I today had a phone call with a French speaking person who said that we mentioned something about the Avatar of Synthesis on our website (see here, here or here). He then pointed out that since some time he is in contact with the Avatar of Synthesis and a channel of him, and that through this work Jupiter is just being transformed into a sun. He asked, if I were interested to know more about it. I answered, not really – the best would be that he follows the unfoldment of his inspiration and I’ll follow mine.

It’s a funny game of spiritual boasting, which wasn’t the first encounter of that kind. From time to time I come across people who like delving into lofty spheres, claiming to have a special mission. It seems that special missions give you the feeling of being someone special, a spiritual VIP. To me however, this seems to be like junk food – looking nice but not really nourishing the soul. It isn’t authentic, just another kind of glamour.

A golden ball in a nearby garden, like an easter egg. Photo from this afternoon’s walk

Two stories related to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to my mind when I heard about his passing:

In January 1979 – I just had finished the TM-“governor”-course with the Sidhi-program – we went to Seelisberg, Switzerland, the then capital of the TM-movement, for a meeting with the Maharishi. In a lecture I heard him say that within about four years the “sidhas” (people practising the sidhi-techniques) would be seen flying over the Lake Lucerne by yogic powers, thus demonstrating the control over the “field of all possibilities”, as he used to call the base-state of the mind.
There had been great expectations around about developing yogic powers within a short while. It was attracting and misleading the attention to side issues of the path. I had experienced myself quite strong inner energies with these sidhi-techniques, but I only later understood that this isn’t the purpose of a genuine spiritual growth.

In late autumn 1977 – I just had returned from the TM teacher formation course – the German TM-groups were informed that the TM co-ordinator for Germany had been flying with the Maharishi along the “Iron Curtain”, that separated East and West Germany. The Maharishi was reported to have said that the separation of Germany would end within the next months.
I mentioned this to my father, who said to me: “You are crazy. As long as I live, the Iron curtain won’t fall.” I made a bet with him: If within the next 9 month the curtain falls, he would give me 20.000 Deutsche Mark, if nothing happens within a year, I would pay him 1.000 Marks. We signed a paper with my eldest sister as a witness and put it into my father’s safe. Of course nothing happened, and I gave him the 1.000 Mark, which he later returned to me at another occasion. I never made a bet again in my life.
I later heard the Maharshi had said that the iron curtain would fall “within a short time” – whatever this time might be. When 12 years later the curtain and the Berlin Wall fell within an incredibly short time, I was reminded of my bet, and even my father said, he wouldn’t have thought that the political situation could change so quickly.

I became increasingly immune to all kinds of prophecies and soothsaying. When I hear anything, I put it into an “inner broom cupboard”, without letting it touch me.

A photo sent by a friend, of the “mahasamadhi” of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – his conscious passing over in meditation. Copyright: Maharishi-people in Vlodrop, Holland.

P.S.: I just got n e-mail with the text of Deepa Chopra published in The Times of India. It begins saying: “The Maharishi didn’t die like mere mortals do. He just went into what we call ‘maha samadhi’. On January 12 this year, his 91st birthday, he announced that his work in the world was over and he was going into silence. He didn’t speak to a single soul after that day. And today, he has passed so elegantly.”

You might be interested in reading the revelation by Deepak Chopra of an undisclosed illness of Maharishi and the parting of their ways.

Today I got an e-mail a friend forwarded to me announcing that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has just passed over yesterday, February 5.
Old memories came to my mind: For over 8 years, from 74 to 82, I had been in his Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, with all my youthful enthusiasm. I went through the formation as a TM-teacher and later as a “governor of the age of enlightenment”, and even became head for a TM-“Academy for Vedic Science” during my student times. I met the Maharishi a number of times, and for a while I was dreaming to work in his surroundings.

At the beginning I was fascinated by the whole ambiance and the teachings, but then I increasingly found the orientation of the movement strange and too narrow. The grandiloquent vocabulary of the Maharishi, the commercial attitude of the movement and the missing focus on selfless service as an essential prerequisite for spiritual progress were some mayor factors. But at that time the decisive “kick” out of the movement for me was that on my spiritual path I came across several experiences, which didn’t fit into the quite simplifying spiritual “map” of TM. There was a “point of no return”, where I left the TM-movement and its world view from one day to the other. It took long years of search through a number of spiritual movements and teachings to get the “missing links” for the questions I had.

A friend wrote to me about this blogpost saying: “Your blogpost on MMY rang very true and paralleled my own experience after being a National Leader for 12 years. Lack of compassion exhibited by the TM movement is a serious failing in any ‘spiritual’ organization. It is possible that the over-centralization and trivialization of the teachers may improve and the original momentum be regained.”

The TM helped me to get out of the traditional religious background and to learn new vistas of thinking, even if they needed to be revised after a while. I have observed the movement from afar, through newspaper articles about their campaigns or when encountering articles of their Ayurveda business – déja-vu feelings kept coming. Looking back I’m grateful to the Maharishi for learning the steps of regular discipline and for gaining a basic understanding of Eastern (Vedic) wisdom. May he proceed on a lightful path.

The close of a fire ritual

On the way back from the Borra Caves and Anathagiri Hill, we stopped in a little forest, where there was a railway station a bit deeper down the valley. We left the bus and went to the railways. A train was standing there near a tunnel. We heard from our Indian friends that some terrorists had just taken away part of the rails, so that the tourists coming by train had to stop here and take a bus to go to the Borra Caves. On the uphill ride I saw everywhere along the road signs of the communist party with hammer, sickle and pentagram and slogans in Telugu language.

Our friends guided the group into the tunnel until it was totally dark, and then we went out again: It seems that there are only few tunnels there, and that it is some kind of an attraction. We had to laugh – back home in Switzerland, you find tunnels everywhere.

Entering an Indian railway tunnel – a modern kind of a cave.

Yesterday afternoon I accompanied my wife and some other ladies on a shopping tour in the centre of Visakhapatnam. They wanted to buy some punjabis – ladies’ dresses. We took two motor rickshaws and started with our adventure.

We started in the biggest shopping mall – and we were not the only persons there: many Indian ladies wanted to get a new dress for the coming Pongal (New Year) festivities. Tissues in bright colours all over, mostly decorated with exquisite floral motives. How poor are the motives you find in a normal Swiss shop…

The full shops – and children playing hide-and-seek in between the clothes racks.

However, the sizes of the average Indian ladies aren’t the same than of European ones’… And so in spite of a lot of trying on, the result in the first shop was meagre. One of our ladies therefore preferred to buy a tissue and get a tailor do the job.The others continued with me to the next store, and then another one and another… Finally we found some dresses for all. My head reeled, and when we returned for evening meditation, it took only a few minutes that I fell asleep.

Our arrival at the WTT retreat centre in Visakhapatnam, India, happened to be on the day of Capricorn new moon – or, as it is counted in India, Sagittarius new moon. We were invited to join a water ritual at the World Teacher Temple: In the course of the ceremony water was poured over some lingams -egg-shaped stones symbolising the manifestation of divine will out of the space waters or cosmic ether -accompanied by rhythmic singing of mantrams. Later the lingams were decorated with flowers and with some cream of chalk. It was a very elevating and soul-stirring ambiance to experience the vibrations of the ritual on the veranda under a tree top, the night sky above. Sometimes a few persons from the paediatric hospital next door looked through the windows – a peaceful and totally normal scene hard to imagine in a European setting.

Decorated lingam at the end of the water ritual

After the ceremony was over, some delicious rice was distributed as a “Prasad”. Then we left with some Indian friends to the compound of Mithila East, where we participated in a New Moon meditation. At Mithila East there is a free school of the WTT for fishermen’s children plus a free homoeopathic dispensary and a vocational training centre.

The brother of our spiritual teacher explained to us the meditation structure: Visualising Mount Kailash, the spiritual centre located in Tibet, which is said to be the dwelling of Lord Shiva, the embodiment of divine will, with Lake Manasasarovar in the back, representing the quiet mind, keeping on looking at Mount Kailash and receiving the energy of the assembled Great Ones and distributing it to the surrounding, especially to people in need. The profound silence of the meditation elevated all to the sublimes spheres of the no-moon time. After the meditation three beautiful panorama photo posters of Mount Kailash were given to group members, and I received one for our group.

Tired, but filled with serene peace we returned back to the centre.

View of Mount Kailash, photo of a friend, summer 2005

It seems that the announced blogging pause isn’t that long, since in the retreat centre of the WTT where we are staying for the next time there is now a wireless access.

Sunday morning our trip to India started with a train ride to Zurich airport, where at the terminal already the stewardesses of Emirates Airlines with their typical head-dresses gave us a little oriental taste, though most of them probably weren’t Arabs…

Much more Arab, however, was the ambiance at Dubai Airport, with all the artificial palm trees, decorations and the dresses of the passengers.

But it was just a short stopover to the next destinations, Chennai (and in between we enjoyed looking some of the many films in the plane, for which I normally don’t take time…).

At Chennai Airport things had changed a lot since I was there 2 years ago: the hall of the international terminal had been redone – all in shining marble and white. The transport chains for the luggage were also new – though it seemed that the construction wasn’t that perfect: Since the luggage came a bit to fast down a slide, a person was sitting there controlling that the suitcases go on in the right way – a new job created?

Very new were the planes of the new Kingfisher Airlines, with a top service, much better than what I was used to at the national airline, though a bit we missed the typical “Indian” charme: Western music came out of the loudspeakers and here the stewardesses were dressed exactly like their colleagues in Europe – though in a bit spicy red.

Again a 1.5 hours jump and finally we landed in Visakhapatnam.

Murthy, the good spirit of the retreat centre, was already waiting there to pick us up with a Toyota fourwheeler, and now we had really arrived in India, with a the smells, the traffic rush, the sounding of horns and the many colours engulfing us from all sides.

A few days ago I got a Christmas-letter with an end-of-the-year review of an old class-mate. He has done an extraordinary career, being since some years the head of Munich airport (Germany’s best airport manager 2007). In our youth we had done some bicycle tours through Germany – to Frankfort, Hamburg and Munich – and in later years he had been in responsible positions at the respective airports. A strange preview of destiny. In spite of his management career he remained somehow very normal, authentic and humorous.

I haven’t seen him the last 11 years, I have rarely been at the annual class meetings, since youth I have felt strangely not at home in this world we had shared in your youth. While a number of my class-mates had done quite a professional career and are well established in different niches of mainstream society (doctors, university professors, lawyers, consultants…), my focus had always more been on exploring the inner realms – though not neglecting having a sound footing in a bread-giving profession which I like. I had felt somehow speechless in mainstream social contexts and their ways of associating – concerts, holiday tours, parties, arts, and the like.

Over the last years I increasingly broke the silence about the inner journey – which also reflected in outer journeys, like regular tours to India for seminars with my spiritual teacher. I noticed that by now an inner ground had grown on which I can express myself much more freely and explain about inner processes and give an understanding. To this had greatly contributed the work with the monthly newsletters about the wisdom teachings, which found an expression in the public talks on Meditation – Experiment and Experience given during the last months.

And so when I replied to the mail of my old friend, I wrote to him much more about what had been going on on my spiritual path than I would have done some years ago. In his letter he had mentioned a famous German sculptor, whom he had visited and who will make a sculpture for Munich airport. The sculptor told him about 2500 kinds of steel, having different qualities. I told my friend that very similarly you develop a sensorium for subtle dimensions, when you work with it over the years, a sensibility which is not possible to convey to someone else who hasn’t developed the related inner instruments.

It is fascinating to observe how these inner tools – called anahkaranas in the East – develop over the years. It is nothing spectacular, just a way of dealing in a clear way with situations, a deeper way of perceiving. It is just the same way a scientist or an artist develops his skills over the years – only that the field of investigation are the inner realms. For those who don’t know them, they remain an unknown continent.

Blue landscape with Bernese Alps. Some paths lead into far away worlds. It says that Eskimos have 20 different expressions for snow – a subtle differentiation coming from a more refined perception.

The last weeks my eldest son (17) has quite increased his online gaming activity – especially since he shifted to World of Warcraft. I had the feeling that he “closed up” to the outer and wondered where this might go. It reminded my of my “wild years” in the early 70ies (of course not in a digital world) and thought, “Is this a return of the times?”

After having met him twice around 3 o’clock a.m. when I woke up in-between (and he had started before 3 p.m., now during holidays), my wife and I discussed what to do. Is a gaming addiction getting hold of him? Is it a state of pupation during adolescence? Is anything else wrong with him?

Next day my wife had a talk with him where they explored the gaming situation. He was quite open to enter into the reflection. She showed him that about 50% of his energy potential is being invested in gaming, 5-10% in other hobbies and the remaining 40% in school and a little help at home (nearing the per mill region…). Luckily he has enough energy and intelligence to get along with the situation without being devoured …

He said that gaming fascinates him most and that other things are more boring to him. She showed him the Rider tarot card of the Ace of Cups and told him, it seems he only reacts on other things with pressure and doesn’t find anymore access to his inner source. So he isn’t getting into a flow with the energy from within. The flow isn’t a
He understood quite well and answered that normally he likes doing things with the hands, he likes even doing dish-washing or helping to hang-up the laundry or especially his work at the scouts. The thing with the dish-washing and the laundry was new to us – my wife always had the feeling that she has to break through a wall to get him do anything. Though the fascination of gaming continues to be strong, we felt a relief that one day or the other also this gaming craze might come to an end…

I discussed with my wife the observation of encapsulated feelings. We have met several persons where there seem to be locked emotions, which block the free flow of energies (see the post on “Filling the Love Leakage“). It seems that losses of dear ones, hardships of destiny or severity against oneself are at the roots of such encapsulations. Seen from the outside there seem to be walls in certain inner areas, where you cannot touch the core, or the person is trying to evade situations of contact with deeper feelings. So it is difficult to come into a flow of exchange.

At the same time there seems to be some mirroring of these blocked energies or fears: In the contact with the person you might get similar feelings out of a momentarily reflection, and you might feel irritated, not realising from where this vague cloud of discomfort comes. In retrospection you might realise that it wasn’t from yourself, but from the atmospheric ambiance. When you are in a receptive mood you are more prone to such infections.

As soon as you link up again to your higher self, you get out of this contagious mood and back into the flow. By linking to the inner awareness, the soul, you also help the other person to break through his or her encapsulations and come again back into the flow of life. My wife remarked she witnessed that this opening up of encapsulations might lead to overwhelming feelings, but afterwards normally a new balance is found.