COSMOS/SPIRIT
Re-Creating Cosmic Space within the Great Cathedrals
During The Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had the necessary concentration of wealth and power to finance the great artistic achievements of the age. It was also a time when the consciousness of the people both within and outside of the Church hierarchy was immersed in spiritual musings, pre-occupations, and metaphysical debate on man’s dual material/spiritual nature. This collective focus on matters of the spirit, and the more sublime promptings of our Soul over our ‘baser’ animal nature was given concrete expression by the builders of the great cathedrals. The cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame among others, reproduce within their vaulted stone chambers the deep stillness and expansiveness of the Cosmos. The ‘pull’ of our Soul to a more expanded spatial existence and awareness finds temporary fulfillment within these magnificent stone structures. Their builders seem to have unconsciously reproduced in microcosm the next higher order of magnitude reality that our Soul yearns for, and prompts us to find our presence and place in. The voluminous space and ineffable stillness within the great cathedrals resonates with the same atmosphere of deep mystery and grandeur of the Cosmos.
But the cathedrals of the Middle Ages offered only a fleeting foretaste of humanity’s future Cosmic destiny. They provided only a brief interlude, a temporary spiritual satisfaction and hint of that future day when we'd experience firsthand, our true Cosmic place and presence.
That time is now.
"Blessed be you, Universal matter, immeasurable time, boundless ether, triple abyss of stars and atoms and generations. You who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards or measurement, reveals to us the dimensions of God."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Hymn to Matter
The Attraction of the Greater
We've all had the experience of slowly waking up from an unusually vivid dream. We might even stumble off to the bathroom still focused on the characters in the dream or whatever urgent intentions were motivating us in the dream's narrative. But no matter how compelling a dream may be, each morning, that initially small, barely conscious part of our awareness that's already awake, eventually rouses us out of our dreams as we ‘touch base’ once more with our more meaningful waking reality.
Whether we're resisting coming fully awake from a dream, or staring through the lens of a microscope at a colony of bacteria - we can ‘box in’ our human consciousness for only so long. Eventually the ‘pull’ or attraction on us for the greater, more expansive human scale reality we live in, will win out. Just as air-filled toys will stay underwater as long as we forcefully hold them down, but will always rise to the surface once we let go, our consciousness is always drawn to the reality that is most meaningful to us.
In this same way, the part of our consciousness that resides in our Soul with its more expansive “Soul’s eye view”, exerts a ‘pull’ on us toward its greater, more meaningful perspective. Our Soul exerts an attractive force on our consciousness toward greater realization of the larger planetary/Cosmic reality we exist within because this is the perspective that has the greater meaning, a greater meaning which will become more self-evident to us over time. Orienting ourselves to our Cosmic presence, our 'Soul's eye view"; is not only consciousness expanding - but also makes possible a higher state of human functioning. Through it, eventually we'll no longer perceive ourselves as ‘humans with Souls’... but as ‘Souls experiencing human lifetimes’.
"(S)pirit being no longer independent of matter or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging from it under the attraction of God..."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Viewing our Earthly lives from the vantage point of a much larger Cosmic 'frame' allows us to see our 'Soul distracted' human lives in the same way we might now marvel at all the frenetic activity of bees in a beehive, and the bee's total obliviousness to our human gaze into its insular little world... This new Cosmic frame of reference makes clearer to us the insular nature of our own little busy bee 'World of Men's Affairs', and our current state of total obliviousness to our Soul's higher perspective.