1988 - Mile Hi Church speech and song

A Rare and Moving Speech by John [Audio updated 26March18]

PLEASE READ- ADMIN NOTE:  This is archival audio from an audience recorded cassette tape, so the quality leaves something to be desired even though it has been restored to some degree; HOWEVER, please listen if you can tolerate it, and follow along with the transcript to help with clarity.  It's important to hear John's voice inflections as he spoke, as it adds dimension and emphasis to his speech.  The transcript may be translated using the Google Translate tool here on the blog, for those who are not fluent in English.  Time allotment: 26 minutes. 

Please take this into your heart and use it as inspiration for reaffirming your commitment to the matters addressed here in this speech.  We must rise up! 

[Speech is prefaced by the beginning of the service, which includes the children’s choir singing “I Want to Live”, as is referenced in the speech. Introduction followed by applause, then John’s speech begins:]

“I would like to thank Dr. Fred, Marjory, Zak, ladies and gentlemen.  I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to be with you.  I knew that it was going to be a pleasure before I got here.  I knew that it was going to be a wonderful experience when I started driving over here this morning and it has risen well beyond that already.  What occurred to me is that when I participated in the beginning of service this morning, in the moment of silence, and that first song, and in singing The Lord’s Prayer together, is something that I wrote a song once about talking about ‘coming home to a place I’d never been before’.  This feels very, very much like home to me; so much, in fact, that I feel quite comfortable in welcoming all of you.  I do welcome you here this morning, this time together, this fellowship, this gathering with all my heart and with great love and respect.  Before I begin, I also want to apologize to the gentlemen who I cut off this morning in my haste to get here in turning on to Garrison [street]. I thought I was turning onto a four-lane road and there’s only one lane there.  So, I know he’s out there and I apologize to him.

So much of what I’ve discovered here this morning has thrown me for quite a loop and almost everything that I wanted to say to you seems unnecessary.  So, I’ve changed a lot of it and hopefully it will all tie together.  One of the things that moved me very much when we were gathering before the service is I read the Mile Hi church purpose, which I’d like to share with you, and I’m sure you all know it to some degree.  It’s in the back of your newspaper.

•  Mile Hi Church of Religious Science is a spiritual center dedicated to awakening and supporting the conscious experience and expression of every person’s inherent divine nature; in teaching and practicing the principles of Science of Mind.  (I’ve got to learn more about this!)  To be a channel for dissolving and healing the illusion of separation from God, the Infinite Freedom Source, in, around and for all.   To create and sustain an atmosphere of Light and Truth, whereby people are provided maximum opportunities to discover, experience and actualize love, integrity, power and perfection of life.  To provide a community of spiritual fellowship and support which nurtures the individual and collective experience of inherent wholeness, peace, joy and success in life’s endeavors.  To empower people to contribute to their spiritual self-realization of personal involvement to the transformation of the world, thus ultimately ushering in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

That’s Beautiful! That’s Beautiful! and the part of you which wrote that!     There’s a poem that I’ve been in love with lately. I don’t know who wrote it, but I’d like to share it with you: 

.

                For winter’s rains and ruin are over

                And all the Seasons of snows and sin

                The day is dividing lover and lover

                The life that loses, the night that wins

                And time remembered is grief forgotten

                And frosts are slaying and flowers begotten

                And in every green under wood and cover

                Blossom by blossom the Spring begins.   [F. Scott Fitzgerald-This Side of Paradise]

               

So, I think that Spring is happening on planet Earth.  Spring in a way that is, perhaps, has never happened before.  Perhaps, to be compared to anything, it’s like the Renaissance, only a hundred years ago.  Perhaps it’s that age of Aquarius that we talked about in the 60’s and early 70’s.  Perhaps it really is the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; coming into a kind of manifestation and reality that has never been here before.  A New Age. 

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world today and I started getting asked all the time about New Age thinking.  I would like to tell you a little bit about what I think New Age thinking is and to give you, perhaps, some examples. There’s all this stuff with crystals; I love crystals, actually!  I had a wonderful experience with crystals. I was with a friend day before yesterday, in South Paulsboro, New York, a beautiful, wonderful woman called Gurumayi, who’s a dear friend to me and a spiritual leader of millions of people around the world.  In their small temple there, they have all these crystals in a big room and you can hardly walk by them- if you hold your hand out they start vibrating.  All of this stuff going on, including crystals.

Not to be side-tracked, there’s all this stuff with crystals, there’s stuff going on with pyramids.  There’s all these, New Age cults, they call them.  There’s things called channeling, and like that.  That perhaps is part of New Age, certainly it is a part of how people express themselves now in their search for the thing that we celebrate here this morning together.  It’s certainly one of the manifestations of that.

Another part of New Age can be expressed differently.  I think it’s also expressed here with what you say in your purpose and what we’re trying to do in the world of Windstar.  An example of what I’m talking about, two examples, that say the exact same thing:  

·    One is Secretary General Gorbachev, who I had the pleasure of meeting last December when he was in Washington [D.C.].  In this meeting he talked to us, the people who were present, about there being a new reality in the world.  He said before this time, we’ve always paid attention only to our own interests. He said in this new reality, however; we cannot really serve our own interests without having some considerations for the interests of others.  That’s New Age thinking, in my opinion.

·     Within weeks of that we were visiting the Hunger Project in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world.  Burkina Faso has an infant mortality rate of 212, which means that out of every 1,000 births, 212 infants will die in the first year of life, as an average.  That song means something to me, like the children of Jackson Hole. Anyway, in Burkina Faso, there’s another terrible drought going on.  The chief of the village of some 300 people, village called Jonda, who I met about 3 ½ years ago; we asked him how the drought was affecting the people of his village.  He said the drought has become a great tool for us.  How’s that?  He said, Yes, before the drought we always only took care of ourselves.  But the drought has taught us that we must work together and conserve water.  New Age thinking.

·    I propose to you that when Columbus set off to find a westerly route to the spices in the Far East, that this was New Age thinking, at the time.  I propose to you that Thomas Jefferson, when he began to really trying to articulate his feelings about the future of this nation with the Declaration of Independence, that was New Age thinking.

I don’t want you to be afraid of New Age thinking.  I really want to acknowledge what is going on in the world today, and I want you to know that it’s coming out of each of us.  I loved this acknowledgment this morning with Dr. Fred.  The difference that one man can make in thousands and thousands of lives all over the world.  And obviously while your expression of this he has made in your life. I think that each one of us wants to make that kind of difference; wants to live a life that matters and we look for the ways that we can do that.  I know that each of us, somewhere in our lives, in our work, our families, our children, that we are making a difference.  I really want to acknowledge that in all of you. The same thing that you celebrate with Dr. Fred, lives in you, for each one of you and ought to be acknowledged; ought to be brought forth.  Not to be spit upon, like the foundation, the difference that you can make, that you are making.

I say to you that there is a New World happening.  You know, this Kingdom of Heaven is right there.  You can really touch and taste a world without nuclear weapons. It’s gonna happen.  I’m not afraid we’re going to blow ourselves up anymore.  You can feel a world without hunger. It’s going to happen.  It’s going to happen before the end of this century if I have anything to do with it.  That is my commitment.  I’m one of the founders of The Hunger Project, which has close to 6 million people now around the world, committed to the end of hunger by the end of this century.  That is my commitment, and I invite you to join me in that.  Because you see the thing is, this Kingdom of Heaven, this Age of Aquarius, this New World of Peace is not going to happen until it comes from each and every one of us.  

At Windstar we say that each one of us is responsible for and part of the quality of life on this planet; and that which affects any one of us, affects us all.  That is the world we’re coming into.  Now, I’d like to tell you a little bit about how that shows up for me in my life.  

One of the ways it does is especially close to me and many of you may remember the movie that I did some time ago called “Oh, God!“.  That was a wonderful movie.   I loved it!  At the time that this movie came to me, I’d received an awful lot of scripts, but I didn’t want to make a movie just to make a movie. So I waited for something in a script that came to me that put a little ‘hook’ in me for some reason, and it was that script of Oh God!, evidently had been floating around Hollywood for about five years…(glitch in recording)….. [God says]… the rivers are filth, you’re killing all my fishes, the sky, the air you can’t breathe, the water you can’t drink. I made the world to work.  Jerry Landers says, well, have you read the papers?  It ain’t workin’, you know?    That’s what it felt like to me; and still, quite often, today it feels like that.  Jerry asks God, he says why don’t you do something about it?  God says to Jerry,

·   Why don’t YOU do something about it?  It’s your world.  Well, boy, that exploded in my heart.  Because I believe if we’re going to save ourselves on this planet, if we’re going sustain civilization, and humanity, that it’s not going to be from Divine Intervention. It’s going to come out of our own conscious actions to create that world, the world that we’ve always dreamed of.

But Jerry says to God, he says, but we need help.  And God says, That’s why I gave you each other.  Oh, I love that. I have always felt that we are here for each other, not against each other.  And that’s what we’re in the process of learning.  Some of the things going on in the world are what it takes for us to learn.

The first time that I remember thinking that, that we are here for each other not against each other, is about when I was twelve years old.  I lived in Tucson, Arizona.  I think I was very shy, and I think it was difficult for me to communicate with my friends because I think that I felt differently than they seemed to feel.  I don’t think that they actually felt differently, but what they said and how they acted, a lot of the things that children do, were just not comfortable for me.  So, I spent a lot of time out in the desert, and I spent a lot of time – there was neighbor caddy-corner across the street over this way who had three beautiful trees in their yard.    I used to go climb up to the top of those trees and sit there, swaying with the wind, and watching the world go by and think wonderful, lofty visions and fantasize that someday that I’m going to sing for people all over the world and that I’m going to have friends all over the world. I’m going to have a place in the mountains that these people can come to, and whether I’m there or not, people will be able to gather there and they will feel at home with one another and comfortable with one another.  They’ll find that they have an awful lot in common and out of being in this place and being with one another, they’ll be able to go back to wherever they come from, wherever they live in the world, whatever work they do, and they’ll be recharged and they’ll be strengthened by what has happened there.  That’s pretty far out for a twelve-year-old kid!  You know? But honest to goodness, that’s what it was for me. 

I started singing, things started to happen all over the world, started to be very successful and a kind of celebrity. I had the opportunity to meet a lot of people who felt like I did. I also found myself called upon many, many times to do a benefit over here, or a tribute over here.  Everyone that approached me really came with a worthwhile endeavor, something that was good, something that was valuable to people; but not always something that was particularly unique or something that really brought out a response in me or my inclinations, my own personal interests.

So, I was talking with my friend, Tom Crum, who I met in Aspen, who does my Aikido training with and I feel is the most recent evolution of martial arts.  He was my security man on the road, and we talked and we seemed to have the same kind of vision about a place like I described a few moments ago.  At one point it got to be very clear, I’d been talking about this little vision I had in that tree had never left me.  A lot of things in my life had changed, but that had never left.  It had gotten, perhaps, more finely tuned, refocused on different occasions, but it was still there.  I realized that it was time to keep talking about it forever, or I could do it.  It seemed to be the opportunity to do it.

  Tom and I founded the Windstar Foundation, the Windstar project.  We bought a piece of land, about a thousand acres nearby Aspen, and we started to gather people together to work on creating a sustainable future, to work on sustainable energy forms, to work on food production, to work on the resolution of conflict.  To work really toward creating that kind of network, that bridge which at some point was going to encompass our earth and bring about this Kingdom of Heaven and this world of peace that we dream about, forever.

1980 - Alaska Lands Act signing- Mardie Murie 

We’ve done a lot of things at Windstar. We’ve made some mistakes, we had some problems, had some real wonderful successes. I think we had a lot to do with getting the wonderful Alaska Land and Wilderness Act created back in about 1976. [correction: 1980]   Great thing, and Windstar was a major catalyst for getting all the environmental groups to finally work together. And in one strong leap we got that bill turned around and got it passed; something that I’ll always be very, very proud of because my children and I love Alaska.  I want all children in the world to be able to see wilderness and wildness of Alaska.  Much of that is preserved now and hopefully it always will be so.  

We had a lot to do with getting people straight about oil shale in Colorado.  They had these grand designs, people were coming in, all kinds of investments were going on. Oil Shale, the future!  They’ve been talking about doing something with oil shale for hundreds of years, and they had yet to make it work.  The one little detail that nobody brought into consideration here in Colorado about oil shale, was water.  It was going to require more water to do the process that they had envisioned there, than there is on the Western Slope.  Nobody talked about water!!  There’s some ranchers and farmers over there who have [water] rights, some of it goes all the way to California.  Little details that somebody missed and we helped point that out.  Unfortunately, though, the bad part of that is that people lost their jobs, a lot of investments were washed away, not unlike last October it was a very, very difficult time.  Some people are still recovering from that.  That’s the way it goes. 

Windstar: I’d like to read you the purpose of Windstar; that’s what I’m really here to share with you today.  See how it compares with what you said in your purpose, where the alignment might be and where it might be another kind of expression in another area of what you were talking about. 

·     The essential purpose of Windstar is to inspire and bring forth ideas and models that contribute to a world that works for research, demonstration and education.  An essential purpose of Windstar is to contribute to the synthesis of significant information and relevant topics and issues for a sustainable future.  To conduct research and educational programs that provide a forum, offering tangible tools, projects, approaches and results in the art of living.  To nurture partnership while building relationships, within the Windstar family and with all of the public.  We identify trends that lead to crisis, provide inspiration and information to leadership to take corrective action.  To be a catalyst for bringing forth the educational and leadership abilities in us all.  To identify and enroll and support key people as levers of change.  To nurture, protect and be stewards of the Windstar land as a living example of human relationship on earth. 

What I feel here and what you’ve said, and what I feel in my own spirituality, which I’ve not had the opportunity to experience in so concrete a form before, is that we all have within us the vision of a world the way that we would like it to be.

Africa 1984

 
You see, I’ve traveled all over the world and, it’s a wonderful thing to me that I have friends everywhere that I’ve been.  I’ve yet to walk on a street in the Soviet Union, a village in Africa, a commune in China, a slum in India and not be recognized.    People know me through my songs, my music, and they relate to those things all over the world.  This feeling that I had from long ago that not only that we are here for each other, not against each other, but that we really are truly the same. 
People say that children are the same all over the world.  
You don’t hear them say that parents are the same.  They are.  Lovers are the same.  Grandparents, families are the same.  That’s who I sing to and what I sing about.  This garners a response everywhere in the world.  I believe that people everywhere feel the same kinds of things that I feel and that you feel.  Maybe they don’t know how to articulate it. Maybe they don’t have the opportunity to express it the way that we have.  Perhaps a part of what’s going on right now is to create that kind of articulation and expression so that all people can feel the unity that you and I celebrate here at this service this morning.

What I propose to you is that Windstar is a tool for that kind of expression; that Windstar can be a catalyst for bringing that forth.  We’re at a point now where we are really about ready to be a worldwide organization.  There’s an enormous step that’s just right there for us and we want to take it.  And I want to invite you to take that with us, to be a part of our taking that step; to be a supporter, a contributor, a member of Windstar and to be a part of what we’re doing.  The last weekend of August is our Choices for the Future Symposium, the third one.  We have some wonderful speakers coming:   Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ken Blanchard, Dennis Weaver, some incredible people; some Soviets are coming.  The winner, the recipient of this year’s Windstar award,  Asktavich [Yevgeny] Velikhov, the Vice President of the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union and one of the three top advisers for Secretary General Gorbachev; the man primarily responsible for directing the cleanup of Chernobyl.  He’s done some incredible things on this planet, and nobody in America knows about it.  And you know that those Soviets have never been acknowledged or ever won an award from the United States; so Windstar is very, very proud to make that first acknowledgement and he’s going to be at our symposium this summer.

.

I would like to invite you to come to our symposium. It’s in Aspen, Colorado, it lasts four days, I’m supposed to be attending, and I promise you an incredible and unforgettable experience and an opportunity to really join and participate in creating the kind of world that we’re talking about here.  And to do so, not only in this way, which is so beautifully expressed, but some of the more tangible, hard, knuckles to the grindstone ways that will really live up to the request of those children who sang so beautifully a few moments ago.  Please, if you can, if you have that weekend free, come and join us.  And there’s some people here to help you sign up for that if you’d like to do that.

I personally would be more grateful than I can say to be able to get up closer to you and see who you are and how you live, how you express your faith, and what you’re doing here.   It would be a great privilege for me.                

                                             

And if I’m not taking too much time, I 'd like close with a song.  This song was born in what is considered to be the largest slum in the world, on the outskirts of Bombay, India. 

India 1985

I was there, this was about 2 ½- 3 years ago, walking amidst people in the most desperate conditions I’ve ever experienced.  It turned out to be an incredibly joyful thing.  There was such a sense of family with these people, and hospitality and spirituality, a real celebration of the day.  You can really sense that every new day was a gift to them, and they treated it as such. 
I wrote this song and there are three verses to it.  It’s for the homeless and the hungry, the refugees all over the world; for the hunger and homelessness that sometimes lives in our hearts. The song is really a prayer, which is why I wanted to do it for you this morning.  What I’d like to do, is there are three verses and I’ll sing them. When I do the last verse, I’d ask all of you to stand, join me, holding hands all around the room.  I’ll do it one line at a time and you sing it with me.  It’s called Falling Leaves.    

Thank you for this precious day
These gifts you give to me
My heart so full of love for you
Sings praise for all I see
Oh sing for every mother's love
For every childhood tear
Oh sing for all the stars above
The peace beyond all fear

This is for the refugees
The ones without a home
A boat out on the ocean
A city street alone
Are they not some dear mother's child?
Are they not you and I?
Are we the ones to bear this shame
And they the sacrifice?

Or are they just like falling leaves
Who give themselves away
From dust to dust from seed to shear
And to another day?
If I could have one wish on earth
Of all I can conceive
T'would be to see another spring
And bless the falling leaves

Thank you for this precious day
These gifts you give to me
My heart so full of love for you
Sings praise for all I see
Oh sing for every mother's love
For every childhood tear .....(tape cuts off)
Oh sing for all the stars above
The peace beyond all fear  "      

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