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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Suzanne Core, Larry Krantz, Aaron Malin

The Attractive Force

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"The cosmos is like a hologram, so the secrets of the universe are close at hand, and there is no need to poke through moon rocks to try to solve the mysteries of the universe. We need look no further than our own human forms, made in the image of God; they align with universal principles and reveal how the cosmos functions."

by Aaron Malin, Suzanne Core and Larry Krantz
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Aaron Malin: Well hello everyone. Larry approached me a few months ago about presenting with him on Father’s Day. This is a pretty special day for me personally but also for many men around the world. This is the day that we honor fatherhood in all its forms and for those of you who may not have children, you may also express the qualities of fatherhood. Mentorship is something that is very powerful in my life and is one aspect of fatherhood. This morning I want to share a bit of my journey as a father. I was born in 1971 in British Columbia, Canada. My parents were a part of a spiritual community that had a center in the Kamloops area. From there my family moved to a small family farm in Wisconsin that was also affiliated with the same spiritual community.

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John Gray, Pamela Gray, Jack Jenkins

To Be of One Heart

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"The root of the word 'accord' means heart. To be of one accord together is to be of one heart."

by Jack Jenkins, Pamela Gray and John Gray
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Jack Jenkins: Welcome, everyone, to Brenda’s and my home here in British Columbia, and welcome to my music studio. This is a sanctuary, so take your shoes off.

I’m not here to entertain you. I’m not here to be critiqued.  I am inviting you to share with me today a different way of listening to music. I ask you to help me compose a piece I’m going to improvise. The purpose of what we’re doing is to provide a setting for something else. I will be improvising over a piece of music that Maryliz Smith composed. It is on one of her CDs and it’s appropriately entitled, “The Beautiful One.” The purpose for our gathering this morning is to entertain the Beloved.

Please participate with me in what is to now unfold.  (Jack performed on his cello. Listen to the “The Beautiful One.”)

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