I today got from a friend the link to an interesting video about a conference on UFOs (with Spanish subtitles). I’m normally not much interested in any UFO-hype, however screened through the film and found the witnesses honest and competent. There is a website about “The Disclosure Project“, from which this video is::

“On Wednesday, May 9th, 2001, over twenty military, intelligence, government, corporate and scientific witnesses came forward at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to establish the reality of UFOs or extraterrestrial vehicles, extraterrestrial life forms, and resulting advanced energy and propulsion technologies. The weight of this first-hand testimony, along with supporting government documentation and other evidence, will establish without any doubt the reality of these phenomena.”

“The Disclosure Project is a nonprofit research project working to fully disclose the facts about UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence, and classified advanced energy and propulsion systems. We have over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology, and the cover-up that keeps this information secret.”

Their efforts to document the findings and convince government officials in the US shows how difficult it is to cause a change in belief systems, and the case is the same on the spiritual path. It takes a long time of inner work and discrimination to get through the two poles of sceptical refusal and credulous superstition.

A Sun Chariot from 1400 BC found in Denmark, photo of my son from an exposition in Switzerland

The agency with whom I’m realising the new intranet for my office invited me last Monday for a visit to the Microsoft Solution & Innovation Center near Zurich and for the football (soccer) match Holland – Italy of the EURO 08 in Berne. I couldn’t resist and accepted the invitation. About the football match you’ll read in the next post.

The Microsoft Solution and Innovation Center is one of 4 centers world-wide, it opened in November 2007. It is some kind of a future-lab, to develop visions of what the electronic world may be in a few years.

In a futuristic setting (“It’s something like Spaceship Enterprise…”) with a 360-camera in the middle and surrounded by 7 large presentation screens we were entering into Microsoft’s visions of how a big enterprise might organise its collaboration, with video-teamwork, electronic white-boards, touchscreen-tablet noteooks and innovative mailing systems, with facilities beyond today’s scope and design.

The head of the innovation center told us, just like the automobile industry develops concept cars, computer technology develops concept workspaces. It was thrilling to see how the virtualisation of collaboration will be progressing, a quality of the Aquarian age.

However, when she asked for feedbacks, I told her that in my job one of the difficulties isn’t technical feasibility, but the humans working with the system. Of course the youth of today is very naturally handling electronic tools, but the human factor remains the center and not the electronic instruments: Instruments are for expressing ideas, helping to manifest them, they aren’t an end in themselves. In spirituality the body is realised to be the instrument of the soul, which has to get hold ov the vehicle, and not the vehicle becoming the master, like it is often the case.

We had a second presentation about the development of unified communication, where Microsoft sees a convergence between the different end-user’s instruments: Not the instrument matters for the communication, but the message to be transported. This too, goes into the same line of a spiritual principle that the instrument has to be the servant, not the master.

Inside the building: Cool style like the technical world, but without the breath of vegetation life.

I frequently observe that similar topics come across my way at home and at my office. It is some kind of synchronicity, which superficially seen seems to be accidental. Of course it is not identity, and there are many strings of themes and activities quite different from each other.

In the last months the relaunch of the intranet system at my office kept me quite busy (I wrote a blogpost 14 months ago and another in October 07, when the project officially started). I’m the project manager and have to coordinate the internal processes with the external agency. At the moment we are in the process of finalizing detail concept, and the new intranet hopefully will be launched in October.

At home I’m working since some months – besides other activities – at the relaunch of the Good-Will website. My youngest son, 15, is helping me with the technical side, and I do the content migration and photo layout, scanning etc. It took a long time until finally the project started. My son needed overcoming technical, but also motivational obstacles. But since some weeks the fire has got him and we are making good progress. I hope that in a few weeks we are through.

I started the old site in 2000 and re-worked it a bit with the site layout 2 years ago. It grew over the years, but the coding, done by a WYSIWYG-editor, is full of mistakes. Since I’m a “layman” as far as the technical side is concerned and don’t have much time to go deeper into it, I wouldn’t be able to do the relaunch myself. Now we have a very good co-operation, where I can realize quite some ideas which my son is adapting into the techical side. You’ll see more of the results in the near future. Also the blog will be integrated into the layout and structure of the new site. Here is a screenshot of the English page on “good will”.

This morning my moped suddenly started to roar – the rust had eaten a hole into the mouth of the tail-pipe. With a lot of noise I continued to my office. On the way home in the evening I took the direction to a motorbike mechanic. When I crossed the bridge from the old town of Berne to the other side, I saw an old steam engine tramway going along, an extra-ride blowing white steam into the air.

The tram was quite slow, so I could easily double it with my moped. I stopped and took out my camera, but it passed by a bit too fast. I drove on and made some shots from the moped and then a last one from the side of the road, here they are.

On the plate of the engine you can read it’s from 1894. I thought about the incredible speed-up of technical evolution in these 114 years. In esoteric parlance this is a result of the starting Aquarian age – though in mainstream society they are laughing it off and give other kinds of explanation concepts.

A few minutes later I arrived at the motorbike shop, where just 2 ladies were returning from a test drive with latest models e-bikes – a new generation of city transport means getting quite frequent here.
And in the newspapers and on the web I saw today pictures of yesterday’s show of the “fusion man” – a Swiss pilot who, with small airofoils and little turbines on his back had given a demonstration for press people, flying at 300 km/h over the Alps – another air of the Aquarian wind.

Friday I was in a suburb of Zurich for a meeting with the web marketing agency with which we are cooperating in my office. On the way back I had a short stop at Zurich main station, where I had a look at the work of art about which I had read in the American tech-blog Engadget (and about which I had heard before…)

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH has installed in the main station hall a huge 3D LED display for its 150th birthday. There are 25,000 bulbs containing each 12 LEDs which are constantly changing colours and patterns. The project is called NOVA and wants to give the travelers a new visual experience: In a surrounding where people are flooded with visual stimuli they want to appeal the people emotionally, remembering them of dreams and visions. The NOVA-team has a fascinating website, which you can also explore with different shapes and colours.

The structure reminds me of group relations not only in technology, but also with human beings. When their patterns harmoniously cooperate, a beautiful lightful structure can appear.

Some days ago I read in the NZZ Folio-Magazine an article by Luca Turin on “The sound of impossible objects” (also translated into English). It is about William Sethares, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (“Each of us plays several roles in life. Some of my favorite are: researcher, teacher, and musician”) .

Sethares did experiments where he electronically stretched the musical octaves and observed what happened with the chords: Some combinations sounded very dissonant, while others produced an astonishing consonance. Some scales he used were more harmonious for the ears than others. So in 19-tone, the “octave” on the keyboard is a fifth larger than the normal one.

Sethares calls this “Xenotonality” (from the Greek word for “strange” combined with tones). The results are described on his website as “strange and somewhat eeri. The effect was so different from the tempered scale that there was no tendency to judge in-tuneness or out-of tuneness.” Some of the songs sound quite normal, some leave an alienating feeling.

You can listen to some example from his CDs, like Incidence and Coincidence. I got a strange feeling from these sounds, like being a bit “off the track”, and the effect lasted for quite some time afterwards. It is not just the kind of vibrations I would love to expose myself to over a longer time, but and interesting transgression of the boundaries of the sound-range of physical instrument. In this context see the next blogpost on “Silence, Speech and Sound”.

Loudspeaker in a little forest ashram in Andhra Pradesh, India

Today I was in Geneva at the office of the UNHCR, the UN organisation for the protection of refugees.

Together with Google Earth they launched for Switzerland the new online mapping programme, Google Outreach (up to now it is only available in certain countries), and at the same time unveiled the outreach programme for the UNHCR:

“It’s absolutely fantastic. The potential for us and the potential to serve our interests and to serve the refugee interests round the world is quite substantial and we need now only seize the opportunity and move ahead with it,” Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone told more than 250 staff and invited guests at a launch ceremony in the atrium of UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters. Johnstone said the pilot UNHCR layers, which are now live on Google Earth Outreach and available from the UNHCR-site, made it possible to zoom in on specific refugee situations

L. Craig Johnstone

And indeed, it was very fascinating to see the the scope of possibilities this new technology offers. Rebecca Moore, manager and founder of Google Earth Outreach, gave an insight into the new application, showing different examples already realised.

Rebecca Moore from Google

With layers you can place information and media into Google Earth (a downloadable program) and Google Maps (online version). Now Google Earth Outreach gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources to greate maps and virtual visits to projects.

This way you can directly show people what is at stake at a place and not just speak about it. You thus can raise the awareness and reach a broader audience – at the moment there are more than 350 million Google Earth users world-wide. You can use the tool to educate people, inspire action and influence decision-makers.

To show the impact of photos to sensitize people to what is happening in other parts of the world, Zalmai, internationally reknown photographer, born in Kabul and and refugee himself, who had just returned from Afghanistan, showed very impressive pictures of the horrible living conditions of internally displaced people there.

In the afternoon there was a tech-session to explain how the magic works, and a a manual for developers (pdf) was handed out. And we did some experiments with the spreadsheets to create information for Google Earth – it’s really not difficult to use.

Google also just launched an initiative together with “The Elders” – a gathering of world leaders coming together to guide and support the people – called “Every Human has Rights“, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Google is now placing the 30 Articles of the declaration into the download version of Google Earth, so that you can see them at different parts of the globe, where they are at stake. This way also the knowledge about the human rights is spread all over – a very inspiring initiative.

At my office we are already using Google Maps to show the areas of world-wide activities. And since yesterday the Circle of Good Will can also be found on Google Maps. But I don’t know yet whether in my office or privately Google Outreach will come to a use… Nevertheless it is a great tool for inter-connecting the world and thus bringing in a fresh air of the Aquarian age.

You now can surf with Google through the galaxies and discover planets, nebula or supernovae with the web-browser, without any other software. The Argentinian programmer Diego Gavinowich from Buenos Aires was a finalist in Google’s Latin America Code Jam and won a 3 months internship at Google headquarters in San Diego, USA.

Google writes: “You can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser.”

Seeing the pictures of the cosmos reminds me of the “Conclusion” of the Critique of Practical Reason, where the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant writes:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (written on his tomb)

For moral law we today might say the subtle inner worlds you discover on the spiritual path. You find more about “Meditation – Experiment and Experience” here.

Google Terms of use – free for private use.

I yesterday read about the Microsoft online service “Windows Live SkyDrive“, an online storage system, which now has 5 GB storage space for free. This service is not yet available everywhere, but at the moment in 38 countries.

I thought, oh, that’s practical as a second backup, I can access to my files without having my laptop with me – at the office or while travelling, and this even without a memory stick.

So registered and uploaded a number of files. It worked well. (Accessing at another time had some difficulties, the login page didn’t open for half an hour – so there are “limits to the sky”.)

Of course this isn’t a sure way of storing and transporting data, for others can easily read them while transmitting. But I have no top security files there. It’s another step into “virtually everywhere”. I wonder what are the strategies of Microsoft for offering these services for free – normally business people always have a “second thought”.

Another kind of a sky drive: start of a glider near Berlin, April 06

I today read an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about the discovery of certain findings indicating that there had been a sunken continent in the south of the Indian ocean, near the Antarctica. An expedition of researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute to the area of the Kerguelen plateau in the contexts of the “Plates & Gates” programme of the International Polar Year wanted to find relations between continental drift and climate. They found in the depth of the oceans structures with silicone stones of continental origin, which is supposed to be part of an ancient continent having expanded much more to the north.

This fact is very interesting, for main stream scientists up to now have dismissed the theosophical doctrine of sunken continents such as Lemuria as fiction and explained the evolution of the globe with plate tectonics. The age indicated by the Plates & Gates-expedition for the sinking of the continent, supposing about 120 million years, doesn’t fit with the teachings of Blavatsky, but these are gigantic periods of time, and maybe some tectonic movements a few million years ago turn out in future as bridging the gulf between occult and mainstream science.

Not just sunken continents…