Why are we afraid of touching taboo issues like one’s own mistakes or bad feelings, such as guilt, shame, shyness, embarrassment? They have got an aura around them, some kind of a cloudy mist. It is often not the subject we are afraid of, but the feelings woven around:

A friend of our teenage son has to sing a song before the music teacher tomorrow to get a better mark. He openly told my wife that he is timid and that it costs him a lot to overcome his shyness. She answered: “A young man being able to confess that he is shy is the most courageous man I can imagine.”

When we dare talking about unvoiced things, we get in touch with that aura, and it needs quite some courage to pierce through. We feel tense, not because of our inhibition, but because so many people have a complex about a certain topic, that they built an aura of “don’t touch me!” around it.

When we talk about it, we address this aura. The subject as such is not frightening at all. However, you might feel the clouds of the taboo topic with the other – and thus don’t dare proceeding. So you help increasing the unapproachability.

My wife likes playing with this and pierces softly through these forbidden themes, knowing that this “ban” is but an illusion. Usually the surprise of the people is big, accompanied by the feeling of liberation. The blocked energy is being released.

Astonished white dog at the Aare river, this afternoon

I sometimes get English e-mails signed “Love and Light”… Now a South African friend sent an e-mail with a signature, which pleased me very much: “Love, light and laughter” 🙂

A photo of a friend, from Bali: The elephant-headed god Ganesha wishing you good luck !

Last week I had at my office an online demonstration with telephone conference of an international web-analytics enterprise: They wanted to convince me to implement their tool (up to now we have another solution). One person had prepared the contact (and he was a bit pushing), two others were on the phone showing me all the advantages of their system. I nearly had no time to say anything nor did they enquire what our needs were. They showed me many features of their tool in all details – the only thing was, that these weren’t relevant for us.

After over an hour the presentation came to an end. Before the second person could go on with some more explanations, I found a second for objecting, “Our situation is different from that of a business enterprise, and the tool has so many possibilities of web tracking, which nobody in our office would be interested in.”

They were a bit consternated, then excused and asked what our needs were. I explained. Indeed, their system could cope with these needs, and in an easy way. At the end they excused for not having asked in the beginning. I said, it’s o.k., only we have to meet each other’s understanding and requirements before we can proceed.

I don’t know yet if I want to change to this analytics-system or not.

Tubes without connection leading nowhere…

A friend wrote me that she see so much competition and rivalry within spiritual groups gives her problems: “Why are there always so many divisions and splits? Why can’t you just work for a common cause, to express synthesis in practical life?”

She tries to keep contact with the different groups and to get people exchange, but it seems to be a long way. A friend of her is in a deep crisis, because she has just been excluded from a group. She told me she sent her the last Lunar Messenger on “Dealing with Obstacles“, since the text was very fitting.

I answered her that sometimes these divisions are like cell divisions and bring about something new, sometimes old things / attitudes fall off, or people with another vibration frequency separate. I had this experience several times in my life. It is like in the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who was excluded from his flock only to find a way to groups of a higher order.

Often it is a “clashing of personalities”, which causes groups to exclude members, especially with dominant leaders or with fix ideas about how things should be. Like with an individual, groups also have their personality… Freedom of the individual and ruling oneself and not the other is most important for a good cooperation in a spiritual or good-will group.

Group conflict sometimes end with broken relations….

The last weeks the clock in my computer went slower and slower – and sometimes stopped. The e-mails and files got the wrong dates, I kept on arranging the clock, but I had to realise: Already after one year the life cycle of the inbuilt battery seemed to have ceased.

Ten days ago I rung up the support of the computer company, the world’s biggest. After a long automatic intro on the phone I finally got a person from the support team. No problem, he said, we’ll send you a battery. And he explaned how to change it.

Two days later an express parcel brought a battery from England. When I tried to put it into the PC, I realised it was the wrong type. Again a call to the support team. Another supporter: No problem, we’ll send you a battery, it’s easy to change.

Last Tuesday I received a big parcel again from England – 20 batteries, but of the right type. Enough until the end of my or my computer’s life cycle, I thought.
I put in the battery (I had to take away the little board of the WLAN) and tried to restart the PC: Window started and crashed, started again and back to black.

With the help of the support team (in the meanwhile I found out how to short-cup the long automatic sermon on the phone, with pop-music in between), we saw from the bios check that the harddisk was still o.k.: You can try to do a soft recovery, this will keep your software on the PC intact.
I tried to to the soft recovery with the recovery DVD, but there was no choice, only: “This will delete all data on your PC”. Ooops.

Again a call to the support team: There seems to be no other way. Luckily I had done regular harddisk backups with a famous backup software, I thought, so I can restore everything.

The backup-restore software showed that the backup was fine, but the system didn’t activate the drive, though it showed up. I tried, tried, tried. No result. The famous software didn’t help in the case of emergency.(I later found out that the secure zone of the software might not start from an external drive, as it said on the web.)

Luckily I have done at least other regular backups of my own files plus the essential software on another harddisk, I thought. So I started the destructive recovery. It took some 4 hours. At the end, windows started. And I was happy. Too early. The software installation procedure went on and on and on. I let it go throughout the night. When I woke up at 3 am, I saw a message: There has been a problem with the installation, it could not be completed… I sighed, stopped the PC, and wanted to ring up the support as early as possible. When in the morning, after some restless sleep and a turbulent meditation, I started the computer, it came up well…

Now the work of reinstalling all the softwares was ahead. The graphic driver gave some problems, so again a call to the support team, and finally, with some new drivers, the screen was fine. Then the MS-office installation gave error messages. A long call to the Microsoft support, searching through the registries. It ended up in reinstalling the software again, and finally it worked. Many other softwares and data had to be restored, my head reeled in the end: The backup of the addresses of the mailing lists of my mewsletter hadn’t worked, I only found an old functioning backup.

So there is still a way ahead to control the many addresses and add all the missing ones from the last year, in order that the next Lunar Messenger newsletter can go out. I hope, without too much delay….

A lesson learned, I thought: A lesson in keeping my head and my nerves calm.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper, NZZ) reported today about a fascinating project of two Swiss artist who developed a method of overcoming the Chinese censorship in the internet. The site “picidae.net” was officially launched last Tuesday and is in English, German, Chinese and Arab. The name “picidae” comes from Latin and means “woodpecker”. The first holes in the Berlin wall were hit by so called “Mauerspechte” (woodpeckers) and gave the project its name: picidae (woodpecker).

They call picidae “an art project, that deals with one’s own horizons of imagination, the image of the world, communication and its hurdles and barriers.” picidae negotiates the firewall (Internet censorship) eg. in China or in the Arabian states. picidae delivers a complete, readable and even clickable image of the censored web sites.

The picidae site is not made up of text and HTML elements (tables, images etc.). picidae delivers a screenshot. The page is visible but not machine-readable. This means the text cannot be searched, marked or saved as a text file. That’s why internet censorship, which reacts on keywords (similar to search engines and correction programs), is not able to detect or suppress picidae pages. picidae is not a centrally organised system and is not be reachable via a centralised database. Every access point and every server runs independently and without description and naming – to prevent censorship and deactivation.

Their definition of picidae as an art project is very close to spiritual concepts of visualisation and going beyond the form, realising oneself as the observer, the I AM, which is not defined by the object he sees: “Art searches for new ways (repetition is in terms of Fine Arts just copying). The new images picidae provides are images of ones own horizon of imagination: images of a global communication and images concerning limitation and overcoming of ones own view. The images are generated in the head of the observer, exactly like in an image gallery. The point is not exactly what is displayed in an artwork but what is inspiring in the sense of Art history and reflection.”

I tested the picidae-server with our good-will website, and it is astonishing how the site is perfectly rendered, as an image. (I tried to put a link to the site, but the url changes, so you cannot link to the picidae-transformed view.)

Hopefully this approach is being used for expanding the freedom of expression and information, to further human relations and not to spread perverse and destructive ideas beyond any sense of discrimination.

By the way, the two artists have earlier launched a site called Zone*Interdite, “a test arrangement that serves as a starting point for individual exploratory tours” into the world of military restricted areas, which they are showing on an interactive map. “Individual imagination and the joy of discovering occurs, i.e. spotting, replacing the patriotic and pacifistic duty of a knee-jerk avowal, and undermining censorship, as well as the restriction of perception.”

Pecking through the great firewall of China and other totalitarian systems

We just changed our internet and phone landline to cable networks and had some problems getting online, but now the system is running 🙂 There were also some problems in changing the settings of the router. This morning I awoke with the impression what to do – and it worked! Back to the online-world. This was a good experience, after hours of searching for a solution…

Last week I read an interesting interview in the NZZ with Theo Wehner, professor for work psychology at the Center for Organization and Work Sciences of the ETH Zurich, about the identity crisis of the work society:

Often in our modern society people don’t succeed in blending work, meaning and fun. In surveys about one third of the persons employed said they would like to stop working if they could. However, two thirds would like to continue, though under changed conditions.

In the 1980ies people said they would like to change their working conditions, in the 1990ies they wanted to have less pressure of time, and now they want more “authority over time” or leisure time.

People however, who lose involuntarily their work are often so much blocked that they can no longer even fulfil their personal duties nor their hobbies. Working is a measure for disciplining and socialising.

It is more and more difficult to find meaning in modern industry and service jobs. Work is being experience as being chopped up into little pieces, and one’s own contribution cannot be experienced within the whole.

Many people commit themselves to voluntary work without payment in charitable or non-commercial activities. They want to do an activity which they like and which is meaningful to them. This is more important than making new acquaintances or giving money for some charitable activity. They found out from their researches over the last years that the main purpose is to do something meaningful, and this is difficult to find in many jobs.

Most volunteers are middle-aged people, where they feel that they want to give something back to society. If they cannot do this, there is the danger of burnout or “mentally giving notice”. Jobless people first want to find a job before going into volunteer work. They found people who after having lost their jobs weren’t anymore able to do their previous activities in an association.

People who had a meaninful life normally can also cope well with the situation of retirement and find something new. The dream of “never working again” seems to be the result of a failed work relation and not a way into freedom.

See also the blogpost on “How to live happy” or the post on The Future of Volunteer Work.

When the old tracks are blocked: Finding a new orientation in work life.

My wife is accompanying several young people in different situations in their lives. It is done very informally, but from her side with intention and not just undesigned. She said to me this morning: “I had been missing such orientation very much in my youth, perhaps that’s the reason why I’m trying to help this way.”

She told me of a talk she had with the daughter of a friend who is about to start her university studies. Since over a year the girl has a committed relationship. The affair seems to be symbiotic, i.e. both feel a passion for each other and want to live together. However, there are differences in attitudes. My wife asked, what the common ground was, and it was not so clear. The girl said, doing projects together, but didn’t exactly know what kind of projects. From the beginning he wanted from her an “eternal commitment”, she felt constricted by this. She was unsure what in these incertitudes was her part and what was from her partner.

My wife loves illustrating inner processes and relations with little diagrams (see here, here and here): A person who is centred within himself is living in a right angle:

and integrated . You might encounter situations or emotions without losing your right angle.

In a relation, you can turn to the other without losing your inner centre. It is like turning your right angle cross towards the other, and the angles meet. The meeting point can be on different levels – on the physical, emotional or mental or even higher levels (represented by the sun). And you can meet on different planes at the same time. When you have a congruence in something higher – common ideals, attitudes, values – it is more easy to find congruence also in other points, like doing a project together. And also to overcome problems and conflicts in matters of day-to-day life and not to get stuck-up. In a relation harmony isn’t always necessary, but if the fundamentals are sound, it is likely to continue as a good relation, where the partners aren’t bound to each other by conflicts.

My wife mentioned: “Some couples just seem to have as a common project raising the children, and when the children are grown up, they separate again.” She asked the student about her higher meeting points with her partner, and the young woman wasn’t sure about them. She wasn’t even sure about her own purpose in life, nor about her partner’s. She felt, she had to ponder on what really is the common denominator in her relation. She surely will find out.

This blog-post has been translated into Spanish, together with some other posts of this series.

From time to time I get e-mails from friends with certain appeals for help or other curious stories. I normally check them up at Snopes, and most of the stories turn out to be hoaxes.

So I got today an e-mail from Argentina with the photo of a badly burned baby, where there was a call that people should forward this mail so that 0,03 Euro would be donated to rescue that child. I checked it up on Snopes and quickly found that the story was partly true and partly false. And it was already collected there in 2005 – as the case of a real Polish baby.

The perverse thing is: Of course nobody is giving any money by forwarding the e-mail to your friends, it is a sarcastic hoax which only increases the amount of unwanted mails. People misuse the compassion of others with these dirty tricks.