I’m preparing to go to Egypt later this year, and as part of that preparation, I’ve been immersing myself in the history of ancient Egypt. It’s been fascinating to read about how this ancient culture developed ways of being in relationship with their gods and built structures to be more connected to them. Over time, as their resources and the complexity of the relationship with the Divine grew, the structures also grew to some of the truly awe-inspiring ones I’ll get to visit in 2026. Humans really are amazing beings.

Across civilizations, human beings have built temples, sanctuaries, and eventually great cathedrals as places where the Divine could be approached and worshipped together.

The great cathedrals became physical centers of communal life. Their scale, beauty, sacred geometry, art, and light were designed to evoke awe and reverence. You entered a space that had been deliberately constructed to alter your experience and orient you toward something greater, even evoke a particular relationship with the Divine.

These places of the sacred were built out of the materials available to human beings at that time: stone, wood, glass, metal, human ingenuity, and extraordinary collective labor. Their devotion took architectural form. What they held sacred became something they could enter together. 

As I’ve been ruminating on all this, I remembered something Patricia Albere used to talk about: building cathedrals of the future.

Evolution brings forth different possibilities at different times. Just as unity and identity are evolving, so too are the structures in which we commune with and experience the Divine. 

This is something I experience very directly when I enter Global, our Mutual Awakening Practice Community.

On one level, what we’re doing is remarkably ordinary. People around the world turn on their computers and enter a Zoom room. Within minutes, someone in California can be face-to-face with someone in Germany, South Africa, Canada, or Thailand.

But something more than just seeing someone on a screen is occurring. When people first start learning Mutual Awakening, I often hear some trepidation, anything from screen fatigue to skepticism that seeing someone through a screen could be as potent as being together in person. And then they discover that where we go is someplace real. It’s felt through another layer of the senses beyond the physical.

I’ve heard people express amazement at how quickly the screen melts away. They feel as though they are truly with their partner and, eventually, with everyone on the screen, somewhere else entirely. And then something else begins to happen.

Every time I log in and “land” in the Zoom room of Global, I feel like I’ve entered a temple. The air has a different pressure and consistency. It feels like entering an invisible but very much felt container, an ethereal holy ground.

I have come to experience this as a new kind of architecture. Each of us participating in Global is becoming part of the building material. Our attention, our consciousness, our willingness to meet, and our capacity to participate in a unitive metness become the living substance through which the cathedral of the future exists. Like the cathedrals of the past, this one requires something of us. We give ourselves to its creation through our participation. 

The configurations matter too. Patricia once said that in Mutual Awakening, the geometry is in place for an intensity to happen and grow in all of us. I find myself understanding those words differently now. 

Just as the architecture of an ancient temple or cathedral shaped what could happen inside it, the geometries we create together shape what dimensions of unity become accessible.

As we meet in specific geometries of unity, sometimes in pairs, threes, fours, or more, the cathedral of shared unity takes form. We face one another, eyes open, allowing ourselves to become part of a living structure through which something greater can exist.

This is what makes the idea of the cathedral of the future so alive for me. Its walls aren’t made of stone. It doesn’t belong to a particular geography. People can enter it from across the world. Its architecture is living. We are simultaneously building it, inhabiting it, and being shaped by what comes into existence through our participation. Our devotion is making a new architectural form possible. 

And it’s just the beginning…