"Building" the New Jerusalem
A project worthy of our time.
In my bubble, people have been talking about the need for a “cathedral mindset”, of being engaged in a project that will outlast you and your children. We lack a project that is able not only to give us the drive for life long sustained attention and effort, but that is able to gather us in robust, sustained collaboration. And so we end up giving ourselves to lesser goals, or become scattered and end up aimlessly participating to the will of other agencies. Whether it’s watching youtube or going to the gym, meditating or doing psychedelics, “enjoying life” or caring for our family, fighting for some cause or building artificial intelligence. All these, rather than being in opposition, could be gathered and organized in service to something greater…
But then, what project is worthy of such sacrifice? What aim is of such transcendent beauty that its mere vision will move you to sacrifice even the satisfaction of seeing it brought to completion? I’ve been in circles thinking about that for some years now, and I have a hard time imagining them gather momentum.
Following a cannabis-induced insight, I’ve had the suspicion for some time now, that the only worthy project would be the actual building of cathedrals. Yes, cathedral not just as a metaphor for a long and worthy project, but as the actual thing. Why?
My understanding of what a cathedral is, is “a beautiful place to gather the Many in the contemplation of the One”. To have this as an aim has various benefits:
It’s about place, embodiment, physical reality.
It has a transcendent point of focus, therefore it has the greatest potential to gather.
Through the practice of joint contemplation that such a place would make possible, the Many could potentially achieve a unity (communion) that couldn’t be achieved otherwise, thus their joint life would be improved in many unforeseeable ways.
Think about it: some of the most beautiful buildings have been built centuries ago, with the best insight and technology of the time. What could be achieved if we, collectively, carefully and patiently (again, think 500 year project) put all the skills, knowledge and tools at our disposal (yes, including the edgiest ones, like psychedelics, crypto and AI!), in service of building the most beautiful place possible, to allow our descendants to have the most transcendent and unitive collective vision of the One as possible?
This sounds too good to be true, but I have to tell even myself: this is not fantasy. It is a possible aim. It has, indeed, been done before.
Two things now strike me as being limitations of this approach: a limitation towards the bottom and a limitation towards the top.
Limitation towards the bottom: the process of even getting to start building a cathedral is itself, unfathomably complex to our fragmented minds and communities. There needs to be a careful process of growing that capacity, which to me seems fractal in nature: before we can build large places to unite many of us in contemplation of the One, we need to build (or join) small places to unite a few of us in contemplation of the One.
And yes, it goes down to you as an individual in your home. Do you have a place to gather your attention, to integrate your multiplicity in contemplation of the One? That’s where it starts. And then the next step is: are you able to find or build a place to contemplate the One with a few others (ideally, your family…)? It seems to me that this process is worthwhile in many aspects:
The process of integration itself. To build a place that’s beautiful to many parts of you, or many people, to find a shared language of beauty, a beauty that is deep enough to integrate all participants’ sense of the beautiful, is transformative by itself.
The fruits of shared contemplation. Of course once you “built” the place and practice, you get to commune and be transformed by it.
The externality itself, of having built beautiful places, that are now “there”. That beauty will operate by itself from then on, inviting and gathering.
Limitation towards the top: We live in a very particular time in history, different from when the famous cathedrals were built: we are now one, global civilization. A cathedral here, a cathedral there (lol, as if that was nothing…), won’t do it. We need a greater collective project.
But here, if we are careful to truly listen to the One at each level, to wait for each level to truly be “given from above” (lest we build a new tower of Babel…), we can humbly aim to extend the fractality of beautiful places towards a pattern that fills the whole world and points to one central place to gather all. The New Jerusalem.
Of course, this is not a new project, but one that has been, in fact, going on for a long time, and that we, the orphans of modernity, might be able to carefully start participating to, not just surrendering all new, hard-won sensibilities (after all, modernity, for all its faults, happened for a reason), but on the contrary, willingly but humbly doing the hard work of dialogue and integration.
And, of course, I’m not talking about a “mere” 500 year project. I’m talking about the Omega point. The end of history, when everything is accomplished. Who knows when that is? Might be sooner than we think, with all the acceleration going on. Or, maybe, a big collapse sets us back 1’000 or 1’000’000 years, or forces us to start over as mere stardust in a far galaxy. Or maybe the second law of thermodynamics makes this end unattainable. Or maybe the New Jerusalem awaits us when we die into our life’s work…
It does not matter: we have established that we are talking about a project, a vision, and a path that must be so beautiful by itself, that whether we personally achieve the end point stops mattering. All we need to know is that there’s plenty of work to do, that can be started right now and here, and that the fullness of our individual participation, and of all, is both its prerequisite and its final goal.
P.S. not all of life is supposed to be “a project”. To the degree that you need one, this seems a worthy one to me 😉
P.P.S. is my post related to the events happening in the actual city of Jerusalem? For sure - but with a lot of distance. I really am too far removed from the cultural complexity of the physical place. If one follows the symbolism of it, the center of New Jerusalem might in the end actually end up being the physical Jerusalem, but - it seems to me - radically transformed, and with all conflicts fully resolved.
The Sagrada Familiar in Barcelona is one such project. But what your post sparked in me was that, instead of a bricks and mortar place, surely the now and future challenge is to work WITH nature (not 'on' it, but in true partnership) so our modern 'cathedrals' could be sacred forests, planted and grown attuned to the the specific environment we are in. Places that embody respect and relationship with the earth and all her inhabitants.....