Yesterday, a friend from Germany rang me up and enthusiastically told me about Ecosia, a free search engine that uses its profits to plant trees. Their business model: “You search the web with Ecosia. Search ads generate income for Ecosia. Ecosia uses this income to plant trees.”

I first was a bit sceptical – it sounded interesting but what is behind and how does it perform?

I looked up in Wikipedia: “Ecosia is an Internet search engine based in Berlin, Germany, that plants trees by donating 80% or more of its surplus income to non-profit organizations that focus on reforestation and conservationism. Ecosia considers itself a social business, is CO₂-negative, claims to support full financial transparency, protects the privacy of its users, and is certified by B-Lab as a benefit corporation. The website maintains a running total of the number of trees planted. According to their website, as of 14 August 2019, the search engine had been responsible for the planting of more than 64 million trees.”

I wondered how they can manage to present a search engine powerful enough in the competition with the big data octopus Google, which has gone far away from their earlier motto “do no harm”. But they have a strong partner- the search results for Ecosia are provided by Microsoft Bing, the second largest search engine in the US, after Google, enhanced by the company’s own algorithms. By the way, when you search on Ecosia “xxx #w”, it directly gives you the related Wikipedia article.

Other questions of mine were answered in their FAQ section: Ecosia’s servers run on 100% renewable energy, and every search request removes 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere (also Bing is carbon neutral). They don’t sell the user data to advertisers, have no third party trackers and anonymize all searches within one week. They even publish their monthly financial reports, so you see exactly where the income from your searches goes.

So, I have now changed to Ecosia in my browers and bookmarked it. If you are using Android devices, you might have difficulties of setting Ecosia from 2020 on, as Wikipedia informs:

“As of 21 August 2019, Search Engine Land reported that Ecosia will not participate in the “search-choice” auction to appear on Android devices led by Google. This means that in 2020 European Android phone users will not have the option to set Ecosia as a default search engine. Christian Kroll explained the boycott decision saying: “We’re deeply disappointed that Google has decided to exploit its dominant market position in this way. Instead of giving wide and fair access, Google have chosen to give discrimination a different form and make everyone else but themselves pay, which isn’t something we can accept.” Applications to participate in the “search-choice” auction are due in mind-September.” (2019)

10 days ago, I was invited to a summer party of the WTT group of Lake Constance. It promised to be a warm but not hot weekend. I took the highway via Konstanz (Constance) to cross the lake via ferryboat to Meersburg – a little holiday feeling.

A quarter of an hour later, around noon, I arrived at the home of my friends in Heiligenberg (‘Mountain of Saints’), with a castle overlooking the vailley. Manfred had to do some errands in preparation of the garden party and he invited me to lunch in an anthroposophic restaurant in Überlingen.

When we returned to their home, Sabine, his wife also had just arrived from school – she is a language teacher. Manfred is a retired industrial engineer and now an enthusiatic herbalist and wisdom teacher. (We had recently met at the May Call seminar in Mount Shasta.) He is focused on promoting knowledge about the healing power of plants. He has developed a huge network and is organising workshops on making herbal products for home use. And since both are also profoundly related to the wisdom teachings, another network of meditation and study developed. Over the years, I had participated in some of their group meetings. It is very inspiring to see how such a “flower-garden of seekers” can grow when it is well and regularly nurtured in a spirit of openness and synthesis. As an outer reflection Manfred has developed a beautiful lush garden with many different types of plants, especially with many different species of fragrant roses. He told me that he is inwardly relating to the plants and they grow there in all glory.

Friday evening around sunset time Sabine and I went swimming in a nearby beautiful bathing lake – summer fulness. The couple had already done quite a lot of preparations and I helped with some final arrangements. Saturday around 3 pm the group arrived, around 20 persons. We started with a meditation and some exchange and then the group went into the garden.

There were sprightly conversations – you could feel that the group connections had grown over the years. I enjoyed talking to various friends and especially exchanging with a new person and her daughter originally from Belarus but now living since many years in Germany – they had visited me the weekend before at our home in Switzerland. They told me about many Russian speaking people they know who are deeply interested in the wisdom teachings of WTT and we discussed of how this could be further developed.

Sabine had prepared a little slide show about the Mount Shasta and the May Call there and she asked me to give a short talk about it. Time quickly ran by, and when the guest had left we tried to clear up the garden as much as possible – an intense thunderstorm came during the night bringing lots of water.

In the morning, there were clouds hanging over the nearby hill and the flowers were still decorated with raindrops. We finished the clean-up work and had some conversations. Such group exchanges are always a good networking time, and so we discussed some ideas. When I set out for the journey back to Switzerland, the temperature had risen high again but I felt fulfilled with the impressions of the beautiful weekend.

On the way back from the CVV Sharing meeting I visited several friends. First I travelled with Wolfgang to the place where he is living now, the community living project in Dahlem-Harmstorf, a small village south of Hamburg. Already during the two hours drive we had an intense exchange, also about his commitment in another project in South Germany – project peace, a fascinating one-year training and orientation for young people between 18 and 25. Wolfgang is now also active in creating a North German equivalent of project peace.

Wolfgang and his wife Karina are also the initiators of the community project in Dahlem-Harmstorf, “Gemeinschaft Mittendrin Leben” (Community Right in the Middle). It is a living community that develops without a hierarchy and where each one is and remains autonomous and responsible for themselves, also in financial terms: the community is the owner of the land and buildings by way of shares for constructing the houses.

Upto now they have a total of 12,000 square meters of land available, with houses of a former farm with  a former main house and residential house, stable building and a barn. The main house of 1889, with about 300 square meters of living space, is a listed building and was renovated by April 2017. Two new buildings (straw bale houses) have been created in 2017, and they are currently expanding their group house (the “Backhaus” – baking house). In the project, 15 to 20 residential units are supposed to emerge, as well as common areas (shop, office, workshop). There is more space around with a forest and meadow area; the group will decide what happens to the areas and buildings, how and where they will be developed.

When we entered the residential building, where Wolfgang is living, lots of children boots were lying in the entrance corridor – a children’s festival as well as a marriage had just taken place the previous days. Several young families with were around, partly community members.

Wolfgang took me on a tour through the site – first we visited the “Backhaus”, where renovation work is taking place; at the same time, it serves for organisational meetings.

Then we visited the two new “straw bale” buildings which had a very nice ambience. The first residents just had moved into one of the houses; everywhere signs of ongoing work were still to be seen.

The barn will be transformed into a big assembly hall for meetings, concerts etc. Wolfgang explained: “In this area there are many innovative people who have come in the wake of the Gorleben protests – against the construction of a nuclear repository. The university of nearby Lüneburg has developed to a centre for environmental and ecological development research.”

“Here we will have gardens and a parking”, Wolfgang explained.

In the evening I met several members of the project – they regularly meet on Sunday evenings for an open silent meditation in the living room of Wolfgang and Karina’s apartment. There was a 84 years old lady who is still living in the direct neighbourhood – she now has given her manor house to the community and plans to move into one of the new apartments: “I’m thrilled to start something new at my age.”

Next morning before leaving, Wolfgang and I made a little promenade along the countryside. He explained that the whole area belongs to two big farmers; the extensive use of the soil in great parts of the larger area has destroyed the foundations of life and big masses of slurry from mass pig farming is sometimes creating a pungent smell. “The economic pressure and the expectation of the customers for cheap meat has devastating results. Up to now the ecological awareness is still dormant or has not reached yet awakened an awareness of the consequences. It is private farming, and the state does not intervene.” They hope for a change in the attitudes by working for a change in consciousness.

Some days ago an Indian friend sent me a Facebook video by Mona Caron, an artist creating large-scale paintings on walls (murals). I have seen other kinds of murals but here I was touched by the subtlety of the colours and the playfulness with which she is creating mainly vegetative motives on all kinds of walls.

[In brackets: While looking at the videos of her paintings, my thoughts went back to the mid-70s, to my student times in Münster, Germany:
Together with two friends I lived on a farm, in an old milker lodging. There I could do a few murals, in my amateur style to bring in some poetic ambience: In the entry a big painting of a church window with flowers, in the kitchen a branch of a cherry tree with a poem of Hölderlin, in the sleeping room a big wall painted with gold patterns of water colour and in the long dark corridor a big spacy painting glowing in the dark with ultra-violet light… And I decorated the windows of the toilet at a little sideroom with glass painting…]

Mona Caron’s flowers grow on fronts of high-rise buildings, at crossroads or along the streets. Of course, when she is painting flowers, these are not “vertical gardens” bringing the beauty of live flowers but her murals enliven the ambience and stimulate the imagination. She is very creative in the way she brings beauty into the otherwise stony deserts of mega-cities. And her works now embellish walls all around the globe. See here the “Market Street Railway” mural. However, she does not only work outdoor but also does indoor artwork.

Mona Caron is a native of Ticino, in the Italian part of Switzerland. She is the daughter of Swiss theatre and opera set designer Peter Bissegger, and now is based in San Francisco. Besides painting she is also active in “art-ivism” with social movements to support different issues like climate justice events.

Read more about Mona Caron on her website.

Painting giant weeds on buildings all around the world: “Weeds”

Outgrowing: “Outgrowing our skyrocketing dangers, reaching for clear skies.. . Healing herbs for an ailing earth, in a 6500 square feet mural in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.”

Manifestation Station – a painted utility box

Picture from the video “Outgrowing” by Mona Caron (c)

A friend today sent me the link to a fascinating  video about “The World’s Biggest Eye Contact Experiment“.

The initiative is organised by a group of young people from various backgrounds who call themselves “The Liberators International“. The idea came “after noticing a common thread of isolation in today’s society.” So they organise events where people share 1 minutes eye contact with a stranger in the heart of cities and towns worldwide. “Holding eye contact with another person can evoke many feelings which can be scary, especially when in today’s society we tend to repress our deepest emotions.” More…

The next global experiment with events in many countries around the world will be on 23rd of September 2017, during the UN International Week of Peace.

Have a look at the video from last year’s Eye Contact Experiment, where 124 cities cooperated.

Read more about their inspiring mission: “”We are a whole movement of people passionate about sharing acts of love and kindness in public.”
“We are here to lead by example to allow the people of planet Earth to see that we are brothers and sisters of the same human race, travelling together on this Earthship we collectively call home. We are a global family of people ready to actively be a part of the change we’d like to see in this world. We use our skills, intelligence, gifts and abilities to create positive experiences for the world to actively participate in making today and tomorrow’s future more sustainable and harmonious. We create large scale global events that create an experience of unity for the Earth, we also create festival experiences of unity that uplift crowds of people by combining ice breaking games with a banging DJ set. … We do not force, we simply give rise to a new opportunity.”
“Our Vision for the Future: We aim to coordinate, record and distribute monthly global acts of freedom, which reconnect humanity with their innate, interconnected power.”

You also find the Liberators on Facebook.

Image (c) from the gallery of Eyecontactexperiment.com

Video: The World’s Biggest Eye Contact Experiment 2016

A few days ago, I received an e-mail of Fali Engineer, a friend from the Houston Lodge of Theosophical Society, with a video-file of a speech by Valarie Kaur. I found the video online at Scroll.in, and it is worth viewing.

“She spoke of the dark times ahead and how instead of leading to despair, this could be an opportunity for change,” it says on her website. And further: “This speech was actually the message of the Revolutionary Love Project, an initiative she launched in autumn of 2016. This movement and her New Year’s Eve speech, Kaur said, arose from her distress about the increase in hate violence during the US presidential election campaign.”

This moving talk was given on last New Year’s Eve in an African American Church in Washington DC. Though it was helt in the context of the political situation in America, what she is talking about is not an American topic but a universal one – about the basic oneness of humanity and overcoming hate an exclusion.

Valarie Kaur is a powerful woman and a charismatic speaker. Wikipedia says about her that she “is an American documentary filmmaker, a civil rights activist, and a Sikh interfaith leader. After the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, she began to document hate crimes against Sikh and Muslim Americans immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the 2006 documentary Divided We Fall. … Kaur has given speeches at the White House, the Pentagon, and the Parliament of the World’s Religions.”

:: The 6 minute video “Raising a Brown Boy in Today’s America“.

Valarie Kaur [picture from the video (c) Scroll.in]

I recently came across a website about façade greening in Sao Paulo, Movimiento 90°, and then found another very fascinating website of Patrick Blanc, a botanist and the inventor of the Vertical Garden. Partly, it is a special form of green walls, which I had already encountered with ivy-clad walls, also at the walls of may father’s office building. However, the Vertical Gardens Patrick Blanc has realised are much more sophisticated, hanging florist artworks.

The site about Movimiento 90° speaks about the advantages of such vertigal gardens:

“The plants improve air quality by filtering CO2, can help with heating and cooling in the buildings they are attached to, reduce acoustic problems and, during periods of drought, increase the relative humidity in the air. But to add an extra creative spin, Guils’ studio Movimento 90º invited artists to design the gardens they were creating, and encouraged them to treat the buildings’ walls as blank canvasses.”

May this creative way of using façades grow and bring a better quality of life into the stone, glass and concrete deserts of our cities.

Image: Wikipedia / Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France: Le mur végétal (Musée du quai Branly)

Image: Wikipedia / Cillas: A wall of living plants designed by Patrick Blanc at Caixa Forum near Atocha station, Madrid

Image: Wikipedia / Thelmadatter: Green wall at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in the historic center of Mexico City

On a nearby mountain we recently saw two dwarf goats standing on the roof of their hut, Bruno and Leo – sturdy, perky and full of power.

Quite a different mentality from that of sheep. Sheep seem to be more interested in following their herd.

You can imagine that it needs a different method for approaching goats or sheep. Or for targeting humans behaving in similar manners. Scientists and marketeers are researching methods to deal with the different types – and the latter want to get the sheep eating what they want to offer them.

Now, if someone finds what kind of psychograms the different animals in a crowd have, it would be much easier to get them run in the “right” direction. And if politicians show this “right” direction, and scientists develop the psychometric instruments, and marketeers cleverly “tailor” such tools for delivering ads and other steering methods, the “ignorant animals” will unknowingly be driven in the wanted direction by eating the food prepared to their “Likes”. The outcome will be an explosive mixture for “guiding” the sheep  – the ROI, the “return on investment” being highly intelligent and effective mass manipulation.

Last Saturday’s issue of the weekend magazine “Das Magazin” of the Swiss newspaper “Tageszanzeiger” – a paper not at all close to conspiracy theories – published an article called “I have only showed that the bomb exists“. It is about a young Polish researcher, Michal Kosinski, who just gave a talk in Switzerland at the Risk Center of the ETH Zurich about the dangers of Big Data and the so-called digital revolution.

The topic of big data and their power in marketing is not new to me but I felt the article quite alarming. Maybe you can read it with the help of Google translator or so. The information below is mainly from this article.

Michal Kosinski is a leading expert in psychometrics, a data driven branch of psychology. He first worked at the first psychometric laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England, and now is working at Stanford University, USA. His research lead to new and very effective ways of profiling great amounts of persons from out of the digital traces they leave on the internet, especially Likes. You can test it on the site of Cambridge University “Apply Magic Sauce” (a personalisation engine that accurately predicts psychological traits from digital footprints of human behaviour). Kosinski’s research showed that from a few Facebook “likes” the intelligence, religious affiliation, alcohol, cigarette and drug consumption can be calculated, besides many of their attitudes, and even if the parents of a person have remained together until their 21st year of age. And it goes much beyond.

Against Kosinki’s intention and knowledge his research was used to develop very effective mass targeting tools by a British enterprise, Cambridge Analytica (CA) – “Better Audience Targeting, Powered by Data Modelling”. These instruments are not only marketing boosters but they were used to steer people with targeted news and other ways of influencing in the Brexit campaign and now in Trump’s election campaign – and they are much more effective than what was known upto now. The head of Cambridge Analytica declared “We have psychograms of all adult US citizens – 220 million people”. On their website a video is shown with a quote by a political pollster: “There are no longer any experts except Cambridge Analytica. They were Trump’s digital team who figured out how to win.”

Euphemistically, Cambridge Analytica boasts that they are “building a future where every individual can have a truly personal relationship with their favorite brands and causes by showing organizations not just where people are, but what they really care about and what drives their behavior.” Marketing speech for intelligent manipulation. Have a look at their website and you will understand better.

With these tools, 175000 versions of Trumps messages, slightly varying according to the target persons, were given out. The team of Trump’s electoral assistants got an app to recognize the political attitude and personality of the residents of a house. They contacted only those whom the app showed as receptive to their messages, and they carried text guides adapted to the personality of the resident they approached. Here is a TV report of SkyNews with a talk of Mr Nix, the head of Cambridge Analytica, from YouTube about their influencing the election.

The members of the Clinton team first were laughing about these British data people. Now, many (right-wing) political parties in Europe are becoming clients of Cambridge Analytica, and the business has requests from all over the world. I am sure that soon legislation here will have to react on these methods. Kosinski, the researcher whose findings enabled all this, declares that he has not built this bomb but only showed what is possible.

Power (politics) and money (business) together are a dangerous mix. They need to be guided by wisdom, i.e. by ethical and moral guidance – and this not only as “marketing speech” declarations. And we ourselves need to develop a high degree of discrimination and loving understanding not to let ourselves get dragged into what others define as “what we really care about”.

In other words, we must firmly stand in the light of our soul and act from there. And we need to have a clear view of what those of the “world” around want us to. Like Bruno and Leo looking around from their viewing platform.

P.S. (6 Dec.2016): An article in the German version of the Wired magazine discussed the claims of Cambridge Analytica (CA) and pointed out that the cooperation between CA and the Brexit campaneers did not work out and that the way they are using data from Facebook etc. for profiling without permission of the users is against European data protection laws.

Some thoughts about the recent violence and a correspondence with Sri Kumar.

Last Friday morning when I went down to pick up the daily newspaper a thought flashed through my mind: Is there something in the news about a terror attack? The thought quickly passed by and the newspaper didn’t report anything out of the ordinary. Next morning I read about the attacks in Paris. It was only then that I thought again of this “fiery messenger” in my mind: There was something in the air before it manifested “on ground”.

Later I saw the news-wave rising in the few online portals I visited. The following days, the newspapers were full with background stories and analyses.  The politicians and other opinion makers got busy, governments demonstrated determination to counteract. Many showed their sympathy and solidarity: On Facebook, many faces of “friends” appeared in the blue, white and red of the French tricolore…

When I thought of the victims whose lives brutally ended, I felt something in the atmosphere beyond the uproar of indignation and confusion – like cries of other victims not in the limelights of attention fuelling – be it in the middle East, in parts of Africa and elsewhere. Later, I read in the local newspaper about people in Lebanon asking, Why no attention to our victims? And about the many victims of attacks in Nigeria and elsewhere. Rising the attention is one of the prime goals of the terror attacks and if we just focus on their acts, their perverse strategy works out: “mission accomplished”.

Attention is a precious good and often disproportionately distributed. Though sympathy and compassion are important, we need to open up our hearts to all where we feel the suffering. It is an attitude and not a doing. An attitude of inclusion and very much needed now.

Some friends from Spain asked me if Dr. Kumar, our teacher, did say anything about the terror in Paris. I wrote to him and he replied:

“I prefer not to get into the activity of opinionating upon events that have political relevance. I only see the whole violence at that level is but reaction to the past action of Europe in Middle East. We the humanity do not learn the basics. ‘Love thy neighbour’ remains an ideal. We fight with neighbours everywhere on the planet. We say we are developed but not in its true sense.”

And a little later: “Hundreds of thousands are killed in Middle East for believed political ideology, for which no concern is shown. Just a hundred and twenty draw global attention. Don’t you see the fallacy?”

From various sides I received calls for synchronised meditation to help spreading light and peace. One mail reminded that by building powerful thought forms the path of humanity will be energised towards a positive future – bringing Love and Light to counter-balance the fear and shadows, to create an international wall for protection. Meditative invocations are certainly important contributions.

I was reminded of the invocation for European unity given by Dr. Kumar some years ago, which I regularly use. Some friends just asked me about it, and so I share it here. The “East in us” refers to the Ajna centre on the front, the seat of soul consciousness, and the “West in us” to the base centre, the physical anchoring:

We the citizens of Europe strive to stand united.
We endeavour to unite the east and the west in us and in Europe.
We aspire to stand in the fusion of the East and West of Europe
and provide a field for fusion for easterners and westerners of Europe.
May we fulfil the Hierarchical plan of discipleship
standing in the Light, Love, Power and Synthesis of Hierarchical energy.

Having finished the above lines, I thought about the word “catastrophes” used in the title. Terror attacks are not “natural disasters” but purposefully planned atrocities. However, I decided to use this expression to hint at the larger avalanche of destruction caused by the pathological distortions of fanatic ideologies, political or religious.

It is a commercial but well done, and the message is spiritual: “We are greater than I”.

The description of the video spot of Samsung created in partnership with the World Surf League says: “It shows how we are all connected, intrinsically co-dependent, and tied together for better and for worse.” And further:

“No individualism here, no ego, no celebration of one hero. In surf, as in technology, one cannot reach the next level alone. Without the people around us, without “We”, without “Us”, “I” is nothing. Together, we make each other better. Together, we push, we inspire, we challenge and redefine each other. We Are Greater Than I.”

May it be so with Samsung, the surfers and with all of us: no ego, no celebration of one hero… And not a side-blow to a competitor who uses “i” in the names of his products.

This viral video got over 5 million views within a month.

(C) Samsung, from the video