A friend sent a YouTube link to sublime songs of Loreena McKennitt – a Canadian singer, composer, harpist and pianist of Irish and Scottish descent. She is famous for writing, recording and performing world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. Have a look at these beautiful videos:

Here are some more songs:

• Caravanserai
• Night from the Alhambra, a DVD document of her performance at Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain.
• The Mystics Dream
• Dante’s Prayer

This is the text of “Dante’s Prayer” (an excellent video):

When the dark wood fell before me
And all the paths were overgrown
When the priests of pride say
there is no other way
I tilled the sorrows of stone

I did not believe because I could not see
Though you came to me in the night
When the dawn seemed forever lost
You showed me your love in
the light of the stars

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Then the mountain rose before me
By the deep well of desire
From the fountain of forgiveness
Beyond the ice and fire

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me

Though we share this humble path, alone
How fragile is the heart
Oh give these clay feet wings to fly
To touch the face of the stars

Breathe life into this feeble heart
Lift this mortal veil of fear
Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears
We’ll rise above these earthly cares

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me
Please remember me

You find more songs of Loreena McKennitt on YouTube.

An Indian friend sent me a very impressive powerpoint about Doug Landis, a quadriplegic artist paralysed from the neck down. He is drawing the delicate pictures of animals with his mouth, thus demonstrating a great mastery of his will in spite of the limitations of his body. You can see the pictures on his website.

From the website of Doug Landis (c)

I came across fantastic photos of the Omo People in Ethiopia, by Hans Sylvester – very poetical expressions of a dream-like union with nature. You can also see these photos in some beautiful YouTube videos or here, with music.

A comment said: “Enjoy the photos for what they are: STAGED. These people do NOT adorn themselves this way naturally. They do paint their skin, but not this way. It’s okay for this guy to have ‘collaborated’ with these people, but then identify it as such.”

Friends of mine had been in Ethiopia last year, probably also at this Omo valley, and brought some photos of these people with their body paintings, not staged, but probably also dressed for tourists. Nevertheless, they are beautiful. So these photos here are not from the video, but from my friends.

Photos by a friend

A friend from Buenos Aires today sent me the link to an article of NY Times from Sept 16 on “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious”, about the “Red Book” of the psychiatrist C.G. Jung, unpublished up to now and which is going to appear soon. The book looks like a medieval volume, with paintings and decorations. There is a screen which gives some impressions. The writer describes the content: “Between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.” An interesting article about a life along the borders of genius and madness.

The dream stories reminded me of another person who lived nearly 900 years earlier, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), a great German visionary, healer and naturopath, composer, herbalist and abbess. Her impressive mystical pictures resemble Eastern paintings. There is a film about her life (in German) coming out this week, “Vision“, and you can see some trailers. Her images have impressed me very much already years ago.

Both sources are deeply spiritual journeys which influenced many people on their path.

“Cosmos”, by Hildegard von Bingen

A friend just sent me the link to a video of Ani Choying Drolma, a Buddhist nun from Nepal, singing a beautiful mantra of Compassion Buddha, to develop one’s own compassion qualities to heal oneself and to heal others. Ani Choying uses the income from her songs to finance a school in Nepal. Another beautiful song is the Ganesha Mantram.

Photo from the video

The next stage of our journey brought us last Saturday from Berlin to Kassel, where our friends, a couple we know since years, are working as nathuropaths. He is also a skilled craftsman and has realised a number of beautiful sculptures, some pictures of them you find below.

Again we had intense exchanges about our spiritual paths. It is a fascinating experience of our journey  that we dive into different atmospheres and environments, where each time we leave back our own world and get imbued with the other realms. We follow the rhythm of meditations and rituals with our friends, dive into their ways of life, and then come back into the “uterus” of our car when traveling to the next place, where another very familiar but nevertheless different world opens up. It is a great experience of an extreme richness of impressions, opening many new vistas and giving us clues to understand better our own world and the interconnectedness with others.

Sculptures of our friend, extract

Sculpture of the 12-petaled lotus of the soul

In the practice of our friends, a model of the inside of a head: The outside of the inside

At the “Hercules” statue, a land-art park of the 18th/19th century overlooking Kassel

On our holiday journey to different groups of our spiritual movement of the WTT we stay for some days with the Belgian group in the surroundings of Brussels. It is a very cordial encounter. Sunday after a morning fire ritual and brunch a group member drove with us to the city of Brussels. On the way he described how often when entering into the city images come to him of the many layers of the city’s history. The past experiences are not gone, but stored in the subtle realms of space, impregnating the qualities of the area.

He showed us different places of Belgium’s historical past, of the urge of rulers striving towards grandeur through pomp and displays of power – on the background of utmost cruelties towards colonialized people who were exploited by force. The karmic waves have backlashed repercussions to the society, causing instabilities and social changes.

In the city we saw signs of occult work from olden times (free-mason) on the walls of several old houses, or other symbols with a spiritual meaning, which the passers-by don’t notice, silent messages without a receiver? In some side-road, where our friend had a house, we saw an old underground passage,  which had been used for transporting prisoners – a strange relict symbolising the imprisonment of man deep down in matter. The towers of the EU administration or other signs of present day’s rulership are thus mixing with undercurrents which escape from the rational mind.

Shop-window reflections of different layers of reality

View to the sky along the front of the town hall of Brussels, on the top of which there is a statue of St. Michael.

Fortune on the wheel with the horn of plenty

An angel trumpeting a silent message over the noisy crowds of the central place

Don Quichote and Sancho Pansa fighting against the nightmares of modern life

I just got an extremely beautiful powerpoint presentation in Spanish (4 MB) about Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”. I made a quick translation of the intro with the help of automatic translation. Enjoy.

Photo of a friend

One week ago a beautiful thrilling seminar with our spiritual teacher, K. Parvathi Kumar, ended. About 500 group members from many countries all over the world assembled in the beautiful village of Engelberg (Angel Mountains) for the celebration of the 100th May Call Day (see the blogpost about the preparation). Nearly 130 members had come from India, most of them for the first time leaving their country.

For four days there were celebrations, lectures, concerts and presentations, and of course a lot of talks with friends. The common meditations created a strong energy field uplifting all. It was astonishing how smooth everything went. Our team of organizers at first had not thought that so many people would come, and more and more hotels had to be included. We had transformed a huge curling hall into the seminar place, so that there were no problems having enough space for all.

The lectures of our teacher were very inspiring. The main celebration on May 29th was a gorgeous feast with many presents brought by groups for the groups, a mutual exchange of joy. Next day there were a number of musical presentations. In the evening I had a special highlight for which I had worked a long time. I had prepared a presentation, “The Song of Fire. A Journey through Macrocosm and Microcosm” (now also on the website), with texts from the wisdom teachings and pictures I had painted over 2 decades ago and later destroyed. I had recovered the pictures from photos and presented them for the first time to a public. I was deeply moved of this occasion. Many people afterwards told me that the presentation had profoundly touched them. Also after the seminar I got quite a lot of feedbacks. For me it was like crossing a threshold, though I don’t know yet where it is leading to.

Path of Light, March 1982

Dawn over Engelberg

There are quite a lot of electronic gifts showing up at the moment. Here are some link miscellanea:

1. A friend from Houston Theosophical Society sent the link to a new page of the site of Theosophy Watch, where you find a number of photos of new crop circles from 2009, and a “Crop Circle Documentary 2009” video, from YouTube:

2. The photographer and environmental artist Chris Jordan does a fascinating work of sensitizing people for environmental concerns in a very aesthetic way (I have already before blogged about Chris’ work). You find new series of photo mandalas about “Portraits of Global Mass Culture” (-> Running the Numbers, 1 & II) and a new large scale mandala. It is depicting the names of one million organizations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture. He has taken the names from Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” project. The mandala is called “E Pluribus Unum”, meaning “The Many become One”.

Have a look at these other websites:

3. Freydoun Rassouli: a beautiful flash intro to the fascinating paintings of the Iranian artist living in California. There are some e-cards of him on the Good-Will website.

4. And another interesting flash on “Awaken Visions” by Daniel B. Holeman. On his site you find a section about animated art.

Iris – Photo of a friend