The highest step

[hagar]

Seeing Felix Baumbgartner's immense act of courage as he stepped into the void, and fell to earth at Mach 1.3, I sat glued to my computer.

His words before he stepped off, and his tiny body dissappeared towards earth was" I'm coming home now". He also said, it takes getting this high to realize how small we are.

The message being more profound than maybe even himself realized at that moment.

What struck me about this feat was the simple and profound realization of what constitutes all of our lives, in a spiritual and profane way; We all yearn for this home, our earth. In spiritual practice, we all stand on this earth, we all commune with it.

It makes sense, reading astronauts accounts of what they felt when they saw the earth from space for the first time. Many of them had deep and profoud transformations of their lives, just realizing their intimate relationship to this blue orb. This act of seeing, sensing our fragile existence is dependent on this relationship is the ultimate spiritual practice. There is nowhere to go, we are allready home. In qigong or mediation, this is all one can do. Just stand, sit, on this earth.

 

I wrote a blog post about the man who held the previous record for the longest freefall, a record that he set in the 60's, Captain Joseph Kittinger. Kittingers words about his experience are worth reading, and skip over my own ramblings:

http://freeandeasywa...highest-step-2/

 

h

[Stosh]

We were playing a quiz game one day and the question that fell to my sister was

"What were the first words spoken from the moon?"

She paused and searched her memory

finally her eyes lit up because she had figured it out!

"HELLOOO DOWN THERE!"

Stosh

[eye_of_the_storm]

Excellent Hagar - Thank you

[Fū Yue]

I can relate to that feeling of being at home.

 

When I went skydiving, the farther up we went in the plane the more calm I became. Seeing everything from so far away, the fear just melted. All my thought processes came to a screeching halt as I realized just how high I was.. and how small everything seemed. Little houses on the hillside, made of ticky tacky? That song was the only thing that came to mind. That 'normal' person perspective seemed so very wrong, everything i'd ever though of as significant seemed so silly to me now. Then I jumped off the plane.

 

Talk about getting a healthy dose of reality. The pressure of the air, the pressure on my eyes, still I couldn't look away. When the free fall was over, the only thing I could say was 'I'm so high right now!' But what struck me most of all, during the entire experience , was how comfortable I was with it. It almost felt mundane, like I was grounded not in my body, but in the earth's own awareness, like a child being watched over by his mother. I landed safely, I went back to my house. The most trans formative aspect of it was I felt no change, there was nothing to transform. I only thought I'd fallen, but I was still up there, and down here, and everywhere else on the planet, and it's always been this way, I just wasn't looking at it correctly. Not forward, not up, not down, not back around, just here.

[thelerner]

I wrote a blog post about the man who held the previous record for the longest freefall, a record that he set in the 60's, Captain Joseph Kittinger. Kittingers words about his experience are worth reading, and skip over my own ramblings:

http://freeandeasywa...highest-step-2/

 

h

Nice blog, inspiring.

[Seth Ananda]

Beautiful

[hagar]

I can relate to that feeling of being at home.

 

When I went skydiving, the farther up we went in the plane the more calm I became. Seeing everything from so far away, the fear just melted. All my thought processes came to a screeching halt as I realized just how high I was.. and how small everything seemed. Little houses on the hillside, made of ticky tacky? That song was the only thing that came to mind. That 'normal' person perspective seemed so very wrong, everything i'd ever though of as significant seemed so silly to me now. Then I jumped off the plane.

 

Talk about getting a healthy dose of reality. The pressure of the air, the pressure on my eyes, still I couldn't look away. When the free fall was over, the only thing I could say was 'I'm so high right now!' But what struck me most of all, during the entire experience , was how comfortable I was with it. It almost felt mundane, like I was grounded not in my body, but in the earth's own awareness, like a child being watched over by his mother. I landed safely, I went back to my house. The most trans formative aspect of it was I felt no change, there was nothing to transform. I only thought I'd fallen, but I was still up there, and down here, and everywhere else on the planet, and it's always been this way, I just wasn't looking at it correctly. Not forward, not up, not down, not back around, just here.

 

Wonderful. Thank you. I can totally relate. I also have experienced this strange combination of elation and ease, when climbing. I have written about that here earlier. I thought what you describe is really moving. The feeling of being watched over, being in the lap of a greater being. The sense of presence as you are further from the actual interaction. I have this feeling when I am up in a plane. A strange feeling of familiarity, of coming to my senses, as if I can only recognize what I have when I see it from a distance. Like this urge to see the entire face of my origin from beyond the clouds.

 

I don't know if this is relevant, but as a teen I always went windsurfing on the fjord in the afternoons after school. I went all the way out in the middle of the fjord, and as the sun was setting, and the waves crashed around me, I jumped off my board, and just laid on my back in the ocean, filled with this immense peace and rest.

 

What you said about feeling no change, like being up there and down there and there being nothing different, brought a tear to my eye. My experience exactly in many occasions in my own risk-related activites, like climbing or steep skiing. This sense of complete mundane ordinariness filled with a sense of awe.

 

I saw Baumgartner fall to earth, and when he touched ground, and the heli filmed his body from above, I saw it almost like a symbolic act. I am probably over-interpreting, but the nature of the flat earth, the white space suit, and the moment of kneeling down was just precious. The vast expance of space, of heaven above, the vast earth belov, and finally home, this tiny fragile human body.

 

Look at this from Baugartner's perspective.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2e0IXa9RRw

 

PS. thanks Seth and Michael

 

h