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

I today got an e-mail from an Argentinean friend informing about a fantastic project of the UNESCO, the World Digital Library, which has been inaugurated in Paris on April 21st, 09.

It is an on-line library that will have as its content the knowledge of the cultural patrimony of all the countries added to the initiative. The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

The navigation and content descriptions are in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.

The portal has been created with famous institutions from all over the world such as The Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Egypt, the Library of the Congress of the United States and the national libraries and some cultural and educational institutions of more than ten different countries. Have a look at the description on Wikipedia.

The Ch’onha chido (Atlas of the world), the traditional Korean atlas produced in the early Ch’oson dynasty (1392-1910), derived from a map produced during the Chinese Ming Empire (1368-1644). From WDL.

An Indian friend sent me a very beautiful and touching powerpoint about an old Chinese story called “The Cracked Pot“. It is about the value of the cracks and flaws we each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding. Enjoy!

A cracked pot, from an art exposition, photo of my son.

A friend living in the States sent me the link to the presentation of a film called “Playing for Change: Peace Through Music“, described as “a pan-global survey — and marriage — of varying styles of world music…” On the site there is an inspiring video with the soundtrack “Stand me by”:

“Starting on the pedestrian mall in Santa Monica, Calif., helmers Mark Johnson (who narrates) and Jonathan Walls made a recording of street singer Roger Ridley performing “Stand by Me” then took that tape all over the world. They added singers in New Orleans and Amsterdam, a guitarist in France, a Congolese drummer, some Zuni drummers in New Mexico, making musical collaborators out of people who’d never met.”

(c) from the website Playing for Change
“Long-range partnerships of singers all around the world are being formed: A singer sings in Buenos Aires, and his female backup trio, the Oneness Choir, is in India… A lot of the musicians are not seen playing in their own homelands — sometimes by choice, sometimes by the choices of others.”

(c) from the video

My friend also sent me another link, to the blog of Gita Saraydarian, with a beautiful recent post “Ode to Joy. The Power of Music”. Gita Saraydarian is the Founder and President of TSG Foundation, an organization dedicated to the Ageless Wisdom Teachings. Year ago I read some books of her late father, Torkom Saraydarian, to whom the organization is dedicated.

Yesterday and today I got some beautiful links from friends.

Here is a very good video from Greenpeace, called “Breathe” – it shows the pulsating nature of Nature, what we call in spirituality the sound of SOHAM, of existence. (You might also like to read the Lunar Messenger on Pulsation or the one on The Art of Breathing.)

This is a beautiful website: Poetry Chaikhana – Sacred Poetry from Around the World.

The “Dirty Car Art Gallery” shows how you can create art on dirty car windows.

And here is a beautiful inspirational video called “Buddha Verse“.

Birds – photo of a friend

I just got an e-mail with a beautiful powerpoint and the following text (link added by me):

“As an artist  myself, I am sending you the attachment to one of the world’s most  unique and deeply inspiring experiences for art and garden lovers of  all ages created by Bruno Torfs.  On Saturday the raging fires  in Victoria completely destroyed his unique forest creation taking  over 300 paintings and scuptures.  As you take a walk through  the forest on the attachment herein, please take a  moment to reflect on the beauty gone and the many people  who have lost their homes, their loved ones, their livelihoods, the  severely injured, the animal life and the dedicated firefighters,  police, civilians, and those involved in caring for the traumatized  and injured. Peccato! Schade.”

Interestingly enough, the name of this garden artist is “Torf”, a German name for peat, which is used to nourish plants…

May the powerpoint and the website keep this bygone beauty in a good memory.

Photo from the powerpoint presentation.