Endnote . . . a few words about the person who put this site together:
I grew up on a cul-de-sac in northern California in the 1950s filled with kids who all loved playing kick-the-can until it was too dark to see. We were all there because of the euphoria and optimism experienced by our parents when WWII ended. But we knew nothing of this. When it was dinner time, our Dad would whistle . . . and my brother Lory and I would run home.
I thought the whole world was like this.
Gradually, I found out how wrong I was.
A decade later, I was studying geology at Berkeley, not in preparation to work for the oil industry as was the case with so many of my fellow students, but to learn about this miraculous planet we call home. My best memories from school are from a five-week field course in the White Mountains of Eastern California, where I walked by myself in deep silence and pure ecstasy across wild and untamed land, mapping the geologic formations and trying to figure out what happened and when. My lasting memory of this time was lying on my back somewhere by myself out in the vast wilderness looking up at the cumulus clouds ever so slowly moving through the sky while their shadows slid over the land. It was this impression that helped me to understand the immensity of geologic time for the first time – reminding me of when I was five and sleeping in my family's backyard and looked up at the Milky Way and felt the immensity of the Universe for the first time.
Regardless of my great respect for scientific inquiry, it is from these experiences that I became connected to that which is far far beyond the ken of the scientific mind. No matter how many quarks or leptons or bosons science finds, the result will never match what is available to a mind unconstrained by the purely material world. It is in the world of Spirit that the truest answers will always be found.
While at Berkeley, my growing sense of the reality of the suffering in the world hit me hard and I almost volunteered to go to Biafra where a devastating famine was raging . . . but instead joined VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a domestic Peace Corps, and was sent to St. Cloud, Minnesota. It was during this time that I came to realize that helping the poor with dental and medical care, finding a way to offer young boys an alternative to the war in Viet Nam, and helping to elect a truly caring, progressive to replace an 'old boy' on the Tri-County board . . . even to help with a famine in Africa . . . would not affect the root cause of all that afflicts the world – our collective level of global human consciousness.
I could only begin with myself and, in my early 20s, my spiritual search began in earnest . . . hoping that I might somehow improve myself and affect the world in a positive way that might make a difference to the whole. I joined a Gurdjieff school . . . valuable in many ways, but ultimately a cult with all the trimmings. Finally, the lesson learned during those years was 'To thine own self be true' . . . to trust myself. After this time ended, I participated for years in the est program . . . essentially a deprogramming from the Gurdjieff school experience and an opening to a new and deeper understanding of myself. After this experience also began to feel cultish, I began a many-year-long immersion in various Vipassana Buddhist meditation retreats. Incomparably useful and profound, my sense of Self expanding. But, in the end, all of these years attempting to make myself a better person didn't put a dent in what was going on in the world.
Somewhere towards the beginning of all that learning and introspection, I became fasci-nated and obsessed with so-called sacred geometry and architecture. . . culminating in the design of a Buddist mediation retreat center in California. The designs I submitted were never used, but the design of the meditation hall focused all that I'd learned and put me solidly on the path I would follow for the rest of my life.
On November 1st, 1999, I smoked the synthesized venom of the bufo alvarius toad – 5-MeO-DMT – and directly experienced the Stillpoint itself. My life was changed forever. This experience led to the almost inconceivable thought that the Earth-Moon Diagram that I'd first seen in 1987 – a diagram of pure sacred geometry that 'impossibly' included the Earth and the Moon – may be an expression of the most sacred and primal geometry known . . . the non-manifesting, Stillpoint / Vector Equilibrium / Flower of Life geometry.
I looked . . . and as ‘impossible’ as it was by any purely scientific explanation, found that it was, in fact, a symbolic, intentional expression of the Stillpoint geometry . . . the geometry of consciousness . . . that also included the Sun.
I was swept into a glorious and deep exploration . . . much like Richard Dreyfuss in Encounters of the Third Kind . . . pulled by forces he/I didn’t understand, into the future . . . connecting dots and following the implications.
Soon after this experience I moved to the high desert of the Owens Valley in eastern California . . . the deepest valley in North America, 100 miles long, running north/south - the 14,000-foot Sierra Nevada to the west and the 14,000-foot White Mountains to the east - one of the more fortunate decisions I’ve ever made in my life. It is vast and silent here. I could not be more grateful.
I’ve made my living as a carpenter and architectural designer and spend whatever time I can find building stone circles, planting trees, and growing a garden with my son and his wife on the land where we live.
And I dream . . . I dream of a new world, a world without war, without hunger, without poverty . . . a world where the oceans and forests - the entire biosphere - have been healed . . . a world where people work together as stewards for Mother Earth.
I would long ago left dreams like these undrempt but for the empirical evidence and its implications presented here.
I couldn't do what I feel needs to be done alone (nor should it be), so I began to compile the endless words and images found here and in Stillpoint in an attempt to explain all this to you.
A note in a bottle.
And it’s found its way to you.
James Ross Godbe, Owens Valley, California
From Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:
There is a crack in everything . . . that’s how the light gets in
We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah, and the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see
I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
They're going to hear from me
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
.