CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Soul of the Cosmos

You could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; so profound is its meaning.
                                                           — Heraclitus

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.
                                                          — John Keats, Letter 18th October, 1818

The moment when physics touches on the ‘untrodden, untreadable regions,’ and when psychology has at the same time to admit that there are other forms of psychic life besides the acquisitions of personal consciousness...then the intermediate realm of subtle bodies comes to life again, and the physical and the psychic are once more blended in an indissoluble unity....We have come very near to this turning point today.

                                                        —  C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 394

There is an exquisite tapestry in the Musée de Cluny in Paris, where a woman stands in the doorway of a tent, flanked by a lion and a unicorn. The artist who designed this fifteenth century masterpiece, discovered in a remote chateau in the Auvergne, placed them in a russet landscape filled with fruit trees, animals, birds and flowers. The series of five tapestries called “La Dame à La Licorne”, to which this one belongs, is said to represent the five senses. However, to me they represent far more than this. In medieval iconography, the lion symbolized the body and the unicorn the spirit. Here, both are held, so to speak, in the field of the soul, personified by the beautiful woman who stands at the door of a tent emblazoned with fleur de lys. A young girl offers her a casket filled with jewels. Above the entrance of the tent are inscribed the words “à Mon Seul Désir”. Two posts or lances on either side of her are painted with crescent moons and display a banner with three crescent moons on them. They may represent a coat of arms but they are also the age-old symbol of the Feminine. It seems to me that this beautiful woman could represent the soul as the essential and long obscured link between body and spirit.
          The soul has been described in languages other than English with feminine nouns. The Oxford Dictionary describes the soul as an entity distinct from the body, as the spiritual aspect of man in contrast to the physical aspect, as the seat of the emotions and feelings and as the aspect of our nature which survives physical death. Metaphysically, it was regarded as the vital, sensitive, or rational principle in plants, animals, or human beings. But millennia ago, it was regarded as the animating principle of the world, the invisible containing Reality which underlay all form—the Anima-Mundi.
          The current concept of the soul in modern reductionist science is revealed in the title of a debate (October 30th, 2011) called “Battle of Ideas” and subtitled, “Is there a ghost in the machine?” The description of the subject of the debate began with this paragraph:

The spirit, spark or personality – the concept of a soul, self or mind distinct from our physical shell – has long been a cornerstone of our understanding of what it means to be human, in both religious and secular spheres. Increasingly, however, scientific fields such as neuroscience, genetics, epigenetics and psychology continue to provide ever more intricate explanations for human functioning that are rooted in the tangible and the biological. There is a widespread expectation that aspects of our lives that currently elude understanding will eventually yield to scientific explication, given sufficient time and research.

Jung’s comment is perhaps appropriate here: “The general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither the great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look at it twice.”(1)
          What has been lost in descriptions of the soul is the Platonic understanding that the cosmos has a soul and that this Cosmic Soul is the origin or ground of our own individual soul — our own conscious — and our connection with the deeper levels of the Cosmos; our individual soul is an inseparable part of the Soul of the Cosmos.
          To understand Soul as an invisible cosmic reality, we need to broaden our concept of it to embrace the inner or unseen life of the visible universe and, following what was explained in the last chapter, recognize that it is alive, conscious and the eternal ground of our own consciousness.
          The reason the soul has been thought of as Feminine is, I believe, because the idea of the soul evolved out of the image of the Great Mother – the matrix of being – whose cosmic womb was the source of all life. One of the most important ideas derived from the image of the Great Mother, described in the preface to The Myth of the Goddess and in Chapter Four of this book, was that “life was instinctively experienced as an organic, living and sacred whole, where everything was woven together in one cosmic web and all orders of life were related, because all shared in the sanctity of the original source.” This is a description of the idea of ‘Soul’ I am describing in this chapter.
          The Neolithic image of the Great Mother was transmitted to the Great Goddesses of the Bronze Age, specifically in Egypt, to the Goddesses Isis and Hathor, as described in Chapter Four. In Greece, it eventually gave rise to Plato’s definition of the Soul of the Cosmos (psuche tou cosmou) and to the eloquent image of Zoe, the Universal Soul, and bios, the individual soul—the tiny, pulsing atom of our consciousness hung like a bead on the great necklace of being. Later, the idea of Soul as a cosmic reality was defined in the extensive cosmology of Plotinus and his idea of the Anima-Mundi or Soul of the World. A similar concept can be found in the Shekinah of Kabbalah described in Chapter Three. Familiarity with the ancient cosmology surrounding the image of the Great Mother and later Great Goddesses as well as the Shekinah helped me to understand what the idea of ‘Soul’ once signified and what it could signify again.
          Heraclitus was right. Even though we travel by every path to discover the limits of the Soul, we could never fathom its depths. For the depths of the Soul are the depths of the Cosmos itself and the multitude of invisible worlds about which, with our limited perception, we know virtually nothing.

When I was gathering sayings for The Mystic Vision, I came across a book called The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies (1848-1887), who lived in the Dorset countryside in the late nineteenth century. To me, there has never been a more beautiful or eloquent hymn to the Soul which, at the same time, is a hymn to the beauty and marvel of the Earth. I was amazed and moved to discover these words in his diary: “There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised…It is in addition to the existence of the soul; in addition to immortality; and beyond the idea of the deity...There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined.”(2) In another passage, he expressed his longing for relationship with this Soul-Entity:

I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness— I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me…Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower, breathing the earth-encircling air, thinking of the sea and the sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, prone on the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that I might reach to the unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity. (3)

His words convey two concepts of soul: the personal one, traditionally thought of as feminine, which is the spiritual core of our being—that aspect of ourselves which is our conduit to an unseen spiritual reality and that is believed to survive the death of our body. But there is also the wider cosmic one that Jefferies calls a Soul-Entity and compares to an immense ocean. This wider concept of Soul embraces the life of the cosmos and its billions of galaxies as well as the life of our planet and every stone, plant and creature on it. It is this older concept of Soul, the hidden source and ground of all life, which has been overlooked, forgotten or dismissed by our culture.
          Jefferies was yearning for something that people once felt they belonged to, in whose invisible life they lived. Over the millennia of the solar era, this instinctive feeling of belonging to an entity beyond the community of tribe or nation, something experienced as numinous, immeasurable and all-embracing, filled with daemonic agents of the divine, was gradually lost and with it the sense of participation in a web of life which connected every single creature and element of life to every other. The great contemplatives of Kabbalah named this web the Tree of Life.
          Without my vision of the Cosmic Woman and my discovery of Kabbalah and the image of the Shekinah, I would never have come to know that the soul is not in us: we are in the Soul. Many years after that visionary dream, another one helped me to understand the intimate connection between our world and the greater world of Soul:

I dreamed that I came to a place where there was a large flat stone on the ground with a kind of fence or barrier extending horizontally from it on both sides. Lying on top of the stone was something that I had to bend down to see properly. It was a beautifully worked red enamel and gold buckle, whose two ‘ends’ fitted together precisely. In appearance it was like the exquisite enamelled buckles found in the Sutton Hoo burial chamber and now in the British Museum. As I looked up, I saw a different landscape extending beyond the fence and far into the distance in front of me. I realized that the buckle in the dream was giving me an image of how two realities fit together to form a whole. I was standing in one reality but could see clearly into another that was similar to the one familiar to me but infinitely more marvellous and extraordinary.

The Net of Indra
In India and China, there has long been an exquisite image of the cosmic web of life, known as the Net of Indra, king of the gods in the Vedic pantheon. This jewel or pearl-studded Net – delicate as a silken spider’s web – was said to be suspended over Indra’s palace on Mount Meru, the Holy Mountain and axis mundi of Vedic cosmology that I had found represented everywhere in temple sculpture on my journeys through India, Cambodia and Indonesia. The Buddha himself once described the cosmos as a “web of golden threads joining myriad many-faceted jewels, each reflecting the multihued light of all the others.”(4) The jewels themselves represent the souls of animate beings and each jewel holds a boundless universe of images and experiences, since all souls carry a fathomless past and are connected to each other through the Net.
          The image of Indra’s Net led me ultimately — near the end of writing this book — to a Buddhist text called the Avatamsaka Sutra or Flower Ornament Scripture, and to Hua-Yen Buddhism, regarded by Chinese and Japanese scholars as the highest form of Buddhism. Legend says that the teaching given within it was spoken by the Buddha when he was in the state of samadhi at the time of his enlightenment. Francis Cook in his book Hua-yen Buddhism (1977) gives us this description of Indra’s Net:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions… the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring. (5)

The Avatamsaka Sutra was originally written in Sanscrit, then translated into Chinese between the sixth and eighth centuries, where it formed the basis of a Chinese Buddhist School called Hua-yen or Flower Ornament School, incorporating elements of both Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. In an outstanding work of scholarship and years of dedication, Thomas Cleary translated all thirty-nine books of the Sutra into English and these were published with an introduction by him in 1993.
          The whole extraordinary text of the Avatamsaka Sutra, the quintessence of centuries of Buddhist contemplation and meditation, might be said to describe the nature and significance of the Net of Indra. Its essential message is that all of existence, both seen and unseen, is an indissoluble unity. Nothing can exist separately from anything else. All aspects of life are interdependent and each interacts with the others in a state of continual flux, change and creativity.
          The great Buddhist scholar, D.T. Suzuki, considered the Avatamsaka Sutra to be

the consummation of Buddhist thought, Buddhist sentiment, and Buddhist experience. To my mind, no religious literature in the world can ever approach the grandeur of conception, the depth of feeling, and the gigantic scale of composition, as attained by this sutra…. Abstract truths are so concretely, so symbolically represented here that one will finally come to a realization of the truth that even in a particle of dust the whole universe is seen reflected—not this visible universe only, but a vast system of universes, conceivable by the highest minds only. (6)

Whereas in the Western tradition, the concept of the visible universe was predicated on the idea of a primal cause or a Creator God bringing it into being, in this text the universe has no beginning and no end, no creator nor hierarchical order but is seen as an immeasurable living “entity” or cosmic web of relationships existing in a kind of unified field, with each aspect integral to and affecting every other. It describes a universe beyond our time-and-space world, one undoubtedly seen in meditation. All life is perceived as an organic whole, just as it was conceived in the goddess cultures and is conceived in indigenous cultures today. All lives and elements of life are eternally and inseparably interwoven with all others, participating in mutual relationship with all others, dependent upon that jewelled or pearl-studded Net of relationships that are ceaselessly changing, ceaselessly coming into being. Everything we do in our lives affects this unimaginable Web, whether for good or for ill.
          The Net of Indra may be aligned with the concept of the universe as a hologram where every tiny part reflects or contains an image of the whole—a concept put forward by the physicist David Bohm in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order and described in the last chapter. Today we are discovering this network of relationships in James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia as a vast living organism where each part is dependent upon every other part for its survival. What is to prevent us expanding his discovery to include the whole universe? In the opening paragraph of his book Francis Crook says that Western man may be on the brink of an entirely new understanding of the nature of existence. (7) Although this Buddhist view of reality may seem unfamiliar to us, it is becoming more familiar as science discovers the interconnected nature of all aspects of life and how one single electron is connected to all others no matter how great the distance between them.
          Science has looked at things in isolation, as separate units, but now it is discovering that life is a web of interdependent elements where, if one element is damaged or destroyed, the whole web is affected, where something as unremarkable as a bear eating salmon and discarding its remains in the Canadian forest, can nourish the life of the trees growing there and the animals feeding on the vegetation on the forest floor. If one element is damaged or destroyed the whole web is affected. Therefore, it is incumbent on us as individuals, to take care of and cherish every aspect of life, aware that the least of our actions, whether in relation to our immediate families, to society as a whole or to the great web of nature, has an effect on the whole. As Crook observes in the concluding paragraph of his book, speaking from the Hua-yen perspective “I am in some sense boundless, my being encompassing the farthest limits of the universe, touching and moving every atom in existence… The interfusion, the sharing of destiny, is as infinite in scope as the reflections in the jewels of Indra’s Net… It is not just that “we are all in it” together. We all are it, rising or falling as one living body.”(8)

The Legacy of Plato and Plotinus
Returning to the Western tradition, no description of the cosmic dimension of Soul can disregard the immensely influential legacy of two of the greatest philosophers of the Greek world: Plato (429–347 BC) and Plotinus (205–270 AD), a philosopher who was born in Hellenistic Egypt and later moved to Rome, where he had a wide circle of students. We are fortunate that one of his students, Porphyry, edited the huge body of his teachings known as the Enneads that formed the basis of what came to be known as Neoplatonism. Through the influence of Plato and Plotinus the idea of a Cosmic Soul and a World-Soul was transmitted down the centuries by individuals who valued the Platonic ideas and their insights, and is coming to life again today. Their enduring influence is manifest in the words of the Sufi Sheik, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in his book, The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul: “The World Soul is not just a psychological or philosophical concept. It is a living spiritual substance within us and around us. Just as the individual soul pervades the whole human being — our body, thoughts, and feelings — the nature of the World Soul is that it is present within everything. It pervades all of creation and is a unifying principle within the world.”(9)
          Plotinus, who developed and clarified Plato’s cosmology, said that we were within a reality that is also within us. “All things depend on each other; Everything breathes together”. His concept of the totally transcendent One as the divine ground of being, emanating through the levels and dimensions of cosmic life in the way the sun radiates light, until the world of matter comes into being, is remarkably similar to the cosmology of Kabbalah. As in that tradition, the individual human soul is the expression or emanation of the divine ground of the Cosmic or World-Soul and carries divinity within its nature.
          In the twelfth century, the works of Plato became accessible in France through the translations of Arab philosophers and gave rise to the marvel of the Gothic Cathedrals. Soul comes to life in the medieval quest for the Holy Grail—image of the boundless realm of the eternal pouring forth its light and love for the nourishment of humanity. Later, in fifteenth century Italy, with the translation of the works of Plato by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the idea of a Cosmic or World-Soul and the quintessential divinity of man was revived. Within a small but influential circle of individuals, nature was again perceived as ensouled and this released a tremendous creative energy in one small part of Europe. Yet these ideas could not take root and flourish. The young Pico della Mirandola gave his great Oration on the Dignity of Man but was murdered before he could accomplish the dream he shared with Marsilio Ficino of bringing together the teaching of Kabbalah with that of Christianity. A little over a century later, Giordano Bruno, one of the most innovative and creative philosophers of his time, was sent to the stake in Rome in 1600 for declaring that nature was ensouled, that the World Soul illumined the universe and that there were other solar systems inhabited by living beings.
          However, even in the midst of the turbulence of the seventeenth century, the presence of Soul as the unseen ground of this material world still shines through the words of the visionary poet, Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) in his Centuries of Meditations: “The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God.”

The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world, the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things…

You will never enjoy the World aright, till the sea itself floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and Crowned with the Stars and perceive yourself to be the Sole Heir of the whole World: and more…because Men are in it who are every one Sole Heirs, as well as you…Till your Spirit fills the whole World, and the Stars are your jewels.

After the turmoil and slaughter of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, Soul comes to life again in the work of the great poets of the Romantic Movement: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, and later, Tennyson, Goethe and the German poets of the nineteenth century who reconnected their culture to nature and the imagination. Blake could see that “Everything that lives is Holy”. But their vision fades before the tremendous social, economic and technological changes wrought by the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.
          Earlier chapters have explored the difference between lunar and solar culture and shown how the perception of the cosmos as a living being was lost during the solar era, and how our conscious self-aware rational mind gradually became dissociated from the deeper instinctive ground from which it had developed. They have shown how, through the great meta-narrative of the Fall of Man, nature and this world became desacralized and woman and all that was related to the Feminine deeply wounded because of their association with nature—a nature that was split off from spirit and seen as part of a fallen world.
          From the fourth century, the powerful influence of St. Augustine and his profoundly pessimistic Doctrine of Original Sin severed humanity from the ground of Soul by imposing on the Christian community the belief that this world was fundamentally flawed and man contaminated by sin and separated from God—from which state only those who were predestined would be rescued by the grace of God. Although there were many other factors contributing to the loss of the wider concept of Soul, for many centuries this Christian doctrine drastically undermined the older lunar participatory experience of life and in my view, led ultimately to the current philosophy of scientific reductionism and the loneliness and alienation of man in an apparently inanimate and indifferent universe.

Soul as the Fathomless Sea of Being
From my dreams and from Jung’s invaluable discoveries I know that the sea is one of the primary images of the Soul—that mysterious sea so difficult to find, so incomprehensible to the mind conditioned to believe that there is only material reality. Perhaps that is why the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Oracles, enjoins us to “cross the Great Waters”.
          No-one has ever referred to the sea as ‘he’. The sea has always been associated with the feminine principle and with the image of a goddess — with Kwan Yin in China and the Virgin Mary in the Christian West and long before these with Nammu, the Sumerian goddess of the primordial abyss. For millennia sailors invoked their protection when they set out in their frail vessels across the dark immensity of the sea. But transpose the image of the sea to the measureless sea of Cosmic Soul. And imagine the small vessel of our individual consciousness sailing on the surface of an infinite sea of light which is continually surging, dancing, flowing into being.
          Imagine that we could see through the physical forms, including our own bodies which we experience as opaque and solid, and were able to see myriad patterns of energy interacting with each other and connecting us with the subtle worlds of the Soul. Imagine shining filaments of light (invisible to us) flowing through the starry galaxies of space as well as through our bodies and the forms of the animals, plants, trees and the landscape we see around us. We experience ourselves as separate entities, but if the whole universe is one integrated, living organism, one symphony of cosmic sound, then we are part of that whole. How did we ever come to believe that the universe and matter are inanimate and dead?
          This cosmic web of life is an inconceivably complex, multi-levelled network of dimensions nested within dimensions, with information continually being exchanged between these dimensions — perhaps comparable to the way we now exchange information through websites and e-mails — at the molecular level, at the level of our own telepathic communication with each other, at the level of planetary life, and at the level of galaxies and perhaps any number of parallel universes of which, as yet, we know nothing. In this invisible soul of the universe is encoded the experience of all orders of life over billions of years as we measure time. We participate as creators in the unfolding of our own lives in this fathomless unfolding evolutionary process but the potential for limitless creation is also there and we participate in that ongoing process of creation. We may inhabit one of these worlds or dimensions after our death when we no longer need a physical body.
          What we call our consciousness is infinite, yet paradoxically as small as the lens through which we try to fathom that immeasurable greatness. How recent a development is our present consciousness in comparison with the age of the universe, even with the age of our planet; how difficult then for us to encompass the meaning of the Soul. If we were to ask ourselves the question put long ago by the great Indian sage Sri Ramana — “Who am I?” — the answer would be “I am the Soul of the Cosmos discovering itself through its own creation.”
          In our modern culture, we are usually so completely absorbed in what the Taoists called the “ten thousand things” that it may never occur to us that the longing we may experience to set out on journeys, to sail across seas or explore foreign lands might reflect the Soul’s own longing to be explored, to reveal to us in the words of an Old Testament prophet “the treasures of darkness and the hidden riches of secret places” (Isaiah 45:3). The Soul may be calling to us but we may unknowingly ignore the foundation on which the whole edifice of life rests.


Reconnecting with the Soul
There is a voice, that of myth, fairy tale and legend and, also, of mystic vision, which points inwards, leading us, if we will allow it, into the neglected dimension of our inner life, our soul, which in turn connects us to the greater Soul of the Cosmos. In its simplest terms, Soul is the secret, hidden dimension that is the goal of the hero’s quest in myth and legend. It is the ultimate destination of all exploration, the unknown, mysterious, fabulous land. The way to it lies through the mysterious gates of horn so celebrated in the ancient world—the gates that guarded the threshold to the mysteries of the Goddess. In the language of mythology and fairy-tale, it has been named the kingdom of faerie, the realm of the gods. In the language of visionary revelation, it is the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God, the sacred ground of all cosmic reality. The Sufis know it as alam al-mittal or what the great Sufi scholar Henri Corbin called the imaginal world (mundus imaginalis) — a world that is as real, alive and present as our world. (10) It is the ground or source of everything we are, everything we perceive. It is our true home in the cosmos to which we return after our sojourn on Earth. If the Soul is all this, it is not surprising that it transcends our present level of consciousness, that we cannot comprehend it after a few hours or years of search and study. Yet, paradoxically, we are both that which seeks to comprehend and the object of our comprehension. We are both part and whole.
          What connects us to the invisible ground of the Soul? It is the quest for meaning, experienced differently in each individual life, which drives our longing to discover, create, explore, know and understand. But above all, it is our capacity to imagine, to make intuitive associations, to bring things together that have been fragmented and are felt to be together. It is through our capacity to feel and to imagine that we are most closely connected to the Soul of nature and the cosmos. It is developing the ability to see with the eye of the heart — often spoken of by poets and artists — that makes the connection with a reality initially beyond the reach of the mind, acting like a plug connecting us to the socket of that deeper reality.
          People sometimes dream of being in a house with rooms they had no idea existed, or find themselves going through a door into an unknown part of it. The Soul can be thought of as a stranger in whose house we live but whom we have never met. This stranger has been the witness of everything experienced since the beginning of our evolution as well as holding everything that is still latent as an unrealized evolutionary potential. This greater Consciousness to which our own consciousness belongs – though still unaware of its parentage – is the basic energy of life which creates, destroys and perpetually transforms itself. Its ‘cosmic imagination’ has brought forth the universe, the galaxies, our planet, the evolutionary process on the planet that has ultimately given us physical form and the self-aware creativity, intelligence and imagination which have transformed the physical and cultural conditions of our life on Earth.
          The idea of meeting this stranger may seem faintly ridiculous at first, even somewhat terrifying. The Soul speaks an unfamiliar language, like the language of hieroglyphs, whose symbols have to be painstakingly learned before we can understand their meaning. As the ability develops to become aware of what it is trying to communicate, to sense its presence and divine its intention and guidance, it begins to come alive. A dialogue develops; synchronicities occur which were not previously noticed.
          Understanding the symbolic imagery of dreams can help to build this relationship. But there are also the insights that have become available to us through the painstaking work of pioneers who have opened up for us this unexplored dimension. Jung developed the method that he called Active Imagination to enter into dialogue with the soul. Meditation can help to give us access to the underlying ground that is obscured by the continual stream of concerns and anxieties which may distract us from awareness of its presence. Silence and contemplation are essential if we are to create the space for listening in our over-busy lives. I remember that the Maharishi said that meditation is like being dipped into a vat filled with golden dye. Eventually, after many dippings, we begin to take on a rich golden hue. What one individual experiences and understands affects the whole. As he suggested and as Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic fields would seem to confirm, once a critical mass is reached, there can be a shift in collective consciousness, a collective awakening.

Sacred Places
The idea that our world rests on the ground of an invisible ‘Other’ survived in the visionary and mystical traditions of the solar age which kept alive the lunar idea of the divinity of nature and the co-inherence of matter and spirit. It also survived in some of the close-knit indigenous communities of the world where the traditions which respected the sacredness of Earth and Cosmos and the methods of opening a connection with the inner dimension were passed from generation to generation—even to the present day. All over the world pilgrimages are still made to places held sacred for millennia because they act as portals which connect the two worlds. In Europe, the churches and shrines sacred to the Black Madonna, whose very blackness evokes the Mysteries of the Great Mother, of Nature and of Soul, still mark these as places of communion between this world and the invisible world. Many healings have been recorded in these places which continue to this day.
          One of the places in Europe, sacred to the Virgin and long before her, to an older Druidic Goddess, is Chartres Cathedral. Chartres is currently being cleaned so that, within and without, it is beginning to gleam with the beautiful pale ivory stone used in its original construction. As you enter the cathedral, you may, as I do each time I visit it, find tears welling unbidden into your eyes in response to its extraordinary impact. Soul and body respond to the subtle harmony created by the sacred geometry which surrounds you, incorporated into every stone, arch and pillar. The very purpose of Chartres is to draw the pilgrim treading its stone-flagged floor from the visible to the invisible world, helping him to see through the veil of matter to the divine ground. The two towers of Chartres represent the sun and the moon and also, most interestingly, the solar and lunar, male and female principles of both Alchemy and Kabbalah. Their union is reflected in the central “column” of the nave, with the altar at the place of the heart in the human body.
           The central line of the nave may also be understood to represent eternity and the two transepts the world of time. The high altar marks the place where they intersect. The labyrinth laid out on the floor of the cathedral symbolizes the pathway through life in this world as a conscious preparation for life in the eternal world, whose presence is indicated by the great rose window on the western façade. When the shape of the rose window is laid over the labyrinth it matches its dimensions exactly, emphasizing the relationship between them. The labyrinth itself acts like a vortex, drawing the pilgrim into the core of itself, causing him to lose his habitual orientation as he follows the multiple turns and folds of the path to the central six-petalled white rose, whose dimensions exactly match the rosette at the centre of the rose window which holds the figure of Christ.
          William Anderson, in his wonderful book The Rise of the Gothic, observes that

The sudden appearance in the years 1135–1150 of a group of men capable of transforming the artistic landscape of Europe was not fortuitous. It happened because these men had as an ideal a new conception of Man to make manifest, a new understanding of their own natures, and a new insight into the springs of art and science. The splendour of Gothic art and architecture derives from the magnanimity of soul of its makers. That was the source of their imaginative grasp of the possibilities of the new technology and of the quality of life revitalized that shines from their work. (11)

The new image of man which is the work of the Gothic masters presents man as an individual endowed with free will, who is seen as God and His angels look upon him and is set within a framework of apparently abstract shapes of portals, arches, niches and vaults that nevertheless symbolize aspects of the laws and forms of the universe. The Christian concept of the worth of the individual soul, a concept with which the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles are instinct, only achieved its first full expression eleven hundred years after the death of Christ, in the column statues of St. Denis and Chartres… They helped to excise the shame in men’s souls at their being men; they spoke, without words, of peace of mind and rationality, and they gave new intensity to the doctrine of the Incarnation through the radiance of the spirit proclaimed by the stone from which they were carved. (12)

The whole cathedral, with its nine portals and its original plan of nine towers was designed to incorporate the nine celestial hierarchies defined by Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian monk of the fifth century, who wrote under the name of a much earlier man, also named Dionysius, who was converted to Christianity by St. Paul when he visited Athens, and is said to have written down the visionary experiences of St. Paul. The works of the fifth century Dionysius, who wrote extensively about the “Divine Darkness of God” were brought from Byzantium to France at the request of the French Emperor, a son of Charlemagne. They were translated during the ninth century at the Abbey of St. Denis in Paris by the renowned scholar and Neoplatonist monk, John Scotus Eriugena who wrote an authentic commentary on the writings of Dionysius and whose other major work will be considered in Chapter Seventeen. Their writings had an enormous influence on the builders of the Gothic cathedrals.
          Chartres was built to offer the pilgrim entering its doors, the experience of the ‘Divine Darkness’ of God illumined by the light flowing from those nine celestial hierarchies and filtered through the exquisite sapphire and ruby radiance of the stained glass windows. (13) As Dionysius himself described so beautifully in a letter to a woman called Dorothy the Deacon, “The Divine Dark is the inaccessible Light in which God is said to dwell. Into this dark – invisible because of its surpassing brightness and unsearchable because of the abundance of its supernatural torrents of light – all enter who are deemed worthy to know and see God: and by the very fact of not seeing or knowing, are truly in Him who is above all sight and knowledge.”(14)
          How, you wonder, was such a marvel as Chartres ever created? How were the enlightened individuals brought together and the skills developed that could design the form, carve, lift and arrange such enormous amounts of stone in such exquisite harmony and proportion? How did they come to incorporate the three great innovations which gave to Chartres its revolutionary structure: the pointed arch, the flying buttress and the ribbed vault? How could flimsy wooden scaffolding hold the tremendous weight of the stones that had to be hauled into place with ropes that could fray and break under the pressure—stones that fitted together with incredible precision and very little mortar?
          Chartres was built as a temple for the Queen of Heaven. The rose itself was a symbol of Divine Wisdom and the whole cathedral with its three rose windows was a hymn to Mary as the Throne of Wisdom and Queen of Heaven:

It was Abbot Suger who helped to develop the iconographical scheme of the Tree of Jesse culminating in the Virgin and her Son that was to lead to the triumphal portrayal of Mary as the Queen of Heaven in so many cathedrals and churches. Through the association with her of so many ancient images of the moon, the stars, the Milky Way, she came to possess a cosmic significance, seen most clearly in the great rose windows of France, as though she were the womb of the universe containing Christ the sunchild. (15)

The nameless men who designed Chartres, who called themselves “Masters of the Compasses”, gave the twelfth century culture of France and Europe a new image of Man as radiant with divinity, the more so as he was able to bring such marvels into being. In exalting the image of the Virgin and making her the focus of their creation, they rescued the Feminine from the contempt into which it had fallen and they redeemed nature from its earlier association with sin, releasing it into a glorious affirmation of its beauty in fruit, flower and foliage, presided over by the Green Man. Chartres is a phenomenal testament to the creative power of the human imagination when it is directed towards bringing something into being that connects this time-bound world with the eternal one. It is the honouring of this connection that creates civilization.
          A most interesting book on Chartres by Gordon Strachan describes how there is evidence from the correspondence of notable scholars in the eleventh century that they didn’t know how to solve very simple geometrical problems. By the thirteenth century, however, they did. This advance in learning, he concludes, could only have come from Islam during the twelfth century through the cultural contacts with Toledo and Cordoba in Spain and from the Crusades and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The historical evidence, he suggests, shows that it was only through contact with the then highly developed civilization of Islam that the full works of Plato, Aristotle and Euclid were rediscovered and that it was the translation of these, disseminated mainly through the schools of Paris and Chartres, which initiated a cultural renaissance in northern France. The rise of Gothic architecture, was, he concludes, the most spectacular result of this. (16)
           The master masons of Chartres were inspired and also instructed by the philosophy and sacred geometry taught at the Platonic School at Chartres that was founded in the eleventh century by a remarkable bishop called Fulbert and renowned all over Europe as a centre of learning. For scholars like Fulbert and Abbot Suger, inspired by the writings of Plato, it was the unseen realm of the metaphysical that was the real world and the material world, marvellous as it was, the shadow or copy of the divine one. (17)
          Strachan believes that there is also evidence of the strong influence of Islam and the skills of Muslim workmen in Chartres and it is possible that workmen returned from Jerusalem with the Crusaders and spent many years in France. (18) What is evident from the overall plan of Chartres and the sublime elements of its construction is that its builders—architects, sculptors, artists and designers—may have drawn their inspiration from learning how to enter into the world of the Soul, seeing in their imagination the prototype of what they wished to bring into being in the town that had been a sacred site for millennia.

The Rose as a Symbol of the Soul
The origins of the sacredness of the rose may be traced to the beautiful eight-year orbital pattern made by the planet Venus. It was from ancient times associated with the Great Goddesses of the ancient world: Isis, Aphrodite, Cybele, Venus and, later, the Virgin Mary and the rosary. In medieval Europe, the rose and the enclosed garden became a symbol of the soul as well as a place for lovers to meet. But more than that, it was the symbol of the greater Soul of the cosmos in which the human soul was contained. The rose is also one of the oldest symbols of the Wisdom Tradition and of Wisdom herself radiating love to our world from the divine ground. Like the thousand-petalled lotus or the jewel in the heart of the lotus of the Eastern traditions, the rose came to symbolize the awakened soul, united with the divine ground, as in Dante’s great vision of the white rose of the Empyrean. The rosary was sometimes called “the rose garden” and Mary herself was spoken of as “The Garden” (of Paradise) and also as the “Rose without a Thorn” or the “Peerless Rose”. (19) Mary was known in the Middle Ages – the time of the building of Chartres – as the Rosa Mystica. To find the shape of the rose so emphasized in the three great rose windows of Chartres and other Gothic cathedrals suggests that the symbolism of the rose held great significance for its builders. I knew none of this when I was haunted long ago by the words of a poem by Walter de la Mare, “O no man knows through what wild centuries roves back the rose.”

The Garden as a Metaphor of the Soul
People often use the word ‘soul’ when they speak of a piece of music they love, a marvellous building like Chartres, a beautiful garden or a beloved person. Soul is a specific quality or radiance that people recognize as touching their heart. Anyone who has worked in a garden and seen the response of nature to his efforts, perhaps over many years of labour, will have felt the presence of Soul in every leaf and flower. From earliest recorded times in every great civilization, in Egypt, in Persia and India, in China, in Roman times and in medieval and Renaissance Europe, people have created gardens as sanctuaries for the purpose of contemplation and communion, and for repose, enjoyment and delight.
           The rose garden in twelfth century Europe as well as in Sufi mysticism became a replica of Paradise, and the fountain or well at the centre, a symbol of the water of life flowing from the divine world. It is difficult to say when the garden became a metaphor for the Soul and a sacred space for connection with the unseen world, but it is certainly found in the mystical streams of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Taoism. In the tradition of Kabbalah, the Shekinah is often addressed as “the Garden”, and the wedding of the two aspects of the god-head – the Holy One and His Beloved – takes place in a garden of pomegranates, symbol of the innermost chamber of the soul.
          From earliest times we have paintings of gardens and even (as in Egypt and Persia) of gardeners working in them. The gardens of Moorish Spain in the ninth century, in towns like Cordoba, Granada and Seville, were renowned for their wonderful gardens, as were the later gardens of Italy and those of Persia and Moghul India. Further to the East, there were the temple gardens of China and Japan. But the monasteries of Europe, such as that of Monte Cassino in Italy, also fostered the art of creating gardens as sanctuaries for prayer and contemplation as well as cultivating fruit and vegetables to feed the monastic community, and these had a fountain, well or tree at the centre, perhaps a residual memory from earlier shamanic cultures of the sacred space acting as a portal between the two worlds. Herb gardens were cultivated in these monasteries and the monks became skilled at using their fragrant essences to heal many illnesses. Gardens were always places which attracted birds as well as the bees gathering the nectar of flowers and plants to transform into honey. Here, a life of contemplation could flourish like the plants and the birds, protected from the turmoil and violence of the world. We may recall the words of Rumi:

When the rose is gone and the rose-garden fallen to ruin,
Where will you seek the scent of the rose?

The Many Dimensions of Reality and the Great Chain of Being
The ancient Wisdom Traditions tell us that we and our world are woven into a cosmic tapestry whose threads connect us not only with many dimensions of reality but with multitudes of beings inhabiting those dimensions. Beyond the present confines of our sight a limitless field of consciousness interacts with our own. They tell us that a great nested chain of being extends from the ineffable light source of the divine ground to our world, the densest level of physical manifestation. In the New Testament Jesus may be referring to this multiplicity of dimensions when he says, “In My Father’s House there are many mansions.” (John 14.2) The deepest ground of reality which contains all other dimensions was known to the Gnostics in the early years of the Christian era as the Pleroma, the root of all, present within all yet beyond all—a boundless, indefinable, transcendent dimension which nevertheless permeates our world in the way that sunlight permeates air.
          It may be helpful to imagine the whole universe as an unimaginably fine web of life holding three main levels or planes of reality in relationship with each other, two of which are invisible to us and none of which are separate from the others.

· The plane of Eternal Spirit, the ground of pure light beyond all form
· The intermediary plane of the many subtle realms of Soul connecting matter and spirit
· The plane of Earth and the visible material universe.

The first two realms of Spirit and Soul are filled with multiple concentric belts, spheres or zones of matter far finer than the composition of our world and varying in vibratory frequency. These planes are not separate from each other or from the plane of material reality. They interpenetrate each other but we cannot see the finer levels with our ‘ordinary’ vision nor, so far, with our scientific instruments although, in their encounter with dark matter, and the Higgs boson field, they may be touching on them. They could be described as multiple nested fields of different grades of consciousness or different vibrational intensities held within a unifying Field, Ground or Web of Light. These spheres interact with our world and can influence us here in ways of which we are not aware. The worlds or spheres which make up this immeasurable realm of ‘Soul’ surround every planet in the solar system and possibly many of the galaxies. They may be part of other universes which interact with ours.
          As will be explained in Chapter Nineteen, countless billions of souls inhabit these spheres or zones of reality. We may wonder why none of this is known to our world. The answer is that it has been known to different metaphysical traditions and is described in the mass of evidence that now exists coming from “the other side” but humanity as a whole has remained largely ignorant of it and will remain so until such time as the existence of these unseen dimensions of reality becomes more widely known, possibly through the discoveries of science but also through reconnection with the teaching of ancient metaphysical traditions.
          From the beginning of recorded history and no doubt long before that, the greatest poets, shamans and visionaries as well as artists, musicians and mystics of all cultures have connected us to this deep ground of Soul. They have connected the seen to the unseen, the time-bound world to the eternal, the waking mind to the dreaming soul. We know from the writings of the Sufi mystics that they have entered this intermediate world of psychic reality and have described it as a plane of reality similar to our world down to the finest detail but of a greater intensity of beauty, colour and exquisite form. It is composed of matter, but etherealised matter, without the density of the matter of our world. They called it “Celestial Earth” and they recognized our terrestial world as a reflection of this unseen world of Soul, seeing its beauty and majesty mirrored in the deep forests of the earth, the snow-capped mountains, the depth and vast expanse of the sea, the dazzling immensity of the star-strewn night sky. From century to century, as links in a great golden chain, they kept alive the reality of the Soul’s existence and the true values of the Soul—the values that honour and celebrate the wonder, sacredness and awesome mystery of life.
          Whether we look at the ancient cosmologies of Egypt, India, Persia, China or Tibet or the tradition of Kabbalah, we find a description of subtle worlds or dimensions of reality beyond this material world and of beings inhabiting those worlds. Angels and archangels abound in the Old and New Testaments and adorn the great cathedrals of Europe. Kabbalists taught that there are four separate worlds that interpenetrate and interact with each other, each governed by archangelic and angelic beings and each a portal to a multitude of other worlds or dimensions. We find the nine celestial hierarchies known to the mystical Christian tradition through the writings of the monk Dionysius, sculpted on the south porch of Chartres Cathedral above the seated figure of Christ, but unless a guide points them out, we might not register their presence or understand their significance.
          In the sixteenth century, the kabbalist Joseph Cordovero named thirteen gates to higher consciousness. In India for millennia the practice of Kundalini Yoga offered a method of enabling our limited consciousness to evolve to higher or deeper levels of perception and the experience of invisible worlds. Mahayana Buddhism teaches that there are three interpenetrating realities: this material world, a subtle intermediary soul world and finally, the formless world of pure spirit named the Clear Light of the Void. All these traditions teach that contemplation and specific exercises prepare the mind for the encounter with these transcendent realities. In the intermediate world of Soul are held all the memories of human experience—memories which may be said to correspond with the collective unconscious of Jung and the World of Formation (Yetzirah) of Kabbalah.
           These memories are known to Hindu cosmology as the Akashic records—Akasha being the name of the limitless field in which they were held. The fact that our consciousness can be expanded to awareness of vast planetary and cosmic memory fields has been proven through the methods of holotropic breathing developed and recorded through thousands of sessions by the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. (20) These transcendent worlds or dimensions of consciousness become accessible through subjective experiences which are not yet accepted by science yet this does not mean they do not exist. They are not so much ‘places’ as we might imagine them; rather they are ‘states of being’. The Metaphysical Traditions confirm that we are living within subtle fields of reality which are imperceptible to our ‘normal’ level of consciousness and the instruments so far devised by science.

Cosmic Soul and Science
As the last chapter has shown, we are experiencing a profound paradigm shift as we move from seeing the universe as a lifeless machine to seeing it as a unified and living organism in whose life we participate as co-creators with it. Duane Elgin describes the paradigm shift in these words:

Our actual identity or experience of who we are is vastly bigger than we thought — we are moving from a strictly personal consciousness to a conscious appreciation of ourselves as integral to the cosmos… In this new paradigm, our sense of identity takes on a paradoxical and mysterious quality: We are both observer and observed, knower and that which is known. We are each completely unique yet completely connected with the entire universe… Awakening to the miraculous nature of our identity as simultaneously unique and interconnected with a living universe can help us overcome the species-arrogance and sense of separation that threaten our future. (21)

Concepts like David Bohm’s Implicate Order and his understanding of the universe as a “sea of being” and as an undivided whole, reanimate ancient ideas of the Cosmos as a great web of life, in which no part can be seen as intrinsically separate from any other. With Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of morphic fields, we are offered an understanding of how all the forms of our world come into being.
          There is also the mystery of dark matter and the Higgs boson field mentioned in the last chapter. Deno Kazanis, author of The Reintegration of Science and Spirituality, believes that scientists may actually be stumbling upon the subtle energy bodies that mystics have spoken of for millennia:

Our ability to see, touch, taste, smell, and hear the world is really only due to atoms’ electric charge. And because objects on the atomic level interact through electric forces, if there's no such force present, then objects can literally pass right through each other.... What intrigues me is that dark matter, being invisible and not able to produce light or any type of electromagnetic waves, means that this is a substance that is not composed of any electric charge... Its presence is determined by its gravity, which is an enormous amount, yet the material itself is totally invisible. So it occurred to me that when the mystics were talking about subtle bodies interpenetrating with our visible body, the only way that could be possible would be if these bodies were made up of something other than charged matter. And dark matter would fit that category quite well.

There have been many names for this unseen ground but light is the primary image which connects the worlds of science and metaphysics. Science would be enormously assisted in all that it is discovering if it were aware of and could accept the validity of the metaphysical traditions. It could bring things together that have been separated for centuries through a failure to recognize the essential relationship of spirit and matter.

The Eye of the Heart: The Soul’s Organ of Perception
As long as science tries to locate the soul in the physical brain and approaches the soul as an object to be observed through the instruments created by the mind, it will not be able to understand the soul either in the personal sense or in the wider cosmic aspect to which Heraclitus was referring. Nor will it be able to answer the questions which have preoccupied the greatest intellects of previous ages: questions of who we are, why we are here and what our relationship to the cosmos might be. An understanding of the soul can only be recovered through what has been called the eye of the heart.
          The heart is the soul’s organ of perception. It has its own kind of consciousness, its own deeply instinctive way of knowing just as the mind has its own way of knowing. It acts as a kind of umbilical cord connecting us to all life on this planet and to the greater life of the Cosmos. The heart is the source of our creative imagination, born of our instinct for relationship with that life. The heart generates all our quests, all our hopes and longings and will ultimately reunite us with the source from which we have come. Without the heart, without the instinct to imagine, to feel, to hope and to love, life is meaningless, sterile, dead. When we are in touch with our deepest instincts, feelings and intuitions it comes alive, it vibrates, it sings. Music, poetry, beauty, close loving relationships, inspiring ideas, magnificent, thrilling achievements like those of the Olympic athletes — all these nourish the heart and each of them is as essential to the soul in this dimension as food is to the body. What part of the body do you touch when someone asks “Where is the seat of your feeling?” Most people instinctively touch the area of their heart.
          What exactly is the eye of the heart? I have found the clearest description of it in three books written by an Episcopalian priest called Cynthia Bourgeault. In them she explains the essential teaching of the Christian Wisdom Tradition about the transformation of consciousness. The eye of the heart, as she describes it, is an organ of spiritual perception. Learning how to develop this organ can help us to move into the different understanding of reality, the different worldview that I have attempted to describe in earlier chapters where I speak of a Sacred Order.
          As the eye of the heart develops, so we become aware of the presence of another, invisible dimension and discover how to align our consciousness with it, acting in this world from a sense of connection and attunement with that Other without in any way diminishing the importance and validity of experience in this world. The eye of the heart, as Cynthia Bourgeault describes it, is a “vibrant resonant field, that functions like a homing beacon between the realms; and when it is strong and clear, it creates a synchronous resonance between them.”(22)

The ancient Wisdom Traditions all saw that the physical world we take for our empirical, time-and-space-bound reality is encompassed in another: a coherent and powerful world of divine purpose always surrounding and interpenetrating it. This other, more subtle world is invisible to the senses, and to the mind it appears to be pure speculation. But if the eye of the heart is awake and clear, it can receive, radiate and reflect that divine Reality. (23)

We can learn to focus our consciousness on the eye of the heart as the door to the soul, and imagine two lines meeting there: the vertical line of eternity and the horizontal line of this world of time. As we learn how to develop the eye of the heart, we begin to live through a different focus, so that we become increasingly in touch with that deeper level of reality. Bringing the dissociated surface mind into harmony and balance with the deeper ground of the soul, could change our beliefs, our lives and our culture. A beautiful quotation from the twelfth century reminds us of the importance of focusing on that point where the worlds of time and eternity meet, the point that is the meeting place of our soul with the eternal ground: “All that is moved is subject to time, but it is from eternity that all contained in the vastness of time is born and into eternity that it is to be resolved.”(24)
          It has long been known that we have undeveloped faculties that are beyond the reach of the rational mind — even that there are large areas of the physical brain that are not used. As Jung discovered and as many followers of Kabbalah, Vedanta and Sufism have known for centuries, the power of the imagination and proven methods of connection can be used to develop the eye of the heart and create a bridge to the unseen worlds. As Bourgeault describes it: “When…the vibrational field of a particular human heart comes into spontaneous resonance with the divine heart itself, then finite and infinite become a single, continuous wavelength, and authentic communion becomes possible. Bridging the created and uncreated realms within a human being, it is both a realm in itself and the means by which this realm makes itself known.”(25)
          The great Flemish mystic, Jan van Ruysbroeck put it in these words: “Unity is this: that a man feel himself to be gathered together with all his powers in the unity of his heart. Unity brings inward peace and restfulness of heart. Unity of heart is a bond which draws together body and soul, heart and senses, and all the outward and inward powers and encloses them in the union of love.”(26)
          As the relationship between our individual soul and the eternal ground of life grows stronger, so we become more aware of its voice, its presence and its subtle guidance. A deepening relationship with this ground can become the inner fabric and focus of our lives. It is an alchemy that we can weave into being with our attention, developing insight through our longing for understanding and relationship with it. If this path into the depth of ourselves is gently followed, we no longer live life unconsciously, responding blindly to events as they happen. We remain in touch with the invisible, even as we interact with the visible. Through this transformation, so gradual and subtle that it is almost imperceptible, our perception of the world is transformed.
          Whoever ventures into the deepest realm of the Soul, will discover, as T.S. Eliot did, that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”(27) She will know that each line of poetry that has stirred the reeds of longing, each image of beauty and fragment of what was felt to be truth has served to reveal, little by little, a Presence that has taken humanity millennia to discover, yet has always been there, awaiting the moment of recognition. The measure of commitment that is asked of us by the Soul in return for her gift of wisdom and guidance may be only gradually revealed, but the inscription on the lead casket chosen by Bassanio, in the hope of winning the hand of Portia, says it all:

Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath. (28)

The Greater Self, Presence and Guide
All spiritual traditions speak of the spirit guide, the hidden presence, the daemon, the angelic messenger, the revelatory voice. The tradition of the spirit guide is very ancient and originates with shamanic cultures. As we become more aware of this deeper reality, it is more able to make us aware that we are not alone, as the wonderful story of Tobit and the Archangel Raphael in the Apocrypha illustrates. In that story, Tobias did not recognize the true nature of his companion until the end of his journey when Raphael revealed himself to him and to his father – whose sight he had just restored – saying, “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels which present the prayers of the saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy One.” (Tobit 12:15) There are many synchronicities in our lives that go unnoticed, many messages from the realm of spirit until our focus changes and we begin to attune our consciousness to the transcendent dimension which interpenetrates our material world and awaits our recognition of it.
          In Christianity, there has always been a strong tradition of guidance and protection from angels. One has only to look at the great angels portrayed in the medieval sculptures or stained glass of Gothic cathedrals and the paintings of the early Renaissance to see how alive this tradition still was for the people of Europe at that time. It has been lost to our culture because we have banished the radiant emissaries of the divine ground. So we might concur with Rilke in the second of his Duino Elegies, when he exclaims, “Oh where are the days of Tobias, when one supremely shining stood on the simple threshold, a little disguised for the journey, no longer terrifying…”
          The teaching of the spirit guide is equally strong in Islamic culture, particularly in Sufism where the world of the Soul was a known reality. Henri Corbin, the great scholar of Sufism, writes that

Some souls have learned everything from invisible guides, known only to themselves…The ancient sages…taught that for each individual soul, or perhaps a number of souls with the same nature and affinity, there is a being of the spiritual world, who, throughout their existence, adopts a special solicitude and tenderness toward that soul or group of souls; it is he who initiates them into knowledge, protects, guides, defends, comforts them. (29)

My own life experience has taught me that we can receive help, inspiration and guidance from the cosmic ground that has brought our consciousness into being over aeons of time and holds all of us in its embrace. Although there are periods of intense darkness and depression that the alchemists called the “nigredo”, and Christian mystics the Dark Night of the Soul, with the patient work of establishing a connection and in moments of sudden insight and illumination, we can experience the presence of that ground and learn how to develop the ability to listen to its guidance. What is it in us that urges us to grow beyond ourselves? Who is it who knows the end when we can only see the beginning, the form of the oak when we only see the acorn? What helps us when it seems no help is to be found? Is this all our own doing? Or are we within a Consciousness, a Presence, greater than our own limited consciousness, which is slowly, laboriously, awakening us to awareness of itself?
          The poet Yeats speaks of this Presence in his autobiography, The Trembling of the Veil: “I know that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, and that teaches the birds to make their nest; and I know that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind.”
          All spiritual traditions have recorded the words of the great teachers of humanity whose teaching comes to them from that source-ground. In Christianity, the connection with this ground is mediated by the figure of Jesus and the Virgin Mary; in Buddhism by the great avatars of the Buddha and the goddess Tara; in Hinduism by Krishna; in Taoism by Lao Tzu and the enlightened Taoist sages; and in Islam by Mohammed, its great mystics and the figure of El Khidr, known as “The Green One”. The divine ground itself has variously been described as the Tao, as Brahman, as God or Allah, as the Void, as the Holy One and His Shekinah. This divine ground is within us as well as all around us. We need to create a sanctuary within ourselves where we can listen to its guidance and receive its help.
          Two thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Piscean Age, Jesus, as a fully awakened man, an emissary from the higher spheres of the cosmos, taught his disciples the path of inner transformation—how to awaken the eye of the heart and to live through that awakened eye by building a bridge, moment by moment, day by day, between the visible and invisible worlds. But Christianity lost that teaching and became an institution which emphasized belief and belonging to the Church as the way to God rather than the transformation of consciousness and awakening to the presence of a living transcendent reality. As Cynthia Bourgeault says, “Like a river bank that is eroded when a river changes its course, so the Christian Wisdom tradition about awakening the eye of the heart and the transformation of consciousness was steadily eroded and finally washed away.” (30) The distinction that Christianity drew between the Divine Creator and fallen creation deeply injured both God and man.
          Jesus opened our awareness to our divinity and the change of consciousness that arises from the creation of a relationship with that hidden ground. Why did he ask us to love one another and to be reconciled with our enemies? Was it because, as an emissary of the Divine Ground, he understood the sacred nature of the whole manifest order? Why did he say, “Ye are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you”? (John 10:34) unless he knew that all of us have the potential of bringing forth the divinity latent within us through a direct and growing relationship with the source-ground that he called ‘The Father’. Why, in the enigmatic saying in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (logion 77) did he say, “Cleave the wood and I am there; lift up a stone and you will find Me there” if not to point to the fact that nature and matter rest on the ground of Spirit, that in their essence, they are Spirit?
          The revelation that he brought and that his disciples at first found so hard to comprehend was of opening the heart to awareness of the unity and divinity of life, and therefore, to love and compassion for all. Jesus himself lived his life from the values and wisdom intrinsic to that perception of reality. This astonishing revelation, this seeing truly into the hidden reality behind the forms of life, living in full awareness of and connection with it while in this earthly dimension, is the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field, the grain of mustard seed which, tiny at the beginning when it is first planted in the soil of the soul, can grow into a mighty tree, hung with the fruit of insight, wisdom and compassion. The beautiful words recorded in the Gnostic Acts of John spoken by Jesus on the eve of his Passion often come back to me and I have silently spoken them to myself in moments of doubt or depression:

I am a lamp to you who behold Me;
I am a mirror to you who perceive Me;
I am a door to you who knock at Me;
I am a way to you a wayfarer.
You have me for a bed; rest then upon Me. (32)

There are many passages in The Mystic Vision which bear witness to the guidance or presence of the divine ground but I particularly love these words of Bede Griffiths:

Each man must discover this Centre in himself, this Ground of his being, this Law of his life. It is hidden in the depths of every soul, waiting to be discovered. It is the treasure hidden in a field, the pearl of great price. It is the one thing which is necessary, which can satisfy all our desires and answer all our needs. But it is hidden now under deep layers of habit and convention. The world builds up a great protective barrier round it. (33)

Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian teacher of the last century, speaks of the process of awakening to the presence and guidance of the soul in these words:

As the crust of our outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature and stuff of consciousness refines to a greater subtlety and purity and the deeper psychic experiences become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil itself, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul then manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body...It takes up its greater function as the guide and ruler of our nature. (34)

The possibility of communion with the Soul of the Cosmos is latent in us as a potential. To bring this hidden potential into manifestation is the work of a lifetime, in my view, of many lifetimes. As the relationship between the human personality and the cosmic ground of Soul grows stronger, we become more aware of its voice, its presence and its subtle guidance. A deepening relationship with the Soul can become the inner fabric and focus of our lives. It is something that we can weave into being with our attention, developing insight through our longing for understanding and guided to action in the world which reflects our connection with it.
          The growing relationship with the eternal ground can change the quality of our lives, giving them a deeper resonance, a different focus. Relationship with the soul brings us into closer relationship with the whole of life. Anxiety and depression, for which we seek treatment through so many drugs and therapies, diminish. Through this transformation, so gradual and subtle that it is almost imperceptible, our perception of the world is transformed.
          A different and more profound meaning to life comes into being. If we realize we are living within a Sacred Order, we find a more profound context for relationships and for changing our habits of behaviour, both as individuals and as nations and societies, which can help us to resolve many challenging problems in our lives and in the wider world.
          Ultimately, what in the beginning was perceived as separate: inner and outer, myself and other, human and divine, begins to fuse and become a unity — one life, one consciousness, one unified whole. It used to be thought that we could not become ‘spiritual’ without sacrificing the life of the body, embracing a celibate life. The idea of celibacy as the way to the spirit was a fundamental error, derived from the split between mind and body which was so deeply imprinted by the polarizing beliefs of the solar age. The body is to be loved and cherished because it is the vehicle of the soul in this dimension of reality.
          Each person can find his or her path with the help of others who have gone before, or through connecting with people who are teaching methods of awakening. Deep soul friendships can be formed. One of the greatest rewards is finding friends through the mysterious connecting and attracting power of the soul as well as, recently, the Internet. Remarkable activist organizations like Avaaz (www.avaaz.com) are gathering tens of millions of people to speak with one voice to bring into being a different world ruled by different values. They are creating something at a planetary level similar to the cosmic Net of Indra. I found this beautiful passage in the introduction by Christopher Bamford to a book by Alice Howell called The Dove in the Stone:

There is a path of love and knowledge to which the West is heir. Once on this path, the pilgrim is no longer alone, but in a visionary company of “friends of God.” ...This prophetic religion of Sophia, forever moved by love and beauty, is a living transmission and a perpetual renaissance; it has no formal church or earthly institution, but is revealed only in the hearts and minds of human beings. Of the spirit, it is present whenever two or three are gathered together in the service of the ensouling of the world – of the return of the soul to God by way of the soul’s return to her true self. (35)

We are awakening from a long sleep to awareness that we and the phenomenal world are woven into a cosmic tapestry whose threads connect us not only with each other at the deepest level but with the divine ground of life. Beyond our present time-bound sight a limitless field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognized by us, embraced by us. The realization that we participate in a multi-dimensional reality that is the source and ground of our own being may eventually shatter the belief that this material reality is all there is, that we exist on a tiny planet in a lifeless universe and that there is no life beyond death. It may be that the Soul of the Cosmos has waited aeons for us to reach the point where more than a handful of individuals could awaken to awareness of the ground that animates and supports the whole of our existence. As we begin to relate to the intelligent Spirit that informs the whole, we begin to align ourselves with that greater life, like a planet orbiting the sun.
           In 1841, the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote these beautiful words which are a fitting end to this chapter:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. (36)

Notes:

1. Jung, C.G. (1964) Man and His Symbols, p. 102
2. Jefferies, Richard (1947) The Story of My Heart, Constable & Co. Ltd., London, p. 46-7
3. Jefferies, pp. 20-21
4. Laszlo, Ervin & Currivan, Jude (2008) CosMos, A Co-creator’s Guide to the Whole-World, p. 50
5. Crook,  Francis H. (1977) Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, Pennsylvania State University,  p. 2
6. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro (1930) Studies in the Lankavarara Sutra, Google Books, p. 95
7. Crook, p. 9
8. ibid, p.122
9. Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn (2010) The Return of the Feminine, The Golden Sufi Press, California
10. See his great work Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Bollingen, Princeton, 1969
11. Anderson, William (1995) The Rise of the Gothic, Huchinson Ltd., London, p. 83
12. ibid, p. 85
13. Strachan, Gordon (2003) Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space, Floris Books, Edinburgh
14. Critchlow, Keith (2003) Chartres Cathedral: A Sacred Geometry, DVD, Jansen Media
15. Anderson, p. 131
16. Strachan, pp. 16-17
17. ibid, p. 38
18. ibid, pp. 28-32
19. There are two wonderful and rare books about the rose and the rose garden: Eithne Wilkins, The Rose Garden Game, Gollancz, London, 1969. And Seonaid Robertson, Rose Garden and Labyrinth – a Study in Art Education, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London,1963.
20. Grof, Stanislav with Bennett, Hal Zina (1993) The Holotropic Mind: Three levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives, HarperCollins, New York
21. Elgin, Duane (2007) from his chapter in Mind Before Matter, Visions of New Science of Consciousness, O Books, Ropley, UK
22. Bourgeault (2010) The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, p. 51
23. Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 35  
24. Sylvester, Bernardus Cosmographia, in Anderson, The Rise of the Gothic, p. 23
25. Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, p. 61
26. Ruysbroeck, Jan van The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage
27. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
28 . The Merchant of Venice
29. Abu’l Barahat,in Henri Corbin, Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, p. 34
30. Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 20
31. To grasp the depth, breadth and beauty of the Aramaic language Jesus spoke, I would recommend the books of Neil Douglas-Klotz, among them Prayers of the Cosmos, Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus.
32. Mead, G.R.S. (1906 & 1931) The Gnostic Acts of John in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, p. 431
33. Griffiths, Dom Bede (1976) Return to the Centre, Collins, St. James’s Place, London and
Templegate, Springfield, Ill. 1977
34. Aurobindo, Sri (1990) The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot, WI.
35. Bamford, Christopher (1988) Foreword to Alice O. Howell’s The Dove in the Stone, Quest Books, Wheaton, Ohio
36. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1841) The Over-soul, Ninth Essay

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