Morning – Florence walking tour and Duomo
Travel is highly addictive. It’s very seductive. It’s an appearance of newness, a shaking up of old patterns that itself becomes a pattern eventually, just like everything else in this world. Often, the more patterned you are the greater travel’s appeal. Something new! How exciting! At some point, however, you end up singing, “I read the news today, oh boy,” with Lennon’s world-weary, old-soul mixture of pathos, humor and horizonless compassion for the endlessly replicating mirage of departures and arrivals. In the longer running mirage-chase called reincarnation, the departures and arrivals are called deaths and births. Travel is just like reincarnation, but tidier and less grueling.
This is our second year in a row in Florence, and probably the fifth or sixth time for me. The first three or four times I saw Michelangelo’s David I cried (well, let’s just say my eyes welled up with tears, which counts as crying for me). But last year I was as dried up as the retired older folks who tend to populate this kind of trip like a crowded departure lounge.
I keep going back to beautiful Florence even though it’s old news, because as J-R often said, “The eyes are always hungry.” The pull of that hunger is a force that’s stronger than the pushing away of familiarity. But how much can you stimulate yourself with newness before it’s dried up like tears, or exhausted like laughter? How many times can you visit a place before it glides into the same level of unconsciousness where home resides? How much can you stuff yourself with emptiness before you finally know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall?
And now I’m going to create some sort of record of all this human-created loveliness for the second year in a row (and God-knows-how-many lifetimes in a row), in a way that conveys some newness in and among all the patterns. “I’d love to turn you on” to what’s new, but that’s a kind of evangelism that was functional sixty years ago, before the Traveler/Christ changed the world. Now I have to turn myself on. The key is awareness. I get turned off when I “didn’t notice that the Lights had changed”—when I lose awareness of what’s already there and how the ever-moving Light reveals it. There’s no growth, just revelation. There are no inventions, just discoveries.
So what’s new? Nothing. Oh, you want to know about what’s new on this luxurious Italy trip? Nothing—which is just awareness, which is everything. Moses initiated the technique (as far as we know) of taking people out of their familiar reality in order to change their psychic/genetic patterning. J-R describes how Moses led them out into the desert in “Christ My Man for Eternity” on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amixNe6py7U. Rip them out of their routine and pour in the new Jew juice. J-R did the same thing on MSIA trips to Egypt and Israel but updated to the modern age, in much greater comfort. And now instead of having to wander around in the desert we’ve got John Motrin in lovely Florence to palliate the pain of our promiscuous pattern-reproduction.
As the new juice of one of these trips pours in, I start seeing my patterns that were unconscious before, as though I’m observing from way above my head instead of from inside my skull. When I observe a pattern it doesn’t disappear, it’s just loved. The pain of attachment is alleviated, and I have more freedom to move to the next new mirage on the horizon—if I want to. It’s a lifting and acceleration of the same old desert experience, but with no unpleasant G-force because I’m in a field of no resistance, otherwise known as peace. Greeting the Spirit as a trip like this starts to materialize is like seeing an old friend slowly emerging from a mirage in the heat-distorted distance. It’s instant recognition—but different from pattern recognition because this old friend looks new and different every time. I recognize him through the feeling of newness, not through any input from the five senses or any repeatable pattern.
Florence for me means the perfect frictionless functioning of artistic creativity and the joy of doing it in the energetic field of a community of artists. It’s a collective intoxication. The artistic community that was here many years ago has been replaced by the touristic community of art appreciators, but it still lives here. I’m in love and I’m addicted to the euphoria of harmonic beauty.
But the Traveler doesn’t allow wallowing in the past. This is a Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. I’m guided by a series of “coincidences” to what I need in order to let go.
On these trips there is always a dulling of my personal desires and plan-making ability in order for that guidance to flow meticulously. An example: After we arrive in Florence the Girlfriend wants to find a certain restaurant where we ate last year. We wander around in what we think is the right direction, but we can’t find it. Eventually I have to go to the bathroom so badly that I sit down at the first available restaurant and run to the toilet. A few tables away we see someone on the trip, an “old friend” who I’ve always recognized from past lives, but who I hardly know in this one. The Girlfriend continues her restaurant search, and the friend and I order food.
The friend tells me about her ability to see psychically/spirituality, about the 200-foot high pastel colors that surrounded John Morton when he called in the Light in Lake Como, and the angelic host that descended on us when John gave a seminar in the mountains of Switzerland several years ago. She tried a long time ago to paint what she saw and couldn’t reproduce it, so she gave up. I tune into her ability to let go of physical representation of inner reality, and something starts to shift inside me. I know she’s here to help me into the next step above my artistic karma—not to destroy it, but to soothe the attachment.
This morning we toured around the city of Florence, along the Arno River and through narrow ancient streets. We strolled through the Uffizi courtyard and ended up at the Duomo. Starting off from our hotels near the Ponte Vecchio we encountered a host of protestors of the Israeli-Palestine war, carrying Palestinian flags, chanting rhythmically. They were entering the area just as we were leaving—a perfectly choreographed opportunity to send the Light and peace to this age-old conflict. As if to remind us about the eternal echoing of these historical patterns, our guide told us a bit about the history of Florence and the significance of Michelangelo’s David (a copy of which resides outdoors in the Piazza della Signoria) as a symbol of the new freedom of the Florentine republic, balanced by the nearby statue of Hercules, symbol the old way of might-makes-right. The tension between the old and the new is as old as newness. Then we moved on to the glorious Duomo and an exploration of its interior. Then some free time.
Starting at 3:00 pm we reserved a space in a building near the Duomo and had sharing from John Morton and our Travelers Through the Ages presenters.
View the Photos by David Sand from Day 5 of the Travelers Through the Ages Tour, Italy 2025
Italy Day 5, Afternoon Sharing
After a few free hours we meet a short distance from the Duomo for sharing. The six color groups (we’re organized into color groups to facilitate travel) meet together, and representatives from them share with the whole group about Travelers of their choice. It’s a great way for people to connect, release, bond, and clear. Then John does Q&A. The energy is off the charts. It feels like the whole room is lifted up out of Italy, out of the galaxy, and into another universe. I can barely sit in the chair. I wish I had better vocabulary to describe it, but then if I did, it would be susceptible to limitation and it wouldn’t be pure Spirit, would it? I return to my hotel room for a sunset view of the Arno.
Magnificent, David–thank you!