The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (Cynthia Bourgeault)
A Blind Woman Examining an Elephant
[My 1-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth of Christianity” by Cynthia Bourgeault.]
I have written two books deconstructing Eckhart Tolles’s teachings, and I could write another book deconstructing Bourgeault’s. Virtually everything she writes is crap, and the challenge for me is to delimit my review, to decide which crap to “crucify.”
According to Bourgeault,”Spirit embodies a “feminine” way of knowing and being.” No it doesn’t. As I point out in my new book on Christianity/Christian mysticism, “the fact that the grammatical gender of the word “Spirit” is masculine in Latin (“Spiritus”), feminine in Hebrew (“Ruach HaKodesh”), and neuter in Greek (“Pneuma”) tells us that God’s Energy can be thought of as male, female, or neither.”
Bourgeault writes, “I have startled several people by suggesting that the Trinity might actually be seen as the Christian equivalent of East’s symbol of yin/yang.” Not a good analogy. The Buddhist equivalent of the Holy Trinity is the Trikaya (or Triple Body)—Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakya—and the Hindu one is the Triad of Siva, Shakti, Jiva. Yin and yang pertain to polarized--or receptive (or “feminine”) and aggressive (or “masculine”)—cosmic energies or dispositions, not to hyper-cosmic “persons,” hypostases,” or “bodies.” But Bourgeault, a compartmentalized pseudo-scholar, never ventures into Buddhist and Hindu tantrism, which hold the key to unlocking the secrets of the Christian Trinity.
In reality, the “Father” (Dharmakaya, or Siva) is universal, transcendental Consciousness (Awareness, or Mind); the Holy Spirit (Sambhogakaya, or Shakti) is uncreated Clear Light-Energy; and the Son (Nirmanakaya, or Jiva) is the divinized, or en-Light-ened, psycho-physical vehicle in which the Father (timeless, spaceless Awareness) and the “Virgin” Mother (unborn Clear Light-Energy) unite and “shine” as the Incarnation of the Divine.
Bourgeault, I believe, has her doctorate in divinity or theology, but she has no idea what “Divine” means. “Divine,”(Di-vine) pertains to the two “vines,” or “dimensions,” of the Godhead. And these two vines in relation to, or in conjunction with, the human-incarnational “dimension” or “person” constitute the Trinity. The two “vines” of the Di-vine are Consciousness (or Mind, or Awareness, or Presence) and Energy (or Spirit, or Power). True Trinitarian spirituality, real Christian yoga, is about uniting these two vines in the human soul (located, relative to the body, in the heart-center). And when this Di-vine union takes place in the human soul, the now uncontracted Soul, or Son, the “Product” of this union, emerges as the God-man, the incarnation of the Divine.
Bourgeault, a chaotic thinker and circumlocutory writer, cannot limit her discourse to the Holy Trinity. Instead, she introduces multiple Trinities—the Unfolding Trinity, The Messianic Trinity, the Sophianic Trinity, the Pentecostal Trinity, the Sophianic Trinity, the Reflexive Trinity, the Economy Trinity, and the Incarnational Trinity—and none of these reductive “models” enables her to even begin to fathom what the Holy Trinity is really about. “Holy” means “Sacred, which means “not of this world or universe,” which means timeless and spaceless. The Holy Trinity is an esoteric spiritual paradigm that informs the cognoscenti that a single “Substance” of Mind or Consciousness has morphed, or “phased,” into uncreated Light-Energy or Spirit, and that an incarnated, divinized, human being can realize himself as consubstantial, or coessential, with this, ultimately indivisible, “Two-Vine” Reality of Mind-Energy, or Consciousness-Spirit.
To bolster her credibility as an esotericist, Bourgeault informs us that she spent ten years studying the “Fourth Way” of the renowned spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff (1866-1949). Then she proceeds to base the bulk of her thesis on Gurdjieff’s nonsensical, byzantine cosmological crap. I too have studied Gurdjieff and his foremost interpreter, P.D. Ouspensky, but I was smart enough to have limited my involvement with these teachings to just several weeks. Then I moved on to real esoteric spirituality—Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, Ramana Maharshi, Christian Hermeticism, et al. Anyone interested in my critical assessment of Gurdjieff’s teachings should check out my Amazon two-star of review of “In Search of the Miraculous,” by P.D. Ouspensky.
Bourgeault, like many other “associates” of Ken Wilber, the most-overrated philosopher alive, thinks she’s wise and ”integral” because she integrates the Enneagram and other Gurdjieffian typology “tools” into her spiritual “toolbox.” The Enneagram derives from Astrology, which is a quantum leap better tool for self-understanding. But Bourgeault, a circumscribed thinker, has no idea that every one of her typology “tools” is subsumed by a greater, or more “integral,” one.
In her book, Bourgeault periodically refers to Valentin Tomberg and his magisterial text “Meditations on the Tarot”—but she conveniently fails to mention the fact that Tomberg, a Christian mystic with a commendable understanding of the the Trinity and the Eucharist, rejected Gurdjieff and his teachings. Instead of, intelligently, basing her arguments on Tomberg’s “Meditations,” Bourgeault tries to fit a square peg into a round hole by using Gurdjieff’s Sufi-based cosmology to explicate the Christian Trinity—and the result is an exegetical disaster.
Borgeault might impress the ignorant with her “Tower of Babble” metaphysics and mysticism, but anyone with a deep and wide background in the spiritual field will dismiss her as a deluded “head tripper.” It is obvious from all sorts of details that she hasn’t been baptized, or initiated, by the Spirit. Nothing in her stilted, pretetentious academic-type writings indicates any grasp of true, or esoteric, Eucharistic spirituality, without which a clear understanding of the Holy Trinity isn’t possible.
In summary, Bourgeault does NOT discover “the radical truth at the heart of Christianity. Rather, she reveals herself as a blind woman examining the “Elephant,” a.k.a. the Holy Trinity.
[My 1-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth of Christianity” by Cynthia Bourgeault.]
I have written two books deconstructing Eckhart Tolles’s teachings, and I could write another book deconstructing Bourgeault’s. Virtually everything she writes is crap, and the challenge for me is to delimit my review, to decide which crap to “crucify.”
According to Bourgeault,”Spirit embodies a “feminine” way of knowing and being.” No it doesn’t. As I point out in my new book on Christianity/Christian mysticism, “the fact that the grammatical gender of the word “Spirit” is masculine in Latin (“Spiritus”), feminine in Hebrew (“Ruach HaKodesh”), and neuter in Greek (“Pneuma”) tells us that God’s Energy can be thought of as male, female, or neither.”
Bourgeault writes, “I have startled several people by suggesting that the Trinity might actually be seen as the Christian equivalent of East’s symbol of yin/yang.” Not a good analogy. The Buddhist equivalent of the Holy Trinity is the Trikaya (or Triple Body)—Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, Nirmanakya—and the Hindu one is the Triad of Siva, Shakti, Jiva. Yin and yang pertain to polarized--or receptive (or “feminine”) and aggressive (or “masculine”)—cosmic energies or dispositions, not to hyper-cosmic “persons,” hypostases,” or “bodies.” But Bourgeault, a compartmentalized pseudo-scholar, never ventures into Buddhist and Hindu tantrism, which hold the key to unlocking the secrets of the Christian Trinity.
In reality, the “Father” (Dharmakaya, or Siva) is universal, transcendental Consciousness (Awareness, or Mind); the Holy Spirit (Sambhogakaya, or Shakti) is uncreated Clear Light-Energy; and the Son (Nirmanakaya, or Jiva) is the divinized, or en-Light-ened, psycho-physical vehicle in which the Father (timeless, spaceless Awareness) and the “Virgin” Mother (unborn Clear Light-Energy) unite and “shine” as the Incarnation of the Divine.
Bourgeault, I believe, has her doctorate in divinity or theology, but she has no idea what “Divine” means. “Divine,”(Di-vine) pertains to the two “vines,” or “dimensions,” of the Godhead. And these two vines in relation to, or in conjunction with, the human-incarnational “dimension” or “person” constitute the Trinity. The two “vines” of the Di-vine are Consciousness (or Mind, or Awareness, or Presence) and Energy (or Spirit, or Power). True Trinitarian spirituality, real Christian yoga, is about uniting these two vines in the human soul (located, relative to the body, in the heart-center). And when this Di-vine union takes place in the human soul, the now uncontracted Soul, or Son, the “Product” of this union, emerges as the God-man, the incarnation of the Divine.
Bourgeault, a chaotic thinker and circumlocutory writer, cannot limit her discourse to the Holy Trinity. Instead, she introduces multiple Trinities—the Unfolding Trinity, The Messianic Trinity, the Sophianic Trinity, the Pentecostal Trinity, the Sophianic Trinity, the Reflexive Trinity, the Economy Trinity, and the Incarnational Trinity—and none of these reductive “models” enables her to even begin to fathom what the Holy Trinity is really about. “Holy” means “Sacred, which means “not of this world or universe,” which means timeless and spaceless. The Holy Trinity is an esoteric spiritual paradigm that informs the cognoscenti that a single “Substance” of Mind or Consciousness has morphed, or “phased,” into uncreated Light-Energy or Spirit, and that an incarnated, divinized, human being can realize himself as consubstantial, or coessential, with this, ultimately indivisible, “Two-Vine” Reality of Mind-Energy, or Consciousness-Spirit.
To bolster her credibility as an esotericist, Bourgeault informs us that she spent ten years studying the “Fourth Way” of the renowned spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff (1866-1949). Then she proceeds to base the bulk of her thesis on Gurdjieff’s nonsensical, byzantine cosmological crap. I too have studied Gurdjieff and his foremost interpreter, P.D. Ouspensky, but I was smart enough to have limited my involvement with these teachings to just several weeks. Then I moved on to real esoteric spirituality—Dzogchen, Kashmir Shaivism, Ramana Maharshi, Christian Hermeticism, et al. Anyone interested in my critical assessment of Gurdjieff’s teachings should check out my Amazon two-star of review of “In Search of the Miraculous,” by P.D. Ouspensky.
Bourgeault, like many other “associates” of Ken Wilber, the most-overrated philosopher alive, thinks she’s wise and ”integral” because she integrates the Enneagram and other Gurdjieffian typology “tools” into her spiritual “toolbox.” The Enneagram derives from Astrology, which is a quantum leap better tool for self-understanding. But Bourgeault, a circumscribed thinker, has no idea that every one of her typology “tools” is subsumed by a greater, or more “integral,” one.
In her book, Bourgeault periodically refers to Valentin Tomberg and his magisterial text “Meditations on the Tarot”—but she conveniently fails to mention the fact that Tomberg, a Christian mystic with a commendable understanding of the the Trinity and the Eucharist, rejected Gurdjieff and his teachings. Instead of, intelligently, basing her arguments on Tomberg’s “Meditations,” Bourgeault tries to fit a square peg into a round hole by using Gurdjieff’s Sufi-based cosmology to explicate the Christian Trinity—and the result is an exegetical disaster.
Borgeault might impress the ignorant with her “Tower of Babble” metaphysics and mysticism, but anyone with a deep and wide background in the spiritual field will dismiss her as a deluded “head tripper.” It is obvious from all sorts of details that she hasn’t been baptized, or initiated, by the Spirit. Nothing in her stilted, pretetentious academic-type writings indicates any grasp of true, or esoteric, Eucharistic spirituality, without which a clear understanding of the Holy Trinity isn’t possible.
In summary, Bourgeault does NOT discover “the radical truth at the heart of Christianity. Rather, she reveals herself as a blind woman examining the “Elephant,” a.k.a. the Holy Trinity.
