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This is the last in an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that Cynthia prepared from what she calls "one of the best things I have ever written." It began on Sunday January 12, 2020, with posts every Sunday and Wednesday during the season of Epiphany. See links for previous postings, and more about the book how I saw God in everyone and everything, at the end of this post. Please share your reflections about the entire series in Comments! Throughout the essay "I Am Not a Space that God Does Not Occupy," Cynthia deftly weaves her personal inner experience and dynamic relationship with God and life—from the time of her childhood to the present—with that of our common human history of consciousness. In Part VII, she shares how initially it was her personal trajectory with Centering Prayer that led her to a clearer seeing and experience of what it is to perceive with the eye of the heart. Tracing the profound nature of Jesus' own words, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God," into the consciousness of our times; Cynthia opens and concludes Part VII with contemporary words of Wisdom. "See or perish," says

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This is Part VII of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020, with posts every Sunday and Wednesday during the season of Epiphany. Look for the last post Wednesday, February 5th; and see links for previous postings and more at the end of this post. Please share your reflections in Comments!In Part VI, Cynthia continues with the history of consciousness, confessing her "profound honor" of both the Old and New Testaments, while sharing Barbara Brown Taylor's answer to the question, "Where is God in this picture?" In light of a God who "is the web… (is) revealed in that singular, vast net of relationships that animates everything that is," Cynthia goes further to say, "Scripture does indeed contain all things necessary to salvation, but only if we keep writing it. And to keep writing it means—as all the prophets from Abraham on have consistently proclaimed—to be willing to leave all known reference points behind in order to ride that arrowhead of evolution relentlessly toward the next unfolding." VII Seeing “Voir or périr,” wrote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his searing prologue to The Human Phenomenon: “See or perish.” In the end, it’s

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This is Part VI of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020, with posts every Sunday and Wednesday during the season of Epiphany. Please share your reflections in Comments! In Part V Cynthia outlines the history of consciousness in a trajectory as relevant to world culture as to individuals. With an example from her own life of her ever-evolving relationship with the true nature and power of scripture she says: "…then I looked upon it as the unchanging revelation of the one true God. Now I look at it as an extraordinary, sacred archive of the evolution of human consciousness." Opening further while relating her public profession of the Holy Bible as "container of all things necessary to salvation," she claims the same of a stone, "in this holy, God-infused universe of ours when we truly open our hearts to it." Cynthia then uses scripture to deftly track consciousness from magical to mythic through rational to integral. "This is where Jesus takes up the story," she says. "As far as the West is concerned, he is indisputably the first to model a fully attained nondual consciousness."   VI. A Brief History of

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This is Part V of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020, with posts every Sunday and Wednesday during the season of Epiphany. Please share your reflections in the Comments section below. In Parts III and IV, Cynthia introduces us to her own opening through Raimon Panikkar, noting in Part IV his observation that the biggest threat that Jesus represented to the powers that be, was his "filiation" to God —"this unauthorized prophet was standing too close." Panikkar's theological vision of a moving, intercirculating, mutually infusing world of worlds, includes us all: we are each and all part of a cosmotheandric universe where, as Cynthia discovers, "God is not a first cause, not an explanation, but rather meaning itself, throbbing through the entire dynamism, suffusing the attuned heart like the air we breathe, like the atoms still reverberating in our bodies from the big bang." V. A Brief History of Consciousness “I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the Word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” It is the occasion of my ordination to the Episcopal priesthood,

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This is Part IV of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020, with two posts weekly, Sundays and Wednesdays, during the season of Epiphany. You are invited to share your responses in the Comments section below; and check out the end of this post for Cynthia’s introductory message to this series! In "Part III: Panikkar," Cynthia recalls first reading Panikkar's Christophany—her heart being "blown wide open by this theologically exacting yet breathtakingly nondual rendition of the Christian mystical vision." Panikkar offered new origin to the Trinity; and gave us a new word: "Jesus’ experience of God was cosmotheandric, the infinite and the finite continuously interabiding one another, dynamically changing places through a process of continuing self-giving, or kenosis." The stunning vision of the Trinity that emerges from Jesus' experience—the "Abba, Father" pole on the one hand, and the "I and the Father are One" pole on the other—comes into motion with the third of Jesus' master sayings, "It is good that I leave." This new vision reveals a beautiful movement of active infusion, an intercirculation of realms, which Panikkar sees as World—God—Human in abundant, dynamic relationship. Panikkar affirms theologically what science calls

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This is Part III of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began on Sunday January 12, 2020. Cynthia introduced the series with this message:               “Dear Wisdom Friends, As the new decade gets underway, it feels like an appropriate moment to share one of my earlier essays, which is still to my mind one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was originally published in the 2018 anthology, how I found GOD in everyone and everywhere.                   I will be sharing my entire essay in eight successive posts, which will be headed your way in bite-sized doses over the upcoming season of Epiphany. I look forward to you sharing your reflections in the Comments section. Enjoy! And Happy New Year!!! May this "year of perfect vision” indeed shed some new light.”   In "Part II: Panentheism," Cynthia remembers how frequently she met resistance teaching Centering Prayer with its understanding of levels of consciousness: "Clearly the whole notion of a divine indwelling, for all its certifiable theological orthodoxy, continues to make many traditionally reared Christians squirm." Inevitably, the word "panentheist" would come up, a term which Cynthia says, "like a 'jet airplane'… tries to define itself in terms of a prior

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This is Part II of an eight-part Northeast Wisdom Home Page Blog series that began with “Part I. The Light Within” posted Sunday January 12, 2020. Cynthia introduced the series with this message:   “Dear Wisdom Friends, As the new decade gets underway, it feels like an appropriate moment to share one of my earlier essays, which is still to my mind one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was originally published in the 2018 anthology, how I found GOD in everyone and everywhere. I will be sharing my entire essay in eight successive posts, which will be headed your way in bite-sized doses over the upcoming season of Epiphany. I look forward to you sharing your reflections in the Comments section. Enjoy! And Happy New Year!!!  May this "year of perfect vision” indeed shed some new light.”  In "Part I: The Light Within," Cynthia shares an experience of an immediate knowing that she had as a young child, one evening in the sunset light of a pumpkin field: “…this holy, intimate radiance suffusing the picture was in me and in everything, if for no other reason than because it was from the inside that all of this seemed to

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Dear Wisdom Friends, As the new decade gets underway, it feels like an appropriate moment to share one of my earlier essays, which is still to my mind one of the best things I’ve ever written. It was originally published in the 2018 anthology, How I found GOD in Everyone and Everywhere, edited by Claremont School of Theology faculty members Andrew M. Davis and Philip Clayton and published by Monkfish, our intrepid publishing partner here in Northeast Wisdomland! Compiled in honor of Marcus Borg, this anthology is broadly structured around the theme of Panentheism and features the usual suspects among Christian nondual teachers, including my colleagues Richard Rohr, Matthew Fox, and Ilia Delio. It's well worth a read in its entirety.                 I will be sharing my entire essay in eight successive posts, which will be headed your way in bite-sized doses over the upcoming season of Epiphany. Part II will be posted here on Wednesday January 15. Look for the next posts to follow Sundays and Wednesdays through January and into early February. I look forward to you sharing your reflections in the Comments section. Enjoy! And Happy New Year!!! May this "year of perfect vision” indeed shed some new

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Dear Wisdom Friends, Our FOURTH annual Maine Wisdom InGathering is now officially open for registration. The dates are May 30 through June 5, 2020. Mark it on your calendar! Once again we are delighted to offer a relaxed, affordable, family-friendly Wisdom School in the heart of scenic Stonington, Maine. This year’s program will feature our signature blend of daily teaching, meditation, chanting, body prayer, and conscious practical work, as well as generous unprogrammed time for exploring the natural paradise here and reconnecting with old friends. This year, our ever-popular “adventure day” will come at the end of the week, on June 5. Once again, we are pleased to be able to offer children’s programming as an integral part of our Wisdom work together. Our theme this year is 2020: HONORING THE YEAR OF PERFECT VISION. The morning teachings will feature a “sneak peek” into my forthcoming (September 2020) book, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal World, where we explore some powerful new perspectives for working skillfully in a world apparently hopelessly divided and gridlocked. In the afternoons we will bore into some of the deeper practical applications of this vision as Matthew Wright leads us once

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Northeast Wisdom is offering the timeless and succinct Cynthia Bourgeault classic, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, as the subject of a book discussion group beginning January 28 with live monthly Zoom meetings through June. Much more than an introductory book–though it is excellent in that capacity–The Wisdom Way of Knowing serves as a perpetual source of foundational Wisdom, one that is returned to again and again by Wisdom practitioners of all kinds.                                                                                          In Cynthia's words, "The purpose of this book is to try to get back to the original containers. I want to introduce you to the Wisdom tradition itself…as its own clear vision of human purpose and the practical technologies for getting there…to show you how to use the teachings of Wisdom to transform your own life." More information and how to register is provided at the end of this post. Join us! When the Northeast Wisdom Council first considered this book study on Cynthia Bourgeault’s, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, I was the quickest to volunteer to write a companion piece. Thus, I got Chapter One! The reason I was so fast to volunteer is that this book has

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