SAN FRANCISCO, CA. January 20, 1997 - On January 23rd 1997, people all over the planet will join together in the GaiaMind Global Meditation and Prayer. This international event will take place at 17:35 Greenwich Mean Time (12:35 p.m. EST / 9:35 a.m. PST) when a symbolic six-pointed star perfects in the heavens. Via the Internet, email, fax and word-of-mouth communication, millions of people are becoming aware of what organizers feel may be an unprecedented opportunity to catalyze planetary healing by both envisioning the light and facing the darkness of our times.

Initially catalyzed by two people with a vision and a computer, the GaiaMind Project has grown into an international grassroots movement with people from many different countries and religious traditions sharing information about the event. In just over three months since the official launching of the GaiaMind website on September 22nd, the GaiaMind Project has rapidly evolved into an international co-creation involving thousands of people actively spreading awareness in communities around the world. The GaiaMind webpage (www.gaiamind.com) has been translated into thirteen languages at last count allowing flyers to be printed from the web and photocopied all over the world. The website serves as an international forum for the integration of diverse ideas on spirituality, ecology, philosophy and consciousness.

The GaiaMind Project seeks to focus collective spiritual intention on transforming humanity's relationship with the Earth. Gaia is an ancient Greek term first popularized by James Lovelock's 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Simply stated, the Gaia hypothesis asserts that the Earth is one living, self-regulating organism. Mind conventionally refers to human consciousness. The term GaiaMind suggests a new understanding of humanity as the living Earth's consciousness. According to this vision, we are the planet waking up and becoming aware of itself.

The global meditation and prayer is intended to focus collective intention on forging a healthy and ecologically sustainable relationship between humanity and the Earth. Project cofounders Jim Fournier and Juliana Balistreri envision millions of people worldwide awakening a new collective understanding of our relationship with the planet, one which expresses our profound interdependence and interconnection with all life on Earth. Enthusiastic responses from a diverse cross-section of people worldwide suggest these ideas resonate with many.

Event organizers emphasize that anyone can participate from wherever they are on Earth, whether alone or with a group. To focus collective intention, they suggest that participants meditate, pray or do whatever brings them closer to the Divine for five minutes beginning at 17:30 Greenwich Mean Time (12:30 p.m. EST / 9:30 a.m. PST), and then, at 17:35 GMT, envision light together for one minute in unison. According to Balistreri and Fournier, "The intention is to visualize the symbolic healing potential of light while also holding in our hearts the very real suffering and degradation that we and all life on Earth are facing. We hope that through balanced vision, participants may bring love, compassion and understanding to embrace the possibility of healing the ecological, social and spiritual challenges before us."

GaiaMind gatherings and events are planned in communities worldwide including a "Birth of GaiaMind" trip to the Great Pyramids in Egypt, a Tibetan Buddhist students' retreat in Southern Brazil, a ceremony at a Mayan temple in Palenque, Mexico and a meditation and prayer group at a community church in Cremorne, New South Wales. As word continues to spread, additional groups are rapidly forming in cities ranging from Asheville, NC to Prague, Czech Republic to Auckland, New Zealand to Hong Kong. Updated information organized by region is available on the GaiaMind Project's website.

The timing for the GaiaMind Global Meditation and Prayer is based on a rare and auspicious planetary alignment discovered by Fournier in 1993. In early 1997 three outer planets - Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune - join together for the first time in almost two hundred years. Saturn and Pluto are also each sixty degrees away. Not since the Renaissance have all five outermost planets been so harmoniously arrayed. Astrologically, the conjunction of these major planets may represent an opportunity for the benevolent expansion of spiritual liberation. On January 23rd 1997 this cluster of planets will center on the first degrees of Aquarius, joined by the Sun, with the Full Moon opposite them all. This particular date represents the first of a series of exceedingly rare multiple conjunctions in the first degrees of Aquarius spanning several weeks.

The chart on January 23rd 1997 forms such a perfectly symmetrical mandala that people may recognize its miraculous symbolic value, without necessarily knowing the details of astrology. The GaiaStar chart may identify a precise moment, out of one day, out of one month, out of one year, out of one decade, out of one century, out of one millennium, on which there will be an unprecedented potential to initiate sudden spiritual change. Thus, it has also been suggested that this pattern may serve as a symbolic representation of the long-heralded dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

According to the GaiaMind Project founders, "Now, more than ever before, we have an opportunity to choose to envision a new understanding of our relationship with the Earth, and thus with each other. Perhaps by envisioning how everything, including that which seems most wrong to us, might be part of the ebb and flow of an evolutionary process, we may accelerate the awakening of global consciousness. We feel that such a transformation of consciousness will be necessary to heal our relationship with Gaia, the living Earth."

"Consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around For this reason, the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed - be it ecological, social, demographic or a general breakdown of civilization - will be unavoidable."
- Vaclav Havel, Former President of the Czech Republic in a 1990 address to the U.S. Congress

"Lovelock insists that this view of relationship between life and the non-living elements of the earth does not require a spiritual explanation; even so, it evokes a spiritual response in many of those who hear it. ...The long and intricate process by which evolution helped to shape the complex interrelationship of all living and nonliving things may be explicable in purely scientific terms, but the simple fact of the living world and our place on it evokes awe, wonder, a sense of mystery - a spiritual response - when one reflects on its deeper meaning." - Vice-President Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (p. 264)

For more information about the January 23rd 1997 Global Meditation and Prayer contact:
The GaiaMind Project, 20 Sunnyside Ave. #A325, Mill Valley CA 94941
Phone (415) 436-0123 Fax (415) 621-7790
email: info@gaiamind.com website: http://www.gaiamind.com.