A friend from California sent me as a New Year’s greetings a link to a very inspiring video posted on the NASA-website (astronomy picture of the day). However, this one wasn’t about spacecrafts or galaxies, but of a man by name Matt Harding traveling around the planet and dancing. And animating people everywhere to dance with him.

The video is also on YouTube, and elsewhere. He has a website: Where the Hell is Matt?, where you can read more about him.

Matt got his journey around the world financed by a chewing gum producer, on the site of which you can also download the video in hi-res and different formats. Through his dances he is spreading joy and inspiration.

My friend sent the link with the words: “The video reminds us of the Tibetan’s quote ‘May the Love of the divine Self be shed abroad in our hearts, through our Group and throughout the World. And may the power of the spirit of Man triumph.’ And so it is…”

Yesterday friends sent me a powerpoint presentation called “Seasons of Life“, with beautiful winter scenes and music.

The story is about a man who sent his four sons to go and see a tree and come back to describe it. He sent them at four different seasons, and each one described a totally different tree. So you also cannot understand the life of a man when you just have a momentary view of a part of his life. Nice thoughts – a good digital present for Christmas…

Sunset glow, last Sunday afternoon

Last Friday evening there was the third and last meeting of our series of public evening themes on „The Call of the Soul“. We were a group of nine persons, most of them members of our group a a few newbies. Before the meeting I felt quite groggy, for the last week at my office was very turbulent – the final sprint before the launch of the new intranet next Monday. But hardly we had started singing an invocation to the unity of all existence, all fatigue was blown away and the thoughts came flowing in.

I had prepared a powerpoint presentation on “The Fellowship” – a play with the title of a volume from the trilogy Lord of the Rings, but of course with a quite different content. It is about the persons and things coming across our way on the spiritual path. At a first glance it might not be obvious what this has to do with “my spiritual path”, seen in subjective individualistic terms, but the theme is of great importance, especially in the long run:

On the journey we don’t walk alone, we move in a group, in many groups. There are countless groupings travelling on the planet and they are going through their path of development. We are surrounded by many kinds of groupings, with which we connected and which accompany us. Very rarely we select the people with whom we are together on our journey, but it is no accident who the fellows are. They come together according to the law of resonance: We learn together and from each other. We learn to cooperate, to support or receive support.

When the taste of subjective living grows, the spirit of being together becomes stronger and the power of the lower nature decreases. Each one adds his stone to the building of a group, and an energetic temple is being constructed, where with a a loving understanding the hearts can meet.

Have a look at the presentations of this series.

A mosaic in Corinth, Greece – a beautiful representation of the energy field of relationships.

Last weekend my wife and I went to see the new German film “Krabat“, after a novel by Otfried Preußler. In English the book was published under the name of The Satanic Mill. There is a movie trailer with English subtitles, and you find an interesting interview with the producer, Marco Kreuzpaintner.

We read the book in our youth and my wife again some years ago.  A fascinating story of a young orphan boy who becomes an apprentice of a miller-sorcerer who teaches his group of assistants black magic, but also subjugates them under his will – and each year one of them has to die.

The movie is esthetically well done, also the more subtle aspects are presented without getting into cheap tricks. So you see a presentation of an out-of-body experience of the main characters, traveling in their subtle bodies to a village. Though this experience was connected with black arts, it was presented in a very natural way.

The plot of the story – the miller-sorcerer imprisoning a group of students through black magic and forcing them to work – provoked thoughts about experiences we had in a group setting where someone was holding the group over a longer time in his sway. It wasn’t easy to see through the mechanisms and find a way out – just like in the film. It took us years to digest the experiences. The story in the movie didn’t discuss the traumatic dimension of the apprentices, it nevertheless reflected in their behaviour and outlook.

Keeping others’ free will under your control and manipulating them is impeding the inner connection to the soul. See the Lunar Messenger on Free Will and Freedom.

Old millstone in Sweden, photo of a friend

Friday a friend sent me an e-mail with a story about elephants marching through a hotel in Zambia, which was built on their migration trail. They just go into the lobby and walk through the hotel to get to their favorite mango trees in October-November, when the fruits are ripe. I found it while googling, and also a video with the elephants on YouTube.

A beautiful story about the power of habit, which is also very strong in human lives, as you can read in the related Lunar Messenger.

Not an African, but and Indian temple elephant in Pondicherry, January 06

A friend sent me today a very beautiful powerpoint presentation about “The Moon”, with great photos and Beethoven’s Moonshine Sonata. Enjoy.

Today I came across a beautiful video on YouTube about “The 12 Keys of Spiritual Activism” by Humanity Healing Network. You find the text of the 12 Keys also on their site. The purpose of their activities is:

Humanity Healing was started to combine Healing with Spiritual growth to offer a more complete healing to those in need. We believe that true Lightworking consists of service to others. We believe that we are all connected and that by helping another, we help ourselves. This is especially true in the areas of Healing and Spiritual growth.

Globally, there are many people and regions in crisis. The principles of Altruism and the Brotherhood of Man have declined in importance as individuals, nations and religions focus on the differences between each other instead of the similarities within our shared Humanity.

We believe that with Compassion, Education and Volunteerism through Spiritual Activism, this can be changed. Each individual can make a Commitment to reach out. Each individual can make a Commitment to work towards the Common Good. As individuals, our personal contributions may be small, but when United in Common Cause, we can Change the World.” (from the website of Humanity Healing”.

Have a look at the 12 keys, they are really fundamental for the spiritual path, they have sprung from sources of eternal wisdom

Passioflora – photo from Iguazu, Argentina, May 08 – a deep symbol for the healing of humanity.

I yesterday saw a small video with a talk by Paul Hawken about his book “Blessed Unrest. How the largest movement of the world came into being and why no one saw it coming.” I was deeply touched by the way he presents the global development of hundreds of thousands of grassroots organizations that address social and environmental justice.

“Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world’s fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity’s collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.”

Paul Hawken is giving voice to the phonomenon of global good will expressing through very many people everywhere in the world. See also his website.

Some days ago I came across a video of National Geographics about a new generation of robots which “express themselves”: Developers have created robots that appear to make human expressions and show human-like emotions. There is a mechanism imitating the muscle movements of the human face – eye movements, smiles etc. What the cinema shows in films like Star Wars in perfection is a bit less perfect with these robots, but nevertheless creating a strange fascination for many: Making forms in their image and likeness.

Animatronics – employing electronics to animate motorized puppets – is quite a developed technology of the illusion-creating industry, as you see here with a human on the site of a Californian special-effect studio. They say: “We can replicate the likeness of virtually any character imaginable. We create realistic looking animals, creatures, and humans. These life-like creatures move, walk, talk, and simulate breathing.”

The dream is old, like with the creation of Pinocchio by the woodcarver Geppetto, or Frankenstein, or, a bit older, of Prometheus, who brought the divine fire of understanding to mankind, or the biblical creation of man out of clay. The modern robots are in the same tradition. There is a certain hybris hidden behind the hopes of technical betterment of man’s living conditions. Robots, however, have become a part of modern life, be it in automobile production or in surgery.

So have a look at the Salvator DaBot, the portraitist robot. He “recognizes human faces in its surroundings and extracts relevant characteristics from them. By using its uncanny artistic talent, it then draws portraits of the participants from the captured images by converting them into vector art and by using inverse kinematics to control the robot’s arm.”

The woodcarver Gepetto creating Pinocchio. Scene from a doll’s house in Berne

Today a friend sent me the link to a YouTube-video of Osho (Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh) talking about “After Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is Dead” – the word F*CK has become the most important word in the English language…” Really funny and philosophical

Photo from the video (c)