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BOEHME FOR BEGINNERS

Cynthia Bourgeault

Jacob Boehme, the great German mystic, is renowned for his obscurity.

What's the best way to approach his work? Experientially.

o gain access to the complex and beautiful cosmology of Jacob Boehme

there is, I think, one all-important secret: it is necessary to approach him

with the same mind in which he received his mystical illumination.

It was in deep contemplative stillness that this German

shoemaker, gazing at a pewter dish sparkling in the sun-

light, was suddenly swept up in such a firestorm of uni-

tive vision that "in one quarter of an hour I saw and knew

more than if I had been many years together at a univer-

sity."

Twelve years passed before he was able to fashion his

cosmic revelation into words; even then they are — to

borrow from e.e. cummings — "such great writhing words,

as uttering overmuch, stand helplessly before the spirit at

bay."

To approach Boehme's teachings from a philosophical

mindset simply won't work. His thinking moves in jagged

leaps; in many places he contradicts himself as he grapples

for concepts to express the truth grasped unitively, in one

great gulp of higher mind.

Boehme is one of those underground geniuses of the

Christian mystical path. He is read in virtually no semi-

naries of either Roman Catholic or Protestant persuasion,

and even eminent contemporary theologians stumble over

his name (one of my acquaintances refers to him as Jacob

Boheme,

as in

La Boheme;

in older versions his name is

sometimes rendered as "Behmen"). His work is kept alive

principally through the steady attention of the Christian

Hermetic tradition, and through an ongoing handful of

devotees in the Christian mainstream, ranging from An-

gelus Silesius in the seventeenth century through Evelyn

Underhill in the twentieth.

Boehme would doubtless have considered himself an

unlikely bearer of such sweeping revelation. Born of peas-

ant stock in 1575, near the town of Gorlitz in southeast-

ern Germany, he was trained as a shoemaker, married the

butcher's daughter, fathered four sons, and for most of his

external life lived a stable and conventional existence. But

inwardly, his brooding and dreamy nature was preparing

to receive that overpowering revelation in 1600 and the

twelve years of disequilibrium and spiritual seeking that fol-

lowed it.

At last, in 1612, his first book, the

Aurora,

was com-

pleted, only to fall into the hands of Gregorius Richter,

the chief pastor of Gorlitz, who attacked Boehme violently

for heresy and maneuvered a decree forbidding him to

write for five years. But his work continued to circulate

among the Gorlitz intelligentsia, where it won him many

admirers, particularly among the students of Hermetic phi-

losophy and mysticism. In 1619 Boehme took up the pen

again, and in the five years before his death in 1624 he

completed all his major works.

I had long suspected that the contemporary meditational

Fall 1997 / Gnosis Magazine 29

OVE IS ITSELF THE TRIUMPHANT

ISSUE OF A PROCESS WHOSE

ETERNAL, HIDDEN BUILDING BLOCKS

ARE IN DESIRE, PAIN, AND ANGUISH.

CHRIST

TESTA'

ers will feel intrigued to explore further along these lines,

offer feedback, and refine as motivated.

In this project, I am in part attempting to rescue Boehme

from that aura of arcaneness that is so intimidating to most

readers. I myself felt drawn toward Boehme for many years

(it turns out that one of his earliest English disciples, William

Law, is a distant forebear of mine), but had always been

warned that without extensive knowledge of medieval

alchemy it would be useless to proceed.

The alchemical aspect is definitely there, and I suspect

that initiated Hermeticists travel much further into Boehme

than I. But Boehme's importance is not limited to this

realm, nor is it accessible only within it. Boehme offers a

remarkably unified Christian metaphysic, with cosmology

and psychology reinforcing each other in a powerful trans-

formative path. This path needs to be recovered and pre-

sented in a way that will invite more people to explore this

powerful visionary, whose works, I believe, still hold the

key to what inner Christianity is all about.

For me, the significance of Boehme's work can be

summed up at both a macrocosmic and microcosmic level

in his deep understanding that will, desire, pain, and an-

guish are the raw materials through which something pow-

erful and mighty is brought to pass. God is love, to be sure,

but love is itself the triumphant issue of a process whose

eternal, hidden building blocks are in desire, pain, and an-

guish. Thus these things are not to be feared or denied in

my life but

transformed.

And so I propose that we move from the known to the

unknown, letting some familiar touchstones in contem-"

plative practice provide a gradual ascent to Boehme's mon-

umental cosmology.

INTERIOR SILENCE

1. The student said to the master: "How may I come to the

supersensual life so that I can see God and hear him speak?"

The master said: "If you can sweep up for a moment into that

in which no creature dwells, you can hear what God speaks."

2. The student said: "Is that near or far?" The master said,

"It is in you. If you could be silent from all willing and think

ing for one hour you would hear God's inexpressible words."

3. The student said, "How can I remain silent in thinking

and willing?" The master said: "When you remain silent from

the thinking and willing of self, the eternal hearing, seeing, and

speaking will be revealed in you. . . . Your own hearing, willing,

and seeing hinders you so that you do not see and hear God.'""

practice of Centering Prayer, with its emphasis on interior

stillness as a radical consent to God, might provide an

experiential access point to Boehme's complex cosmolo-

gy. Last summer I had the opportunity to test out this in-

tuition with a group of experienced Centering Prayer

meditators in British Columbia. The material in this arti-

cle emerges largely from our group effort to find a way

into the heart of Boehme's mystical illumination by the

mode of direct experience. My hope is that GNOSIS read-

30 Gnosis

Magazine I Fall

1997

These three little versicles from Boehme's Sixth Trea-

tise ("On the Supersensual Life") are the starting point for

the experiential journey into Boehme. I am trusting that

most GNOSIS readers will have an established meditation

practice, and by whatever method can understand the dif-

ference between their own "hearing, willing, and seeing"

and "the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking."

In his teachings on Centering Prayer, the Benedictine

monk Thomas Keating characterizes these two states as

"ordinary awareness" and "spiritual awareness." Ordinary

awareness is our usual jumble of thoughts, impressions, and

reactions, fueled by the self-reflective nature of the human

mind; the Buddhists call it "monkey mind." In spiritual

awareness, the mind moves beyond its preoccupation with

the contents of its own thinking and comes to a "resting

in God."While the content might appear to be empty, one

is actually present to a higher level of intensity, coherence,

and purposiveness than is apprehensible though our nor-

mal modes of thinking. Spiritual practitioners discover that

they can sometimes move globally from deep interior still-

ness to right action without the usual "downloading" into

linear thinking. This is key to unlocking what Boehme

means by being "in the will of God."

The first step into Boehme, then, is through the actual

experience of that higher "hearing, seeing, and speaking"

in me.

This higher level is somehow more vibrant and vital,

more charged with a purposive life; it can be mysteriously

infused in us when we, in Annie Dillard's picturesque

words, "do not waste most of our energy spending every

waking minute saying hello to ourselves."

THE RESICNEP WILL

"True Resignation," the title of Boehme's Fourth

Treatise in

The Way to Christ,

is perhaps

the

pivotal

concept in all of Boehme's work — the tie that binds the

simplicity of his spiritual path to the complexity of his

cosmology. Again I have found that with some

experiential understanding of what the "resigned will" is, it

is possible to follow substantial parts of Boehme's

cosmology intuitively, even if one's grasp of details

fluctuates.

We wrestled hard in our British Columbia group to find

better words for this idea. Many did not like "resigned,"

saying it sounded passive or despondent. The actual Ger-

man is

gelassenheit,

which means something like "calm" or

"letting go" — that is, "the calm will." It comes closer to

the Buddhist concept of equanimity than to the contem-

porary Western stereotype of submissiveness.

This concept is not unique to Boehme, of course; it

is at the core of the Christian mystical path. Traditional

ways of describing this state (which goes so much against

the grain of our contemporary self-assertive culture) have

included "surrender" and "abandonment to divine

providence."

Centering Prayer allows us to catch a more subtle un-

dercurrent in this "true resignation" business. If we equate

the "unresigned will" with Thomas Keating's "ordinary

awareness," we can observe that perhaps the most striking

characteristic of our ordinary awareness is that

it is always

stirred up.

It loses itself in a constant stream of reactions,

worry, and emotional considering ("How well am I doing?"

"Are others appreciating me sufficiently?").

By contrast, the "calm"

(gelassenheit)

of spiritual aware-

ness seems not so much a diminishment of self as a vastly

expanded inner spaciousness in which the true self can at

last come to birth. As Boehme writes, the secret of true

resignation is this: "It does not kill you but makes you

alive according to its life. Then you live, yet not you, but

your will becomes its will."

There is a complete indwelling,

so that the "eternal seeing, hearing, and speaking" be-

comes the functional core of your own being —"the life

of your nature."

This idea gives a glimpse of the subtlety of Boehme's

thinking and his skill in maneuvering around traditional

Christian logjams. For Boehme, true resignation is not

primarily a moral issue ("man's unruly will," as the the-

ologians love to lament) but an

ontologkal

one: it lies in

the nature of the mind itself, with its capacity for self-re-

flective consciousness. Boehme sees the mind as a kind of

lens or magnifying glass that, in the freedom of the human

will, can be turned in two directions. It can be held be-

fore the divine mind, so that it "magnifies the Lord," in

the words of the ancient canticle, or it can be turned in

so that it reflects and focuses on itself; it essentially be-

comes its own light.

Boehme rails in the Fourth Treatise: "We see in Lucifer,

and also in Adam ... true examples of what self does when

it receives external light as its own property so that it is

able to enter into its own dominion in reason. One also

sees [this] in learned men; when they get the light of eter-

nal nature as their own possession, nothing results but

pride."

This is a crucial point for understanding Boehme. When

one turns that lens inward, into self, the result is "multi-

plication" of desires, passions, wants, and the general frag-

OUR OWN HEARING

WILLING, AND SEEING HINDERS YOU

SO THAT YOU DO NOT SEE

AND HEAR GOD."

mentedness of consciousness. This insatiable self (which

Boehme calls "only an anxious and dry hunger")

franti-

cally tries to mirror and view itself in being. Only when

that lens is "resigned," held steadily up to reflect divine

light, is there the possibility for the emergence of the true

being of the soul, which is love. As Boehme writes in the

Sixth Treatise:

The student said: "Dear Master! Tell me where

does [love] dwell in man?"The master said: "Where

a man does not dwell there it has its place in man."

The student said: "Where is the place where man

does not dwell in himself?"The master said, "That

is the resigned soul brought to the ground. Where

the soul dies to its own will and wills nothing more

than what God wills, there it dwells. For insofar as

the self-will is dead to itself, it takes for itself the

place, where earlier the self-will sat. There is now

nothing [there],and where nothing is, God's love

works alone."

Foil 1997 / Gnosis Magazine 31

It is clear how radically different this is from main-

stream Christianity, where man is considered to be the in-

terpreter of God's will. Endowed with reason, memory,

and skill, he uses these to discern the will of God and plot

and carry out a course of action.

For Boehme, it is very different. To be in the will of

God, to be in the resigned will, is an immediate and di-

rect opening, at an energetic level, to the Source of all

being. It is a commitment

not

to turn the lens inward,

not

to break connection with that eternal "hearing, seeing, and

speaking ."This is to be in the will of God. The rest Boehme

castigates savagely: "No work outside of God's will can

reach God's kingdom. It is all only a useless carving in the

great laboriousness of man. . . It is only a mirror of the

contending wheel of nature where good and evil contend

with one another. What good builds up, evil breaks down;

This text, from Boehme's Eighth Treatise ("Conversa-

tion between an Enlightened and Unenlightened Soul")

is crucial for two reasons. It is the core of the actual spir-

itual practice by which the resigned will is activated. It

also, I believe, holds the key which unlocks the "three prin-

ciples of the divine essence," forming the heart of Boehme's

cosmology.

Again students of Centering Prayer will have a practi-

cal head start here. The practice described in Boehme's

text bears a strong resemblance to the "letting go" (or

"open mind-open heart") practice developed by Thomas

Keating's associate Mary Mrowzowski for the purposes of

recognizing and surrendering the "emotional programs for

happiness" — traditionally called "the passions," or, in

Boehme, "the creatures."

This training, available to all advanced Centering Prayer

F YOU STAND FIRM, IF YOU DO NOT

BEND, YOU SHALL SEE AND PERCEIVE GREAT WONDERS.

YOU WILL DISCOVER HOW CHRIST WILL STORM THE HELL

IN YOU AND WILL BREAK YOUR BEASTS."

and what evil builds up, good breaks down."

Boehme's "will of God," then, is roughly equivalent

to what the ancient Hebrews called the "righteousness

of God": an energy-charged field, not an abstract moral

template. One must find one's way to this energized will-

ing and then abide within it, refraining from all action

apart from it, from one's personal sense of merit, need,

or desire.

The goal of this effort is not renunciation or peni-

tence, but something infinitely more powerful. For just

beyond the storms of personal chaos lies the profound in-

dwelling power of love, the Source and true center.

Boehme says, "If you find it you will come into the

ground out of which all things proceed and in which

they stand, and you will be in it a king over all the works

of God."

THE SURRENDER PRACTICE

Here now is the right place for you to wrestle before the divine

face. If you stand firm, if you do not bend, you shall see and per-

ceive great wonders. You will discover how Christ will storm the

hell in you and will break your beasts.

32 Gnosis Magazine / Fall 1997

students, offers a three-step process combining modern

"focusing" techniques with the traditional practice of "aban-

donment to the will of God." When a troubling emotion

arises, one learns

to focus,

or sink into the emotion by ex-

periencing it deeply and nonverbally in the body;

welcome

it, acknowledging that whatever feeling is going on with-

in me in this moment can be endured and encompassed;

and, insofar as possible,

let it go.

Not long ago a friend of mine in Maine had an un-

expected opportunity to work with this practice. Recently

widowed and terribly afraid of her own grief, she sensibly

scheduled an aerobics class at five o'clock, the time when

she and her husband had always gathered by their hearth

for the cocktail hour, a time of special closeness. But one

evening a fierce storm came lashing in off the Atlantic,

covered the roads with ice, and took out the power lines.

There she was, stranded with her grief. Terrified, she

took the first step in the practice and sank deeply into the

feelings, experiencing her anxiety, her grief, her agitation

at being able to do nothing — simply seeing where these

lived in her body. In the next step, she turned and began

to whisper, "Welcome, grief . . . welcome."

"And then," she told me, "a quite extraordinary thing

happened. The stranglehold of grief seemed to let go, and

it was as if some new presence entered me. One moment

I couldn't cope; the next I could. It was that simple."

"If you stand firm, if you do not bend," says Boehme

— that is, if you bring your unconditional presence to this

moment, no matter what its emotional content — "you

will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and

will break your beasts." What Boehme both picturesquely

and, I am convinced, completely literally describes as "Christ

storming the hell in us and breaking our beasts" is a new

empowerment, an infusion of spiritual strength, brought

about by the process of surrender itself. Through our own

anguished "creatures," rendered up, Christ is mysteriously

activated at the core of our lives.

Those who take on this practice are well aware of its

potency. It is the most powerful path I know for con-

necting the inner consent of meditational prayer with the

outer requirement of unconditional presence in daily life,

so that "prayer without ceasing" becomes a lived reality.

But beyond this, the practice of Boehme's little versicle in

daily life, if accompanied by a careful self-observation,

yields us the experiential data to begin to penetrate into

Boehme's complex cosmological universe.

Let's go back to my friend in Maine and attempt a

more careful anatomy of her moment of "wrestling before

the divine face." If one looks carefully, one can isolate three

distinct components creating the emotional tempest with-

in her. There is first of all the yearning for her husband.

The second is a kind of

inner inflammation

caused by the

realization that what she yearns for is unfulfillable; since

the yearning cannot be satiated, it only grows stronger and

more stinging within. The result, the third component, is

the anguish: her emotional turmoil as the passion and its

insatiability wrestle and writhe inwardly.

Into this matrix of turmoil comes a fourth component,

introduced by the surrender practice itself. This "sinking

down," in Boehme's words, or

surrendering into the emotion

itself,

serves to activate some aiding force, a Christ light,

born in the midst of the very materials of darkness. The tur-

moil is the necessary birthplace of the new calm; in some

strange but indispensable way it furnishes the

fuel

for the

transformation.

If you can clearly recognize these steps in the process,

you will essentially have the gist of Boehme's "three prin-

ciples of the divine essence."

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

In the intricate brilliance of his mind, Boehme asks

the question which few have even conceived: How does

one move from God at rest, from "the eternal, immense,

incomprehensible Unity,"

to God the author of the mul-

tiple diversity that is our created, perceiving universe? What

had to happen internally, in the depths of God, before that

first

Fiat

could be spoken? Boehme leads us through a set

of three principles, subdivided into seven properties (some-

times also called "forms"), which occupy the space be-

tween inaccessible and accessible light. They also remain

present in our universe as the driveshaft of all temporal

processes, observable in our own strivings and in all cre-

ated life.

First Property.

Before anything can come into being,

Boehme asserts, there must first be movement ("outflow")

in the endless Unity of divinity. This is accomplished by

creating an "unequal pressure" in the equilibrium of the

divine will by the

concentration

of desire. As Boehme says:

"The first property is a desirousness, like the magnet, viz.,

the compression of the [divine] will; the will desireth to

be something, and yet it hath nothing of which it may

make something to itself; and therefore it bringeth itself

into a receivingness of itself, and compresseth itself to a

something; and that something is nothing but a magneti-

cal hunger, a harshness."

This first property Boehme variously calls "hardness,"

"harshness," "sharpness," "sourness." The core component

is yearning, "magnetical hunger."

Second Property.

When there is unequal pressure, some-

thing begins to flow, as one observes in siphoning water,

or in wind and weather systems. Boehme identifies this

"drawing or motion in the sharpness"

as the second prop-

erty, which he calls the "motion," the "stirring," and some-

times also the "sting" or the "astringency."

Here it is important to watch carefully what Boehme

is saying. I have read several commentators who tend rather

glibly to equate these first two properties with the classic

spiritual dualism of affirming and denying. But the second

property for Boehme is not, strictly speaking, the deny-

ing. Rather it comes closer to an inflammation, an

agita-

tion

created in and through the very insatiability of the

desire.

We have seen this in the situation of my friend in

Maine. The first property would be the desire for her hus-

band. The second, because of the inevitable frustration of

that desire, is the

motion

(or in this case, the

emotion),

the

fanning of the flames of the desire to unbearable intensity.

It is a subtle point but an important one. In Boehme the

second property is not so much opposing the first as

rushing toward it, like a whirlpool being sucked down a

drain. That whirlpool is the motion, the second property.

Third Property.

This leads directly to the third proper-

ty, which Boehme calls "the anguish." He explains: "For

when there is a motion in the sharpness, then the prop-

erty is the aching [or anguish], and this is also the cause

of sensibility and pain; for if there were no sharpness and

motion, there would be no sensibility."

This is perhaps

the

core point for understanding

Boehme. What is born out of the struggle between desire

and its insatiability is anguish. But this anguish is also, at

the same time,

sensibility,

the capacity for feeling. Out of

the "nothingness" of the original divine stasis, "some-

thingness" has been born. In this third stage, divine nature

becomes perceptible to itself; the "somethingness"

of feel-

ing

is created, the matrix out of which all else in the vis-

ible universe will be fashioned.

These first three properties, taken together, constitute

the First Principle. Boehme calls it the "fiery" or "wrath-

ful" principle and sees it as part of the eternal nature of

God.

Fall

1997 / Gnosis Magazine 33

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