Cynthia Bourgeault - Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm

EYE OF THE HEART

Eye of the Heart is an immensely original piece of thinking, feeling, writing. There is nothing like it. It opens new terrain, plants new seeds, starts them on their way toward the light.

R OGER L IPSEY , author of Gurdjieff Reconsidered

By weaving together mystical wisdom, the Fourth Way, and the authority of her own experience, Cynthia Bourgeault masterfully charts a new path of interior transformation through the hearts ability to know and choose the way of love and service. I learned a lot from this book, and I bet you will too.

C ARL M C C OLMAN , author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism

Reading Eye of the Heart is a powerful and clarifying experience. The weaving of personal, metaphysical, and contemporary political insights is amazing, seamless, and intercessory in and of itself. We need this kind of weaving and interpenetrating in our culture just as we need it between the realms.

T IMOTHY S HRIVER , author of Fully Alive

If ever there was a teacher who could gather the reins of the mind to gallop into the land of the heart (and take us with her), it is Cynthia Bourgeault. This exquisitely written love story distills the intricacies of the esoteric Western traditions into a transformational elixirboth rigorous and luminoussimultaneously intoxicating and sobering. This book is nothing less than a map to the meeting of the worlds at the crossroads of our own souls, one the mapmaker urges us to abandon the minute our heart sees the way.

M IRABAI S TARR , author of Wild Mercy

In Eye of the Heart Cynthia Bourgeault invites us on a journey that is profoundly personal and opens us to a truly fresh and panoramic vision of the purpose of human existence. In bringing to our attention the importance of the imaginal realmsthe levels of consciousness between our physical reality and our ultimate divine sourceshe fills an enormous gap in the current conversations on spirituality. Cynthia has an amazing ability to take potentially complex ideas and to explain them with clarity and kindness. Only someone who has actually traversed these realms and knows them well could accomplish such a feat, and she does so with beauty and grace. Any serious student of the Western traditions ought to partake of these teachings. You will be grateful you did!

R USS H UDSON , co-author of The Wisdom of the Enneagram

A brilliant synthesis that both situates the imaginal world and gives it more meaning than it has previously had. [Bourgeault] is a true representative of the Western spiritual tradition.

from the afterword by A.H. A LMAAS

A LSO BY C YNTHIA B OURGEAULT

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

Chanting the Psalms

The Heart of Centering Prayer:

Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice

The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three:

Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity

Love Is Stronger Than Death:

The Mystical Union of Two Souls

The Meaning of Mary Magdalene:

Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity

Mystical Hope:

Trusting in the Mercy of God

The Wisdom Jesus:

Transforming Heart and MindA New Perspective on Christ and His Message

The Wisdom Way of Knowing:

Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

4720 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301

www.shambhala.com

2020 by Cynthia Bourgeault

it may not always be so; and i say. 1923, 1951, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. 1976 by George James Firmage, from Complete Poems: 19041962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Cover art: photo: Sunset Sailboat 1 by Scott Holstein

Cover design: Erin Seaward-Hiatt

Interior design: Claudine Mansour Design

Illustrations: Andrew Breitenberg

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bourgeault, Cynthia, author.

Title: Eye of the heart: a spiritual journey into the imaginal realm / Cynthia Bourgeault.

Description: First edition. | Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2020. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019042163 | ISBN 9781611806526 (trade paperback)

eISBN 9780834843097

Subjects: LCSH: Spirituality. | Spiritual life.

Classification: LCC BL624 .B626 2020 | DDC 204.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042163

a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

To you, John Kontsas

Despite and because of everything

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.

T. S. E LIOT , East Coker (in The Four Quartets)

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

T HIS BOOK , LONG percolating on the back burner of my mind, was finally torn out of me in the aftermath of a beautiful but brief relationship that left my heart broken wide open to the cosmos. Some of you will shake your heads and say I wrote it simply to process my grief. But if the subject Im tackling herethe imaginal realm and its mysterious causalityis in fact the chief operative, then its probably the other way around: the relationship came into my life in order to tease out of me this book. Grief is not the bottom line here, only the alchemical fire. Transfiguration is the bottom line. To John Kontsas, my soulmate for a season, I owe more than I can ever say. You named your boat Zoi, Greek for life, and life is what you gave mea good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.

Because this book was indeed written substantially in the heat of fusion (in two intense six-week bursts bracketing the summer of 2018), I should perhaps call your attention to a couple of slightly unusual features of its structure, a product of the essentially visionary modality through which it came to be. The book is an exploration of the imaginal realm to be sure, but it is not a scholarly tome. One part spiritual memoir, two parts exegesis, and one part extended prose poem, it is an effort not only to describe that other intensity (as T. S. Eliot calls it) but more importantly, to evoke it. You will enter the world of this book more comfortably through the gateway of literature than through the gateway of mental speculation. The main part of the work (chapters 1 through 9 exploring various aspects of imaginal reality) is bookended by the story of my own death and transfiguration in the wreckage of a deeply hoped for but ultimately doomed love. And while you can skip over this story and begin at chapter 1, I hope you wont; the depth dimension grows out of the interweaving of the two parts.

The chapters are themselves interwoven with four shorter reflections that I call tropes. In medieval musicology a trope is a short, lyrical piece attached to a larger element (like a scriptural reading or liturgical text) whose purpose is to comment on and accentuate the larger element, which is exactly how these little tropes are intended to work. They are not fully a part of the chapter they are paired with (and they resisted all efforts to shoehorn them into that format), but in their tangential positioning, they draw out deeper and more feelingful shades of meaning at work beneath the cognitive surface of the chapters themselves.