Sanford Baran

The Point of Balance

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"I am certain that balance is intrinsically present throughout all of the cosmos."

An artist’s concept of Kepler-186f, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the “habitable zone.”
Credit... T. Pyle/NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech

by Sanford Baran
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Here in the U.S. it’s been a fairly quiet week with not much really happening!

All kidding aside, apart from the national election, which has been all-consuming for many, I thought I would do a scan of the universe and see if anything else of note was going on.

As you might be aware, the universe is believed to be expanding—and has been since the Big Bang. I was curious—how much did the universe expand this last week? So, using what is known as the Hubble Constant I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and estimated that the outer reaches of the universe expanded by 110 billion miles in all directions, just last week. Not bad for a measly seven days’ worth of work. And to my knowledge the universe didn’t break a sweat. Sounds like expanding the universe is a lot easier than counting ballots!

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Larry Krantz

Higher Ground

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"If we are attuned to the fineness of spirit, we know when something does not feel right. By releasing ill patterns, we lift up to higher ground, those bonds no longer holding us captive."

Nemonte Nenquimo

by Larry Krantz
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Here are words from a letter written by an indigenous woman who lives in the Amazon basin. She is not well-educated or sophisticated, so many people dismiss what she says out of hand. I find this letter, which was later published in the Guardian, rings true. Here are her words: 

Dear presidents of the nine Amazonian countries and to all world leaders that share responsibility for the plundering of our rainforest.

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John Gray

Election Day

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"Nothing that truly matters
is at risk."

by John Gray
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When we turned the page of our Gregorian calendars to 2020 about ten months ago, I expressed in one of these teleconferences my hope that this would be a year of clear twenty-twenty vision.  I can’t say if things have worked out that way, but I think we could all say at this point that we’ve seen a few things this year! We’ve seen examples of real people acting in selfless altruism, in virtuous character, and we’ve seen the absence of these in dark self-centered depravity and distortion. 

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Volker Brendel

The Curse not Talked About

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"Are our interaction based on the highest expression of nobility and character accessible to us?"

Southern Indiana fossil. Photo credit: N. Pohl

by Volker Brendel
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Today is a beautiful autumn day. Leaves are turning in Southern Indiana and are displaying wonderful colors; a sight to behold. There is comfort in the predictability of the seasons. We know that summer will come to an end, autumn will come, and eventually winter and spring will follow. We take comfort in this orderly progression. We like to be able to predict our future, and yet our experience shows time after time that we don’t do a good job of this. Who among us could have imagined our current life circumstances from the perspective of fall of 2019, looking ahead just one year? As strange as it may sound, a year ago was pre-epidemic. Many of us wouldn’t have known what a coronavirus was, let alone how quickly it could spread across the globe and change almost everyone’s lifestyle. And that is covering only the very small timescale of one year!

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Sanford Baran, Kate Isaacs, Joyce Krantz

The Uplifting Spirit

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"Just the act of noticing what's right in an individual (and saying it out loud when the moment calls for it) is the single most important thing you can do with a child, or with anyone, to create that uplifting spirit where each one can grow into their greatest creative potential."

Photo by Nicola Pohl

by Sanford Baran, Kate Isaacs and Joyce Krantz
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            Sanford Baran: To begin our time together I wanted to play for you an audio soundscape that I produced last week that provides a surround for Alan Hammond’s poem, The Eternal Presence.

Listen to the soundscape    (12 and a half minutes)

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Bill Isaacs

The Authority of Quiet

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Photo by Nicola Pohl

by Bill Isaacs
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Let us be present together in this moment of quietness, to listen to the world around us, the world within us, the larger dimensions of Being that are always present.

There is a great deal of noise in the world. I was struck by this realization this summer when my family and I spent a few weeks on an Island 30 miles out to sea, off the coast of Massachusetts. We stayed in a place where you could constantly see the open sea, the sky, the wide landscape, and in the evenings, dazzling and richly textured sunsets. The Milky Way gleamed vividly luminous at night. And most strikingly, it was very quiet. There is a vastness and an openness to this place. I realized how nourishing that is, how sensual, and how easily that experience can be lost in the press of busy experience.

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Larry Krantz

To Live Gracefully

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"Grace, and graceful living, is no accident but the result of moving with the rhythms of Being, and of listening within. It is not a haphazard thing, but the result of right living."

by Larry Krantz
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The world is a messy and chaotic place, especially these days. There is an intensification happening which may prove destructive unless there is a rising up of spiritual consciousness to meet it and extend control, and we have an important part to play in letting this outworking be creative. People often favor quantity rather than quality oflife experience. They want more but have less. This notion is well-expressed by Dr. Bob Moorehead of Seattle (from Words Aptly Spoken, 1995). He says:

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John Gray, Pamela Gray

To Grace the World

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"Life is God’s gift to the world through humanity. This is why all life matters."

Photo by Pamela Gray

by Pamela Gray and John Gray
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Pamela Gray: In these days of intensification when so many feel this world is rapidly moving out of control in horrendous ways, there is a constant.  We gather like this to remember. The grace of God is with us. This is the constant that has always been and always will be present: God’s grace.

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Volker Brendel

Our Divine and Cosmic Identity in Expression

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"In many ways we recognize ourselves as an expression of divine and cosmic identity. “Divine” indicating something beyond our mental constructs, and “cosmic” indicating a vast context. The task of the day is not to rehash that this is what we are about, because somebody else said so, people whom we respect. No, the task is to provide a living, practical demonstration of our deep knowledge of that identity, expressed in whatever is on our plate; hour by hour, day by day."

by Volker Brendel
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Daniil Trifonov – Rachmaninov: Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini, Op.43, Variation 18

I hope you’ve had a chance to look at the night sky in recent days particularly. You may have read the news reports about the spectacle of the comet NEOWISE appearing in the northern sky, right below the Great Dipper after sunset. I have been going out every evening trying to get a glimpse of the comet zipping by, with its sparking dust cloud trailing. I figure this is my only chance: the comet comes around every 6,800 years, and I don’t know where I’ll be next time!

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Bill Isaacs

The Dragon and the Antidote

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by Bill Isaacs
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What is your awareness of your purpose? How alive is it? There are many ways one could address this topic. It is an ever-expanding subject. It may not be something you spend much time on. However, if you have devoted time and energy towards this, you come to realize that to arrive at ever new levels of understanding takes work. Part of this work includes relinquishing well-rehearsed and perhaps reassuring formulations of your purpose. Our ideas about purpose, and indeed about any subject can easily become stale or obsolete. It takes something to ground one’s experience in something that isn’t merely an outdated mental perception. I have over the last 12 months made a measured effort, each day, to penetrate this question. I found that it was quite productive to spend a deliberate period of time each morning meditating on this. I think I have missed three or four days over the past year. I’ve been somewhat amazed to discover all the ways in which I have held an inherited or limited or conceptual view that didn’t at first occur to be that at all. In fact, in many instances, I found that my view was quite self-inflated, even arrogant, or at times just reactive to the situation around me.

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