Early Wednesday morning after breakfast the group started for a journey to Rajahmundry. On the highway you could see ox-carts or motor rickshaws going on the verges of the road – and sometimes also a rickshaw came driving in the wrong direction – flexibility.

An ox-cart on the highway

In Rajahmundry the World Teacher Trust is constructing a 5 storey building on the banks of the river Godavari – the 2nd longest and a most holy river of India. On the banks of the river the Government has given to 12 spiritual organisations, who are doing service activities, ground to establish buildings there. Since over 20 years the WTT-Rajahmundry is doing substantial service activities and is well-known in the surroundings.

In Rajahmundry all 12 years, when Jupiter is entering Leo, there is a huge gathering of pilgrims from all over to take a bath in the Godavari during the auspicious time of 12 days. Especially around that time the WTT-brotherhood is caring for pilgrims, offering food and shelter, doing transportation etc. The building is still a structural shell, but will be finished during 2008. The brotherhood offered us a warm welcome and showed us the building, explaining the different activities to be held there in future.

After lunch we went to a landing stage and entered a boat, which took us on a 2.5 hours ride up and down the huge river.

The two bridges in Rajahmundry are the most attractive long bridges found in Andhra Pradesh.

We landed on a sandy beach to enter into the river and enjoy the scene. On the way back to the landing stage the group chanted Purusha Sooktam, Sri Sooktam and other mantrams, while a beautiful sunset shed its light over the river.

Afterwards we went to a silent place at the banks of the Godavari River. The river is dedicated to Rishi Gautama, who had been meditating there, and there was a statue of the seer at the river. We sat for a while on the banks for a meditation.
Then we had a short visit to some of the spiritual centres in the immediate vicinity of the WTT-centre: A temple of Lord Dattatreya, where a little pooja was being done, and an ISKON (Hare-Krishna) Temple, where we witnessed singing of Krishna mantrams and an arati (waving camphor light in front of the altar) and returned to the WTT-building for dinner.
The group of Rajamundri had prepared a gift for each of the Western group members, with photo of the future centre in a beautiful golden frame, for the ladies a panjabi dress and a small decorated box and for the men a towel and a little statue of Ganesha.
Later in the evening we returned back to Visakhapatnam, where we arrived after a 4.5 hours drive in the early morning hours.

Monday afternoon the group went to Hamsavanam – Ramadri, where the World Teacher Trust has developed over the years a temple compound with a big statue of Hanuman and a number of little statues and temples.

All over the place there are installed little stones carrying pictures of Rama, Sita and Hanuman. Under them there are stone coffers containing thousands of booklets, in which disciples have written many million times the mantram Sri Ram. R is know as the seed sound of Cosmic Fire. The sound “rha” is known to the American Indians as their Sun God as well as “Rha-aam” is also the Fire God of the Egyptians. This sound uttered and written repeatedly burns up the impurities of the physical, emotional and mental planes, making thus the personality transparent and receptive to the higher energies. Thus at Ramadri the vibration of that mantram of cosmic fire has been “earthed”, emanating protection and healing power into the surrounding.

Three couples of our group, my wife an me among them, were invited to join the ceremony of installing 16 new coffers with mantram booklets. There were about 150 persons joining the ceremony. With the sound of the mantram RAM, flowers were spread over the booklets, followed by kum-kum and turmeric. Then the coffers were closed with a plate and a small stone monument with the pictures and a flower was put atop. A coconut was broken and the content poured around and camphor-light and incense waved over the coffer – symbols of the personality opening to the soul, and the soul merging with the super-soul.

After this ceremony the group assembled around a tree, under which a new statue of Lord Shiva was to be ceremoniously installed. In the beginning the black statue was carrying a red scarf, a sign that its “eyes” weren’t yet opened. When they are opened in a ritual it is an important moment: The eyes spread light, and through the eyes you can see the soul of a person.

During the ritual a mason built a pedestal onto which several men lifted the statue. Sri Kumar and his wife Kumari, assisted by other persons, started washing the statue with different materials – coconut water, milk, curd, ghee, honey, a turmeric paste, sugar and other materials were poured over all parts of the statue and then washed away again. This Rudra or Shiva Abhishekam (or water-) ritual is a means of charging the statue and the environment with the vibrations of the ritual.

After the washing over, the statue was decorated with flowers and camphor light was waved over it. It was a magnificent ambiance – the lights, the flowers, the smells at this beautiful place overlooking the Gulf of Bengal, with the sounds dispersing into space and the radiance of the full moon lighting the place.

The ritual took about 2 hours. Afterwards “Prasad” (food gift from a ritual) in the form of spiced and sweet rice and bananas was distributed to all those who attended the ceremony.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft will have his good-bye at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) 2008 in Las Vegas, where he will give the keynote speech on 6th of January 08. He is going to leave his leading role at Microsoft in the next months only to devote his time entirely to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. The foundation’s goal is to “ to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world.” It is devoted to global development programs, especially health programs.

Gates said that his keynote at the CES will be his last one: “They can invite me in the future, but I’m not sure if they really want it, for I would talk about contagious diseases and not more about excellent software.” (translated from a German quote in the Heise-Newsticker) – a really great change towards good will work.

Computers are a very good tool for goodwill work.

Today I got an e-mail from a person who receives our newsletter. She wrote:

“I am hoping you will take an interest in the content of the following website: www.leesrecovery.com. I have been advocating for the mental health treatment needs necessary for my brother, Lee, over the last twelve years. The result is that we finally made a breakthrough this year, 2007, in obtaining some of the vital services needed. What remains is an intensive program of head injury/substance abuse recovery and I do not have the funds. Without this specific recovery treatment Lee is probably without an option for a healthy, stable future; with it he is very likely to fully succeed.”

She wants to reach 5000 people to donate $ 10/each. I am impressed by the commitment of the lady to help her destitude brother. She has realised a high-tech flash website to promote her concern about her brother, with a lot of creativity. However, collecting donations is not the way I would go, but trust in support when going into the direction I understand as right. So I’m not going to send money – my “localised” focus of help attention is elsewhere. I am confronted daily in my work with so many situations of urgent need and initiatives of collecting money. But maybe someone of the readers feels being touched by this cry for help, especially at this time of the year.

Water flowing into a pont for extinguishing fire

Today I came across the site FreeRice, an online English vocabulary learning game to help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free. This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on the site. By improving your vocabulary your donated rice enables hungry human beings to live and be productive. The sponsored money is given to the United Nations World Food Program.

Though it is a marketing instrument for the enterprises advertising, the game is serving a good purpose. There is a database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors.

There are 50 levels in all – I quickly reached level 49, though the vocabulary was very difficult – not because of an excellent knowledge of English, but because I had in a second window the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, which found the meaning of the different search-words. FreeRice is making no profit, all the rice “won” goes for sponsoring food. It is a sister-site of Poverty.com, where you also can see how much the different countries gives as international aid.

Yesterday at my office a colleague gave me an article to read. It was a talk which one of our heads of the Red Cross had given on the occasion of the release of a book about Professional Solidarity on the World Volunteer day of Dec 5. The book has been financed by a Swiss association of fire insurances. The talker, a theologian, presented a brilliant association between volunteer work or donations to a good cause and fire insurance:

Volunteers help other people, often with the perspective of getting something good in return, at least a good feeling. Also people giving money for a good cause mostly do it with the perspective of getting a better feeling. They are hoping for a better hereafter, so that they don’t land in the purgatory fire. Thus doing good-will work or giving donations is in a way some kind of a fire insurance.

The wisdom teachings tell us that the purgatory is not a world hereafter, but the plane of unsolved emotions, desires and reactions on our doings. You can experience the effects now as well as in the time between the passing and returning. There is a beautiful passage on the purgatory fire in the book Fiery World 3, § 69, from the Agni Yoga series:

“There is no mightier purgatory than earthly life, if all the potentialities of the spirit are intensified. Likewise there is no mightier hell than the earthly infections of the spirit. To affirm purgatory on Earth as a beginning leading to the Subtle and Fiery Worlds is a problem of the purification of consciousness. All strivings of humanity for knowledge of the Invisible World should impel the consciousness to take up the thought of purification, which will continue the earthly path to the Fiery World. Only the concept of oneness of the path will impel people to live in beauty, and to depart this life as wayfarers continuing their journey. When the World will apprehend this indissoluble bond with the Subtle World, purgatory will then take its rightful place in Eternal Truth.”

Picture of a Fire Ritual, Delphi, Greece, May 2005. Fire rituals have a purifying effect on the subtle bodies, see the book on Agni – The Symbolism and the Fire Ritual“.

This morning, when I came into my office, there was a big parcel lying on my desk, sent anonymously from a town near Zurich. I didn’t expect any packet. When I opened it I saw a chequered bag filled with nuts and sweets, sent by a web-marketing agency with whom I’m working. I thought, nice greetings from Santa Claus and distributed the content in our office (of course I took also some sweets and realised again that I’d better not…).

Then, in the afternoon, I even caught a short glance of Santa Claus: He was walking through the church garden past my window, followed by some people. I quickly took a shot of him.

Beyond all commercialisation – his inspiration of sharing with others is a genuine message of good will.

Karma is the impact of your actions. “Carma” is the name of a website dedicated to “Carbon Monitoring for Action” with a giant interactive database showing who in the world causes most carbon emissions.

The site has just been launched on November 15th. They have collected information of over 50,000 power plants and 4’000 power companies worldwide. Power generation accounts for 40% or all carbon emission in the US and about a quarter of global emissions. The USA is at the top, nearly 2.8 billion tons of CO2 are emitted by power plants, followed by China with 2.5 billion, and China also has the power plant with the highest output.

So have a look on the global “Carma” to see who causes most global karma (: and we get our’s through the power outlet…):

Thursday night the first new snow fell in the city, and the following morning the roads were very slippery, when I went to work with my moped. The day before I had a flat tyre-tube which I luckily got quickly repaired, plus a new tyre. I jokingly had told the mechanic: Now I have a winter tyre for the snow – and it came faster than I thought.

First new snow: View from the rest-room at the upper floor of our office building in Berne

This Scorpio-time is a time of letting-go, of working on old burdens: The heritage my father had left over he had distributed quite uneven, and the part assigned to me was quite a lot below the legal share. I had spoken with the notary, who told me that he had been unable to convince my father that what he was going to decide was not along the rules. He nevertheless did the final version of his testament according to his own convictions and without the notary’s assistance.

A second notary involved in family affairs told me the same, with more details. Speaking with my brother and sisters showed me that they weren’t happy with the situation, either. But since the affairs are more complicated and I didn’t want to get into a legal procedure with the family, with costly expert opinions etc., I informed them about what the notaries had said and that I don’t want to insist on the legal minimum.

There had been quite some reflections about the backgrounds of the situation, of what is the right way of proceeding without emotional entanglements, and also with balancing other expectations around. A lot of pictures came along, with thoughts of past situations, about the relation with my old family, of discussions with my father, of karmic inheritances. Clearing the wastes of the past and laying sound foundations for steps of future growth helps letting-go the shackles of unresolved emotional ties.

Similar Scorpionic situations came along with a friend who went through a crisis of inner birth: long-frozen emotions came into a flow after a talk with my wife. It was like a baby being born within, which quickly started growing. Throwing loving light into abysses of the past, while keeping close contact with the light of the soul, helps triggering transformation processes. Scorpio really is the month of the phoenix, going from death to a new life.

An American friend forwarded to me the following blessing today:

A Prosperity Blessing

May you be blessed with an amazingly abundant day today!
May the clouds break and the heavens pour down upon you more joy, more love, more laughter and more money than you could have ever dreamed of.
May the sun shine its golden light of prosperity through every cell of your extraordinary body.
May you be cleansed today of any resistance or feelings of unworthiness that you may still be holding onto.
May your false illusions of doubt, fear and scarcity gently fall away like soft white feathers on a gentle breeze.
May you be willing, simply willing, to allow the Universe to shower you with miracles today.
May the Angels wrap you in their shining wings of opulence. May the fairies deliver you to their pot of gold at the end of a majestic rainbow.
May your eyes shine with the glorious truth of who you really are and may that truth uplift others in your presence to their own inner knowing.
May your ears hear the sound of perfection ringing in your soul.
May you taste the deliciousness of every precious bite of life as your day unfolds moment by moment with amazing grace, heartfelt love and a bounty of magnificent money.
As this day ends, may you slumber wrapped in an exquisite blanket of enduring peace and profound gratitude.
And may the last words you speak today be Thank You!

NB: The author of this Prosperity Blessing informed me about her copyrights: the blessing is written by Veronica M. Hay, her website is Insights and Inspirations.

A brook in a Jordanian oasis.