I sometimes get e-mails from different people with texts about the state of the world or about some atrocities, often containing some appeals for action. I feel them written out of an indignation about the way things are going on, wanting to denounce abuses or deplorable situations, to stir the conscience, to stimulate to action or at least to create an awareness.

They speak out of a dismay and concernment. Often I feel like there is a wound in the writers or, with some, a missionary zeal. It reminds me of mine which I had for years.

For a long time I got myself infected from these calls of indignation. I either did some mini-steps into these direction or at least got a guilty conscience, out of solidarity or co-indignation.

I feel that this has faded away in me, it hardly lingers on. It’s true that I feel some of the waves, but there is nearly no more echo in me. For a while I asked myself if I have become indifferent. I know that’s not the case. I perceive what good and less good things are going on in the surrounding, in the world, through observation and the media. But some kind of a discrimination has developed which makes me focus my forces on where I can contribute something in a constructive direction, for strengthening, at least wanting to be something like a rock in turbulent waters, for a more human life.

Where I feel that indignation gets me nowhere, I don’t invest anymore energy except a loving thought like: “May pain bring due reward of light and love…”

I have become more calm, also more composed and focused. I welcome these mails, mostly not because of the content, but as a sign of a communication flow, an expression from heart to heart. This can be felt between or under the lines. About this I’m happy.

Blind-folded Fortune on the turning wheel, relief at a house in the centre of Brussels

Yesterday in my office I went through an online questionnaire concerning customer satisfaction with an agency and a Microsoft related product. I had to evaluate the quality of the cooperation and the introduction of the product.

When some minutes later, in a pause, I looked up my private e-mails, I saw an e-mail of an old friend who sent me the link to an online questionnaire: She is going to a workshop on personal effectiveness, where colleagues/collaborators should give a personality assessment with some 60 questions or so. I went through the questions. It was strange for me doing this profiling, an abstract form of evaluating my friend, not only about the chocolate sides, but also on more difficult personality traits in cooperation and organisation.

Two days before, at home, I had seen the assessment which the military had done about my son who at the moment is going through a lieutenant formation, and the profile showed his strengths and weaknesses in leadership qualities, very similar to our perception, giving recommendations where he should focus on… Somehow I felt strange reading this assessment without further reflecting on it.

My wife mentioned a talk with our homeopath yesterday, who said that the qualities of homeopathic remedies, when used to qualify an individual, are somehow simplifying and reducing the complexity of the individual. A plant or a mineral is much less complex than a human being, and so the way to find a remedy is an approximation to the problem of the person.

When we meet a person, we perceive him or her in his/her totality, in a split second (the so-called “first impression”). When we focus on specific aspects, we tend to narrow the individual down with our categories to see his/her aptness as per our expectations or needs. It is important to keep the broader perspective of the whole, to feel the other as a seed, his potential development through time instead of just the present form.

My wife and I spoke at noon about a young friend. Seeing in her the profound potential, which will unfold through time spurs the unfoldment. It is fascinating to feel this dormant power. My wife said, she had missed this view of her deeper potential in her youth, and that it is a great encouragement, knowing that someone sees the beautiful tree in the seed and believes in it, and also expresses his/her trust in the vision. This is much deeper than any personality assessment.

A work of art in Girona, Spain, symbolising stages of unfoldment

The United Nations have just officially announced the “University of the People” launched in April 09. It is a new online university, which for the moment is still free, but later will charge some modest study fees to maintain the university. The  UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) wants to show how an online university can improve the formation situation world-wide with modern information and communication technology, as the German online magazine Heise.de writes.

While up to now many people on the planet cannot attend a university, the Web 2.0-technologies now allow students to study at home, using open source technologies and open course material as well as e-learning methods and methods of peer  to peer teaching. They offer classes with 15 – 20 students each with one lecture per week and a weekly work and learning schedule of at least 8 hours.

Up to now they have about 200 students from 52 countries in computer science and economics. For the first semester they don’t take more than 300 students. In the course of 4 years they want to extend it to 15′000 students. The final exam will correspond to that of a Bachelor for the moment, they hope to be accredited as a full university in the next years.

A very inspiring development.

Info-kiosk in front of the Swiss Federal Palace during renovation

In Hamburg, Germany, there was just the 14th German Trend Day. The topic was: “Social Wealth. Share and win”. On the invitation it says:

” ‘Yes we can’ is a motto that heralds a new beginning – and not only in the USA: the “we” stands for hope right across the globe. The ego’s claim to sole power imploded along with the financial markets. The self-destructive desire for self-celebration has been paid for with the loss of personal, commercial and social equilibrium. And it isn’t only consumers and investors who are changing the way they think – companies and states are doing so as well. As the successful chapter of “I” and “my” draws to a close, the search for the “we” is on.’ ”

This sounds very much what the wisdom teachings say, that satisfaction comes through sharing, not through egoistic dominance. A summary (in German) on Heise.de gives some thoughts of the talks: “You are what you share”, said Charles Leadbeater, “Social wealth comes from common interests, common communication, common action and common innovation,” Peter Wippermann explained. And David Bosshart of the Gottlieb-Duttweiler-Institut said that one way out of the lifestyle-crisis of the 20th century requires less consumption: “1. Eat less. 2. Consume less. 3. Throw less away.” And on the Social Wealth website the trend is summarized with the words of Keynote speaker  Lawrence Lessig who believes that, in future, the efficient handling of consumers’ creativity will be key to value creation. Lawrence Lessig is the inventor of the Creative Commons licence, a professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society.

The future will need new forms of consumption, cooperation and living together. Have a look at “Good Will in Action“, No. 12 on Cooperation.

Living together is not just like sheep on a meadow, but focusing on the common ground.

Two days ago I was at the University of St. Gallen for the final presentations of the term papers of a seminar on Web 2.0 communication strategies. A project team had elaborated an issue coverage with communication and fundraising proposals for my office. I had several preliminary talks with the professor, coming from Berlin, and the team and was now curious about their proposals.

Two students of the team picked me up at the station and accompanied me to the campus. In the seminar room a young person said hello, presenting himself. I first thought he was a student, but he was the professor from Berlin. 4 teams were presenting their issue coverages for 4 different NGOs. The presentation of my team was the first.

They had analysed that we are only partially using the possibilities of the new social media instruments and that networking between different platforms like blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube would enhance the effectiveness of communication activities, making proposals for the next steps.

The students did a good job, in view of the fact that they still have little experience of the professional world and its mechanism. There was quiet an optimism about the possibilities these social media offer. In my office there is more scepticism around, as per the real use for our purposes, though the intererest is rising in the management. A collegue and I are working on doing experiments with social media platforms. Maybe together with the inputs of the students and some more discussions the management will decide about a “go”.

The way to the university

This impressive photo from July 1918 shows 18,000 soldiers in uniform forming the Statue of Liberty. They were preparing for war in a training camp at Camp Dodge, in Iowa. It is an authentic photo, and one of a series of group photographs taken by the photographers during and immediately after World War I at U.S. military training camps. Each took up to a week to compose and shoot. The purpose was to unite the people for America’s involvement in the war.

The involvement was meant to fight for liberty. Whatever the kind of liberty was they were aspiring for, it is a manifestation of a common thought. Working for a common goal in spiritual matters is of great power and inspiration.

Photo by Arthur S. Mole & John D. Thomas (1918). Source of scanned image unknown.

At Frankfurt airport last Monday, while waiting for my wife to return from the lavatory, I observed a man standing at the entrance of a duty free shop. He was in the 50ies or 60ies, grey-haired, wearing a livery suit and a bow tie. He was just welcoming customers saying “Good morning”.

He was saying it with full attention to the persons, who often reacted a bit irritated: They felt drawn out of their unconscious walk into the shop. Some smiled and greeted back. Here and there a person came with a question, not necessarily related to the business. He was greeting in a cordial, but distanced way. I wondered what he was paid for – he did not make any attempt to persuade people coming in or do anything related to motivating them to buy. He was not at all a salesperson, just a greeter, spreading a warm welcome full of attention.

It made me think of how we meet and greet – mostly in a superficial way. Especially in electronic contacts via e-mail the wording of greetings is often just a clichéd expression without any attention or deeper meaning. Particularly when I get e-mails from the States I feel the “Hi” or addressing just with the name without any greeting like opening the door into another one’s room without any knocking, very casual. The mainstream way of interacting is fearing any expression from the heart. In the word “Dear…” there is at least a reerberation of a heartfelt attention, like the greeter’s attention at the entrance of the shop. The attention creates a subtle bond, from human to human, from being to being, an expression of unity: “welcome brother”, “welcome sister”, “Welcome, soul”.

The greeter

P.S.: A Mexican friend sent me the following comment to this blog-post:

“As people mostly interact in fear, they don’t smile when they encounter other people’s eyes, or greet them in a friendly and cordial  way, even if not in words,  but with a nod of the head.  When my daughter studied in Bremen, she told me that she perceived Germans  as if they were angry, because they did’nt answer her smile.  In Mexico when we walk and find somebody, it is our habit, to search for their eyes, and greet him-her with some words or with the nod of the head, even if  they are not acquaintances.  I don’t remember a moment when I had’nt  received a smile together with the greeting.  Sometime ago, something happened in Germany to Gabriel,  my son.  He always walks with an ample and kind smile, and in a street, suddenly  a lady came and congratulated him for his smile, and gave him a beautiful present, a painting,  telling him to give another present, when he found someone that had that generous smile in his-her face. He and her wife laughed a lot about this incident. They are very friendly and have as you do, many friends from all over the world, from different colors, races, religions, nations.

Christmas is the time for business partners to exchange standardized, automatic greetings, often void of any deeper sense. A few of these also arrived in my office. Some want to impress (or bribe?) partners by the value of their gifts, while others give their gift to a social institution. One card I got was of a different kind saying that instead of Christmas present they prefer giving the money to micro-credit institutions financing grass-root economics in developing countries.

Another agency sends every year very interesting small Christmas greetings. This year it was a little self-made booklet entitled “Money – Magic, Mathematics, Soap Bubble?”, together with a bill of “One Talent“, an alternative currency of the Initiative for a Natural Economic Order INWO in Switzerland, inspired by Silvio Gesell.

Besides some short sketches of fairy-tales involving remuneration like that of Mother Hulda or The Star Money, the role of money in different religions and the development of money and digital money, the booklet containes a very interesting visualisation  of the momentary financial crisis:

To save the UBS-bank, Swiss government has given 66 billion Swiss francs. As a pile of hundred Swiss Francs bills, this is a pile of 79.2 kilometers height. For fighting the crisis in the States, the government has promised 8 trillion US$. This is an 8 with 12 zeros, or a pile of hundred dollar notes towering to 9.600 kilometers height (or about 6.000 miles). This sum is without the recent money promised to the automobile industry… An incredible financial Tower of Babel.

Quite impressive, but not the height of the towers of money – the TV-tower in Barcelona, Spain.

Last Wednesday I participated in a workshop of my office on image language and the way we use images at the Red Cross. Though three years ago I had built up the image bank we use, I hadn’t been much into the topic of images, especially not the last year.

The meeting was held in the rooms of a media agency in Berne, by a photographer and an art director, specialist of visual  design. After an introduction to image theory, image language and picture assessment, we had a look at our publications. It was very interesting to see these visual specialists “from the outside” giving a critical look and showing flaws and shortcomings. We see the pictures with your own intentions, without noticing that they might stand in the way of the perception of others. When pointed out, you understand the questions arising, but as a lay person you normally just feel that there is something not at optimum with a picture or a detail, be it in the composition or its placement in a publication.

They showed us a number of examples of how enterprises or other organisations have defined their “image language” and present themselves according to it, giving thus a visual message linked to their vision and mission – in the form of colour selection, emotional tones or image composition. They showed us extracts of photos from which everyone immediately recognised the related organisation, without seeing any brand sign.

In the afternoon, after an input about image rights and models of  licensing we did some picture research in image banks like Gettyimages, Fotolia or Corbis. It’s not easy to find pictures for visualising a given theme.

Then we tried to define some basics of the picture language we want to use. It was an interesting discussion, to describe some do’s and don’t’s without becoming too rigid in regulations. It made me think about the way I work with pictures for the Good-Will website, especially when I am preparing powerpoint presentations on different themes of the wisdom teachings.

Seeing the costs of professional image licensing gave me an idea of the great treasure I collected with the pictures given to me by friends from all over the world, which I use for illustrating the teachings. Of course, they are not done by professionals with their high-tech equipment, but nevertheless many of them have quite a high quality standard.

Shooting or seeing photos is not just a process of the eye, but of the mind, the photographer. The way he captures a scene or how he selects a detail expresses very much of the consciousness with which he is working.

Photos of an iris, by a friend. The iris is also part of the eye and a Greek goddess of the rainbow, messenger of the gods, like Hermes. In Wikipedia it says, As the sun unites Earth and Heaven, Iris links the Gods to humanity.

Concerning the present stock market crash there was a nice anecdote from the times of the crash of 1929 in our local newspaper:

In the States an immigrant built up a little business. He worked hard and slowly met with success. Years later he was asked if he didn’t have problems during the time of the crisis.  Depression?, he answered. Oh no, he didn’t feel anything. In the beginning he didn’t understand any word of English and therefore didn’t read the newspapers. So he didn’t know that there was a crisis…

The same “imperceptibility” is true with the path of light: For most people it simply doesn’t exist. They go on making their experiences in the outer world and go through the related difficulties. Some are using the occasion which time offers now, they align with the soul and discover their inner potentials. For them the Aquarian age is becoming a reality – for the others the time of darkness continues. You might like to have a look at the Lunar Messenger on “Meditation for the Aquarian Age“.

The entrance of the Swiss National Bank in Berne, where a great amount of gold is stored in the basement. The money of the bank is now also used to counteract the present crisis of the UBS bank.
Inspired by an initiative of an American group of meditators I planted a little rose quartz heart into the flower-bed right in front of the bank about 10 years ago, with the thought that the energies of money and gold might be directed to evolutionary purposes.