Last weeks the children have developed a skill to “slip away” from their responsibilities in the household. They tend to leave their schoolbags, skateboards or instruments on the floor right at the entrance. Used plates stay on the table, packing garbage doesn’t find its way into the bin. When asked to clear their mess away, they tend to say, “Yes, I’ll do it in a minute” – and nothing happens. Computer games are much more fascinating than homework, and the latter are started late in the night.

Two days ago my wife felt tired of the Don Quichottean fight, the feeling of running against rubber walls. So she decided to go on strike as per the service in the “Hotel Mom”. She packed the dirty clothes of the children into their room and told them to do their laundry themselves. And she stopped preparing food for them. So yesterday we had breakfast, lunch and a cake – but not for the children. They stayed at first “cool” and were out most of the day.

In the evening the younger one (14) made a “charm offensive” and said, o.k., he’ll clean up his mess and help preparing the dinner. We had a dinner with three – the elder one didn’t yet come back. But my wife didn’t react on the younger one’s demands for preparing some extra wishes. The youngest found this “antisocial”, but tried not to come into the front line. And he did the clean-up of the kitchen.

The other one (16) is living at “minimum effort level” in highschool and at home. He yesterday said he would come home at 8.30 pm, however, it turned out to be 2 hours later, totally wet from rain. At the moment he is still blocking and somehow organising his meals. If “mom on strike” is stronger or his “strategy of freedom” – the outcome is still open…

A friend sent me the following comment: “There were some articles recently in Swedish newspapers on teenagers and empathy. Twelve year olds have great empathy. Then it disappears totally, and re-appears around 18-20. So there is some light in the end of the tunnel :-)”

In puberty the inner roads sometimes seem to be blocked because of reconstruction work.

Yesterday we had a final spurt time at home: Our youngest son (14) had been finalizing the website he had created together with some classmates for the Junior Web Award, a Swiss national class competition for realising websites which closed this night at midnight. The contest was organised by Switch, the Swiss Education and Research Network, which is responsible for all Swiss domain registrations.

With the project they wanted to offer “teaching staff the possibility of integrating the topics of internet, domain names and websites in their school lessons. By having students gain insight into the structure of a website and letting them learn something about usability, for instance, they have been able to improve on their own personal information capability and enhance their media competence. At the same time, the competition has also allowed them to acquire other competences of central importance in the present-day world of work, such as teamwork and project management. It is precisely these aspects that have made the competition so valuable for vocational school classes too: planning and implementing a project (e.g. a website) jointly in a team and within a limited timeframe is a skill that is absolutely essential for professional life today.” More than 100 classes – or more than 2000 students – have created in excess of 100 websites in the categories of Design/Fun and Topic/Contents.

Our youngster however, didn’t have much of his web-knowledge and experience from school, but from his enthusiasm about creating websites. Since he was 12 he had started doing sites and studying web programming (he switched from reading Mickey Mouse to reading books on html- and php-programming…) and has done already some projects.

The site for the competition he called Freizeit und Sport (Leasure Time and Sport, for the contest section Design/Fun), of course housted on his own domain… He got some friends together to portray scenes from sport and hobbies, and one of his friends does really good photos. Another friend dropped off from the project 2 days ago, so that they had to realise with another one the missing section, and it worked out well.

Besides a school soccer cup of our community, where his class yesterday made the first rang, and a school band concert from his ex-school there was quite some stress around till the site was finalized, but it really turned out well, also in comparison with many other sites of the competition.
So in case you want to vote for this site in the contest, you can do it here (write Freizeit und Sport into the box) from June 18 – July 15.

I yesterday finished typing my notes from the seminar with Sri K. P. Kumar. The seminar was quite intense, but he gave a lot of illustrations and stories to make abstract thoughts more comprehensible. Here are a few examples and stories, which can be understood without the bigger context:

A businessman was in a shop selling and buying. A madman passed by and asked him: What are you doing? He said: I’m doing business. – What for? – To make profit. – What is profit? – Making 2 out of one. The madman replied: That’s not profit, that is loss. If you make 2, 3, 5, 10 out of one, it is loss. If you make One out of 10, then that is profit. The businessman was confused. He know hot to multiply. We know how to multiply thoughts, money… Multiplication is anti-yoga. Bringing to One from many is yoga. The businessman said: How? Madman: Yoga is to be One, to join, enjoy.

* * * * * * *

The butterfly is totally different from the caterpillar. The flower is totally different from the tree, but it has come from the tree. The Master is totally different from the man, but he has come from the man. Yoga is nothing but cultivation of the field.

* * * * * * *

This is a story related to balancing. There was a Zen master always laughing. We believe that when someone gives us a laughing Buddha we get luck, that is our own perception. The more we seek luck, the more we are in the contrary. That is our own expertise. This Zen master is always laughing like laughing Buddha. He was considered very highly accomplished. In the high land of Tibet they are scarcely habited. One day a disciple requested to be in his house. The master was in the basement, he was in the first floor. In the midnight hours the devotee found him moving on the roof of the house. He knew the master is in the basement, but he found him over there. He asked: What are you doing there, master? Dancing. How did you go there? – I fell up there. We fall down, he fell up. Wherever you keep me, I fall up.
I tell these stories, because we are all inclined to move up. Moving up is possible only when we balance the lateral, then the centripetal and centrifugal, the internalization and externalization.

* * * * * * *

Blind following is not recommended, especially in the Aquarian Age.
On the Indian roads, in the busses, when you travel with speed it is 80 km. When you travel in such busses, there will be a lot of backbone adjustments. Traveling takes long hours, much more so in such busses. A group was traveling at night in such a bus for long hours. The bus stopped because of a problem. The driver said, it takes one hour to repair, stay in the bus and relax. You cannot relax there, so the passengers came out. One looked into the sky, then the next one did the same, then the others. The last one came out and asked: What are you looking into the sky? – I don’t know. No one knew why he was looking. The last one asked all, the first one said: I am not looking at anything; I had a back pain and was stretching, thanks to the bus and the roads.
Like that the humans visualize consciousness. We have that habit. All sheep go without knowing. Like that many people keep on doing it, not knowing what it is. Better know and do it.

* * * * * * *

There was a man who said that rabbits have three legs. Even if you say to him, it has four legs, he would not agree. And he would demonstrate it, holing a rabbit by one leg and showing the other three legs. What do you tell him? Likewise people are fixed with their own viewpoints, they cannot see the others’ viewpoints. Be open to see some more viewpoints. Be open, but be not fixed.

* * * * * * *

There is a nice story in Zen Buddhism:
A man was living all alone. He never had a companion to see. Once he had to travel from one place to the other. On the way when it was dark he had to take a place in a transit house. There was a group living. All sleep in a hall. They went to sleep, but he could not. He was feeling the discomfort.
In some of the side-beds his neighbor saw the person: What is the problem? – I cannot sleep. – Every day or today? – Today. – What is it today? – I am not accustomed to sleep with so many. Tomorrow when I get up, I don’t know who I am when I get up, for there are many. It is like a wave going into the ocean. How do you know it is the same wave in the ocean? When we sleep together, we all become one. When I wake up in the morning, I don’t know who I am. If there are 100 waves merging into the ocean, the waves come out again. How do you identify the waves? You cannot.
That is his problem. The next time he gets up, he has a problem, who I am. The neighbor said: Don’t worry, I shall bind a red ribbon to your body. When tomorrow you get up, by the red ribbon you know. He remembered the colour of the ribbon and comfortably slept. When he was in deep sleep, the other untied the ribbon and tied it around another person. In the morning when he woke up, the ribbon is with the other. There is a great confusion: “I know he is me, but I don’t know who I am – because our identity is by the ribbon of name, form, nationality.
We think we are these ribbons, because we don’t know who we are. There are many stories like this in India.
When we identify ourselves by our peripherals, we are lost. If we daily practice, it will be helpful to identify the wrong identities. The real identity is, I am That and That I am. Other identities are bound to mislead you.

Wisdom stories are colourful illustration for a better digestion of ideas. Photo: India 06

Yesterday afternoon we went half way across Switzerland to Einsiedeln to meet Sri Kumar, our spiritual teacher. Besides some administrave issues and watching a tennis match with Roger Federer at the TV, we had a meditation, a walk and a talk together. Again I was impressed by his deep spiritual wisdom expressing in minute details of day-to-day life.

We spoke about keeping the inner contact during the day. My wife told him that she experienced during the seminar we had attended last week a strong energy of presence that was brought in through him, and she asked him how he does it. He said that through opening up to the Presence and invoking the Spiritual Hierarchy, the energy starts flowing through.

We also spoke about meeting with adversaries. He told us that he had had in his life strong attacks from different sides, but he never acted against them. Instead, he neutralised the opposition by keeping silent and absorbing it. He said, it is his experience, when you don’t oppose to an adversary, this takes away the opposing energy. The person starts inquiring what is going on in the other, why he doesn’t strike back. When a person starts pondering, he stops attacking.

When people come and complain about others, he is trying to subtly show them the viewpoint of the other, so that they can come to a broader understanding. Actually we can be sure that we usually only know half of the truth or even less.

Kandersteg, May 27th, 07

Friends from SouledOut, California sent me an e-mail encouraging people to participate in the Global Peace Meditation/Prayer Day, also known as World Oneness Day, during the 24-hour period of Sunday, May 20, 2007, along with groups and individuals worldwide.

It is an experiment on the power of directed thought. People around the world join in special ceremonies, praying and meditating on the theme of planetary peace and harmony with nature.

The day’s effect on consciousness will be measured at Princeton University by the Global Consciousness Project GCP. The GCP is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. So they are collecting data from a global network of random event generators since August, 1998, with about 65 host sites around the world for field measurements of group consciousness, which show that resonance and coherence of focus can produce structure in the random event generators (REG) data.

During yesterday’s study group, while reading a transcription of a seminar by Sri K. P. Kumar on the Secret Doctrine, we came across a caption that there were failures on the subtle planes with the creation of the earth by the creative intelligences (devas), just as there are failures with what human beings are doing. We shouldn’t understand the devas as infallible. And just like people with power try to hide their mistakes or even justify them by making or manipulating laws in their favour, the same can be observed with these intelligences. However, in the long run they are getting into other cycles of adjusting and learning.

I like this idea. It is so very human and common in day-to-day life. You can also observe it in your own behaviour. I’m talented in creating excuses, also before myself, and observe the same with others:

Yesterday, a “low energy day”, I grew angry with my wife that the children hadn’t cleared their mess in the kitchen. With this simmering anger I got them do the washup.

For me, I was sure my growing angry was because of the mess of the children and that they had preferred gaming to cleaning up. Only later I came to see that already before that I felt a bit imbalanced. Out of this, my dealing with the kitchen situation came much more from my predisposition than from the actual situation.

Two days ago I got the newsletter of Alertnet, a humanitarian news network of Reuters Foundation. Alertnet is aiming at keeping relief professionals and the wider public up-to-date on humanitarian crises around the globe. In the newsletter there was a link to the World Press Tracker, that shows which emergencies the media limelight grabs and which are “forgotten” by the press:

(c) Alertnet

You can select different conflicts and time sections and see how much these areas are captures by the media, like Iraq or Afghan turmoil, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon crisis, AIDS pandemic, Bird flu, Somalia troubles, Kashmir dispute, Sri Lanka conflict, Darfur conflict … Out of a database of 10 000 media sources they have selected 108 English-language print publications from Europe North and Latin America Africa the Middle East and Asia. So it is a selective view, but nevertheless an impressive synthesis.

Grabbing the attention of the media is important for the flow of money and often decides on whether or not people react on a crisis. There is quite a business around the craving for attention. And the media are mirrors, instrumental for attracting and directing the attention.

Attention and focus are most essential for directing the focus of our life. Easily we get side-tracked from our genuine purpose by distractive influences. Ads, main-stream opinion, belief systems, only to mention a few. But the most important is one’s own mind. In any meditative practice it is most vital to learn focusing ones energies of attention, expressed through our thoughts. The power of habit is very strong, but with a regular training and attention to your motives you will grow in inner awareness.

Picture of the “eye of divine attention”, from a fountain in Berne, which formerly was the facade of a house.

There were some situations my wife and I came across the last times, where people were living in a state of fear of failure. Fears of disappointing others, fears, others could see some weak points in them or think bad of them. And above all: fear that others might do a job not sufficiently well. Seen from the outside, there were clouds of fear, cultivated for quite some time. The fears didn’t declare themselves as such, but showed up under the cover of over-identification with a task:

When someone comes from the outside and says, you’re o.k., this doesn’t take the fear away, but he’s going on with his fears. The clouds work like a blind spot: What you have inside is seen as problems outside. You see the fears you have inside with situations in the outside. So when an impulse comes from the outside, it is being reflected by your cloud and projected outside – as a criticism about a situation or how others do a task:You are convinced that you know what is right and might want others to act in your way. Or you get angry about others that they have another approach and don’t act according to the way you think it’s right. You might start making prescriptions to others, because they don’t correspond to your way of acting – or you don’t to their’s.

As long as you stay on the level of argumentation, you remain stuck in the blockage of mental conceptions: “I (you) have to do this because…” You are pressing the other with arguments, and the other is pressing back. This way you don’t get out of the cloud of fear. (see the blogpost on “Communication or Riding a Bicycle“). You can observe this very well in politics.

When you come to see what is common between the standpoint of the other and yours, you are already about to overcome the obstructions and resistances. Focusing on what is common and not on what is separating lets you see that there is much more in common that separating. This way you come into a mutual exchange and flow:

With this vision you come to understand: “I do my best, because I love doing it – and it’s the same with you.”

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

How to describe the magic arising in a profound conversation? Last weekend I came into a room, where my wife was talking with a friend. The topic was about attitudes, about identifying with ideas and ideals and thus losing the contact with others. The background was a concrete situation which isn’t “bloggable”. The atmosphere was somehow enchanted, and quickly I was caught by the spell of the talk.

It was like the opening of a sphere, in which all three of us participated. Barriers of mental “bricks” were dissipating and there was a strong flow of energy between us. In this subtle ambience things could be expressed, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. Somehow the ground was fecundated by mutual attention, respect and tenderness of attitude. When the time was over, we felt that something had changed within. The experience left a deep impression with all of us.

I remembered one of my philosophy teachers speaking about “kairos“, how the Greeks called such auspicious moments, a “time in between”. It is different from chronos, the flow of sequential time with its changing qualities. Kairos is like a door into the deep space within, a meeting place of an uplifted encounter.

“100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time.” This is the title of the 10×10 (ten by ten) site designed and developed by Jonathan Harris. It gives a snapshop of our world as a picture postcard window. 100 different pictures are taken hourly in connection with the most used words in the top ten news of several international news sources, such as Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, New York Times International News. 10×10 just shows what the system finds, without any politics nor any secret agenda. It runs without human intervention.

10×10 says: “When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we’re lucky, gives us pause to think.”

The photos here below show the momentary “snapshop of the world”.

Another “picture that defines the time” you will get when you meditatively work with time cycles, observing the changing pattern of planetary constellations, pondering on the cosmos within. You find more about it in the Lunar Messenger on “Working with the Key of Time“.