “.2”—1.2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2, 5.2. The number before the (.) refers to the Day; the number after the (.) identifies the particular topic.

• In addition to the full word-for-word transcript, the Guide also includes supplemental images, quotes, and other graphics to emphasize key points and elements.

• For your convenience, we provide extracted sections of the Guide that correspond to every day in the course. You will find these easily accessible as you progress through the course simply by clicking on a download icon. Or, you can follow along in the complete PDF Companion Guide if you have downloaded and/or printed it.

• The design includes generous right-hand margins for note- taking.

• We have curated additional resources to supplement the teach-ing for a number of sessions. These will be clearly indicated where available.

You’ll see, as you watch Cynthia on the course videos, that her presence and transmission is powerful, luminous, and engaging. This Companion Guide is offered with the hope that it helps to bring Cynthia’s teachings to life on the page, as well.


Day 2.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer

Day 2.2 Morning Teaching: The Great Benedictine Monasticism*

Day 2.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work

Day 2.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders)

Day 2.5 Afternoon Teaching: The Gospel of Thomas: Logion 2

Day 2.6 Evening: Questions & Response, Chant & Closing Meditation*

An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault



Asterisk shows which teachings have multi-partsClick title

to go directly to each session

Screenshot from course video




Welcome & Getting Started x

Community Support Resources• You will find private discussion forums throughout the course where

you can ask questions, offer comments and reflections on the course materials, as well as respond to others. These will be moderated by experienced Wisdom leaders in our network.

• We have mentors who are willing to be in contact with you if that is something you desire.

• We also have a vibrant world-wide network of Wisdom students you can get to know as fellow companions on this journey. You can learn more on our website: wisdomwayofknowing.org under “Communities of Practice.”

Screenshot from website


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Welcome & Getting Started xi

Course Rhythm & StructureMuch care has been taken to ensure that the rhythm that unfolds at a live, on-the-ground Wisdom School has been preserved as you proceed through the virtual course content.

Cynthia provides a comprehensive overview and explanation of the daily schedule and rhythm in her initial welcome and introductory teaching. Here is a brief outline of how a Wisdom School day is typically structured, which closely matches the rhythm you’ll encounter as you proceed through the course materials.

Daily Rhythm of a Wisdom School

• First evening welcome and introduction, followed by a time of deep gathering through chant and meditation to end the evening, and then leave in what is called “the Great Silence,” which goes through breakfast each morning

• Early morning reading, chant, and meditation• Breakfast in silence• Morning teaching• Conscious practical work, usually done outside, with an inner and an

outer task• Lunch• Personal time off for reflection, rest, whatever people want to do• Regather for afternoon reading, chant, and meditation• Afternoon teaching, usually on the Gospel of Thomas• Dinner• Evening gathering for synthesis, reflection, discussion, questions and

response • Evenings close with chanting and meditation, and then back into the

Great Silence

Suggested Setting and Formats for Using the Course MaterialsRegardless of whether you are taking this course all at once following our format of a five-day retreat setting, or taking daily “small dives,” be sure to include regular periods for chanting, meditating, reflecting, and intentional silence. In whatever setting you choose, Cynthia strongly encourages you to plan for and include conscious work periods. As you will discover, these are an integral part of the Wisdom School experience. Tasks for the work period can be as simple as tending to household or outdoor chores. Take on the work period as a way of joyously including your body in the process of “knowing with more of your whole being.” You will have the opportunity to learn much more about all of these vital components of Wisdom School as you move through the course.

There are numerous ways you can use this course material. Following are some suggestions to help get you started.




Welcome & Getting Started xii

1. Use the Course materials as a group

This ecourse format is well suited for individual use, but when possible Cynthia highly recommends that you invite a few others—perhaps family, friends, or members from your spiritual community—and experience your own Wisdom School as a group. If you are interested in using the course materials with others in this way, please contact us for group rates: [email protected].

You can easily fit the course content into many settings and time frames. With as little as two hours or a half-day gathering, you could gather and chant, meditate, watch a shorter teaching segment by Cynthia, take breaks in silence; read, reflect upon, and engage with a specific topic, or use any daily task for an opportunity to engage in conscious, practical work. If you have a longer period of time, such as a weekend retreat, the materials will easily expand to fit the particular needs of your group.

Tip: If you plan to watch the videos with a group in a large room, connecting to a projector screen may be useful.

2. Replicate the Wisdom School setting

If you can arrange for a full five days in a “retreat-like” setting, you can basically recreate the Wisdom School environment and rhythm, and structure your days to engage with the material in the order presented. This type of full-immersion setting is supportive and beneficial if you’re a single individual working with the course material on your own. It is also a very effective way to work with the material as a group, in essence creating your own Wisdom School structure and experience.

This course is a perfect companion and guide for anyone who would like to gather in this way. For example, as a maiden voyage with these teaching videos, our Wisdom community member Marcella Kraybill-Greggo offered a very successful onsite five-day Wisdom School at Moravian Seminary using the videos from this course with Cynthia as principal teacher, while also weaving in her own course components that were suitable for her setting.

“Great videos! Cynthia was larger than life! So funny and engaging! Good quality video.

Love the text of important parts on screen.” —from a Wisdom School participant at Moravian Seminary regarding the videos

from this course


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Welcome & Getting Started xiii

3. Plan to use over a longer time frame

If a full five-day experience is not possible, you can stretch the course over a longer time frame, such as watching and engaging with the material for an hour or so each day, or on a regular weekly or monthly basis. All of the longer teaching sessions have been divided into shorter, multiple parts for just this purpose. Every longer session that is available as a multiple part teaching is clearly marked with an asterisk*.

Additionally, you can supplement what we have offered in this course with additional chants, readings, meditation periods, or other related teachings.

4. Engage with the course materials by topic

While you are free to navigate to any part of the course in any order, we highly recommend that you first progress through the course as it has been created and offered by Cynthia. After you have completed the course, you could return to the materials and study—alone or with a group—the materials by topic. A few suggestions could be a study and reflection of the course materials related to:

• The Gospel of Thomas• The Great Benedictine Monasticism• Three Centers of Intelligence• Conscious Practical Work• Cynthia offers more suggestions in her concluding video, “Where to

from here?”

Whether engaging in a group or on your own, we recommend you determine a suitable plan ahead of time, and make a commitment to give your full attention when watching the sessions and working with the practices.

Whatever context and time frame you choose to engage with the materials, whether on your own or as part of a group, the teachings will have their own way of enriching the unique container of your own life and circumstances.

“There was no difference in impact or transmission in teaching received by video. People immediately felt ‘present’ to the sessions,

receiving teaching that catapulted all of us to depths of knowing and new recognitions. With Cynthia’s masterful gifts of teaching

we were brought into the inner circle of the profundity of Luminous Love, brought face to face with the truth of our own hearts, and, in

the next moment brought back into lightness, grace, and humor, just as Cynthia does in real life. Her tell-tale red knit hat reminded us

that ‘nothing has changed.’ Cynthia seemed ‘as real’ and present on video as she does in person.” —Marcella Kraybill-Greggo, Host and Teacher of a five-day onsite Wisdom School at Moravian Seminary,

regarding the videos from this course




Welcome & Getting Started xiv

Stay ConnectedHere are just some of the ways you can stay connected:

• If you have general questions about the course materials, please email [email protected].

• If you have more specific questions or need guidance, email Robbin Whittington at [email protected] and I’ll help connect you with someone who can provide assistance.

• Sign up for our monthly enewsletter in which we share new courses, reflections from Cynthia and other Wisdom leaders, as well as upcoming Wisdom events and new resources.

• Consider adding your voice to our growing world-wide community network by sharing what you are offering in your area. You can find more information and meet others on our website: wisdomwayofknowing.org.

• Visit wisdomwayofknowing.org often as we add new content regularly. Our website contains a master archive of Cynthia’s teachings across the web, so you can use the site as a portal to navigate to many of her resources on the web. (Despite our ongoing efforts, we know there are more resources out there we’ve missed. If you find one, tell us!)

• We would love your feedback. To share comments or suggestions, email us: [email protected].


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Cynthia’s Personal Welcome to the Course

Welcome to Wisdom School. Welcome specifically to our very first virtual Wisdom School. This program of study you’re about to join takes place and was filmed at an actual live on the ground Wisdom School, which took place in November of 2015 at Kanuga Center in Western North Carolina. Today, I’m sitting at another of our favorite Wisdom centers at Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham, Massachusetts. This is simply to let you know in advance that you are really stepping through the portal into a living tradition that Wisdom Schools and the particular Wisdom School you’re joining has been lived, experienced and, in a sense, consecrated by the group of folks you’ll be seeing in the videos and in the lectures online.

We’re very, very much a living tradition. I’ve been involved in giving Wisdom Schools particularly geared to students progressing along on a very inclusive Christian path. I’ve been giving them since 1999 and at this point, we have given them all over the planet: North America, including Canada. We’ve given them in New Zealand. We’ve given them in Scotland. It’s a growing worldwide phenomenon. The course you’re about to join is just part of this living stream of reclaiming the Wisdom tradition. But wisdom is not something that we invented and Wisdom Schools aren’t something we invented at the end of the 1990s.

It’s an ongoing tradition that tends to come above ground at times when the planet is going through great changes or when consciousness is about to take a major new leap to a new place, a new level of understanding. I would say that both of those conditions apply today. We certainly clearly are at a point of great transformation in our own societal culture. It’s almost as if a Western stream of understanding, which has been going in a direction for maybe 2,500 years, is coming full term and something else is arising. From everywhere, you hear people using the words it’s the second axial arising. It’s the new convergence. Something new is happening.

Many, many people say that this isn’t just a change in politics. It’s not just a change in regimes. It’s actually a shift in consciousness. People were beginning to see and perceive and understand in different ways. At that time, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Wisdom Schools will come above ground and be there to nurture the quality and quantity of human consciousness as it goes through these major periods of transition. The fact that I’ve had the privilege of being part of this consolidating and escalating movement for more than 20 years now really tells me that something is up in society and to watch the people that I’ve gotten to know in these Wisdom Schools has been a real sense that there are people rising to the plate, to step up and be transformed not just for personal benefits but for the sake of the ongoing life of our planet.

We’d like to encourage you, as you come into this, even though the major

way you’re going to be receiving it is by looking at me on a computer screen, we encourage you to consider this a living stream, to pay attention to the fact that

it is an ongoing thing that we do walking through our day.




Cynthia’s Personal Welcome to the Course xvi

In that spirit that we realize that we wanted to widen the Wisdom tradition and the Wisdom School tradition and make it more generally available. Just by the fact that I’m a single limited human being, I can’t do more than a half a dozen of these schools a year and there’s a long, long waiting list for the schools and some people simply can’t come because they live too far away or the circumstances of their life don’t allow it. In our departure into this virtual Wisdom School media, our producers hope to open this tradition more widely in places where it couldn’t come otherwise.

We’d like to encourage you, as you come into this, even though the major way you’re going to be receiving it is by looking at me on a computer screen, we encourage you to consider this a living stream, to pay attention to the fact that it is an ongoing thing that we do walking through our day. People who come to Wisdom School arrive typically on a Sunday night—the schools will typically run Sunday evening to Friday morning—and they’ll put away their bags. We have an introductory get-together. I explain what the Wisdom tradition is overall. Those are the first couple of sets you’ll find in this course.

Then, we insert ourselves in a container and this container is ancient. It goes back in the Christian tradition at least as far as the sixth century to the rule of Saint Benedict and the Benedictine Monasticism, which has been the major taproot in our western culture for conveying Wisdom. We enter Silence in the night. There’s a time, it’s a time for deep gathering, for prayer, for meditation at a personal level. Then, we wake up and go through a day, which alternates rhythmically from a time of meditation in the morning with some chanting in it to teaching, to a time of practical work outside raking leaves or planting bulbs or washing windows to help bring in that element of what we nowadays call mindfulness or mindful awareness.

There’s lunch. There’s time off for personal reflection. People come back for more meditation, more teaching, dinner and then, in evening, which we’ll have time for reflection, discussion, synthesis of the day. That’s the context in which an on the ground Wisdom School is offered. We invite you in your own living room, if you would like, to try as much as possible as you learn the rhythm that Wisdom grows up in to try and pattern that as much as you can into your own life or even better, to invite a couple of friends over and try to do this Wisdom School as a group.

The other parts of this course will unpack as you follow the lectures through, as you participate and give yourself to the context always keeping in mind that while you’re sitting in front of a computer, the computer is on the planet and the planet is in the solar system and we’re part of a living stream of our Wisdom tradition that’s ongoing in our time and joins everyone who’s ever touched the stream including you, joins us in a new union, in a new relational network in which we exchange both information and the deepest yearnings of our heart, so thank you and welcome to Wisdom School.

Screenshot from course video





FIRST EVENING OF WISDOM SCHOOL

First Evening Welcome & Introduction to Wisdom School*

All longer sessions that are available as multi-part teachings are marked with an asterisk*



Notes:

© WisdomWayofKnowing.org 1

First Evening

Welcome & Introduction to Wisdom School



Part 1: Welcome & Introduction, page 2

Part 2: The Rhythms & Components of a Wisdom School, page 6


First Evening: Welcome & Introduction to Wisdom School 2


Welcome & IntroductionWow. I hope you’ve all done this already. If you haven’t, just take a look around the room just for the moment, just glance around. Welcome to Wisdom School. Yeah! This is a historic first, perhaps even in the history of the planet. Never before, at least since Babylon, have so many Wisdom seekers been gathered in a single place at a single time. I think this is not so much a Wisdom School as a Wisdom convention. I think that the synchronicity of this gathering taking place at this particular point in time, in place, in the history of our planet is not without implication. That we really are here as Wisdom seekers have been from time immemorial; as seekers after truth, as seekers after compassion, not to be here to search for our personal enlightenment, but to hold the space and deepen the level of conscious compassion on our planet.

I think in that way, I’d like us … When we first gathered with the interns two days ago to begin to prepare the way for your coming with us, coming on board, all of you, we started first by sensing ourself as a small group of people in time, here on one level to help orchestrate a production, a Wisdom School. But on the other level, a group of people who’ve come together to be available in a deep way to what T.S. Eliot once called the intersection of the timeless and time, and how things are impacting and playing in our world.

We are a gathered group of people. What we possess already and are going to be possessing a lot more by the time the week is over is synergy, which is the power of each person’s individual yearning multiplied by 200, multiplied by two million. That as we begin to organize and tap into that power of yearning, faith, idealism and willing service that is in this group. I’m quite in awe of this gathering as a prophetic and potentially healing gathering. I would ask us to offer all of our work this week—and not just the moments of triumph, but the moments of real frustration that you encounter and look at closely and work with rather than running from—all of that work is part of the offering we make this week for whatever use the planet may need it for.

What I wanted to do tonight is to just go over a few little basic orientation things, and then to walk you through the schedule a little bit, and call attention to some of the highlights, just enough so that we can get off and running tomorrow. A lot of stuff you’re going to just learn as you go along. We can’t do the thing of teaching you the whole theory first and then having you practice for the rest of the week. We’re going to be moving back and forth so we’ll get a little bit of a bite of something as an idea. We’ll work on it. We’ll come back and unpack it as an idea and back and forth it’ll go.

This is your first overall view. As I’ve said often, and if you’re read the whole Wisdom Way of Knowing book, Wisdom has a billion different definitions out in the planet. It goes everywhere on the scale from secret esoteric information, generally orgiastic and ritualistic in nature, done behind closed doors, to the other—the sort of familiar—Chicken Soup Wisdom, where it refers to the kind of often folksy and humorous things that are known by just being around here for a while. Our definition of Wisdom, which comes through a specific

(Part 1 of 2)

Wisdom is not knowing more, but knowing with more of you, knowing

deeper, carving and digging your being deeper and deeper so that

it can receive more knowing.




lineage that I’ll be talking more about in due course, is something very akin to what in the past few years has become popularized as integral knowing.

What it means is not knowing more, but knowing with more of you, knowing deeper, carving and digging your being deeper and deeper so that it can receive more knowing. The knowing as it’s often been talked about in Wisdom traditions is state-dependent. It’s not hidden. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, but unless you have got, as they love to say in the Bible, “eyes to see and ears to hear,” it can be sitting right there in the room with you, sitting on the nose on your face, and you won’t see it.

One of my favorite sayings in the Wisdom tradition goes, “As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases. As your being decreases, the old meanings return.” We’ll be back to that one a few more dozen times. Which basically means that as you become more settled, more deep, more balanced, as you bring all the wonderful systems within you online for the genuine present moment, apprehension of what’s going on in this world, then you begin to see things that you’ve missed before. You can walk past the same old building three million times, and you suddenly look at it and say, “Hey, I never noticed that beautiful cornice.” It’s like that.

What we’re really trying to do is not so much fill you with new information, but deepen a capacity within you to see in a way that you’ve never seen before, to connect dots in a way that may remain unconnected. We’ll be giving you a glance of the little bit of a time-tested roadmap in our own tradition that will allow you to form a template around that for continuing transformation once you go home from Wisdom School.

So, there by some arguments, Wisdom schools have always been here. They go back at least as far as Babylon, if not all the way back to Atlantis. But by some accounts, they represent an unbroken stream passing on a certain body of conscious transformational knowledge. All the religions, all the great sacred traditions, in some sense, are putting their roots down into that deeper well. But the schools also tend to come aboveground and take shape, really begin to have a much more visible presence, at those times in the history of humanity, at those critical turning points, when the world is in a time of really critical mass, critical velocity, upheaval, or change, or need. One of our interns today came back and said, “Hey, did you hear what Pope Francis just said? “We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” He says, “This is not an era of change, this is a change of era.”

In that regard, it’s exactly there, at the changes of era, that Wisdom schools tend to come aboveground. A gift of what some indeed call, and I don’t think it’s a metaphor, the “Conscious Circle of Humanity.” Those wise elders, some in the flesh and some beyond the flesh, who encircle this planet with loving arms, and help give course corrections as we go kicking and screaming into what’s coming up at the next evolutionary turn.

“We are not living in an era of change, but a change of era.” —Pope Francis

“As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases.

As your being decreases, the old meanings return.”—Maurice Nicoll




The Importance of Wisdom Schools in Our EraI don’t think we need to detain our self far by saying we’re obviously in such an era. Old orders are passing away. Old institutions are in distress. The change in the kind of orientation and education and facility that’s gone in place just between the generation that I was born in—the mid-boomers—and the millennials that sit here as the youngest among us. We’ve gone through a change in orientation and the handling of knowledge, which leaves Gutenberg in the dust. We’re really in an era of massive upheaval. We know that this weekend, if nothing else. [Cynthia is referring to the Paris attacks (sometimes referred to as 11/13), which were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that occurred on Friday 13 November 2015 in Paris, France, and the city’s northern suburb, Saint-Denis. … The attackers killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theatre. There was also a suicide bombing in Beirut, Lebanon on Nov. 12 that killed 43 and injured 240; and a bombing on Nov. 13 in Baghdad, Iraq, killing 19 and injuring 33. These were in the two days that coincided with the start of this Wisdom School.]

Wisdom Schools emerge. And I think that it’s no great surprise that it’s carrying an energy and an interest that you can feel palpably because the water is flowing here right now. May not flow here forever, but it’s here. We’re going to run with that living water. A little bit about this particular lineage that I’ll be bringing you during the week, the place that I’m speaking from, it really is a fusion of two streams and two strains and you’ll feel these streams and hear these streams in dialogue all week. It’s been my own particular—I won’t say individual—but this has been the tradition that I’ve been given to carry on.

Wisdom Lineage and the Fusion of Two Streams One of the streams is the stream that comes from very, very deep in the Christian tradition: the lineage stream coming from the Wisdom of the great Benedictine Monasticism. Saint Benedict, in the fifth century, drawing on an already well-established stream of transformational Wisdom that came out of the deserts of Egypt and Syria by a first generation of people that really wanted to practice what it means to put on the mind of Christ. Saint Benedict became heir to this and shaped it into a massive, stable container, which has been the foundation of Christian monasticism and monastic transformational practice in the West for 1,500 years.

Its brilliant stable legacy of “Ora et Labora”: “Prayer and Work,” as a fundamental rhythm for the balancing and ordering of human life, and for the growing of that beautiful rose of Wisdom. That’s the Benedictine contribution. That is the one strand, and it’s the earlier strand in my own Wisdom formation. I’ve been a monastic wannabe for 40 years now, and most of my own deep formation in the Christian path has been at the hands of wonderful Benedictine abbas and ammas, both straight-up Benedictines, Trappists like Thomas Merton, that lineage. So that you’ll hear is one of the streams.

Wisdom Lineage and the Fusion of Two Streams

1. The Great Benedictine Monasticism

2. The Transformational Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff




What’s a little bit unusual in my presentation of Wisdom is that the other strain that comes from my 10 years of active participation in what’s called “The Work”: the transformational teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff, or “Gurdjeef,” depending on what kind of group you get yourself into. That wonderful Russian, basically Russian-Armenian spiritual seeker who was the first to really go at what we would nowadays recognize clearly under the label “mindfulness practice.” Who clearly felt that there was a missing piece, particularly as regard to the West, that kept people always stuck in their heads and simply recycling the same old cognitive knowledge without ever changing. He went to look for the piece that might change things and brought it back to the West in a teaching that’s been passed on for many years below the radar screen. Then it all came above the radar screen when the Enneagram of Personality movement broke wide open, and all of a sudden people had heard of his name, since he was the one who first brought it to the West. I worked in the group and I still have very, very deep connections, but from my 10 years in the Work, mostly in Canada, I learned the piece which was never fully articulated in the Benedictine tradition, which is that whole piece of “Conscious Work.” What does it mean to be awake when you work? What is presence? How do you find it? How do you notice when you’ve fallen out of it? And even more important, how do you get back into it?

Transformation Through Conscious Presence So, in the Work are this extraordinary body of knowledge and skills about transformation of presence. In other words, raising the state of your being so that you become receptive to higher meaning. What I did was basically, with the help of a Trappist hermit monk who was my own teacher and mentor in this, fused the two together. We offered our first Wisdom School on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, in July of 1999. And it’s been nonstop since then.

So that’s a little bit of the lineage that I’ve been working in. You’ll hear the pieces of that, but that’s where we’re going. I had felt and actually had complained to my teacher at one point that I felt like the Work had the bottom part for the pyramid. It had all the practices that taught you how to be present, but it didn’t have a context. Present to what? And the Trappist Benedictine tradition had the top of the pyramid, the extraordinary mysticism and devotion, the beauty, the surrender, the humility. But there was nothing that put those two together. Without a bottom, the top is just a mirage. Without the top, the bottom is just a practical skill set. Our work has been to try to get these things not only in dialogue, but fused. So that’s the ambiance in which you’re working.

“The Work”: The Transformational Teaching of G.I Gurdjieff

Ora et Labora

prayalone

work

alone

work

togetherpray

together




The Rhythms & Components of a Wisdom School

There’s a lot of things to get used to when you’re just starting a new adventure. But I thought it might be useful to at least walk you through the schedule so that you’ve got a little bit of an idea of what we’re going to do every day, maybe a little bit of a sense of why we’re doing it, and some sense of the flow.

At 7:15 in the morning, we gather here. We have morning prayer, reflection, reading, and meditation. Basically what that is, is a glorified, about 20 to 25 minutes centering prayer or meditation/sitting, with a little bit of chanting and a reading, a short reading. It’s not a service. It’s meditation. Bring your meditation cushions if you’re used to sitting there. When we’re meditating, when we’re doing that kind of stuff, sit anywhere you’d like. And yes, if you have back issues and want to do it lying down, fine. It’s that time. Very, very simple. And then we go from there to breakfast.

Now, please note, breakfast is in silence. What we do as part of the drill at Wisdom Schools is we observe what the monastic tradition calls “The Great Silence.” As much as possible, from our last meeting tonight, which will end with some chanting and quiet, we go out into the dark in silence. As much as possible, maintain silence through breakfast the next morning. Now I know that for those of you who have roommates, you may have some operational challenges around that. Certainly, use your space to exchange all essential information. Keeping silence doesn’t mean tip-toeing around and trying to say, “Is it your time to take the shower yet?” Talk as you need to. But what we’re really trying to do when we observe periods of silence is cut out compulsive chatter and to give everybody a space to be inward without having to put on the face you put on to meet the face you’re going to meet. It’s a safe space in which we can disrobe a little bit, drop our personalities, and also do the deep work of integration without somebody disrupting us to ask us about what we think about political events. We try to maintain the spirit of silence, which anchors the times of talking that will go on during the day.

A Wisdom School is not a contemplative silent retreat. They’re different art forms. The intention of a silent retreat is to really give you that unbroken silent space to do the deepening and processing that happens there. But remember, Wisdom is integral knowing. What we’re really working on in a Wisdom School is developing the capacity in you to move from deep silence and gathered recollected stillness into action without losing the spaciousness, without losing the recollection. So that we can extend our silence in the form of gathered presence into everything we do without getting rattled and without getting frenetic. It’s a learned skill, but it’s a basic “being” skill, which is not taught in the Christian tradition apart from Wisdom schools. You either get seminars where you’re packed with knowledge and there’s no possible space to integrate them, or else you get silent retreats where you luxuriate in silence but are not taught how to take that with you out into the world. That’s what we’re working on. There will be a deliberate and intentional alternation between times of talking and times of not talking.

(Part 2 of 2)

Remember, Wisdom is integral knowing.




In general, I would say try to keep an eye and an ear on compulsive talking, and keep that a little bit less than you usually do anyway. It really allows better fellowship to happen. There’s no need ever to fill up the available space with words. But we aren’t a silent retreat and we don’t want to make it feel too precious and brittle because that’s not what we’re doing here. If we need to, we’ll put a desert day in, or a desert morning if things are getting too rowdy or over-stimulated. But we’ll see if we can learn this balance. It’s part of Wisdom.

[Cynthia is describing a typical schedule for a 5-day Wisdom School. In this eCourse, we will offer ways to incorporate these rhythms into different formats and timelines.] So breakfast is in silence. From 9:15 to typically 10:15 to 10:30 every day, I will give the morning teaching, which will be on some aspect of the Wisdom tradition, or the Wisdom teaching. We’re going over, in this fundamental Wisdom School, some of the fundamental basics of that.

Daily Periods of Conscious Practical Work We will move every day into a period of practical physical work around the grounds; conscious work, as it’s sometimes called; conscious mindful work. Gurdjieff called it conscious labor that really serves a number of functions. The top two on the list are really to invite your body to participate, to observe the rhythm of ora et labora from the Benedictine tradition, and to give you the opportunity to begin to learn the skill of conscious self-observation and presence.

In the groups, you will be given an inner task as well as an outer task. An inner task that will help if you want to take it on with mindfulness. And your group leaders will be helping to guide the container of your little work group, your cohort, so that work hopefully becomes an adventure in expanded consciousness, not just an opportunity to go automatic and get a job done. We’re not doing it for service to Kanuga. We’re doing it because it is one of the most time-tested ways of transforming consciousness. We’ll unpack the details tomorrow. That will take us through the morning. I will tell you more about conscious work in due course during the week. But this is a little bit of a foretaste of what you’re actually doing.

Talking Lunch and Personal TimeWe’ll have lunch then afterwards. It’s a talking lunch. Afterwards, you’ve got as much as three hours of disposable time for your own use. You can walk. You can sleep. You can journal. You can do whatever you want. It’s at your disposal.




We’re going to ask that you keep the sleeping areas quiet just so that those that want to nap can do so. And, by and large, if you’re going to talk with friends, it’s better to congregate in the already public meeting spaces, or take a walk.

The AfternoonWe’re back here at three for afternoon meditation, which will be, again, a chant, a reading, and a sit.

Then following directly on that, we’re going to do Thomas work. Tomorrow, I will explain a little bit more about why we’re using The Gospel of Thomas and why this has been, over the years, so central to Wisdom teaching and so effective in shaking things up. I’ll give a start, and then you will go into your small groups to your appointed rooms to break apart Thomas in smaller-group formats where it works way, way better. Everyone of your great leaders is more than experienced in breaking open Thomas and allowing groups to develop their pattern. After that, it’s Thomas till dinner.

The EveningYou’ll come back here after about an hour of small-group meetings for a final summation of the day based on some of the material you feed me from your groups. Questions, comments you can have, and depending on how it rolls, maybe a question or two from the plenary. But short, and then chant, meditation, and back into the Great Silence. Okay? That’s basically our rhythm.

What we will be doing, if you notice it already, you may get a sense that it rotates between—it starts in silence and prayer and chant, moves through cognitive learning, physical activity, a little leisure time, back to meditation, prayer again, more teaching, and then back to reflection, and ending again with sacred chanting. We’re following a modified, but very, very strongly connected Benedictine rhythm of a regular rhythmic circulation between prayer and work in a balanced way so that nothing overbalances.

The classic Wisdom assertion that we’re going to be looking at over the next couple of days is that that [Wisdom School] is the optimal vehicle in which Wisdom learning takes place. Yeah, we could get rid of the work bit, give you about 80% more content, but you wouldn’t be able to absorb it. This is a container. And what that means is that no part of what you do is less important than any other part. It’s funny. Everybody thinks, “I coming to hear Cynthia


First Evening : Welcome & Introduction to Wisdom School 9


and the teaching is, of course, what I’m here for.” In Wisdom School after Wisdom School, what people have most taken home is the chants, and the conscious practical work.

So don’t take any part of it as time off. It’s all cooking. And even if your path this week runs into resistance, as it sometimes does, that’s part of the work, too. The frustrations, the things that didn’t go as you thought they were going to go. How you deal with that material is all part of your conscious transformation. We’re here to help, but you’re the one that will do your transforming.

If you are new to Sacred Chanting, you’ll hear the text of it. It’s just repeating a simple phrase over and over. You’ll pick it up very quickly. As you begin to hear harmony, if you want to put the harmony in, super.

And so we begin. A short reading from The Gospel of Thomas [Logion 24, p.56].

[bell]

Logion 24

His students said to him, “Take us to the place where you are, since we are required to see after it.”

He answered them, “Whoever has an ear for this should listen carefully! Light shines out from the center of a being of light and illuminates the whole cosmos. Whoever fails to become light is a source of darkness.” —The Gospel of Thomas, Translation by Lynn Bauman

Closing Chant & Meditation[Chant with Darlene Franz on harmonium: Lord as You Will]

Lord as you willLord as you knowHave mercyHave mercy

[bell]

Meditation

[bell]

[Cynthia] Go gently and quietly into that good night, and ease into your first night at Wisdom School. We’ve begun. Thank you all.

Note: Darlene Franz generously offers her original chants and music throughout the Course. For more chants to listen to and/or purchase, visit her website: https://wisdomchant.bandcamp.com/





Notes:


Day 1.1 Morning Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence*

Day 1.3 Morning: Conscious Practical Work

Day 1.4 Afternoon Reading, Chant & Meditation (offered by co-leaders)

Day 1.5 Afternoon Teaching: Introduction to The Gospel of Thomas & Logion 1*






Notes:


Day 1 1 Morning

Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer

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

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

[04:35] [bell for meditation]

[31:13] [bell to end meditation]

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

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

[32:01] [final bell]

Day 1.1 Morning: Reading, Chant, Meditation & Body Prayer 2



Notes:


Day 1 2 Morning Teaching

The Three Centers of Intelligence



Part 1: Introduction to Three Centers of Intelligence, page 2

Part 2: The Moving Center, page 5

Part 3: The Intellectual Center & The Emotional Center, page 9

Part 4: How the Three Centers Interrelate & An Introduction to Conscious Practical Work, page 11

Day 1.2 Morning Teaching: The Three Centers of Intelligence 2



Introduction to The Three Centers of Intelligence

So this morning, we’re going to talk a little bit further about Wisdom and about a topic which is really foundational to how we’re going to proceed in Wisdom School and a little bit different environment from what you might get in more sort of traditional renditions of the Christian contemplative path.

I started last night with a quote that comes out of the Gurdjieff work, The Fourth Way tradition. “As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases. As your being decreases, the old meanings return.” This may take a little bit of decoding—“What’s this mean, ‘my being increasing?’” You know this really, really simply. You can tell in yourself when you’re in a bad state and when you’re in a better, I ask you to remember right now, take about ten seconds and recall yourself in the worst kind of state you get in: angry, neurotic, intense, urgent, whatever it is, and really kind of feel that inside with sensation; how you are there.

Then compare yourself, think about how you are when you’ve just come out of meditation or seen a beautiful sunset, or somebody’s told you’ve done such good work. You’re going to get a raise. And sort of ease in to how you feel inside there. Okay. Can you feel the difference between the two and yourself? Okay? So use that as your own internal measure for what it means: the difference between being in a bad state and a good state is, when you’re in a bad state you have very little being. Okay?

If that time when you’re like that, your three-year-old kid or grandkid comes along and says, “Tell me a story.” Or, “Let’s play, there’s a castle under my bed and let’s crawl under.” And you go, “Aah! Leave me alone kid!” Whereas, if you’re in a slightly more relaxed state, you accept the invitation. This is all right in your normal life. To take that and then translate it back into the statement; when your being is like this, when you’re agitated, when you’re tensed, when you’re self-preoccupied, you don’t pick up the opportunities. You don’t take advantage of what’s there in every moment for wonder, for joy, for creativity, for connection with something that’s much more mystical and much more uplifting.

(Part 1 of 4)

“As your being increases, your receptivity to higher meaning increases. As your being decreases, the old meanings

return.” —Maurice Nicoll




And when you’re in a larger state, a more profoundly settled one, you’re able to run with possibilities, and to see possibilities you couldn’t see when you were trapped beneath your own event horizon. Really, in short, the business of virtually all spiritual traditions is to help raise your state of being so that you become open to things that are there anyway, but that you don’t see when you’re too sort of shattered and tense, and off-balance. It’s really fundamentally as simple as that.

Another story—to take it in a slightly different direction about being in higher states—About 15 years ago now, a monk died at the monastery of Snowmass, my spiritual home away from home. Father Theophane, who was a wonderful, wonderful fellow who actually looked like the Buddha dressed up as Rasputin: shaggy hair, beaming eyes, this friendly, playful nature. One of the great gurus of the planet and gave everybody joy. Well when Theo died, they did the usual protocols at the monastery. They laid him out in his Trappist robes in the middle of the congregation. They came to do the requiem mass to send him off. At the end, it was really interesting, people walked out of that church and there was a couple of completely different meanings. It’s like they’d been in different funerals. Some people said, “Oh, it’s so sad. He was so alive and now he looks so stony and gray lying there on his pallet. Isn’t a tragedy?” And others said, “That rascal, he was playing with us all the time.”

What was the difference? Simply that some people only saw his physical presence. Others could pick up his imaginal presence, his energy still there in the room. So, that’s another way of looking—a slightly more esoteric way of looking—at this question of being increases. The ones that had enough being to pick him up and really be there with him at that energetic level had a whole different experience of what was happening. He was not absent or dead. He was present and dancing. Another way, as our being increases, our receptivity to higher meaning increases.

A couple of other names for “being,” higher being, more being. When we’re in a state of being, we can also say we’re present. And another term that’s used consistently in all over everywhere in the inner tradition including very, very strongly with Jesus, we’re awake. The call over and over again in all spiritual traditions is: wake up; awaken; increase your being; wake up. Be here. In approximately two weeks, the trumpet shall sound and the clarion call shall again tumble from the pulpits: it’s Advent—awake, awake! Be watchful. Be vigilant. It’s the theme of the season we’re coming up to liturgically in the Christian Church. But the catch is, nobody tells you how to wake up.

You hear people yell, “Awake!” It’s like a little alarm clock just went off. You just go back to sleep more nervously. How do you wake up? And what does presence even mean? Sometimes, it looks like just doing everything in slow motion. “I am present. I lift my feet so mindfully.” Is that presence? I don’t know. But the problem is and I think anyone, if the truth be told, really starts searching for this, the problem is we’re faced with an imperative that’s urgently given to us with absolutely no clue what state we’re aiming for or how to get there. No wonder people keep going around in the same sort of tracks.

The call over and over again in all spiritual traditions is: wake up; awaken; increase

your being; wake up. Be here.




One of the things I find most useful about the little schematic I’m about to share with you is that it gives you some quantitative measurements you can work with about when you’re awake and when you’re asleep, when you’re present and when you’re not present. And it gives you some really specific things to do to change the state when you evaluate that you’re not present, that you’re not awake. In that way, it becomes a wonderful, wonderful tool for moving toward a state of greater objective presence. I think it’s also the curricular foundation of the Wisdom School. This is the Gurdjieff notion of Three-centered Awareness or, as he often calls it, Three-brained Awareness. The assertion here is that human beings have not simply a single system of intelligence in them, but actually three major centers. That there is certainly the intelligence of the Three Centers of Intelligence: 1. Intellectual Center. This is joined by the intelligence of two other centers: The 2. Moving Center and the 3. Emotional Center.

Three-brained intelligence is intelligence of the intellectual center, the moving center, and the emotional center. And these are seen as constituting three discrete meaning c-r-e-t-e, three separate but interrelated systems of intelligence, which in a person who is truly awake, are all online and all informing each other. What we’re going to see as the foundation in the Gurdjieff Work then is that being asleep is technically and what you can call experientially related to being in one center only. In other words, it’s like you’ve only got one of them online and the system will only work when all three are online. Hold that thought, we’re going to come back to it. But of course, the first thing we need to do is say what are these three centers? And then we’ll look at how they interrelate.

First of all, don’t spend too much time going down the neuroscience pathway. “Where are these centers? Do they correspond to the parasympathetic nervous system? Can we actually document neurologically that they’re there?” Don’t fight the form that way. I see myself, and I think there’s increasing corroboration from science that, yeah, as we look at it more that Gurdjieff, as is so often the case, beneath what people take as metaphor, is actually talking harder objective science than people are prepared to meet. But the point for now is that it is a very useful tool. Whether or not you can objectively correlate the intellectual center with some specific nervous system in the brain is less important than the fact that if you work with these, understand what they are from the point of view of the work and of conscious transformation, you have tools, and very effective tools, for quickly changing your state. Recognizing when you’re straying into autopilot and bringing yourself back into remembrance. So, it works.

I would encourage you, as in all Wisdom teaching: nothing is to be taken just because I’m speaking it. There’s no top-down memorization of dogma. No dogma. Test it out in your own life. If it’s useful, work with it. If it’s not useful, discard it. But betcha, betcha, betcha, you’re going to find this useful when you actually start working with it. So, intellectual center, emotional center, moving center. You could say, “Oh, yeah, we do that today in psychotherapy. That’s head types, heart types and gut types, right?” Not quite. They’re close. They’re like parallel riverbeds, but don’t just say it’s the same. Because in the Gurdjieff system, there’s some very, very significant differences.

Three Centers of Intelligence:

1. Intellectual Center

2. Moving Center

3. Emotional Center




The Moving CenterI’m going to start with the moving center first because it’s the one that’s by all accounts and balances least known in the West, least valued, least worked with. It’s the unknown territory for most of us. And the second reason to work with it is that as you start really going down the path of inner transformation, you’re going to discover more and more—betcha betcha betcha—that it is within a deeper capacity to work with and within the moving center that you really begin to discover the secrets that make conscious being possible and help you to realize the things that your head yearns for and even your heart yearns for, because it’s through the moving center that you’re going to be able to start to walk the path of sensation and the path of sensation is going to take you way closer to where you’re yearning to get than almost anything else we have.

In the general cultural parlance, what we call the “gut types” has to do with the primitive feelings of emotion: anger, the churning nervous system. In the Gurdjieff Work, and in the definitions we’re using in our Wisdom School, the moving center basically is about intelligence through movements, through movement. It’s the way that our body is able to put its tentacles out and explore, and gain information from the world. It includes a wide range of skills, ranging from simple things, like knowing how to walk up a step of stairs without having to look at every step. Something in your body knows how to measure and gauge distances. Knowing how to walk at night. To the wonderful skills of imitation that allow you not only to learn to dance, but to learn to master a language, or learn an accent. It’s that whole realm of things that we don’t do directly with our intellectual rational brain. But that really deeply engages, and as we look at it, it’s a center of Wisdom. You drive a car, you ski down a hill, you sail a boat. It gets in your body. That kind of intelligence, which we mostly underuse, is a huge reservoir of connectivity and information with the world.

One of the real problems that we deal with in our culture—in our Western tradition in general and in the whole post-perennial philosophy, axial conscious—is that we don’t trust the body. As a matter of fact, when you look at the shocking history of religious culture, right back from the first axial awakening over 2,000 years ago, we got set up with this notion that the body is course, dense, heavy, the seat of the sinful self-will. And that reaching spirit requires a separation from—a training of it at best, and sometimes a mutilation of—our body. And that kind of training is implicit in our culture.

You can’t go anywhere before you bump into—spirituality is essentially an escape from the body. It’s a very, very bad habit.

Eckhart Tolle called the question on that. He says you can do that all you want but, if you’re going to get enlightened on this planet, nobody gets enlightened except in their bodies. But we have this long, long tradition we’re pushing out and how Christianity gets away with it, I don’t know, because we’re supposed to be the religion of incarnation. Yet even by the third century, people were merrily castrating themselves so they could get to heaven. Go figure. There’s been long, long paths in religious tradition in which people awake at night and flagellate themselves. This intensive and, for me, completely inaccurate

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description that the body is the seat of sinful self-will and desire. And it’s the body that has to be mastered or, if not mastered, at least over-ridden before we can have any hope of spiritual attainment.

That’s an ancient, ancient kind of orientation in the culture, and I think one of the things that we’re beginning to see nowadays is that it’s simply isn’t correct. And that one of the things that’s been rising up to meet us already in the second half of the 20th century—and I think is going to be one of the real challenges in workplaces for those of you that are shaping 21st-century Christianity, if the term itself isn’t an oxymoron—is that we’re going to have to go back and look at theology, look at our spiritual practice from the point of view of embodiment rather than disembodiment. I think this is going to be terrific because that’s where it belonged all along. It opens up the possibility of making Christianity finally coherent and consistent.

More to that later but I think what Gurdjieff saw—that people still haven’t gotten on the plate with—is that far from being the source of sinful self-will and that which drags us down, that the body actually carries in and through the moving center what in the Gurdjieff work is called “first force holy affirming.” The capacity to initiate and to bring in wonderful information that gets the journey started and sends it forward. And, in particular, the body carries the language of understanding the transformational cues that the head misses again and again. The body implicitly knows, through the moving center, the language. It gets the gesture of some of the great spiritual concepts which, at the level of the head, remain dense and impenetrable.

I want to unpack that with you just a little bit now because it really is, in and of itself, a core turning point. There’s a famous, famous story—I quote it in The Wisdom Way of Knowing. It was told first by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, a great Russian Orthodox abbot. “Metropolitan” they call them when they’re the abbot of a large territory of people, big bishop. Anyway, a fellow comes to see him—I picture always a young Ivan Karamazov—and says, “Abba Anthony, my problem is I have no faith. I say these creeds and they sound like impossible propositions. How can anyone believe this? How can you say the Nicene Creed? It’s ridiculous.” I’ve heard that once or twice before. [laughter]

Anthony’s response to this was not what you might expect. He didn’t sit down and say, “Now, now, dear son. I am going to tell you why each of these things makes sense. Let me explain to you what it means, et cetera.” What he did instead is say, “Go home, and for a month do one hundred prostrations a day and then come back to see me.” Now, in the Orthodox tradition, a prostration is not for the faint of heart. It’s not that embarrassed little bob and curtsy that we do, we call genuflection, at least in the Episcopal Church. It’s a daring gesture. It takes guts and it takes even physical prowess so I’ve asked the head of my intern crew, the co-head, to demonstrate. Bill, show us a full prostration [Bill Redfield demonstrates].

The body actually carries in and through the moving center what in the Gurdjieff work is called “first force holy affirming.” The capacity to initiate and to bring in wonderful information that gets the journey started and sends it forward. And, in particular, the body

carries the language of understanding the transformational cues that the head

misses again and again.




Thank you. Thank you. Not for the faint of heart. [applause] Thank you. When the fellow came back a month later, ten pounds later and in good physical shape, his eyes were glowing with faith. Anybody know why? If you don’t know why, practice some place. Go into your inner chamber and see what happens when you take that position. It’s absolutely revolutionary. That what he had absolutely discovered in there was the gesture of oblation, in its dual and very interesting components—that as you lie yourself out like that, it’s a position of utter humility. And yet, it’s a position of utter safety. Rather than teetering, precariously trying to stand up, you’re there. The ground holds you. You’re making contact. You’re learning the language of self-offering and that something inside your body knows how to do that, and wants to do that.

That was the missing piece. When he came back and he began to experience where faith lives in the moving center, then he realized that it wasn’t the chore that he thought. The chore that the intellectual center sets up. It wasn’t about having to examine all these individual propositions in the creed and decide whether I agree or not. That would be the view based on the intellectual center. The moving center taught him that there was something deeper going on under it, and it was that gesture that he needed before he could decode the language.

So in the same way, I’ve looked for myself and I’ve told this story before, but everything I ever needed to know about surrender—a very, very difficult and counter-intuitive concept for most people—I learned when I was nine-years old trying to learn to float. You know, I was a little kid and like most people, when they throw you into a swimming pool, you kind of pull yourself in and go turtle and you sink right to the bottom of the pool. Finally, a beautiful swimming teacher says, “Don’t worry about your legs, just put your head back, put out your arms and fill your chest with air, and you won’t sink.” My goodness, she was right. And I began to discover that motion, and that motion has carried me all my life. You put out your hands, you keep your chest in the air, you won’t sink. And that going right to the bottom comes from clutching and going turtle.

A powerful lesson. I could never have learned it in seminary class. I would’ve come up with something saying, “Well, this surrender is just a leftover from the victimization of women by patriarchal misogyny. [laughter] That’s what it would’ve look like from that center. But if I had thrown away surrender because it didn’t check out on my political correctness list, I would have lost the chance to begin to go through the eye of the needle of putting on the mind of Christ in the body.

In the same way, everything I really began to learn about inner guidance, inner authority, I really learned from learning to ride my bike the first time, seven-years old. My daddy takes off the training wheels, gives me a little push, and off I go. How many of you can remember the first time you ever rode your two-wheeler by yourself? It’s a kind of thrill that you never forget because it teaches you that you can find your balance from the inside. That sense that, “Yeah, I can do this. I know the balance so I can find it.” It’s profound. I think it’s even mystical. And it’s a moving center thing. And that all this “Oh, I’m looking for my inner guide up in the sky.” You begin to learn there’s something in here that can find its balance. Moving center.




Perhaps one final example when it comes to moving center is a day I had with my daughter on the ski slope in Telluride, Colorado, when I was … when I’d sort of gotten myself up to a single blue-level intermediate, and she wanted to do a single black. So I’m up there at the top of the hill saying, “You want me to go down this?” Taking the best of what I could remember of my beginning skiing classes, I was traversing the hill very closely back and forth, back and forth.

She finally waited for me down at the first stopping point and says, “Mom, if you do that, you’re not only going to take forever and scare yourself to death, but you’re going to hit all the icy patches where everybody else has turned.” She says, “If you want to go there, you simply have to look at where you’re going and ski down the hill.” Whew, I felt that in me, but it’s right. That constant self-checking motivation that gets you starting and then you’re scared to run for it, and you go back, and you … So I realized that in my body skiing, I was learning to follow the movement of the intention set in motion. Whew! What a wonderful thing. You get the idea?

That your body knows the language of gesture and the great movements in the spiritual journey are encoded as gestures, not as concepts. I think one of the great woes to which Christianity has come, beginning certainly by the fourth century, is to try to translate the language of gesture into the language of concept. And then to try and do it with our heads rather than with our moving center. It’s doomed to failure.




The Intellectual Center & The Emotional Center

The intellectual center is a very, very good tool. It’s a profoundly useful tool for exploring and navigating the world, and it allows us to do things that separate us from the rest of the animals. It really is what makes us a three-brained creature and not a two-brained creature. We have a good neocortex. But the program it runs is perception through separation. Okay?

Consider yourself a computer programmer. This is the program that the mind uses to pick up reality. We identify something by its characteristic distinguishing characteristics. I know that Darlene is not Bill because well, she’s female and he’s male: she’s sitting here and he’s sitting there, et cetera, et cetera. So we pile up these little individual characteristics, and then we compare them: What makes this one different? What makes this one different? It’s a grand separating, evaluating, and measuring tool. But it can’t “do” because of the limitations built into its operating system. It can’t ask two questions: “Who am I, and who am God?” because these questions can’t be measured by an operating system that depends on separation.

We’ll see more of what that means. I have sometimes said that doing the journey towards mystical union, toward that fullness of being, toward nondual attainment or enlightenment—or all these things we want—trying to do it with the mind is like trying to play a violin with a chainsaw. It’s not because the chainsaw is bad, but because it is its nature to destroy and separate the thing that it’s trying to make music on. It’s built into the operating system. We don’t have to beat up on poor old Descartes, but it is, “I think, therefore I am,” and its implicit identification of the essence of the human being with the intellectual center really doomed the West to a fatal sleep. I’m using the word “sleep” technically and precisely in the way that it is used in the Work, which is being in one center only. We’ll be back to that again.

But really, if we are trying to do life with our intellectual center alone, we are going to be, to some extent or another, cut off from life—isolated, outside, and therefore, lonely and anxious. Okay? And everything is going to look slightly suspicious because that, again, is the legitimate function of the mind. It really carries the denying force. “Okay, let’s look at this. Let’s see.” So you begin to see the problem; it’s a wonderful tool but it is not beyond a certain point, like 33.333%, useful for being awake. Okay.

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

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identical. At least not at first. We’re going to see more and more that the heart, as it matures, doesn’t really have anything to do with emotions as we experience it now.

But things have to grow up before we see that. The emotional center is the capacity to explore and receive information from the world through empathetic entrainment. In other words, it’s the capacity to know things from the inside by matching your vibrations with their vibrations. You can see why the stuff we call “heart” is appropriate; it’s pertinent here, why people would think they’re the same. It’s the capacity to explore the world by what you might call vibrational resonance. Okay.

And so when you use this capacity, you are able to get inside of things by simply collecting yourself in a certain way and really sort of training in on their vibrations, and the setting up of a feedback loop. You do this, those of you that are good intuitive spiritual directors, that’s what you do when you sit down with a person. All the time you’re listening to what they’re saying with their mind, you’re entraining, using these wonderful capacities with this other faculty. Gurdjieff was very precise in locating it in the solar plexus. And I think he was really, if we translate it into the science of our day, he’s talking about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems working together and coming together. He says that the emotional center is really spread throughout your body but kind of has its nexus right here, just below the heart. Hold that thought for about four days. [laughter] Of all the centers, the emotional center moves the fastest. It’s, as you all know, you get the impression instantly. You don’t have to parse it out. The intellectual center is slowest, because it has to submit everything to this laborious process of taking it apart, linearizing it, comparing it, evaluating it, drawing conclusions from it. And the emotional center and the moving center are there dancing on his gravestone by the time it finally arrives. [laughter]

The emotional center is the capacity to explore and receive information from the world through empathetic entrainment. In other words, it’s the capacity to know things from the inside by matching your

vibrations with their vibrations.

The Solar Plexus




How the Three Centers InterrelateThe first and clearest thing to say is that everybody has all three centers in them. Now, in our usual unformed, raw state, most people are born into the world, or very quickly acculturated, to favoring one center or another. If you hear these head types, heart types, gut types, that’s what’s it’s talking about. That we learn to make one what you might call our dominant center for our own orientation to the world. And in the Western culture, I would say that’s overwhelmingly, shockingly, the intellectual center. If you look around the world, particularly at Westernized culture, you’ll have a small group of people who are kinesthetic types—you know, moving center, kinesthetic. A slightly larger number who are emotional centered and we sometimes call them right-brained. And then this vast majority of people who are plunging and plodding through the world using their intellectual capacities.

Of course, you know in school that that’s the capacity we train to. With maybe a little bit of space left for kinesthetic for moving center and sports programs, and virtually nothing for the emotional center. Any budget cutback and what leaves? Arts and music. The primary channels through which the emotional center is still trained. So we come out in the West a heavily lopsided intellectual-center-oriented being. That’s what we start from.

Now, here is where the work makes a bend and a turn from what popular culture will say. In pop culture, we say, “Well, find your center, acknowledge it, and live in it.” In the Fourth Way, in the inner tradition work, it says, develop your under-utilized centers. If most of us come in over-balanced in our use of the intellectual center, then the work lies in bringing our emotional center and our moving center fully online, and integrating them. Just as a sort of parenthesis or footnote here, but it’s an interesting one: As many of you know, Gurdjieff brought the Enneagram to the West for the first time, but he didn’t bring the typology of nine different types. For Gurdjieff, there were basically three types: intellectual center, moving center, and emotional center. And the idea was not to discover your type, either by narrative or by facial gestures, or by any of those kinds of online tests to discover your type and improve it.

It was to discover your starting position and reach out to incorporate the other two so that they were fully—and in a balanced way—a part of your perceptual center. Okay? Slightly different instructions there. Whatever you may find yourself to be, don’t detain yourself on it, because it immediately sets you out your job of discovering where the other two are hiding inside yourself and bringing them online. The reason for this is that it’s only when you have balanced the three centers as it used to be called “man number one,” “man number two,” and “man number three.” Kinesthetic moving center, emotional center, or intellectual center. Only when you found them and balanced them and integrated them can you become “man number four,” woman number four, in our own day and age.

This person, the first transformed human being, is the person who is conscious, who is awake. Gurdjieff called it “conscious man”. So you got to get them all there as a good, strong tripod before you’re really awake. The classic and most

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If most of us come in over-balanced in our use of the intellectual center, then the work lies in bringing our emotional center and our moving center fully online, and

integrating them.




powerful inference here, and the definition I was talking about at the beginning of this talk, is that in the inner tradition specifically as it’s come down through this line, when you are working in one center only, you are asleep. Period. End of question. You can be holding forth brilliantly on the most intricate degrees of post-Nicaean theological philosophy, but if you, at that moment, don’t know where your feet are, you’re asleep.

That’s what I meant when I said that so much of what’s going in Western culture for the past 500 years has gone on in the state of sleep. Not because it’s dull, not because … It’s often brilliant, but it’s unbalanced. It’s coming from one center only. And if you’re in one center only, no matter how brilliantly you’re there, you are technically, from the state of spiritual transformation, asleep. I remember very, very keenly—when I was talking about that “where are your feet thing,”—the classic kind of training that I had to do when I first entered inner work, and I was about as hard a nut to track as there ever was, because I was a brilliant poster child of the unbalanced culture I’d grown up in. A little talking head with a Ph.D. and a brilliant sense of the stuff I could hold in my head was bigger than most people could hold in their head. So I thought I was enlightened and everybody told me I was. When I came to the inner work tradition, I think I was running this inner program of enlightening them. [laughter] So I would ask a leading question in a little group and then I’d immediately turn it around to my own advantage and begin a discourse about what was really meant by this. And one day, I was holding forth with rhetoric which would’ve left Plato gasping, and somebody just said, “And where are your feet?” [laughter] And I looked at it as rude. I took a deep breath and recomposed myself and off again, and, “Where are your feet?” And it took a long time, and about five years in the work and two teachers who nearly ran me out, before “And where are your feet?” finally came home.

That what I was doing was brilliant but unbalanced. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. You see it in the opinions that are ricocheting around on the internet. You see it in the articles written. You’ve seen it in the way people hold discourse when they come to meetings and convocations and are trying to solve their problems with rhetoric and emotional manipulation. “Where are your feet?” Just as importantly then, as it gives you this benchmark of what sleep technically means, it also gives you a wonderfully simple, but I would say 100% effective, tool for waking up. For bringing yourself slightly more into a state of presence. That’s to be that if you realize, if you can sort of reach around and feel around inside yourself and realize, damn, you got stuck in your head again. And feel that as an energy thing, just like a big balloon that’s suddenly exploding here. Then it’s so obviously what you do to wake up. You simply bring another faculty, another center, online. And the one which is always there at your disposal, polite and humbly waiting to be discovered, is your moving center.

Learning to bring the emotional center online is a little trickier, but the moving center, it’s so simple. As simple as returning to your feet, returning to your breath, bringing your attention to your hand and watching with wonder what happens when the active attention hitting your fingers suddenly seems to

You simply bring another faculty, another center, online. And the one which is

always there at your disposal, polite and humbly waiting to be discovered, is your

moving center.




bring them, fill them, with tingling life, with sensation. What’s happening there? What’s this power? What’s this feedback loop between my attention and sensation? And how could I use that tool to envitalize my own being, grounding me and, at the same time, reconnecting me to the higher states of being?

So that basically is the core of the curriculum. We’re going to be looking tomorrow at the great Wisdom tradition that comes down to us in what St. Benedict called his “School for the Lord’s Service.” And I would say, in a nutshell, it’s the most brilliant proto-Wisdom School that the West has ever developed. A profound framework for doing Wisdom in, but it lacks this one piece: three-centered awareness. And with that, you can begin to develop—you have a huge population of sleeping monks because you need earnest sleeping monks, yes? But the capacity to awaken, the capacity to bring what by wager is the receiving mechanism you need for inner spiritual work, is presence, is being awake.

And until you really begin to attend to how to wake up, how to notice when you’ve drifted into a state of sleep, and how to bring yourself back through a distinct and measurable energy shift within your body of vitalization. Until you’ve learned that, not even the most exultant, elegant, programs will work. Because, yeah, you can fall asleep in paradise. So these are tools. We begin very simply in Wisdom School, like a child, literally, taking her first steps. Because that question, “Where are your feet?”—and the connection with sensation, and through sensation, to three-brained balanced awareness—is the gateway on which we’re actually going to be able to realize, and the foundation on which we can realize, a more attained enlightened consciousness.

So that’s why we’re looking at this piece today in the specific way we are. One of those kinds of what you might call esoteric secrets. You know, and I promised not to give you secret information, but this is kind of secret information. It’s actually as plain as the nose on your face but, according to that first principle, you have to be in a certain state of being to know what it means. What really happens is that that state of being in one-centered awareness, being completely identified with the view from one viewing platform only, from one center of intelligence anyway, is it’s a real low energy state. It’s a kind of entropic, dissipated state. You’re scattered. Your attention is all over everywhere. And when you begin to pull, pull it together, what we call consciousness, enlightenment, presence, being, all of these names for that thing that we actually recognize by smell more than by concept. All that is exists at a higher energetic state, at a higher state of vibrational presence within you.

And in order to discover, “What is oneness?” “What is compassion?” To see the field of mercy, to see that the veil between life and death is thinner than that. To see the bands of love forming coherently around a world that looks like it’s infinitely broken, is all right there, but it requires a higher state of being to see that. And that means a higher state of vibrant presence, known in our Christian tradition by the code word “vigilance” or “recollection.” And that is gained partly by attitude, but mostly by plugging the energy leaks. How do we stop

Because that question, “Where are your feet?”—and the connection with sensation, and through sensation, to three-brained balanced awareness—

is the gateway on which we’re actually going to be able to realize,

and the foundation on which we can realize, a more attained enlightened

consciousness.




running off our energy trying to chase after things that are small-self mirages. That you aren’t going to take with you anyway when you die?

That the working off our success, our building, our fame, our annuities, our stocks. What they do beyond pay for a few months in the care facilities when we come down with Alzheimer’s? Where does it go? What is our attention for? What are we here for? These are the questions that need to be held in our heart, but to be holding them in our heart requires a gathered enough attention to hold them there. And as long as we’re chasing our egoic desires of improving ourselves, achieving ourselves, dealing with our pain, dealing with these likes, dislikes, chatter, chatter, chatter. It’s like trying to hold water in a leaky bucket. So the work here is to begin to draw together that three-center base, foundation of presence, with which we can then begin to touch the mystical reality that is there, but just right above our heads energetically. Okay? That makes sense?

Introduction to Conscious Practical WorkWell, that segways into what we’re going to do. You’re about shortly to go out and do your first work period, where we’re actually going to shift the scene into practical work. And as you go there—and I’ll give you just a little rundown on the logistics in a minute, don’t worry I’ll take care of that—think about what we’re doing in terms of the talk we’ve just had on three-centered awareness.

What center would you say you’ve been mainly in during this talk? Yeah, can you sense it buzzing a little? Okay. If nothing else, moving out into the work is going to give you a chance to engage the moving center. To participate directly

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

What is our attention for? What are we here for? These are the questions

that need to be held in our heart, but to be holding them in our heart requires a gathered enough attention to hold

them there.




windows, and rhythm, of course, is right in the domain of the moving center. It’s a wonderful pathway for healing, for integration. And just being outside and filling your body with the air, with the sights, with the impressions of this place, which is still new and unfamiliar to most of you, can kick the emotional center online, too, as you become really, really truly alive in here.

What we’re walking out into is not a break from this talk. It’s a continuation of the work in another center. Okay? That clear? And you will get something out of it to the extent that you participate in it in that spirit. That we’re not goofing off. We’re not, “Oh, now the fun’s over I can close a notebook,” but that, “I am really inviting, lovingly, my moving center—my body—to join in full participation in this work of inner transformation.” That’s the first thing we’re going to be doing out there.

The second thing to keep aware of is that it gives you a chance, if you want to, to participate in the foundational skill of self-observation. In other words, if you look at all—and if you’ve got the courage and guts to look—you see very quickly how there’s something in us that really doesn’t like to stay present. We say we want presence, but then when somebody puts you there and says, “Well, here’s presence, go for it,” you say, “No, no, no I’d rather prefer that I use this time to just sort of go through the motions raking while I think about. …” Gotcha. In other words, I had a work teacher who once said that the chief feature of the ego is that it’s never here. We’re always either leaping ahead into what’s coming next, dragging back into, “Oh, this reminds me of that.” Or, lost in some sort of game of like and dislike: “This appeals to me; this doesn’t appeal to me.” Commentary: “This person’s doing it wrong.” “Oh, I know how to do it more efficiently.” You know that constant stream of chatter. We’re constantly running away from our own cell.

The great monastic tradition says, “Stay in your cell and it will teach you everything.” And our cell is really the “now.” It’s about that three seconds on either side—slice—of present before it drops into past or future. And if we can learn how to truly inhabit it without running off into thinking, thinking, thinking, imagining, daydreaming, fantasizing, comparing, manipulating, all of which belongs to which center? Intellectual. Yeah, you got it. Then we can give three-brained awareness a chance.

But you will discover if you’re honest that it’s hard. Virtually no people fall into conscious presence automatically. Simply because you can’t go from a lower state of being to a higher state of being automatically. It doesn’t happen. Yes, there are the odd mystical experiences that, combined temporarily, change things. But in order to move from a scattered and more dissipated out-of-yourself, out-of-your body thinking-about-what’s-next, judging-this—welcome-to-the-human-life—from that kind of state, to this more recollected one, we had to consciously engage our willingness and our will to be there. It’s work. We’re going against the grain of our own entropic disposition. See that and realize that in yourself.

To become conscious, you’re a salmon swimming upstream against the great autopilot of mechanical behaviors. And where the rubber is going to

The great monastic tradition says, “Stay in your cell and it will teach you everything.” And our cell is really the

“now.” It’s about that three seconds on either side—slice—of present before it

drops into past or future.




hit the road on that beautiful thought is when you’re out there and you’re thinking, “Well, how long till lunch?” “Then what can I do?” “Boy, this is boring, and I’ll bet they’re having more fun on that other …” And with a quiet, gentle laughter, “Aha, here we are again.” Forgive yourself immediately because this is built into your finite, physical carrier. That doesn’t mean you’re intended to stay there forever, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. This is how every single one of us is. This is where we not only start from, but have to return to again and again, and again, and again. And to bring that will into the moment. To bring the higher possibility. To work against that—so easy to drift into automaticity, so easy. That’s why we call it automaticity. Okay, that’s what we’re doing.

The idea is to see if you can, to some degree, begin to form an energetic unit as you help each other to stay on task with not just the outer work, which is unimportant really—it doesn’t need to be done—but the inner work. Can we stay present to why we’re here? Can we come back and can we help each other come back when we all drift off into our own personal oblivions? Okay? The ground rules are that your co-leaders will give you an inner task. You’ll start together and—hey, this is really important—you end together. Your co-leaders will tell you when the session is over. The session has been calibrated to be over in such time as to give you time to put your tools away, wash your hands, and go up to the lunch room.

Ending is ending, it doesn’t mean you finishing that last window or pulling out that last weed. And this is really important because many of us suffer in the West from workaholism. Addiction is when you can’t leave something. Leave it. Okay? We cannot be addicted to finishing—okay?—and still be conscious. That’s the basic ground rules. You’ll work together. Depending on what your leadership team wants to do, there may be times called for a stop when you, just for a moment, put down the tool you’re working with and pull yourself back consciously into recollection. Connect with being as it feels like being to you from the inside, and then move on.

But that’s what we’re going to be doing each day. In the course of the week, I’ll fit in what work looks like from the Benedictine perspective, but if we got to that point in the lecture before we started to work, the work would be packing your bags to go home already. [laughter] We’re going to throw you into the stream. Hang on to sensation, hang on to three-centered awareness, hang on to coming back.

A n Introductory W isdom S chool · Course Transcript & Companion Guide ix Community Support...

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Transcript of A n Introductory W isdom S chool · Course Transcript & Companion Guide ix Community Support...