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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Seven
Mind, Body, Heart
Our Three Intelligences
Monday, February 17, 2020
After her theological training and ordination in the Episcopal tradition, my friend Cynthia Bourgeault has spent much of the last two decades teaching the Wisdom tradition in a Christian context. You are about to read something that it took me most of my life to begin to comprehend! I admire Cynthia’s unique insights and ability to bring together the ancient wisdom of Christian monasticism and the transformational teachings and practices of spiritual seeker G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949). Today she offers a brief explanation of Gurdjieff’s teachings on Three-centered Awareness.
Wisdom is a way of knowing that goes beyond one’s mind, one’s rational understanding, and embraces the whole of a person: mind, heart, and body. The intellectual faculty is one way of knowing, to be sure, but it is joined by two additional faculties: the intelligence of the “moving center” and the intelligence of the “emotional center.” These three centers must all be working, and working in harmony, as the first prerequisite to the Wisdom way of knowing.
I’m going to start with the moving center because it’s the one least known in the West, least valued, and least worked with. The moving center basically is about intelligence through movement. It’s the way that our body is able to put its tentacles out and explore and gain information from the world. It’s that whole realm of things that we don’t do directly with our intellectual rational brain but that deeply engage us. We drive a car, ski down a hill, sail a boat. It gets in our bodies. That kind of intelligence, which we mostly underuse, is a huge reservoir of connectivity and information with the world.
The intellectual center is a profoundly useful tool for exploring and navigating the world, and it allows us to do things that separate us from the rest of the animals. But the program it runs is perception through separation. It’s a grand separating, evaluating, and measuring tool. But it can’t “do” because of the limitations built into its operating system. It can’t ask two questions: “Who am I, and who is God?” because these questions can’t be measured by an operating system that depends on separation. I have sometimes said that doing the journey toward mystical union with the mind is like trying to play the violin with a chainsaw. It’s not that the chainsaw is bad, but its nature is to cut and separate, not make music.
Finally, the heart and the emotional center are not identical. The emotional center is the capacity to explore and receive information from the world through empathetic entrainment by what we might call vibrational resonance. Of all the centers, the emotional center moves the fastest. It’s the part of us that gets the impression instantly. We don’t have to parse it out. It is our antenna, so to speak, given to us to orient us toward the divine radiance. The heart is not for personal expression but for divine perception.
Gateway to Action & Contemplation:
What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?
Prayer for Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (Jossey-Bass: 2003), 27, 28, 34; and
An Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault: Course Transcript & Companion Guide (Wisdom Way of Knowing: 2017), 5, 9, 10. Now available through the online course, Introductory Wisdom School (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2019).
Image credit: Saint Serapius (detail), Francisco de Zurbarán, 1628, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.
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News from the CAC
Study the Wisdom Path with Cynthia Bourgeault
For those eager to further their inner work, our 14-week online course Introductory Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault, March 4–June 9, will help you develop the skills, knowledge, and actions for your own transformation. Registration closes February 26, 2020.
Just This from Richard Rohr
Just This is a collection of brief, evocative meditations and practices that invite us to cultivate the gift of waking up to the beauty of reality in all its glorious ordinariness. Richard Rohr helps us discover that the contemplative mind does not tell us what to see; it teaches us how to see what we behold.
CONSPIRE 2020 Webcast
Our 7-year CONSPIRE conference series explores Richard Rohr’s seven themes of the Alternative Orthodoxy. For the final, capstone experience watch all five of our core faculty—Cynthia Bourgeault, James Finley, Barbara Holmes, Brian McLaren, and Richard Rohr—teaching together for the first time. Register for the CONSPIRE 2020 webcast and join us online live May 15–17 or watch the replay.
Action & Contemplation
2020 Daily Meditations Theme
What does God ask of us? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. —Micah 6:8
Franciscan Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation. If we pray but don’t act justly, our faith won’t bear fruit. And without contemplation, activists burn out and even well-intended actions can cause more harm than good. In today’s religious, environmental, and political climate our compassionate engagement is urgent and vital.
In this year’s Daily Meditations, Father Richard helps us learn the dance of action and contemplation. Each week builds on previous topics, but you can join at any time! Click the video to learn more about the theme and to find reflections you may have missed.
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Inspiration for this week's banner image: A Wisdom way of knowing . . . requires the whole of one’s being and is ultimately attained only through the yielding of one’s whole being into the intimacy of knowing and being known. . . . It doesn’t happen apart from complete vulnerability and self-giving. But the divine Lover is absolutely real, and for those willing to bear the wounds of intimacy, the knowledge of that underlying coherence—“in which all things hold together”—is both possible and inevitable. —Cynthia Bourgeault
