I yesterday witnessed a strange and moving story of light and darkness:

In a previous blogpost, I mentioned a friend from Germany originally from Belarus. Two days ago, she told me that a friend of hers had contacted her “with the wish and courage to translate the English text of the biography of Sripada Srivallabha into Russian. She is a nun, and the Avatar Dattatreya is the main deity in her ministry… She is a pure soul and also speaks both languages well in the spiritual direction…”

I was thrilled that another step in the direction of the prophecy in the book that some hundred years after it was written it would be translated into many languages and go over the world.

When I read that this Russian lady is a nun related to Dattatreya, immediately images of Russian websites came to my mind where some years ago – it was in August 2016 – I had seen pictures of a beautiful ashram east of Moscow with a big golden statue of Dattatreya and other saints. (If you have the Google Chrome, go to the following pages -Russian- with automatic translation – I only use this browser for such cases…. you can download it here). I am not putting the images in this blogpost but please do see them.

They had done 108 sculptures of mahasiddhas and gods, they wanted to create a mandala of one hundred eight temples of unity of all religions. For this, they had created already a beautiful Avadhutta Dattatreya Temple, a Rishi Vasishtha Temple, a Temple of Seven Rishis and planned to do a Temple of Refuge. See here about their spiritual head, Swami Vishnudevananda Giri.

And here is another website about this Center of Vedic Culture ‘Divya Loka’ as a community of Russian-speaking followers of Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma).

When I told my friend of my findings, she sent me a picture of the destruction of the ashram by Russian autorities… I googled for images of the ashram – and found a Russian TV report of NTV.ru entitled, in English translation, “The temple of Nizhny Novgorod sectarians razed to the ground”. And: “The bailiffs decided to demolish three so-called churches at once in an abandoned village in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where members of a strange religious community have recently settled. Services were held there by the newly-minted and self-proclaimed guru. He is known in the world as a former political officer of the Ukrainian army. Regular trances, hypnosis, and cruel punishments for the smallest offenses drove adherents crazy.” See here the printscreen of the Russian original website and here with English translation. You can read more background information on the original site. See also the page about a series of suicides related to this place in 2014.

Fact or fabricated story? I had to think of persecutions in the name of state and religion in present and past and of spiritual aberrations. In the Indian scriptures, there are many stories about how the king of the devas (the beings of light, of spirit) became proud (behaved wrongly) and so the asuras (the forces of matter) attacked and destroyed the world of the devas. Only after turning to Narayana (the highest God or the pure existence) for help, they found the way back to the rightful path…

My friend wrote me, “Nothing new for Russia. The Roerich Museum was also closed.” (I had blogged about the museum before, see here and here.)

Thoughts came to me what Sri Kumar had repeatedly told us, that outer forms can be destroyed but the inner truth will manifest where time and space demand. That we do not build much outer structures to remain “light” and that we should try to live “normal temperament”, not creating special attention: “Much working can be done in silence provided there is ‘Normal Temperament’.”

I had a little exchange with the Russian lady. She is at the moment living in Nepal. She started reading the biography of Sripada Srivallabha and is willing to translate it. May the endeavour be blessed.

P.S. from February 2020: The lady told me in December that the book is already translated (wow!!!) and they are about to print it.

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.

The formula “E Pluribus Unum” (from many, one) is the traditional motto of the United States used on seals and coins. Its meaning, however, is much more profound than just uniting different ex-colonies to one nation. It is even deeper than what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus gives as “The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one”. The eternal wisdom teachings explain that focussing on diversity, as we do with our analytical minds, makes us lose the sense of oneness. All multiplicity is coming from one source, is being held in existence by the unfathomable background of all and is merging again into the inconceivable oneness – from many to one.

Chris Jordan, a photographer and artist, has created a mandala named “E Pluribus Unum”. In the video project realised in 2010, he visualises the many different “organisations around the world that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social justice and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture” (from the video) by zooming from a detail structure to a great globe of interconnected lines expressing the beauty created by all the goodwill work done on the globe.
The video contains a million names of such organisations – Chris explains that it would need to include more than twice the number of names to cover all activities.
All these projects seem to be different activities but together they form one unified effort to promote the well-being of earth and of the beings living on it – a great visualisation of oneness done through Chris’ video.
The mandala is constructed around a circle containing 108 equally-spaced points. In Eastern wisdom, the number 108 is explained as containing profound keys to understand time cycles, like 4 x 108 = 432.

In many of his artworks Chris visualises complex realities in photos or movies. See also my 2007 blogpost about his activities or about the trailer to his impressive video “Midway” about plastics polluting the Pacific Ocean.
His works are intended to raise our awareness to understand complicated relationships by visualising with his “environmental art” the effects of pollution, mass consumption or destructive behaviours.

See more on his website or his videos on Vimeo.

Picture (c) Chris Jordan, from the video

Today 12 years ago, I published the first blogpost on Friday, 31 March 2006. In the meanwhile, 1402 little “flowers” (blogposts) have grown along the wayside. The quote from Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’ Garden I with which I started is still the guiding star:

Yes, yes, yes, each word of unity is as the seed of some fair flower.
To cultivate a garden of beauty is permitted to all.
But where are the gardeners who can judge which seed is best?
We shall teach them to gather the fertile stalks.
We shall pluck out the blighting weeds.
And the ground where God has manifested Himself
We shall adorn with flowers.

I decided to do the blog in English to keep the scope international. In a way the blog is my public diary of events, reflections and little stories to sow some seed of inspiration and good will. And I frequently search the blog to re-find a specific topic.

And sometimes interesting comments by readers add a little flower to the garden. So I hope that the garden of inspiration will further grow with future blooming.

Easter Bunny working in the garden in front of the seminar centre “Lichtblick” (Bright Spot). On the ball in the background it says:
“Good thoughts are angels which you send out to bring about the desired event.”

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

Benjamin, a good friend of mine from Munich, has built an app which shows daily astro-events as a calendar. He calls it smoon and makes it available for free:

The new app is launched today, at Virgo full moon. smoon stands for “sun and moon”. It runs on smartphones and tablets with iOS or Android, in English German or Spanish, in a few days also in French, later will come Portuguese.

At a glance you can see moon phases, constellations, sunrise and sunset, day and quarter rulers; short keywords indicate the specific quality of time. All calculations are done for your local position and time zone – everywhere in the world.

For installation on iOS download “smoon” in the AppStore, on Android search for “smoon” in the PlayStore.

The app is a practical tool for working with the daily constellations, for meditation or interpretation. It might help you to have the energies of the time in mind.

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]

Several times already I have blogged about Sripada Srivallabha (1320-1350) – how I came into contact with his biography, a visit to his birthplace and a few other instances; the first post, on November 27, 2014, was about “Lord Dattatreya – Adventurous Encounters“.

Now the German translation of the book, “Sripada Srivallabha Charitamrutam – Biografie eines Dattatreya-Avatars” has just been published and a multi-language website, sripada-srivallabha.org, has been launched. In this blogpost I will tell you a bit about how things developed.

October 2014, Lakshmi, an IT specialist from India, had brought me in contact with Sripada’s biography, and she later helped getting the translation and publishing rights. I found a soft-copy of the book on the web and later got the paper version. When I read the English text for the first time, I was like electrified. However, it quickly became clear that it is not an easy read for Westerners – the Indian publication is full of unknown terms, concepts and names. To unlock this intriguing world for occidental readers, it would need some aids. I decided to add footnote explanations – but how to get the information?

January 2015, I met Ravee in India. I knew this young engineer from the time when he had studied in Germany. When I mentioned the book he immediately declared that he wanted to help providing definitions for unknown expressions. He didn’t know the book before but he was thrilled to hear about Sripada’s birthplace Pithapuram – his father was also born in the same town. Ravee was of great help, furthermore I searched in Wikipedia and in other online sources.

When I spoke to Robert, a friend from Spain, about the translation project, he said at once, “Don’t you think that a Spanish version would be good?” – “Oh yes!” And so he started as well. Later, Sébastien from New Caledonia joined for a French translation – since years he is doing the French versions of the Lunar Messenger.

To enable the translations and the proof-reading (also for other languages in the future), I first had to create a Word document in English containing the complete text with all the adaptations (spelling harmonization, explanatory footnotes, appendixes, forewords etc.). Soon I noticed the need of a commented index of all the many persons mentioned in the book – sometimes different individuals have the same name or the same persons are called by different names… And from the very beginning of the work, I had the idea of creating a multi-language website for introducing the world of Lord Dattatreya and his avatars to Westerners: sripada-srivallabha.org.

Quite soon after starting the translation there was a series of incredible “coincidences”: Ravee came to know that the then “official” English publication of the book I had was incomplete – quite a number of pages were taken out, for whatever reason. The very day I started e-mailing Ravee, his mother, without knowing about the translation work, came home with a copy of a complete English translation published in their home town Tadepalligudem (this version has now been published by the Samsthanam, the temple at the birthplace of Sripada, as the new “official version”). Soon I also got these copyrights.

Simultaneously Robert came into contact via Facebook and Whatsapp with Srinivas, an Indian from the US, whose friend in Hyderabad was doing another English translation from Telugu (still unpublished). And Srinivas then provided me with the texts of  the ongoing work. I was thrilled and thought, wow, what a guidance!

A great situation – but what to do with three versions varying in style and wording? I compared the different translations as per comprehensibility, clarity of expression and number of unexplained terms used. All had certain strengths. I then decided to continue on the basis of the “official version” but wherever indicated I did adaptations on the basis of the two other translations, including all the missing texts: I tried to translate with a good flow but stay true to the sense of the book. While working on the German translation I simultaneously was fusing the three English versions to a new enriched text version.

The German translation got ready last summer. Then followed a lot of proof-reading and editing work, together with friends from Kulapati Editions of the World Teacher Trust (WTT) Germany and others. I wondered how well the typo gremlins can hide in a text. But in the end, I hope, we send all of them to the digital nirvana.

In parallel, I was working on creating the website to inform about Dattatreya, this grand cosmic teaching principle, and to give a better understanding about Sripada,  his life and teachings and his further incarnations, which impressed me so much. There was a warm support for the project from Sri Kumar and other friends. An international team of helpers and translators formed – from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico, New Caledonia, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. All were well qualified and very enthusiastic.

For the technical part and the design we used the existing WTT website, with minor modifications. Friends shared images related to Dattatreya and Sripada. Together with my own and some public domain images the illustration structure and the image editing could be done. Then the translations dropped in. Two friends helped creating the web pages.

Now, on the occasion of the celebration of Dattatreya’s anniversary (Sagittarius full moon, 13 December), the WTT is launching the website in five languages: English, French, German, Spanish and, very soon Portuguese: www.sripada-srivallabha.org, at the same time with the German book.

And what is it all about?

In the 14th century, Lord Dattatreya took birth in South India as Sripada Srivallabha. The knowledge about this gorgeous incarnation which lasted only 30 years got nearly completely lost. However, Sripada was reborn two more times, one time as Narasimha Saraswati (1378-1459) and another time as Swami Samartha ( – 1878). There are much more traces of these lives. Through the three incarnations, Dattatreya established a way of life where Synthesis of Wisdom is followed in daily life. There are more persons who are worshipped as avatars of Dattatreya – I concentrated just on the three major ones mentioned in the book.

During Sripada’s lifetime, a biography was written but, as decreed by him, the work would be kept secret until the thirty third generation of his maternal grandfather. The book came to light in 2001 through a person of this line. It was first published in Telugu and has then been translated into several languages. The “Sripada Srivallabha Charitamrutam” is an extraordinary book about this first incarnation of Lord Dattatreya in the present age. In an exciting and entertaining way, it gives an insight into the fascinating biography of Sripada, his sportive plays, teachings, prophecies and miracles. The book provides a feeling of being in his very presence and participating in the events:

“I will remain in a subtle form in every place where My biography is devotedly read.”
“Don’t think that Sri Charitamrutam book is a mere book. It is a live stream of a glorious consciousness.” – Sripada

And as predicted centuries ago in the original text, the “Sripada Srivallabha Charitamrutam” has now been published in German, by the World Teacher Trust Germany. The German edition (624 pages) contains a foreword by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar and is enriched with 21 images, many footnote explanations and a commented register of persons.
You can buy the book in book-stores, at Amazon.de or via Syntropia.de And you can download here the book for free.

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.

If anybody doubts that the Aquarian Age is an age of conquest of air and space have a look at the video below visualising the world-wide air traffic of one day done by the Zurich School of Applied Sciences. I blogged about their flight radar map 3 years ago. You can also look at the PlaneFinder showing real time all airplanes flying at a moment.

Awe-inspiring what a great human, technological and logistical effort is behind these pictures.

The European Space Agency ESA has now mapped signals picked up from Proba-V satellite upwards of 25 million positions from more than 15 000 separate aircraft. They contain flight information such as speed, position and altitude. ESA wants to demonstrate the feasibility of orbital constellations that could work to better police our skies from space.
At the same time, it appears as a map of the interconnectedness of humanity and the nervous system of human civilisation.

Air traffic map by ESA/DLR/SES (c)

Printscreen from PlaneFinder (c)