“AN ELDER statesman of the New Age movement, Sir George Trevelyan saw the mission of his later years as an ‘exploration into God’. From the moment when in 1942 he first tagged along to a lecture given by one of Rudolph Steiner’s students – “I have no doubt”, he later said, “that this event in my life was staged by higher destiny, and that the time was ripe for a leap in consciousness” – he began to work towards the promotion of an alternative spirituality.”

THIS BOOK, the third of a trilogy, follows A Vision of the Aquarian Age and Operation Redemption. As I worked on it, I suddenly knew that its title must be Exploration into God. What presumption I thought! Who am I, who have no qualifications whatever as a theologian, to use such a title? Yet I knew it was right and fitting. The phrase comes from a passage in Christopher Fry’s play A Sleep of Prisoners. Prisoners of war, locked in an empty church at night (itself a powerful symbol) talk and banter, joke and smoke, but one after another they are taken over and speak from higher inspiration out of the spiritual world. Finally Meadows, the Sergeant, touched with the higher consciousness, says this:

The human heart can go the lengths of God.
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;

The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake
But will you wake for pity’s sake?

I have quoted this frequently in lectures, since it gives a powerful expression of the age we live in and the hope of a change in consciousness which will usher in a New Age.

While Principal of Attingham Park, I invited a distinguished theologian and Shakespearean scholar to conduct a weekend course on the work of Christopher Fry. I spoke of my admiration of the above passage and to my great surprise he responded:

Oh, Christopher went badly wrong there! There can be no question of our exploring into God. All we can do is to pray and wait for God’s grace to be granted to us.

And then I saw that the emergence of the spiritual and holistic world view in our time was calling and challenging us to go beyond academic or traditional viewpoints and really take our own initiative in exploring into the field of God-thought. So I offer it, with due humility, as truth.

Sir George Trevelyan Bt (1906-1996) was an educational pioneer, a founding father of the New Age movement, furniture maker and visionary - a man with a mission to teach enlightenment in what he saw as a world of chaos and tumult.

In his youngest years, following parental example, Trevelyan had been an agnostic, but in 1942 he attended a lecture that revealed to him the spiritual dimension of the world. Thereafter his study of anthroposophy profoundly altered his view of life and laid the basis for much of his future work.

After World War II he became the Principal of a college of adult education in Shropshire where he spent 24 years. The college drew large and enthusiastic audiences for courses on subjects such as ‘Frontiers of Reality’ and ‘Spiritual Awakening’. Trevelyan attracted leading speakers and took an active part himself in almost all the courses.

When he retired in 1971, he founded the Wrekin Trust to continue this work. An educational charity, the Trust did not espouse any single doctrine or dogma; its purpose, rather, was to help people find the path most suited to them, organising conferences - including meetings of mystics and scientists, doctors and healers - on the holistic world view, introductory approaches to various disciplines and a curriculum for ongoing spiritual training. His inspiration was derived from the medieval concept of the university, which was concerned to find methods and systems of knowledge leading to union with the One - as revealed by the Latin word universus, meaning ‘turned to the one’.

Trevelyan invented ‘the network’, encouraging the setting up of small energy centres, which could draw strength from one another. Among those he helped to inspire were the Soil Association, the Findhorn Trust, the Teilhard de Chardin Society and the Essene Network. The last 15 years of his active life were spent in a ceaseless round of lecture tours and meetings. During his time he wrote three books: (sic) A Vision of the Aquarian Age (1977), Operation Redemption (1981) and Summons to a High Crusade (1985). He saw his later years as an Exploration into God, which was also the title of his last book, published in 1991.

Man as a spiritual being chose to use his intellect to render matter into its smallest condition and master it. The price we had to pay was the loss of vision of the subtler worlds of being and spirit. The question now is whether we can learn creatively to handle that freedom and work with the ocean of creative life.
George Trevelyan

Source, http://www.rightlivelihood.org/trevelyan.html