Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault speaks at Montreat.

From Daily Planet Staff Reports

MONTREAT — Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault addressed “Wisdom” as the keynote speaker during a conference of the Association of Enneagram Teachers for about 90 minutes Oct. 27 at Montreat Conference Center’s Convocation Hall.

A nearly standing-room-only crowd of 300 people attended, with organizers noting that the audience includes AET conference attendees as well as many other “spiritual seekers.” Prior to the program, a book-signing, dinner and reception with Bourgeault was held.

Bourgeault, an ordained Episcopal priest, author and a leader in the movement to restore contemplation and Mary Magdalene to the Western Christian tradition, advocates the “wisdom way of knowing.” She has established a center in Aspen, Colo., called the Wisdom School. Bourgeault also is a chanter and drummer.

She is the author of seven books, including “The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman in the Heart of Christianity.” The book is billed as revealing the amount of thought that goes into choosing a word such as “wisdom.”

In beginning her talk, Bourgeault noted that “this is one of the largest audiences I’ve had a chance to talk to.” She then said that “the wisdom way of knowing” is the focus of her presentation, “but the wisdom of Mary Magdalene” is the inspiration.

Thus, she said, “The recovery of Christianity is dependent on the wisdom way of knowing. That’s the way Jesus” used it. “Wisdom means anything from the study of Hebrew scriptures to goddesses to esoteric texts.”

Bourgeault added, “It’s a path for spiritual transformation, which is known in all of the worlds’ great spiritual traditions ... You know it’s interesting that the place where all of the great traditions meet is not theology, but on the path.”
Also, she said, “The wisdom way of knowing is not knowing more things, but knowing deeper.”

In addressing the term “gnosis,” she said the traditional definition is “knowledge as secret information.” However, a “modern” definition is “that it’s internal knowing ... knowing on all four cylinders ... Knowing with the whole engine of your being.”

With a laugh, she quipped, “As in love-making, you’ve just got to be there” to understand the experience. The audience laughed.

Bourgeault said she has three “important ideas or concepts, central to the wisdom way of knowing. These form the core building blocks of the wisdom way of knowing.”

She said ordinary knowledge comes to an individual from the outside and is essentially one’s data bank. In contrast, direct knowing “is what you know intuitively. It goes through revelation — not from your schooling. You just know it in a direct way. Wisdom is always direct knowing.”

Bourgeault asked the audience to consider how much each person acts as a custodian of ordinary knowledge versus “boldly going with direct knowledge.”

“Our institutions encourage us to be the palace guardians of ordinary knowledge.”

She then listed what she termed “the greatest dangers of living with contemporary Christianity,” including the automatic assumption “that we’d recognize Jesus if he came” back to humanity and the process of using creeds, which makes people think that if they “master these statements of faith, then they’re in.”

The aforementioned made her realize that “it had to be something more seat-of-the-pants” to satisfy her spiritual quest.

“You have to make up your mind what do you know ... We have to take our bearings from something else. And ordinary knowing” is too limiting. In expanding her knowing, she found particularly enlightening the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), a Russian mystic and spiritual teacher credited with bringing many of the ideas of the East to the West. (Gurdjieff called his discipline “the Work, connoting “work on oneself” or the “Fourth Way.” At one point he described his teaching as “esoteric Christianity.”)

“In the ‘60s, the bumper sticker was ‘Question authority,’” she said. “In our wisdom tradition, it’s question assumptions.” For instance, Bourgeault asked, “How do you know that depression is anger turned inside out? That alcoholism is a disease? That an enneagram has nine personality types?”

In winding up her discussion of ordinary and direct knowing, Bourgeault said, “You can work with it as you like ... Always go through the inventory of periodic challenges of your core assumptions.”

She then turned back to Gurdjieff’s work, noting that, although “he was a great spiritual and esoteric teacher,” he also was “tough” on his students. Bourgeault credited Gurdjieff as being the first to promulgate the teaching of the enneagram, “but not as it is taught today.”

Bourgeault also said that “he did bring us some powerful teachings — work on yourself to bring yourself closer to knowing.”

She explained “the idea of three-centered knowing, including centers of moving, emotion and intellect. “It almost, but does not quite, equates ... For Gurdjieff, the movement center is the intelligence of perception ... Moving through gesture, through sacred dance.” He spoke of “the intelligence of movement.

“The emotional center,” which she described as “lightning fast,” does not quite translate into heart, Bourgeault noted. “It’s center is in the solar plexis region ... Our emotions get there faster than our mind does.” She said emotions are dragged don by negativity and identification, the latter of which she termed “making things all about me. There is a self-referential tendency.”

“Only when you get past these (negativity and identification) does the emotional center grow up,” she said. “Then you get to the center.”

Most commonly, “instead of the mind-heart cliché, we have mainly the emotional system run amok.” She noted that Gurdjieff insisted that people tend to pander to idiocy. “Only when all three systems are firing is there any chance of presence.”