Year in Review – Charles Gilchrist and Sacred Geometry

Regardless of their fear, I pressed on. In the early 1950’s I was a teenager living in the Chicago area. It was then I discovered the surrealist painters. I read library books with countless reproductions of the surrealist works by Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Rene Magritte, Alberto Giacometti. Salvador Dali, etc. I was totally fascinated by the surrealists because they were investigating their own internal dream worlds, their subconscious imagery. This kind of thinking struck a nerve in me and, at that point, I thought of myself as a “Surrealist”. I could feel the serious TRUTH of honest self-investigation.

Then high school, art school, marriage and fatherhood. The practical necessities of life had finally caught up with me. I became a professional portrait photographer out of necessity and immediately began to make a decent living. The family was happy as I had apparently started to become respectable. I stopped making serious art and turned to photographic commerce. Surrealism was now the last thing on my conscious mind.

The 1960’s however, upset my comfort zone. They were extremely challenging years with fundamental shifts of the collective consciousness on multiple levels. lines in the sand were being drawn: the Civil Rights movement, assassinations right and left, the Sexual Revolution, another horrible war, the Women’s Movement, Black Power, top level corruption in government, rampant and open drug use by the young, and numerous people coming out of various kinds of closets on all levels. And these were just some of the dynamic power-shifting energies at work. I was horribly conflicted and miserable.

And then, on June 17 1970, my thirtieth birthday, I experienced a profound mystical realization in which I remembered my early and intimate connections to spirit, and the commitment I had made to my own God given talents. The entire experience lasted almost two days. There were no drugs of any kind involved, but in those altered states I glimpsed numerous eye-opening visions including my unfulfilled potentials. I had received a gigantic dose of my own ignorance and failure. I was thereby humbled to the level of a worm. Almost everything I thought I believed in was simply untrue, or at best only partially true. It was an intensely numbing experience, simultaneous death and rebirth. I cried and prayed for hours.

Miraculously, a benevolent voice began to instruct me. He told me his name was “Watcher” and further told me he was there because I had called for help. “Watcher” rapidly became like a guru to me. I trusted him completely. He guided me almost every day for the next two very difficult years, about the length of time it took me to reinvent myself. By then I had changed my profession from portrait to commercial photography. I had already begun to make serious surrealistic art again and had returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art as a night school student. I felt wonderful because I had regained my personal intimate connection with the Universe and rediscovered my early vision of a mysterious spiritual purpose.