On October 9th, Yoko Ono, the wife of late John Lennon has unveiled the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER on Videy Island, Reykjavik, Iceland. It is dedicated to the memory of John Lennon, and the day would have been his 67th birthday. The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will shine as a beacon for World Peace.

The IMAGINE PEACE TOWER is a work of art conceived by Yoko Ono. It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription ‘IMAGINE PEACE’ in 24 languages. The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges. The strength, intensity and brilliance of the light tower continually changes as the particles in the air fluctuate with the prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions unique to Iceland. The electricity for the light comes entirely from the Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant. Every year it will light up between October 9th (Lennon’s birthday) and December 8th (the day of his death). In addition the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER will be lit on New Year’s Eve, during the first week of spring and on some rare special occasions agreed between the City and Ono.

At that occasion of the inauguration Yoko Ono said:
“Our work to shift the axis of the world has now begun. From here on, let’s not waste even for a moment on depressing thoughts about our future. Negative thoughts are luxury we can’t afford. The future of the world is in our hands. It’s time for action. Action is love. I love you!”

There were greetings from many around the world. Michael Moore wrote:
“I believe in the basic goodness of all people. I know that inside each one of my fellow human beings there exists an enormous capacity to love and do good for each other. I also know that that goodness can be snuffed out, and that the world can start to look like a dark place. It is up to each of us to create the world we were meant to live in, a decent and just place where all have the oppurtunity to live in peace. This peace can be obtained once every soul has been given a seat at the table, and fruits of this life are shared so that all are nourished and can thrive. Thank you, John Lennon, for living this every day of your life. Happy birthday to you and to all of mankind.”

Imagination is a very powerful instrument to foster good will, so may this initiative of Yoko Ono bring inspiration to action for the well-being of all.

The Peace Tower (c) imaginepeace.com

Last Thursday I was flying with Swiss to Berlin. During the flight they are showing on a flatscreen a map of the route with the position of the plane. Different cities in Europe were marked, but neither Berlin nor any other German cities. When we landed in Berlin it was on the map as if we landed on a green lawn. I had to smile…

It reminded me of the maps we have in our mind, especially the one of our life. We are often heading towards a goal without knowing where and how we are going. But nevertheless we are on a way. If we know the goal, we can orient and adjust the direction.

The plane arrived well, though the sky was clouded. It is incorporated into a network of navigation systems and guiding impulses. Even if the sub-map in the cabin isn’t showing the goal, in the bigger chart system of navigation we were well on the track. So there is also a bigger cartography system, to which we can link up and follow the lines.

Good will and service have to do with skill. You need the aptitude to do something, otherwise you cannot help. Sri Parvathi Kumar, our spiritual teacher, just spoke about this in a seminar in Spain saying:

“You think it is a service to adopt a child, but there are business houses who adopt whole countries. In India there are business houses that run hundreds of schools for free. How much time it takes for an individual to run so many schools for free? The same thing a business house does faster and better. They are the able ones. The ability when it turns to service does a lot. So business can be service.

What government can do is not comparable to what an individual can do. If the government takes to goodwill, the impact is very high. If business turns to goodwill, the effect is much better than of the individual. It is only a reorientation. I say this, because the ability to do service can do better than the inability to do good. Inability has to be transcended to gain ability. Groups have to gain ability besides goodwill. Without ability there is no effective service. Ability and goodwill have to be together.”

Last week I read a media communication by The Business Humanitarian Forum located in Geneva. They want to foster the positive potential of the private sector, they “seeks to encourage private sector support for economic and human development in post-conflict areas and poor countries where investment is needed.” They want to “bridge the gap of understanding and promote cooperation between humanitarian organizations and private business, encouraging both sides to work together to solve complex development problems.” A very encouraging approach.

Bridging the gap between ability and good will

Last weekend my wife and I made a short trip to Spain. At Montserrat, a famous monastery located about 50 km from Barcelona, our spiritual teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar, was giving a seminar on “Service – The Path to Wisdom”. A friend from the Spanish WTT-group picked us up at the airport and drove us all the way up the mounting with its peculiar rock formations. The monastery is a magnetic spot, many visitors – pilgrims and tourists – flock to it to see the Black Madonna with the child. We also paid them a visit before the start of the seminar.

Friday evening the seminar started with the evening meditation followed by an introductory talk by Sri Kumar. Saturday and Sunday morning there were further talks, and Saturday and Sunday afternoon presentations of service activities of the groups. In between we had exchanges with friends and a little excursion on top of the Montserrat mountains. A highlight was the Sunday morning fire ritual. Here are some thoughts from the lectures:

“It is impossible to escape from service. You find it even with minerals, plants or animals, and also with the higher deva kingdoms. When the service is done with goodwill, it helps cleaning the mind and purifying the heart. So the intention to dedicate one’s activities to the well-being of the surrounding life is the basis for all growth. There is no end to service, the will to serve is therefore most important, so that service becomes a ways of life. In this we should not look for recognition and recompense, but to see how we can serve better in a humble way.

You can do service on many different levels, not only physical, emotional or mental, but also from higher planes. In the process of serving you come to forget your own needs, and nature starts taking care of you. Service gives a value to life, otherwise it has no value. Selfish service can be disguised as selfless service, if the motive is wrong. If you give preference to service economics also grow with the time.

Many have not time for service, because their daily life is full of non-essentials. They think they are already doing much, but it is wasting time. We have to distinguish between essential and non-essential activities. Don’t engage in activities which are not useful for others.

Many think they are doing the activities like business for themselves, but the truth is, they are doing it for others. They have to satisfy customers, employees, pay taxes, insurance, machines, materials, the cost for the rooms, electricity. From the remains of the money you pay for clothes, shoes, food. Even the food is not for us: The tongue takes it and gives it to the stomach, from there it goes to the intestines. It has to be passed on. If you see it or not, all is for others. What remains for us is the experience. If you don’t have the sickness of looking for you, you are healthy. When you think only of yourself and hot of others, you get bound by your actions, but even then you are doing it for others.When you reorient to service, you will get fulfilled.

Don’t see service only as small acts we do. A good idea helps many people, it can be all kinds of activities, making music, writing, working. All is service when you think of the people who benefit through your work.”

Saturday after the morning meditation Sri Kumar invited me to come with him for a little walk. He spoke a bit about the lectures he had given in Toledo and Madrid. Then he made some proposals for our local group of the Circle of Good Will, that it would be good starting to go out and to speak to interested people about the teachings, about meditation or other topics which the people might be interested in. We haven’t done so until now: If we done this before. He gave several inspiring suggestions, and now we are thinking of how to put them into practice.

You might like to read the Good Will in Action on “The Value of Service“.

Two pictures from last Saturday’s morning walk with Sri Kumar at Montserrat

A friend of mine who is teaching at an American university sent me yesterday the following interesting lines:

“I have been cruising the web the past days for material I can incorporate into the class I teach and found a current development in Hollywood circles quite inspiring. It seems that more and more celebrities take action toward a good cause and use their fame and social status to help make the world a better place.

For example, Leonardo DiCaprio has produced a documentary about environmental damage and its effects on our planet titled The 11th Hour. What is most incredible about it is that he and his team don’t leave it there. They have created a website with a lot of information for people on how to make changes and contribute individually.

Another actor who’s been in the media recently for his activity for a good cause is Brad Pitt. He’s spent millions of dollars to help rebuild New Orleans’ homes in an environmentally friendly way.

Someone who is having a great impact on the Native American nation that is close to my heart is Viggo Mortensen. He founded a publishing house where he publishes books about the Lakota Sioux nation of the Dakotas. Mortensen was a published poet and painter already before he landed the role as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Among other books that pertain to Lakota culture, he wrote a book titled Miyelo in 2003 in which he documented the history of the Lakota and the tradition of the sundance. The greatest part of the sales of the book flows toward the Pine Ridge Reservation where Mortensen was welcomed when he learned the Lakota language for his role in Hidalgo. It seems he has found a second home there.”

Doing good doesn’t only inspire Hollywood stars. Today I came across an article about “Silent deeds for a better world”, an ad-campaign of a German soft drink producer (“the official drink for a better world”) who has realised a website called Stille Taten (Silent Deeds), which inspires to do anonymously good deeds to others and gives an occasion to write reports on it. This initiative has caused a great deal of discussion in blogs and the press. Though it is an PR-campaign, it leads people into a good direction.

Another friend from the States sent me today the following lines of H. P. Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine“, which fit very well to this theme:
“Altruism not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but many bad effects. If virtue in distress, and vice in triumph make atheists of mankind, it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own savior and his own destroyer.”

Spreading some sunlight into the life of others

At my office at Swiss Red Cross I saw last week the pdf of a poster “Trinconmalee – 4500 Houses”, to be printed soon in Sri Lanka. It showed a picture of many colourful houses, which had been constructed in an area destroyed by the Tsunami of 2004. With the financial help of a “cash for repair and reconstruction“-program people had rebuilt houses themselves – an interesting approach to support them in the rehabilitation of their fully or partly damaged dwellings.

Click on the picture to see the whole poster.

Today I read a news in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) about Tamil refugees exactly in this area, who had to flee, hardly their houses destroyed by the Tsunami had been reconstructed. The article described the violence between the government troups and the Tamil rebels, and the refugees being caught between the front-lines and depending from the help of international NGOs, who are slowly withdrawing from post-Tsunami reconstruction.

It is a tense situation, and it seems that the long list of ongoing atrocities of the civil war, ongoing since 1983, won’t end soon. How much suffering will be needed until people find a way out of ideological obstructions and mutual suppression of opponents until a common ground is found for realising peace?

From a spiritual point of view these conflicts, however bitter they might be, are learning processes, which don’t end just with the present life. Suppressing opponents doesn’t solve the tensions. Unless you learn to settle your conflicts in a peaceful way and to integrate opposing viewpoints, the lesson to see the greater whole is still to be learned. It might take a long time, but Nature is patient.

I just read an interview with Bruno S. Frey, a Swiss professor of economy and happiness researcher in the Migros consumer magazine. The essence: Important factors for happiness are the relations with family and friends, but also a job giving enough autonomy and recognition of one’s work by the superiors. To be happy is the result of a good life. And a good life consists in doing what seems to be meaningful for oneself.

Research has shown that this is the case when people do voluntary work and give money for good causes. However, running after happiness is of no use. If you try to do it, it slips away. A materialistic attitude makes you unhappy, idealists and optimists are generally happier people.

These findings are very much in tune with the wisdom teachings, saying that good living is a result of acts of good will. They give you satisfaction and at the same time you learn to become less selfish. You might like to read the Good Will in Action on the Value of Service (PDF) or the post on The Future of Volunteer Work.

Children in India

Yesterday a friend from another country informed that he had to withdraw from the presidency of a voluntary aid organisation, which is doing substantial good-will activities for people in difficult social conditions, especially immigrants. I was fascinated by the way they had been doing a great scope of service activities since I came to know about the project some years ago.

The organisation had been created 10 years ago and grown quite a lot since. The founding members, however, who had been committed to the project in the beginning, had dispersed with the time. He had now been the only one who had remained for running the management of the organisation, with several helpers in the activities.

He told me some months ago that it was increasingly difficult for him to keep on running the activities. He wrote now he had tried to cope with all the deficits, to do the work that nobody else wanted to do, but had reached his limits: “We all have had other things more important to do or we have found some reason to avoid it.”

Burnout – even with a lot of good will you have to see and respect the limits of ones forces. Sometimes, however, a phoenix might come out of the ashes.

The news touched me, for I felt how much my friend had been committed to the work and the pain of his decision. It needs courage to say no, when a certain limit is reached, even with a good cause. And even if one work disintegrates or collapses, there is the hope that other people take up the challenge or start something new. You should never fall into the trap of thinking that you are indispensable or that a good activity which exists now will go on forever.

See also the blogpost on “Burnout or Burning” with some thought about compassion fatigue, your the beautiful little booklet by K. Parvathi Kumar”On Change“.

A new tree growing out of the stump of a cut tree.

Following today news-posts on the Climate Savers Computing initiative, which brings together industry, consumers and conservation organizations to significantly increase the energy efficiency of computers and servers (Intel, Google, Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, WWF and many others have joined it by now), I came across a website called Things Are Good: good news.

They are trying to inspire change by celebrating all the good in our world. They started the site to bring the attention to news that benefits people – that encourages people: “Negative news is easy to find, we aim to make positive news easy to find. Don’t stop reading those other news sources, just remember not to get bogged down by them.”

Anybody can write for ThingsAreGood. You have to register here and you can publish with a web text editor: ” What’s good? Anything that looks at the news with a positive spin and doesn’t contract our list of categories. Here’s the full list: Direct Action / Energy / Environment / Equality / Freedom / Fun / Health / International Events / Mind Space / Peace / Random Act of Good / Spin da News / Technology / Tolerance / Transportation.

So if you want to read some inspiring news or get active yourself, have a look at the site.

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.