Go Deep to Go Far
Chartres Academy: The Sacred Geometry and Living Intelligence of Water
The Sixth Liberal Art of Geometrica
Format
In Person
Event
Next
July
6 - 12, 2025
Location
Chartres,
France
Faculty
Veda Austin, HeatherAsh Amara, Margot Borden, Jim Garrison, Calen Rayne, Banafsheh Sayyad, Tony Khalife
Credit
Bachelors – 4 credits Masters – 4 credits Doctoral – 4 credits
Available to the public
or for Academic Credit
Overview
In the twenty years we have been making pilgrimage to Chartres, exploring each year one of the seven Liberal Arts, this year will be among the most extraordinary. We will be exploring the sacred geometry and living mysteries of water with the world’s foremost researcher, Veda Austin. We know water as the source of life. What we will learn with Veda is how water can intelligibly communicate with us through what Veda calls “hydroglyphs” and open portals to different dimensions of time and space. Water, we will learn, is living sacred geometry.
Geometrica:
the Sixth Liberal Art
This course is framed within the Sixth Liberal Art of Geometrica. The Liberal Arts were developed initially by Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to guide “lovers of wisdom” to understanding the true nature of the cosmos and how to live authentically and in a moral manner. The Chartrian Masters refined the liberal arts to their highest expression in the 12th century and it is in honor of this that Ubiquity University established the Chartres Academy which convenes a pilgrimage to Chartres each year.
Our Intention
In participating in this event, you will be engaging in pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a sacred journey motivated by the yearning of the soul for transformation. You will journey from where you are to the ancient site of Chartres where the healing presence of the divine feminine has been experienced for thousands of years. She will rise up to meet you and for seven days we will engage in ritual and ceremony together. The meaning you will experience will be the meaning you have created. You will then return to where you started transformed and more whole to the degree you have opened your heart to the numinous. In studying one of the liberal arts, you will be combining awareness of the mystical with the deepening of knowledge about the world. The sacred and the secular are two sides of the same coin. This is our intent for you and all the pilgrims who will be joining together for this noble purpose.
Featured Faculty
Veda Austin
Veda Austin has dedicated the last 10 years observing and photographing the life of water. She has learned that water is a fluid intelligence, observing itself through every living organism on the planet and in the Universe. Her primary area of focus is photographing water in its ‘state of creation,’ the space between liquid and ice. It is through her remarkable crystallographic photos that water reveals its awareness of not only creation but thought and intention through imagery.
Core Faculty
Calen Rayne
MFA, DMin
Director of Organizational Architecture and Energetics for Ubiquity
Banafsheh Sayyad MFA,MA
Sacred Dancer, Choreographer, and Co-Director of the Ubiquity Chartres Academy
Tony Khalife
Singer & Multi-instrumentalist,
Ubiquity Chartres Academy Music Director
Dancing Sacred Geometry
We will celebrate the spiritual relationship of the human being to the Cosmos and to the Earth through dance, awakening the soul to a conscious experience of the harmony of the spheres – an experience through which the divine origin of the human being becomes tangible. The dances create dynamic living mandalas as a flowering of the life forces, giving human form to the harmony of the planets and stars.
For the Chartrian Masters, the liberal arts were ultimately an artistic impulse, through which the highest appreciation of the sacred is expressed. Dancing the patterns and rhythms of the cosmos opened sacred communion with the world of the stars. The labyrinth no doubt emerged out of their cosmic contemplations. Led by Banafsheh Sayyad, we will dance to awaken and consciously embody sacred geometry. We will whirl like the planets and stars, echoing that which from heaven streams down to human beings and animates us to becoming luminous reflections of love.
Dreamwork
A significant part of our Chartres program is dreamwork led by Margot Borden and her team. Over the years, students have dreamt powerful and often prescient dreams. Each year they have expressed our collective soul. The community gathers every morning to report on their dreams and to discern their deeper meaning.
Our journey will include:
- Teachings by Veda Austin, Jim Garrison and Calen Rayne
- Sacred movement and dance with Banafsheh Sayyad
- Morning dream circles
- Dancing, singing and ceremony to create sacred space
- Daily sacred practice in the Cathedral before it opens to the public
- A private evening in the cathedral devoted to ceremony in the labyrinth, accompanied by music
- A private evening devoted to ceremony in the lower church (crypt)
- Personal time for meditation and exploration, enjoying the marvelous cafes and restaurants around the Cathedral with old and new friends, and the most extraordinary light shows around the town of Chartres at night.
About Chartres Academy
Ubiquity Chartres Academy builds upon and reinterprets the original Chartres Academy founded by Fulbert in 1006 when he became bishop of Chartres. Fulbert called his school the Academy to indicate that he was in the lineage of Plato’s Academy founded in 387 BC in Athens. We at Ubiquity University are privileged to be in this lineage and to count Fulbert and Plato among the giants upon whose shoulders we sit.
Our Chartres Academy is intended as a gathering point for a contemporary wisdom community to come together through the very same learning system that Fulbert and Plato used — the seven Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts were initially refined by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who organized the first four, called the Quadrivium, comprised of music, mathematics, geometry, and astronomy.
Plato learned the Quadrivium from Pythagoras and with Aristotle developed the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Together, they form the seven Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts were designed by these great thinkers as initiatory rites into the deepest truths about the universe, with each Liberal Art describing a certain essential element of the larger whole, and designed to prepare the students for both professional skills and spiritual awareness. The goal for both students and teachers was to participate in an alchemical process of transformation, leading to a deeper understanding of the universe and how to live an active compassionate life in the community.
Building on this foundation, the Seven Liberal Arts were brought to their highest expression by the Chartres Academy during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The seven arts also shaped the education refined during the Renaissance and gave rise to our modern “liberal arts” education, although education today has long lost the deep spiritual aspects of the original liberal arts. This is what the academies of Plato, then Fulbert, sought to instill, and that now our Chartres Academy seeks to recover and utilize as a transformational tool for what Plato called “the enlargement of the soul.”
“Water is transparent, it knows no color, creed or religion. Water does not judge, nor does it label, it will enter the body of an ant as easily as it will enter the body of a king, or a homeless person or a tree or a dragonfly. Water is our constant companion, from the moment we are conceived it is always with us, even upon death, it is water that evaporates from the physical rising upwards into the Heavens.”
Veda Austin
Water Researcher
Required Reading for Students taking course for credit
Veda Austin, The Living Language of Water
Rene Queridos, The Golden Age of Chartres
End of course essay regarding the learnings in this course using APA style.
- For BA students – 6-9 pages in length
- For MA students – 10-15 pages in length
- For PhD students – 20-25 pages in length
All papers must be written to the APA standard and demonstrate the “subject/object synthesis” — we want students to demonstrate command of the content of the course, and we want students to demonstrate how they have been affected by what they have learned, how the content has informed their spiritual or personal development. We welcome all forms of artistic expression as part of the student’s paper.
The Sacred Geometry and Living Intelligence of Water:
The Sixth Liberal Art of Geometrica
$2,297
Price includes registration only.
Lodging, transportation and meals not included.
