Cynthia Bourgeault – Living on the Ray of Creation
The Ray of Creation is G.I. Gurdjieff’s sweeping remake of the Great Chain of Being, a metaphysical cornerstone of Western esotericism. The classic version of this model pictures the entire created order streaming out from the fiery epicenter of divine purpose in a descending cascade of “realms,” each one denser, more material, at a further remove from divine consciousness. With a few bold tweaks Gurdjieff transformed this “redshift” map into a dynamic and expressly evolutionary model of a mutually bootstrapping cosmos, capable of generating its own energy and stewarding its own conscious evolution through a series of energy exchanges between the realms.
This profoundly relational and hopeful vision will be the subject of Cynthia Bourgeault’s lecture, based on her recent book Eye of the Heart. A longtime student of both the Christian mystical tradition and the Gurdjieff work as well as an acclaimed teacher in her own right, she believes that this map reunites both of these spiritual traditions at their respective high points—in their demand for self-surrender in service of a greater whole, and in their emphasis that this realm, our fragile and beleaguered earth, for all its frustrations and failings, is still precious to the divine purposes and in fact has a crucial role to play in generating and maintaining that counter-entropic evolutionary current flowing upward along the great chain of being, on which the stability of the entire metaverse depends. Our home is not simply the planet earth; our home is entire Ray of Creation, and how we rise to comprehend this is not simply about our personal spiritual evolution; it is our fundamental human purpose and task.
This is big-picture thinking for sure, but Bourgeault’s talk will remain grounded in the practical and strategic. The purpose of this exploration is not to spin Prospero’s castles of imaginal fantasy, but to lay out a solid and doable path out of the morass of human despair that seems to be steadily engulfing our planet; a path founded on a collective reclamation of our fundamental human purpose and responsibility. Together, let’s attempt to rekindle a vision high and wide and broad and deep enough to contain the human heart and to take our first collective steps along it.
CYNTHIA BOURGEAULT is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude and sailing the waters around her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. Cynthia is a core faculty emeritus at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has been honored by the annual Watkins Review as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.
Speaker
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Cynthia BourgeaultEpiscopal Priest, TheologianCynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, and theologian. For thirty years she worked closely with Fr. Thomas Keating as a student, editor, and colleague and has taught and written extensively on Centering Prayer. She is a core faculty member at the Center for Action and Contemplation and founding director of an international network of Wisdom Schools. In addition to her work on Centering Prayer, she is the author of numerous other books on the Christian Mystical and Wisdom tradition, including The Wisdom Jesus, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, and her most recent, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm.
