Wednesday night, July 8, sixty people gathered in the Fifth Avenue Meditation Center and Gallery of the Brahma Kumaris for dinner and a talk on Something Beyond Greatness. The group was a real cross-section of New York - all ages - from early career twenty-somethings to those in retirement - and from all of Manhattan's boroughs.

Gayatri had to be with her Father in Toronto, so Judy laid out the search they had embarked on to understand what happens to heroic and generous people in the moment when they do something generous or heroic. In the middle of the evening there was a windown of conversation - a chance for those in the room to consider when they had personally witnessed such an act of what they would deem "great." After the round of conversation, one woman rose to share, saying that she had become a mother when she was quite young and that the experience had caused her to have a nervous breakdown. She described how one day her mother, a single mom herself, came to see her and said she would take over raising the boy. The woman described how this deeply generous act had changed her life and the life of her son. She believes her mom to be one of those great ones we were searching for.

It seems of all the stories of greatness we hear, it is mothers we hear about most often. It may be that their natural vision of love for their children ignites the kind of endless energy and selfless action we are talking about in this book.

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