What is missing in this densely electronically over-loaded culture that now bombards us daily? So much of what was once valued as the fabric of our way of life, just twenty or fifty years ago, is now gone. But what has become especially striking is our new near-complete absence of awareness of the presence of God, divinity, and the pervasive spirit within all that surrounds us and within ourselves. We have lost our bearings, and even the quest for our bearings within an immensely vaster cosmos extending beyond all time.
Our perception of ourselves as interwoven with this far greater macrocosm has disappeared. We are instead painfully isolated and buffeted about by materialistic desires and fears. How much we now experience in our electronic media is toxic sludge being poured daily into our brains? How do we cut off this relentless pipeline? Who controls it? For almost all of us, there is no longer a unifying “big-picture” that can provide meaning to our lives. We are left with an accompanying lack of insight into why, ultimately, we are here.
Extending far back through human history in a large part of the world has been what we can call the “mystic tradition of the West”. Its teaching is that God, a kind of divine “being” of a magnitude we cannot even imagine, can be perceived tangibly as right here with us and inside us, that we and the universe we inhabit are, at their essence, nothing but God. This often ecstatic, frequently over-powering direct experience of the divine is entirely different than sitting stiffly in church or synagogue. Ultimately this realization is at the heart of all true spiritual faiths.
For Jews who took their devotion seriously, like my Hasidic grandfather, reciting the Shema prayer multiple times each day was his affirmation that, “I shall love the Lord my God with all my heart and all no soul.” This was no abstract, theoretical God but one whose presence was palpable. When, later, my mid-western Methodist in-laws thanked God with sincerity before every meal for the food, the “blessings”, they were about to receive, the sense they were actually communicating directly with God, that God was right there at the table with us, was just as real.
For thousands of years this personal communion with the divine, though also found in endless ordinary settings, has been at the heart of the “mystical path.” The sacred presence invoked in a Sufi prayer gathering can be not only tangible but overwhelming. Buddhist and Hindu traditions encompass their own variations upon this same experience. The God we can sense right here, with us and inside us as well, whether in our homes, congregations or at our dining tables, is very different from the remote, authoritarian father-figure God that is a mere abstraction.
This perceiving the divine in all creation and wanting to comprehend the emanation of our “world” from out of this unity inspired what became known as the original “Invisible College” of spiritual adepts and seekers. Pythagoras, Plato, Solomon, Jesus, Saint Francis, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Bernini, and innumerable alchemists, kabbalists, and holy men and women have all been among its members. Its surviving works include the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral, Sainte Chappelle, St. Peters, and Saint Paul’s. Embodied and reflected in all of these are the principles of “sacred geometry”, the visible manifestation of the invisible inner structures of the universe, that have yielded these wonders.
At present, however, outside of Islamic cultures, our sense of direct connection with the divine and even of this possibility are rapidly disappearing. It is crucial for us to understand how much of our precious human identity as emanations of divinity is at risk of being lost forever. This awareness is at the essence of who we really are. To nurture and help keep this stream alive is the purpose of the New “Invisible College”.
(formerly NewInvisibleCollege.com / Chartres-sacred-geometry.com; now Chartres.GeometryCode.com)
Will Gold, 2022