“I have thrown fire on the world. Look! I watch it until it blazes!”
Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas.
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WERE YOU EVER IN A STATE of comfortable assurance that everything was going right on schedule when something crops us that threatens to disrupt your schedule and prevent you from reaching your destination or goal on time — then a surprising event springs up, seemingly out of nowhere, that resolves the impasse and you’re on you way to a timely arrival? Well, such synchronicity is basically what Gurdjieff’s “Third Force” dynamics is all about. But let me share Cynthia Bourgeault’s interpretations and demonstrations of the “Law of Three” from her “exquisitely written love story,” EYE OF THE HEART.
THIRD FORCE
According to the Law of Three, all new arisings in whatever domain and at whatever scale are caused by the interweaving of three independent forces (not just two), which Gurdjieff calls affirming, denying, and reconciling. Where there are just two, there is impasse, and situations logjam. But since it is the nature of life in the created order, flowing as it does out of world 3, to be continuously moving and shapeshifting, third force enters. Impasses break up. New configurations emerge, for better or worse. This will either happen randomly, under the law of accident, or it will happen intentionally, under the law of fate. In the latter case it is an imaginally generated new arising, and the conscious circle often has a distinctive role to play.
Third force is a bit like quicksilver itself; under various lights it can appear to be generated, invoked, midwifed, or discovered in a situation — or it can emerge, seemingly out of left field, through a random event or “coincidence.” The conscious circle can be deployed in any of these directions. While generally its role seems to be to maintain that deep reservoir of spacious, nonidentified attentiveness out of which third force most spontaneously arises, every so often it finds itself functioning directly as third force itself, providing that requisite bridging element that breaks up the logjam and ushers in the new configuration.
The history of civilization is marked by a few great turning points, when things which had apparently been moving in one direction suddenly shift course and move in another, often under mysterious circumstances. I do not want to fall into a magical retelling of history here, where every miraculous plot twist is taken as evidence of imaginal intervention. But as I ponder how third force has played out at some of these significant crossroads in human history, I would like to share three stories, all of them basically anecdotal, that appear to me to bear the particular fragrance of conscious-circle involvement.
The first story was told to me many years ago by my dear friend and teacher Murat Yagan, who trained extensively in the Abkhazian shamanic and Bektashi dervish lineages before emigrating to Canada in 1960 to take up work as a teacher of the deeper imaginal roots of the Western Inner tradition. According to Murat — and he was adamant about this — the origins of Sufism predate Islam and in fact lie in “the order of Melchizedek,” or in other words, directly in the imaginal realm. The marriage of these two spiritualities was effected only in the ninth century through the deliberate intervention of a Central Asian Wisdom council, which directly foresaw that the external container of Islam would be the only vessel strong enough to withstand the devastation shortly to be unleashed by Mongol invasions. Moving quickly to protect a tender shoot of human consciousness beginning to bud in Central Asia, the council effected a union so sturdy that to this day the standard version of Islamic history claims that Sufism is simply “the mystical arm of Islam,” generated entirely within an Islamic matrix.
Sometimes initial calamities, once viewed from the perspective of the conscious circle, begin to make sense in a whole different way. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 is just such an example and furnishes my second story. On the one hand, this violent act of aggression broke up a Wisdom enclave of almost supernatural purity and power. On the other hand, it displaced this Wisdom to the West, where it was sorely needed and well positioned to grow the entire world. As the Dalai Lama, Lama Yeshe, and others of that remarkable lineage made their way to Dharamshala and points west, the cross-pollination began in earnest, and the reinfusion of energy into the West’s own contemplative traditions has laid a sturdy global foundation for the second axial awakening. . . .
“IS PARIS BURNING?”
My third story may be my own fantasy, but only the last connection; all the rest up to that point is verifiably true. During the dark days of World War II, when most spiritual teachers were fleeing for refuge to less war-torn places, Gurdjieff elected to stay put in Paris, in his tiny flat less than a quarter of a mile as the crow flies from the central command post of the German occupation. And in this bitter season of deprivation and hopelessness, he set about generating intentionally the energy of abundance, the missing element in a desperately traumatized world. Using skills he had gained who knows how, he managed to acquire huge stockpiles of food — not just basic staples always available in an unlocked pantry, but elegant luxuries, Armagnac and chocolates, served up in lavish banquets in an atmosphere suffused with the limitless possibility of the human spirit. Those who still remember those banquets know full well that the real food being served was love. . . .
Just over the hill, in the place de la Concorde, during the summer of 1944, the noose was tightening on the Nazi occupation. The American troops had landed in Normandy and were steadily making their way toward Paris. An elaborate scheme had been set in place by those leading the German evacuation that would have left behind a swath of destruction obliterating some of the great monuments of human culture. Dietrich von Choltitz, a general widely known for his ruthlessness, was in charge of the operations. Explosives were placed under Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre. It is all detailed in the book Is Paris Burning?”
Somehow, it never happened. The reasons are still not clear. There was never a moment when it was decided not to blow up Paris. There were negotiations and communications right up to the end, but no moment of decision. Like the tide turning, the moment simply receded.
I could never prove that there was a connection between these two events. But knowing how imaginal causality works and Gurdjieff’s skills in this realm, I cannot not believe it. In my heart I still fiercely hold it as his greatest gift to our West, and I offer up my prayers of gratitude. I will count him forever among the thirty-six.
LOVE CASTING
The “thirty-six” relates to the Hasidic folklore cited in a previous post which claims that our world is held in its planetary orbit by thirty-six conscious human beings, whose work is of such a fine quality as to “rise like incense into the earth’s atmosphere” creating a “sturdy bandwidth of protection, blessing, and guidance.” This, in essence, describes the nature and function of Gurdjieff’s “conscious circle of humanity.”
The number 36 is of course symbolic and can represent a group of individuals as well as individual groups of people, many of which have convened together to form what some are describing as “love casting” circles. I am a participant in a few of them myself. Modern technology today allows us to gather via Zoom conferences, which makes our conscious awareness of one another and of our work more visible and generative.
If you think that you would like to participate is such a love casting circle, drop me an email for more information and contact references. One of my group coordinators is in Jerusalem, another in Toronto and a third in Hawaii. Then there are smaller circles of light workers who “meet in the field” weekly at various times — the “field” being Rumi’s realm in consciousness “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing” where Rumi says : “I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense.”
THIRD FORCE INTERVENTION
“Even from the days of your fathers ye have gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return to me and I will return to you, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Malachi 3:7)
The rest of that passage is relevant today:
“But ye said, Wherein shall we return? Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I shall rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field saith the LORD of hosts. And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.” (Malachi 3:7-12)
Our world is cursed with a plague that is destroying the lives of our children, our youth, and our elders. With over twenty wars currently waging globally, and the pending threat of nuclear annihilation, this civilization is on a fast track to self destruction. Not the planet, just the mind-made world on its surface.
God loves this world so much that He sent His only begotten Son to save it from destruction. His coming was as a third force at a time when affirmation of the promise of a Messiah by the prophets and sacred scripture was strong in the minds and hearts of the people, and denial of the truth of the oneness of heaven and earth was strong as well. He came to reconcile the separation between His Father in Heaven and His children on earth, and to restore our consciousness to the awareness of the presence of the Kingdom on Heaven within us and all around us.
But His “Third Force” intervention in the downward path humanity was on at that time occurred on the cross when he cheated death and then, as though from out of left field — although He had forecasted His resurrection — He rose from the tomb, and in so doing altered the course of human history.
Third Force intervention is happening again today in what is called ” The Second Coming of Christ.” Only this time it’s happening in and through a collective body of chosen ones, incarnate angels who have come here to prepare the way for His coming on the clouds of heavenly human consciousness by casting the fire of love into the world and thereby generating the spiritual plasma needed to accommodate the transmission of the Christ Spirit into the world. I repeat His words recorded in the Gospel of Thomas:
“I have thrown fire on the world. Look! I watch it until it blazes.”
That fire of love is beginning to blaze, as the words of this poem by Martin Cecil proclaim:
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THUS IT IS
From age to age
Love’s word rings forth,
“The truth is true and all is well,
Unconquerable life prevails.”
Oh, man, whose strident dreams
Lead gravewards,
Return to calm and noble
Character of life.
Blaze forth pure virtue.
Depart false ambition’s restless schemes.
Busy thought and troubled feeling
Trespass not in virtue’s wise serenity
Where firm control and awful power
Eternally abide.
Here earth’s pains are healed
And cruel chaos of mind’s spawning
Is called again to order and to beauty.
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Let’s make our world a “delightsome land” again, by returning the tithes of our heart’s love to the One whose world this is, the LORD of hosts. For it’s through our hearts that His Spirit returns to this earthly realm.
I welcome any thoughts you may have in response to this post and wish to share. Until my next post,
be love . . . be loved.
Anthony
tpal70@gmail.com