GERRI:             Hello everyone, and especially hello to those of you watching us from around the world, so good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.

I'm Gerri Schwartz from the Visioneers International Network.  I'm here with my partner, Des Berghofer, and we're here to bring you the conclusion of the journey of extraordinary wisdom, and the launch of our new initiative on winning the peace.

We have brought you in their own voices our extraordinary wisdom keepers in episodes 1 to 9, and we have displayed their cumulative power in Episode 10.  Now, in our own statement of purpose we bring you the launch of our new initiative in winning the peace, and I'm here to do that by telling you the most extraordinary story of a wisdom keeper you will be astonished to meet.  His name is Edgar Mitchell,  Dr. Edgar Mitchell, and he has a story that will touch your deepest heart, the highest and clearest part of your mind, and indeed the very essence of your humanity.

So, listen up you people of the breakthrough, global citizens, and be prepared for a new level of thinking, and for the start of an epic journey.

This is the story of Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut and commander of the lunar landing module on the Apollo 14 mission to the moon. We will give you the background first, and then you will hear him live, as it were, speaking his truth in his own voice as he is being filmed inside the Apollo 14 spaceship travelling back to Earth from walking on the moon.

DESMOND:      Astronaut Edgar Dean Mitchell, engineer, US navy pilot, astrophysicist was originally scheduled to be on the Apollo 13 mission to the moon April 11 to 17, 1970.  However, NASA decided that he and mission commander Alan Shepherd needed more time for medical and other reasons and transferred them to Apollo 14 due to leave the following year.  Edgar became part of the ground crew for Apollo 13.

As it turned out, Apollo 13 was an ill-fated mission. Five and a half minutes after liftoff, the crew felt a little vibration that caused one of the engines to shut down two minutes early.  This caused the next stages to burn out of sequence.  Not a serious problem, but the first of more to come.

On April 13, 1970, at 55 hours 46 minutes into the flight to the moon, just as the crew bid the whole world good night, oxygen tank number 2 blew up, causing the number 1 tank to also fail.  A breathable atmosphere for the astronauts in the command module was being quickly depleted.  The consequence was immediately obvious.  The mission to the moon had to be aborted, and everyone became focused on bringing the crew safely back to Earth.  To conserve power, the systems in the command module had to be turned off.  This meant they would have to pilot the spacecraft from the lunar module still attached.  It also meant they would have to return with the lunar module still attached, acting as a lifeboat.  The equipment in the command module, the mothership, was not usable, so a way had to be found to pilot the combined vehicle with the lunar module in piggyback and battery power very low, so that they could re-enter the Earth 's atmosphere at the right angle. 

It was an unprecedented situation. Edgar Mitchell and Ken Mattinglee, as the two most experienced astronauts in the ground crew, jumped into the lunar module and command module simulators respectively to try to figure out how the crew on Apollo 13 could do it.  The odds against them succeeding were 10 to 1. No one had ever before envisioned or trained for this complex series of failures.

GERRI:             The world was riveted, gathering around radios and television screens, from New York to Tokyo to Tel Aviv, to hear any scrap of update.  Pope Paul the Sixth prayed before an audience of 10,000.  In India, at a religious festival hundreds of thousands of pilgrims prayed for the astronauts safe return.  In Jerusalem, prayers were said at the ancient temple wall on one of the holiest sites of three world religions.  Estimates were that one third of the world's population was riveted on this event.

As time passed, the odds of recovery began to rise as the world watched in hope, but re-entry would have to be done manually without instruments and using the curvature of the sun for guidance.

Finally, the moment of re-entry arrived.  Communications between the astronauts and ground control was lost. Silence crackled through the air. Humanity held its collective breath, eyes glued to television screens worldwide. Questions flew across the planet. Would the heat shield hold to protect the astronauts inside. Would there be enough power to slow their speed?  Helicopters buzzed over the projected splashtown area.  The rescue ship waited.  Television cameras scanned the empty blue, blue sky. 

The normal time for loss of communication was three minutes. Three minutes passed,  Suddenly, seeming out of nowhere, three orange and white parachutes blossomed out over the Pacific Ocean and the voice of mission commander Jim Lovell boomed out, announcing their safe arrival back to Earth, and they splashed down within eyesight of the rescue ship.

We tell you this, in case you don't believe the whole world could pay attention, without regard for borders belief or national identity to cheer for the team of humanity.  Now keep this in your mind.

DESMOND:      But there's a larger question demanding answer.  What really brought Apollo 13 back to Earth?  Was it the brilliant minds of the NASA ground crew in their finest hour?  Of course it was.  Their determination and expertise to bring their colleagues back safely to Earth was superlative, and has become part of space history.  But was there something else at work not obvious on the surface?

Edgar Mitchell pondered this, and a few years later he gave a penetrating answer.  As a PhD physicist steeped in hard science, and part of that ground crew, he spoke at a conference in Orlando, Florida in 1978 to describe the event.  And he closed his remarks by saying:

“It was the power of thousands of praying minds that pulled Apollo 13 back to Earth.”

The power of thousands of praying minds pulled Apollo 13 back to Earth.  Where did that idea come from?  A man with a reported IQ of 180, at the 99.9 percentile of IQ scores, had just revealed a deep spiritual sense, informed by science, and taken a 180 degree turn into the world of quantum entanglement.  This conclusion was the result of his own extraordinary experience when he finally got to go on his own journey to the moon in 1971, and his research in the years following.

I tell you this story because it has profound implications for our objective in the Visioneers Project to win the peace, a seemingly impossible goal.  There's a good reason why we've chosen the story and wisdom of Edgar Mitchell to be the bookend to the other episodes we have brought you.  We know that the global mind change and spread of planetary consciousness voiced by the other wisdom keepers to get us through and beyond humanity 's current mega crisis--we know that is achievable, we know it can be done.  How do we know?  Because of Edgar Mitchell's experience on Apollo 14 and his subsequent work.

Here's the rest of the story.  Listen carefully and be prepared to learn how what seems impossible becomes possible.  Edgar Mitchell and the other members of the crew of Apollo 14 lifted off Cape Canaveral atop the mighty Saturn rocket on January 31, 1971.  They had a very successful expedition on the moon 's surface in which Edgar had the major responsibility.  After that very busy minute-by-minute activity, on the return journey in the quiet of the command module he was able to relax and assume a minor role of monitoring gauges in a well functioning spacecraft.  He had the freedom and time to look out the windows of the cockpit as the module rotated slowly, turning continuously, displaying a celestial panorama of billions of stars far brighter than anything ever seen from Earth, then also to see his home, a blue and white planet set in the black emptiness of the universe.

You will see this yourselves in a moment. He described it as:

"a sight that bores deep in the soul and shakes the foundation of your being."

Fundamental questions sprang into his mind.  Can the planets and stars coming together in this magnificence be an accident?  Is all this just an accidental collision of matter coming together in space because of gravitation?

He answered his own question:

"In an instant, I knew for certain that what I was seeing was no accident, that it did not occur randomly and without a plan."

Look at what he saw yourself and listen to him speaking into the microphone later, explaining his reaction.

EDGAR:           The biggest joy was on the way home.  In my cockpit window every two minutes the Earth, the moon, the sun, and the whole 360 degree panorama of the heavens, and that was the powerful overwhelming experience, and suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, and the molecules in the bodies of my partners were prototyped and manufactured in some ancient generation of stars.

And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness, it wasn't them and us, it was that's me, that's all of it, it's one thing.

And it was accompanied by an ecstasy, or a sense of, Oh my God, wow, yes, an insight, an epiphany.

GERRI:             Edgar said he experienced an epiphany.  That's a blow-your-mind experience, after which you could no longer be what you were before.  He said it was an ecstasy.  These are his own words:

"It was as though my awareness reached out to touch the farthest star, and I was aware of being an integral part of the entire universe."

For one brief instant, he understood that the very molecules of his body and of the bodies of his crewmates were forged in some distant ancient star.  They, and all of us, are integral parts of a vast cosmic whole.

The moment was short lived.  Then he experienced the feeling of the darkest, blackest despair.  He saw the comparison between the tiny Apollo 14 spacecraft and the Earth as a spaceship.  The astronauts knew they had to work together to conserve resources, but back on Earth "my people, the crew of Spaceship Earth were in disharmony, disarray, egotistically, lustfully, and hatefully destroying themselves and each other, behaving like lemmings rushing towards the sea, for lack of vision and understanding of who they really are.  They are universal beings, stewards of Spaceship Earth.  They do not recognize their own potential, or their gifts of intuition, intelligence, and creativity.  Nor are they ready to believe there is a guiding force within that connects us.  In Apollo 14, the responsibility of the crew to conserve our resources was clear.  On Earth, the crew is billions, and the craft is the planet, still with finite, limited resources."

Edgar concludes that for the Earth to survive as a planet, and to provide for the nurturing, the growth and well being of its inhabitants, we must rise to the challenge of learning to be stewards of the Earth and each other, and we must do this together, and we must do this together.

He says: "We now possess the power and knowledge to control the Earth, but we have yet to find the wisdom and sense of destiny to find the solutions, to become the creative intelligent loving creatures of the universe that is our true reality.

DESMOND:      The answers we are looking for are coming through new discoveries in quantum science.  This was one of Edgar Mitchell 's fields of study. In the book "We Are One," published in 2020 posthumously, after Edgar 's death in 2016, he is quoted as follows:  "What we have discovered in quantum physics, just in the past 20 years, is the secret of why the mystics have all said for thousands of years that we are connected in some mysterious way."

One of the key attributes in quantum physics is called entanglement.  Edgar explains it this way:

“In the quantum world we learn that if things are in process together at a subatomic level, they become entangled, and if they go apart, wherever they go across the universe after that, they are interconnected.  And that’s called entanglement.  They are entangled with each other.”

It was thought at first that this was only a theoretical construct, but Edgar tells us we are now finding that it applies to human beings.  People are entangled with each other such that at moments of great intensity,like the life-and-death situation facing the Apollo 13 astronauts trying to get safely back to Earth, the prayers and good wishes of people across the world brought the people and the astronauts into what is called resonance, and had the effect of bringing the astronauts safely home, which was the intent of the people praying for them. That's why Edgar Mitchell said, "It was the power of thousands of praying minds that pulled Apollo 13 back to Earth."

What is going on is that people are using their intuition to produce an outcome.  Edgar says we should not talk about intuition as being a sixth sense but rather our "first sense."  It has great power.  Another way of saying that, is our intentionality has an effect.

“To a certain extent, we create reality by the way we think about it.  The role of mind in shaping reality is becoming very well established.”

GERRI:             Edgar applies this to humanity's current predicament.  He says: "Civilization is at a crossroads.  Species are being made extinct, the population is growing, garbage is piling up, all of these ills of civilization seem to be increasing, but since we've created most of them, we can undo them and solve these problems."

He continues:  “It places the responsibility on each and every one of us to live exactly the type of life and create situations exactly like we would like to see them in this relationship of being harmonious on this planet together.  We are either all going to work on this together, or we’re going down the tubes together.

So, as you learn to quiet your mind and listen to your intuition, these deeper resources and subtle energies, in a more profound way, the resonance with everyone else starts to take place.

DESMOND:      From one perspective, the reality seems to be that the world is mired in its existential problems and can't get beyond them. But there's another way to look at that.  Bill Halal, one of our wisdom keepers, told us we are at the culmination of a life cycle of evolution.

We are on the cusp of a great transition.  We are going beyond knowledge into an Age of Consciousness. At the moment, we're not doing very well at it, because many people are choosing to believe things that produce disharmony.  But human minds are creating this reality.  We need to change our minds and get beyond this form of consciousness into a global consciousness of collaboration and harmony.

But how do you get millions of people in many different cultures and life situations to change their minds about conflict and struggle for limited resources?  You do it by going beyond knowledge, as Bill Halal says,and spreading the wisdom of our globalthought leaders about what can be done, and showing the observable evidence of people doing that through projects of good work creating a Web of Good Work.

And that is what we are doing in the Visioneers Project.

All of this is the evidence we need to confirm that we are a unique species participating in an interconnected living universe,which gave rise to us and will not allow us to fail, but will empower us to construct on Earth the same harmony that fills the universe.

GERRI:             So, let's come back to Edgar and his advice.  He asks: “What is it that we could become if we dare?  Are we a step above animals, or are we universal beings with great potential to determine our destiny?”

His answer, following research and discovery to sum up his findings, says we are not a physical machine as in the picture painted by scientists of medicine, biology, chemistry, and many traditions.  We are a limitless spiritual creature having a human experience in a body with which to achieve our goals of learning and potential. 

So far, we have been described only by our physical body, but not our essence, our truest deepest nature.  For tens of thousands of years we've roamed the Earth as nomads, fighting for survival in harsh environments and protecting ourselves and our possessions, worrying about those who seem to threaten us.  Rarely have we listened to the inner voice of our true destiny.  We have believed life is hard and we have made it so.  We must change, we must experience a different reality.

DESMOND:      And here is the key to all of this as told by Edgar:

“Dreams and visions do not change the world.”

But they do inspire a new awareness of what can be done, and this sets the stage of the action that is to follow.  Edgar Mitchell spent the rest of his life doing just that.  He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).  He convinced Willis Harman, whom we featured as the first wisdom keeper on the Visioneers episodes, to be its President, and many other things.  His book "We Are One" is dedicated to those who dare to believe in the power of the conscious mind to change the world.  It's for this that he was awarded a Visioneers Hero of Humanity Award.

GERRI:             Here is the main wisdom that he teaches us:

“We are connected, not just to planet Earth, but to the living system of the vast cosmos of which we are an integral part.”

If we act on this, what we could do on this planet is beyond imagination.  That is the belief that needs to inspire us now.  That is the work that we undertake as Visioneers.  That is how we win the peace, and how we build the Golden Peace.  That is how we bring the billions of our crew safely back from flawed consciousness to become stewards of the Earth.

DESMOND:      We have another great resource helping humanity create a better future.  The United Nations founded in 1945 by a few key nations at the end of World War II, with a charter focused on ending the scourge of war, has continued for more than 70 years and now includes in its membership 193 nations on Earth.  Under the leadership of several remarkable Secretaries General and with Robert Muller running the show in the Secretariat, the United Nations became what Robert called the Meta Biological Organism of Humanity, studying and finding solutions to problems of inequity, measuring population growth, forecasting the future, creating humanitarian agencies, coordinating the research on environmental degradation, and urging the nations to avert the consequences of climate change, and keeping the peace.

As a political organization, the United Nations is by no means perfect, but it's the best meeting place the world has for settling differences without resort to war.

In 2015 the UN released 17 Sustainable Development Goals for achievement by 2030.  Though the achievement date may be overly optimistic, the goals are out there as the nearest thing the world has ever had to a broad integrated vision.  And the Visioneers Project is showing progress on the goals through a Wall of Stories linked to the goals by color-coded bricks.  We show the progress of Visioneers contributions to the goals in a bar graph.

Visioneers Visionary Leader, Cyril Ritchie is the former President of the United Nations Congress of non-governmental organisations, and probably no one is more cognizant of the importance and limitations of the United Nations system. Listen to a few of his comments:

CYRIL:             Why is the United Nations important to each one of us?  The United Nations Organization is an ever more essential part of today's and tomorrow's world.  Today's and tomorrow's problems, crises, and challenges are increasingly ones that cannot be resolved within national boundaries: pandemics, natural disasters, poverty, migration, economic ups and downs, climate change, trafficking in persons, crime syndicates, ocean pollution, and many more issues are no respecters of national boundaries.

The daily work of the UN includes feeding millions of the hungry, protecting the human rights of millions of refugees and of migrants and of those denied justice by authoritarian governments.  There is news to be told about the UN regarding its work, for example, advancing biodiversity, and combating desertification, or in mobilizing and coordinating international aid to victims of natural disasters or of conflicts.

Perhaps the most meaningful illustration of all this is the current emphasis on the sustainable development goals, the SDGs, which are a challenge, an opportunity, and indeed an imperative, for every government, every NGO, every university, every profession, every citizen,

Following on from the more limited Millennium Development Goals of 2000 to 2015, the SDGs from 2015 to 2030 set out the parameters for how our planet can be made more sustainable, more just and responsible, more healthy and equitable.  In short, more livable.

DESMOND:      So, the Visioneers International Network is firmly committed to working with the United Nations towards the support and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and we look forward to cooperating with the UN in this pivotal decade of the 2020s.

GERRI:             Now, let's turn the focus on youth, who have the biggest stake in the future.  The Visioneers Project is multi-generational.  In Episode 9, George and Sedena Cappannelli told us of the role that can be played by that demographic over the age of fifty, but we must also include the voice of youth.

This was expressed most emphatically at the Visioneers Launch ceremony by the Visioneers Youth Leaders, Tatiana Speed and Jamie Magrill.

TATIANA:         I want to address in this room the future youth leaders, which is all of you.  And I'm just overjoyed to be here and to feel your energy in this room, and the fact that you made it here at 11 a.m. on a Sunday on a Canadian Thanksgiving tells me that you are already incredible changemakers and Earth citizens. So, well done for being here.

I want to acknowledge as well that this is a very inter-generational audience, both in this room and listening and watching online, and that up until now we've heard predominantly from our elders.  We've heard the ways in which they have dedicated their lives to serving humanity, the ways in which they've tried their best to move the needle forward, and I want you to receive their messages, hear their words, and experience this as a kind of passing of the torch.  They have done everything in their power, and they are trying to impart on us their wisdom, and for all their service I want to thank them from the absolute bottom of my heart.

And now, the torch comes to us, to all of the young people in this room, and we have a monumental task in front of us.  The planet, as we know, is in great peril.  We've heard about it through all the speakers today, but I don't want you to feel frightened by that, or helpless, or hopeless, because, as we've also heard, this is a time of incredible transformative power, of possibility, and of potential.  And people around the world are rising up and discovering new solutions to the challenges that confront us, and actually what we're witnessing is an enormous planetary awakening, an enormous paradigm shift, that I am personally very excited to be a part of.  I think that this is actually a very exciting time, in the midst of the challenges and adversities we face, because we will see in our lifetimes true systemic change brought about by the necessity of our current circumstances.

And that is why Jamie and I are launching the Youth Leadership Circles.  The Youth Leadership Circles are a way we want to work with you to empower you and your unique voice and messages, the unique gifts that each and every one of you is here to bring and share, because the voice of the youth is honestly the great power that this world needs, and youth voices are rising up around the world, and they are being heard. You have inside of you a very deep truth and a knowing of what is right and what is wrong, and that is the moral compass that the planet desperately needs.

So, I invite you to reach out to Jamie or me after this event if you're interested in being part of that.  And my prayer for all of us is that when we reach the end of our lives where these elders are now, that when we pass on the torch, we feel we've done everything in our power to also movethe needle forward.

Thank you.

JAMIE:             Thank you Tatiana, and a big thank you to all of our wisdom keepers and to Des and Gerri for sharing their knowledge with us.

Every day, young people pick up their phones and are bombarded with negativity, from the news, from social media, and from their peers.  This leads to more than just hopelessness, but a sense of helplessness.  Young people feel that they cannot make an impact against this wall of negativity.

That is why Tatiana and I joined the Visioneers as co-founders, to build a network, a platform, a movement.  We started small, expanding from BC to Canada, and now we have people in 45 countries and 1000 people online today watching, with the same goal to connect changemakers from around the world to create a space, to collaborate, share ideas, support, and resources, and to create opportunities for changemakers of all ages and especially youth to find mentorship and leadership opportunities.

In addition to launching the Visioneers International Network today, we are also launching our Visioneers Youth Leadership Circles, as Tia said, which are here to accelerate you as you confront the challenges of the future. So, let's get you out there creating solutions.

I have a message for everyone here today in person and online:  Continue to engage with us as we build this network, as we build this movement.  If you have a network, spread the word.  If you have ideas, or want to help, or a young person wondering how you can make a difference, reach out to us.  That's why we're here.  If you have a project like Aaron's project that we heard about earlier, come on board. 

That's the promise of the Visioneers International Network launching here today, and looking forward to the better future that we will co-create together as we wage peace.

Thank you.

GERRI:             Tatiana and Jamie have expressed the energy of youth to get going on their own projects to build a better future through the Visioneers Youth Circles.  This is now getting under way, as it must, with an emphasis on education.  In the coming months, we will be taking the content from the wisdom of our global thought leaders delivered in a series of extraordinary wisdom, and working with schools, students and teachers, to build the curriculum of global citizenship.  This subject has already been endorsed by the Council of Education Ministers of Canada as an essential competence for young people in the 21st century.  So, we have a perfect opportunity to do this right, anchoring the teaching of the best wisdom and information available, and working with the Ministries of Education and universities to have the global citizenship course accepted for university entrance.

We will start here locally in Vancouver, but once it's done, it will be our Visioneering Project to spread it globally through the process of school twinning all around the world, so that learning how to be a global citizen can become a part of school curriculum everywhere.  And not just learning about it academically, but getting involved in hands-on projects chosen by the students themselves to create a better future, creating Clubs of Global Citizens, getting out there, and letting the world know that youth is mobilized for waging peace, getting rid of outmoded ideas of war and conflict, becoming the new humans that Jean Houston spoke of and I wrote of in my poem, "Sapiens Part Two."

I can just see it spreading around the world, providing the observable evidence that achieving humanity's Golden Peace is possible, not just the absence of war, but peace in the home, in the hearts and minds of people everywhere, so that people can thrive in their communities, and in their cities of peace in every country.

Now, I want to talk about Visioneers Leadership Circles.

Des, you presented this proposal at the Visioneers Launch. Let's take a look at that.

DESMOND ON VIDEO:             We've truly come to this moment in history when everything is on the line for human beings to transform the way we are living on Earth.  Safe passage into the future depends on people all over the world working together to support the greater good.  The focus must be on doing what's right for the whole human family.  That's why the world needs our Visioneers Project, and we want to give you now a practical too to go forward with into the future. It's called creating a Visioneers Leadership Circle, that's a group of three or more people who have come together because they share the kind of vision for the world that we are talking about here today, and they want to do what they can to bring it about.  And the best place to start is in your own community. 

So we invite you at the conclusion of this event to think about what you can do, and who you can ask to join you in looking at your community to find all the good things that are already going on, and then create something new. You might find stories about helping older people live a better life, or about young people cleaning up a beach, or a polluted creek, or a polluted piece of land, or a program to help disadvantaged people, or provide food to hungry children in school.  All of these are good Visioneering Projects to be done by a Visioneers Leadership Circle,

And when you begin to look, you'll find that there are many other such stories going on that are unnoticed.  So you would need to send them to us, and we'll put them up on our Visioneers platform so that they become known around the world. The point is that Visioneering can become the way things are done everywhere in the world, people working together to make things better, powered by respect, cooperation, and compassion.

So, our call to you is to go forward by forming Visioneers Leadership Circles, and to join the Visioneers International Network so we can put your stories up for the world to see.

We are the ones the world has been waiting for.  We cannot, we must not, we will not fail.

DESMOND:      No, we will not fail, and we will not cease to work every day to build Humanity's Golden Peace.  Since the launch, we have released the wisdom of our global thought leaders.  Now, we are developing Global Citizenship Courses for youth and promoting Youth Leadership Circles.

The next step is to begin a major push to create Visioneers Leadership Circles that can be the on-the-ground practical action focused on winning the peace.

Here's a guide on how to do that, which you can download.

In this way you will become an active part of a cohort of leaders and changemakers giving you, giving your work and your community a global reach.

So, now we have our campaign ready to go to win the peace.  We have the leaders of our peace team, that's the wisdom keepers, and we have the wisdom that they have given us to win the peace, and we have their books and their wisdom episodes.  All of this is on the website to be at your fingertips for review and inspiration.

GERRI:             And we have the Masterworks Emporium showing the resources available.  It's a magnificent modern library with nine categories of contribution, books, film, documentaries, music, etc.

And the music that will continue to uplift our hearts.

DESMOND:  We are making humanity's age-old dream for peace come true.  We call it "Waging Peace," taking the word waging that usually applies to war and turning it on its head as part of the global mind change.  It was also my dream when I wrote "The Visioneers" 30 years ago and concluded itwith a rallying call of Why Not!  I would like to share that.

GERRI ON THE AUDIO THEATRE:       And suddenly there seems to be an overwhelming response of why not. Touched by the energy of the global mind, people heard the announcement in a new way. If only the future for the planet is along a path of peace, how can we step aside here from such a course? There are differences and difficulties, there are hatreds that go back for thousands of years, but this is a new time now, the end is clear. We must have peace, the thought is in our minds, there will be dangers and difficulties and setbacks, but the end is clear, and we will find our way to it Why not? 

DESMOND ON THE AUDIO THEATRE:             By the end of the week this was the question in everyone's mind, why not?  Why not peace in the Middle East?  Why not an end to aggression and hostility?  Why not shut down corruption in high places?  Why not override the drift to drugs by giving people a new sense of the power in their minds?  Why not set aside the benefits of greed by showing the rewards that come from pursuing lives of meaning and worth?  Why not expect the best of people and help them to achieve it?  Why not replace tough negotiation with synergy and deep listening?  Why not live together in love and fellowship?  Why not take charge of the future of the planet and learn to live in the flow of the universal life force?  Why not create a global mind and learn to see our lives fulfilled through our contribution to this higher force?  Why not learn to be the magnificent beings we were meant to be? Why not?

DESMOND:      So, why not win the peace in our lifetimes and make our planet the precious jewel of the universe?

There's a concluding message on the Visioneers Audio Theatre released today. Listen to it and find more advice on how to win the peace.

GERRI:             What better way to conclude than with our Visioneers Youth Choir raising their young voices to sing Why not.

CHOIR SINGING: