Year in Review – Charles Gilchrist and Sacred Geometry
Watcher instructed me that it was time for him to go. He gave me specific instructions relating to various studies, insisted I continue my meditations in earnest, and then simply went away.
I took his advice, studying and growing for five more years (1977) until another trilling mystical experience catapulted me to a whole new level. It began with a surrealist drawing experiment based on a relatively bad photograph I had taken of a beautiful young couple standing in front of a large fireplace. I felt a strong intuitive attraction to the out of focus photograph and transposed the basic composition to a large piece of white paper. Working with fine quill pens and ink allowed me to slip into meditational calmness. I found my consciousness up on the ceiling and watching myself drawing below. It was thrilling and amazing to watch my own creative process unfold from above. The part of me which was drawing was also enjoying the fantastic images which were swimming in the blank parts of the drawing. It was open-eyed dreaming. I had already experienced very powerful transcendental levels of my own consciousness through the classical practice of deep meditation but this open-eyed transcendental experience was much more intense.
Eureka, a TRUE breakthrough! Over the next few months I continued to develop the same drawing and the process of quietly working on the small details lead me into the same kind of open-eyed transcendental experience. I had stumbled into a consistently predictable way of accessing my own dream world while remaining wide awake. I had discovered a practical technique which allowed me to directly experience the essence of the surrealist philosophy and Sacred Geometry was just around the corner.
That drawing (The Saints Of Jade) was the first of a large series of transcendental drawings all based on my photography of models. By 1980, I had already created over twenty of these very complicated and highly detailed drawings and I was healing myself in the process. This series entitled “The Enchanted Couples Suite” lead me to an ever deepening understanding of my own psychological dilemmas and guided me to my discovery of the power of Mandala and Sacred Geometry. Aside from the fact that this work was all figurative, I discovered each drawing also contained mysterious references to classic geometric forms (circles, triangles, squares, spheres, cubes, etc.). And numbers, especially sequences of numbers, floated in and out of these drawings. I realized my internal dream creating “Higher Mind” was sending me messages in the language of geometry and numbers. This was the beginning of my fascination with the concepts of Mandala making as a transcendental healing process. I had been successfully attempting to discover the TRUTH of my own human situation, and now I was discovering that perfect geometric BEAUTY was also existing at the deepest levels of my own universal consciousness. And I could hear my mother speaking to me from the past, “Charles, an artist pursues truth and beauty.”
