Human Interest
Next Adventure: Solar Flight Around the World
Bertrand Piccard next adventure: Solar Flight around the world
In a hot air balloon, Dr Bertrand Piccard circled the world. He, and partner, Brian Jones, did this in twenty days in 1999. The trip broke records and was called the "last great adventure of the twentieth century." But that's not all.
What I found most interesting about Bertrand Piccard's TED Talk (below) is how Piccard expressed the adventure of the balloon flight as metaphor for his spirituality. The title of one of his lectures is called, Adventure is a state of mind: the metaphor of the first around-the-world balloon flight.
Bertrand had an interest in human potential before he embarked on the balloon flight. He was influenced by his mother's interest in philosophy and spirituality. He became a doctor specializing in psychiatry and psychotherapy. His father and grandfather were adventurers. His father reaching the deepest waters of the ocean and his grandfather being the first to reach the stratosphere in a balloon.
In this metaphor of life, the balloon is prisoner of the air currents, just as man is prisoner of his convictions, problems or fate. But in the same way as a balloon changes altitude to find the currents that will drive it in a new direction, man can rise professionally, psychologically, philosophically or even spiritually, to become responsible for the direction of his life.
- Bertrand Piccard
ACIM Speaks podcast for the New Year 2010
ACIM Speaks podcast for the New Year 2010
A brief podcast for the New Year from the text of A Course in Miracles and a clip of Don Rickles, recorded in 1968 (I said 1969 in the podcast, apologies for that). The clip was how he ended his live shows.
Listen to the podcast, and read the notes and quotes, below.
Subscribe with iTunes 
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Philanthropy
Philanthropy - How do you want to be remembered?
Being from Massachusetts, and living on Cape Cod for some years, the Kennedy family was always a presence. They represented some of the highest good and deepest tragedies of our time. Ted Kennedy held his family together and maintained a force for good in politics through it all. Some point out his flaws, but most of us would be hard pressed to endure and maintain his sense of responsibility through all those years. He gave "stay the course" real meaning. Yes! I want to Read the rest of this post ...
A New Year Prayer
A New Year Prayer
This is the time in which a new year will soon be born from the time of Christ. I have perfect faith in you to do all that you would accomplish. Nothing will be lacking, and you will make complete and not destroy. Say, then, to your brother:
as part of myself.
I know that you will be released,
unless I want to use you
to imprison myself.
In the name of my freedom,
I choose your release
because I recognize that we will be released together.
So will the year begin
in joy and freedom.
There is much to do,
and we have been long delayed.
Accept the holy instant as this year is born,
and take your place,
so long left unfulfilled in the Great Awakening.
Make this year different
by making it all the same.
And let all your relationships be
made holy for you.
This is our will.
Amen.
- A Course in Miracles
Christmas as the end of Sacrifice
Christmas as the end of Sacrifice
Fear not to recognize the whole idea of sacrifice as solely of your making. And seek not safety by attempting to protect yourself from where it is not. Your brothers and your Father have become very fearful to you. And you would bargain with them for a few special relationships in which you think you see some scraps of safety. Do not try longer to keep apart your thoughts and the thought that has been given you. When they are brought together and perceived where they are, the choice between them is nothing more than a gentle awakening, and as simple as opening your eyes to daylight when you have no more need of sleep.
a light in darkness.
See it not outside yourself,
but shining in the Heaven within,
and accept it as the sign
the time of Christ has come.
He comes demanding nothing.
No sacrifice of any kind,
of anyone, is asked by Him.
In His Presence,
the whole idea of sacrifice
loses all meaning.
For He is Host to God.
And you need but invite Him in
Who is there already,
by recognizing that His Host is One,
and no thought alien to His Oneness
can abide with Him there.
Love must be total to give Him welcome,
for the Presence of holiness
creates the holiness that surrounds it.
No fear can touch the Host
Who cradles God in the time of Christ,
for the Host is as holy as the Perfect Innocence
which He protects,
and Whose power protects Him.
This Christmas
give the Holy Spirit everything
that would hurt you.
Let yourself be healed completely
that you may join with Him in healing,
and let us celebrate our release together
by releasing everyone with us.
Leave nothing behind,
for release is total and,
when you have accepted it with me,
you will give it with me.
All pain and sacrifice and littleness
will disappear in our relationship,
which is as innocent
as our relationship with our Father,
and as powerful.
Pain will be brought to us
and disappear in our presence.
And without pain
there can be no sacrifice.
And without sacrifice,
there love must be.
You, who believe that sacrifice is love, must learn that sacrifice is separation from love. For sacrifice brings guilt as surely as love brings peace. Guilt is the condition of sacrifice, as peace is the condition for the awareness of your relationship with God. Through guilt you exclude your Father and your brothers from yourself. Through peace you invite them back, realizing that they are where your invitation bids them be. What you exclude from yourself seems fearful, for you endow it with fear and try to cast it out, though it is part of you. Who can perceive part of himself as loathsome, and live within himself in peace? And who can try to resolve the “conflict” of Heaven and hell in him by casting Heaven out and giving it the attributes of hell, without experiencing himself as incomplete and lonely?
As long as you perceive the body as your reality, so long will you perceive yourself as lonely and deprived. And so long will you also perceive yourself as a victim of sacrifice, justified in sacrificing others. For who could thrust Heaven and its Creator aside without a sense of sacrifice and loss? And who could suffer sacrifice and loss without attempting to restore himself? Yet how could you accomplish this yourself, when the basis of your attempts is the belief in the reality of the deprivation? Deprivation breeds attack, being the belief that attack is justified. And as long as you would retain the deprivation, attack becomes salvation and sacrifice becomes love.
So is it that, in all your seeking for love, you seek for sacrifice and find it. Yet you find not love. It is impossible to deny what love is and still recognize it. The meaning of love lies in what you have cast outside yourself, and it has no meaning apart from you. It is what you prefer to keep that has no meaning, while all that you would keep away holds all the meaning of the universe, and holds the universe together in its meaning. Unless the universe were joined in you, it would be apart from God and, to be without Him, is to be without meaning.
In the holy instant, the condition of love is met, for minds are joined without the body’s interference and, where there is communication, there is peace. The Prince of Peace was born to re-establish the condition of love by teaching that communication remains unbroken, even if the body is destroyed, provided that you see not the body as the necessary means of communication. And if you understand this lesson, you will realize that to sacrifice the body is to sacrifice nothing, and communication, which must be of the mind, cannot be sacrificed. Where, then, is sacrifice? The lesson I was born to teach, and still would teach to all my brothers, is that sacrifice is nowhere and love is everywhere. For communication embraces everything and, in the peace it re-establishes, love comes of itself.
for the time of Christ
is meaningless apart from joy.
Let us join in celebrating peace
by demanding no sacrifice of anyone,
for so you offer me
the love I offer you.
What can be more joyous
than to perceive we are deprived of nothing?
Such is the message
of the time of Christ,
which I give you
that you may give it
and return it to the Father,
Who gave it to me.
For in the time of Christ
communication is restored,
and He joins us
in the celebration of His Son’s creation.
God offers thanks to the holy host who would receive Him and lets Him enter and abide where He would be. And by your welcome, does He welcome you into Himself, for what is contained in you who welcome Him is returned to Him. And we but celebrate His Wholeness as we welcome Him into ourselves. Those who receive the Father are one with Him, being host to Him Who created them. And by allowing Him to enter, the remembrance of the Father enters with Him, and with Him, they remember the only relationship they ever had, and ever want to have.
