Cynthia Bourgeault Points Five through Eight on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage

[Part 2 of 2] In response to several of her students asking from where this particular stream of Wisdom arose, Cynthia came up with eight core founding guiding principles of this particular Wisdom lineage. In these videos she defines and describes how this particular tradition got formed, how it came together, and more deeply explores her eight points, and what distinguishes this path from other wisdom paths. (See her other video for Points 1-4)

[@kaybochert3568]

Cynthia, I am honored and thrilled to read and listen to your explication of your Wisdom Tradition. My first Wisdom School was at St. John's in Collegeville with Hilary ... former Abbott.
Since then I have been looking for the same wisdom in many places and have always gone back to your books and writings. In hearing this I know that this is where I belong.
Thank you for giving us permission to move beyond our own psychological work and grow into what we are made for. (#7) My plan has been to start a Wisdom Circle here in the Twin Cities but I get mostly empty faces in response. Now that I have a blueprint of what such a circle can look like I am more encouraged.
How do I stay within these teachings? Is there a mailing list or website I should persue?
Thank you again for this wonderfully encouraging piece for those of us who are ready for more.
Love is what it is all about,
Kay

[@slowwco]

The Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage (Points 5-8):
5. “In contrast to many branches of the wisdom tradition based on Perennial or Traditionalist metaphysics (with its inherently binary and anti-material slant), we are emphatically a Teilhardian, Trinitarian lineage, embracing asymmetry (threeness), evolution, and incarnation in all their material fullness and messiness … Wisdom assumes in a very fundamental way the shape of its container … The direction in which the divine is manifest in this world is not by sucking us back into an eternal spirit but by birthing ever new, and more complex, and more intricate, and messy forms-the journey is always through matter into new forms … Ours is one that embraces threefoldness as we see it in the trinity-asymmetry and movement into the world, the basic evolutionary stance, as foundational to our understanding of how love becomes incarnate and present in the world.” - Cynthia Bourgeault
6. “We are moving steadily in the direction of revisioning contemplation no longer in terms of monastic, otherworldly models prioritizing silence and repose, but rather, as a way of honing consciousness and compassion so as to be able to fully engage the world and become active participants in its transition to the higher collectivity, the next evolutionary unfolding. We see contemplation as a tool of luminous seeing, not as a lifestyle … The contemplation, the inner work, is the ground for a deeper seeing, and in that seeing, a participation in this evolutionary journey of our planet and of our universe toward the fullness of love.” - Cynthia Bourgeault
7. “We are an integral school, not a pluralistic one (to draw on Ken Wilber’s levels of consciousness); our primary mission field is teal, not green. Our work concentrates not at the level of healing the false self, woundedness and recovery, substance abuse, equal rights, restorative justice or political correctness (although we acknowledge the importance of all of these initiatives), but rather at the level of guiding the transition from identity based primarily in the narrative or egoic self to identity stabilized at the level of witnessing presence, or ‘permeably boundaried’ selfhood. While we are open to the world, we’re not an issue-driven school … Since it's work that still is, by and large, undertaken out of the finite sense of selfhood and the narrative selfhood, it's very vulnerable to the shadow side … What the wisdom schools have traditionally attempted to do is shift the center of selfhood out of which we work … You have to carry your selfhood in a different place. You have to move beyond the agenda of healing the false self, finding the true self, stepping beyond all that finite selfhood, and begin to learn to live stably in what the great traditions have called the ‘witnessing self’-a self which is more spacious, which has one foot in this realm and one foot in the next, in terms not of heaven after you die, but in terms of the greater cosmic coherence and can mediate between the two of them.” - Cynthia Bourgeault
8. “Our most important teachers and teachings are Jesus, St. Benedict, The canonical and Wisdom gospels (Gnostic gospels, The Gospel of Thomas, etc); The Cloud of Unknowing, the greater Christian mystical and visionary tradition (including Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Ladislaus Boros, Bernadette Roberts), the Desert and Hesychastic traditions; Bede Griffiths and the Christian Advaitic traditions (including Raimon Panikkar, Henri LeSaux/Abishiktananda and Bruno Barnhart); Rumi, Sufism, G.I. Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. And of course my own teacher, Br. Raphael Robin.” - Cynthia Bourgeault