Yesterday we were reconnoitering a spot for the Pentecost scouts’ camp of our son. They got the o.k. from a farmer to do the camp on a beautiful place called Angel’s meadow, in a forest on a hill. Since they wanted to place the kitchen tent in the forest to protect it from bad weather, they had asked the local authority to whom the forest belongs. The map showed stripes of about 10-15 m width going through the forest, and each stripe belongs to another owner. The owner of the nearest stripe refused the kitchen tent, the second allowed it. Now we had to see where there was a convenient spot. In the thick forest you just discover here and there a plug – and finally, wet from the rain, we located a spot for the tent. You think you are in nature, but is is full of mentally fixed divisions.

The same theme in a different setting:

When I was yesterday deleting old e-mails, I re-found a link about a website on Indo-European languages, which an Indian friend had sent me some months ago (fascinating how this big language group of several hundred languages has similar roots – the wisdom teachings trace the origins far more back than contemporary science).

The author of the site is a 25 year old American lady, Jennifer, who is an English Language Assistant near Annecy, France. In her blog she mentioned that she was just about to leave, because she was jobless at the moment, wasn’t allowed to work, since she didn’t have the permission, and that (yesterday) she would return back to the States. Permissions fix barriers, something so common, that we don’t even think about it and take these mental conceptions for natural.

I dropped her a note in a post. I was astonished about the parallels between her situation and that of a friend in the US. Her situation is reversed to that of Jennifer, and she also left a comment in Jennifers blog. She is studying Linguistics and Creative Writing and working as an assistant at the University of St. Cloud (and she had been helping for a while translating the Lunar Messenger). She might have to leave the US because of having just a student permission. Again mentally fixed barriers of the legal regulations.

There is so much regulation in every part of life that you forget that life as a whole is a unity, that our concrete mind is crystalising and segmenting. On the spiritual path you learn to come out of this fragmentation and at the same time live in it and learn to handle it in an intelligent way, changing thus ways of behaving.

The concrete mind – a storehouse of knowledge, of analysing and dividing

In the last times I witnessed a few cases where friends came into a burnout. Certain patterns seemed me to be similar: Over a long time there had been quite a commitment to a voluntary activity. With the time the work load had increased, and they felt responsible for running the activity they were committed to, and also for the general situation around the activity. Were there signs of a “helper syndrome”? Difficulties were overcome with enthusiasm, which, with the time, mixed with frustration and exhaustion. Suddenly they drew back from their commitment and the related contacts. I suppose, followed by a crisis. A case of compassion fatigue?

There is an underlying structure: A pendulum in motion swings from one side to the other. An over-activity leads in the long run to an under-activity. Only an inner equilibrium can also create an outer balance. In the wisdom teachings, such as those of Pythagoras, the over-activity is called an acute angle:

the under-activity an obtuse angle: and the well-balanced activity a right angle: When you are in the acute angle, you tend to overdo things, even with a good motive. Aggression, haste, nervousness cause a state of tension. When you are in the obtuse angle, you tend to be late in doing things, being slow in understanding and acting or reacting. Both angles are counter-acting. In the right angle, you find the middle path of an adequate reaction. In order to be balanced in a stable way, you need to be well aligned vertically, meaning in a stable connection with your inner, the soul or the higher self, and active horizontally, into the world. In the sign of the equilateral cross you see four right angles, having a stable stand in the world:In this position you are unlikely to fall victim, even of a burnout. A burnout means that before you have burnt. The burning fire is the symbol of life force. At Easter they use to burn fires as a sign of new life coming with spring, or with the resurrection. The following picture of a fire ritual is a beautiful illustration of the fully burning vital force.

This blog-post has been translated into Spanish, together with some other posts of this series.

The last days I had several experiences in e-mail conversations where the first impression I got from a situation modified with further clarification. My impulse to react on the first impression was not wrong, but only showed a partial aspect. The answers I got enlarged the picture and made me put things into another order or context.

I cannot go into details because of the nature of the topics, just in one case where I wrote a blogpost on “A Case of Spiritual Confusion“.

Yesterday the person “skyped” me again, and when talking to him he turned out to be a seeker who had had some times ago certain psychic experiences and who is on the way of working out his path. He thought of himself as an advanced person, after 5 years of search, though it seemed to me it was still in its infancy. He reminded me of my erroneous searching some 20, 30 years ago. I still feel myself very much a beginner, having to learn a lot.
He was quite open, reflective and trying to overcome traditional ideologies through his own way of understanding. These are promising qualities with the potential of a good growth.

Barbed wires in the head are blocking new ways of thinking. Figure on the hoarding for the renovation of the Swiss Federal House.

When I’m looking at the statistics of the good-will website, I’m always astonished that the most frequented pages are those of the background images or wallpapers.

I’d put them in just for fun – but it seems that changing the desktop background is quite a favorite pastime of many. Today I came across a site with beautiful free wallpapers, where you find hundreds of motives from nature:

In spirituality the word “background” denotes what is at the background of our being – the pure existence, which continues to be there, whether we are awake, dream or sleep. Without this background you wouldn’t be back next morning to get up. You can’t call that a “wallpaper” – it’s not only the wall, but the space into which the wall is built…

Someone must have subscribed me (it wasn’t me) to a newsletter called The Soul Journey, which is published bi-weekly by the Canadian Andrew Schneider. He is an ex-Roman Catholic monk and author of different esoteric books.

Since he receives our Lunar Messenger, I didn’t unsubscribe, and normally have a quick look through the texts, which contain thoughts about different spiritual topics with questions to ponder upon. Here is the beginning of his latest newsletter which just arrived: “The Soul Journey – On Our Teachers”.

“Everyone we meet – strangers too – bring us a particular gift. They do not carry it in their hands, but emanate it from the core of their identity or from the peculiarities of their personality. Their gift is a teaching. Everyone can be our teacher if we are willing to learn.

Because we observe and experience others through our own psyche and soul we filter what we see through our own unconscious identity. Therefore every time we make an observation about someone, positive or negative, we are revealing something about ourselves. And since we are revealing something about our unconscious selves, everyone tells us something that we would be wise to pay attention to. …”

As Heise.de reported yesterday, Bloggers have found out that Google Maps can give pictures in a much higher resolution than available with normal zooming: You zoom to a place, take the URL saying “Link to this page” into the address field of your browser. There is a parameter with which you can direct the zoom, which normally only gets to 19, to much higher values. So if you put in a higher value, you can zoom in much more – though not at all places. Here is a picture of a place somewhere in Africa with the zoom factor of 23, where you can even see the face of people looking upward, as if seeing the satellite observing. Here you have more sites with photos from space. So be careful when you are outside lying naked in the sun at a lonely beach – they might be watching you.

This zooming to places somewhere on earth reminds of what you can do with visualisation and the power of imagination. You can read more about it in the book extract on “Intuition” from the book “Saraswathi – The Word“, by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar.

A friend sent me today a link to a YouTube-video about change of lighthouse crews, with the words:

“On those days when you think you’ve hit every roadblock possible, or you think the hurdles to get the service activity done seem insurmountable, think of the lighthouse crew.”

The scene is not just a video-clip, but is full of deep spiritual symbolism: The waves represent the turbulences of outer life, the ocean the totality of the background existence. The boat can be seen as the man who is steering his way through the waves. The lighthouse is a symbol of the higher self, the soul, giving illumination. There is a gap between the boat and the lighthouse, which is bridged by a rope, via which the crew ascends and descends. It says that between the personality and the soul, resp. between the higher and the lower mind there is a gap, which has to be bridged on the spiritual path. Read more about this in the Lunar Messenger on “Building the Bridge“.

So contemplating on a situation may give you a deeper understanding than just watching the outer scenes

We yesterday returned from a one week stay at my natal family in Germany. Three days ago my father, who had just read the new issue of the Lunar Messenger, said to me: “My mother would have said: ‘Just words’. I don’t really understand what this is about.”
I told him, “When you read a journal for specialists, like this technical journal, you also might not understand it.” Nevertheless he wants to continue reading the Lunar Messenger.

We can accept and understand what is compatible with our comprehension. It is my experience with the wisdom teachings that subtle aspects sometimes reveal their deeper dimensions only after long times of pondering, after years of spiritual practice. Many who are reading these teachings just remain casual readers – interested, but not working with them. The teachings remain abstract and theoretical, when you don’t work to integrate the basics into your life. Intuitively we might reject them, not because there is something wrong with them, but because the soil in us is not ready to receive.

I yesterday read in the Swiss Coop Consumer magazine – which is publishing besides theirs ads some contents of general interest to attract the attention of consumers – an article about the restauration of the papyrus of the Gospel of Judas (for details see the National Geographics article). In five years of a crazy detail work Florence Dabre and others have restored 66 pages of the old codex dating back to the 3th or 4th century a.d. which was about to decay. Part of it is now in the Bodmer Foundation near Geneva, where many original manuscripts are kept.

According to the canonical Gospels, Judas betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities, who then turned him over to the Roman authorities by whom he was crucified. This newly discovered Gospel portrays Judas as acting at Jesus’ request when he hands Jesus over to the authorities. Wikipedia says: “Like many Gnostic works, the Gospel of Judas claims to be a secret account, specifically ‘the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot’.” And: “The Gospel of Judas describes Judas as being the favourite disciple of Jesus, just as the Gospel of Mary describes Mary as the favourite disciple, the Gospel of Thomas describes Thomas as the favourite disciple, and as the Gospel of John describes its author as the Beloved Disciple.”

This discussion reminds of the feeling of most of the jealous religious believers that their belief is the best and only right one and the others are wrong – an attitude which has to be overcome on the spiritual path. When seeing things from a synthetic point of view, you can discern what is right for you and respect what is right for the others without judging what is wrong and right. And you accept a multitude of different points of view as the many facets of the one reality.

For yesterday’s birthday my team gave me as a gift the new book in German language about “Jakob Kellenberger – Diplomat and ICRC-President“, by Hansjörg Erni. It is written in interview form and gives an insight into the life and work of this outstanding personality in the service of humanitarian work at the International Committee of the Red Cross.When I opened the book this morning just casually, a sentence jumped into my eyes, about why he had studied literature: “A study of literature also teaches to take words very serious, because you gain insight into the portentious significance of words and into the associations they awaken. You learn to be very careful when dealing with language. This was later also of benefit for me in negotiations. Many conflicts and much suffering could be avoided if people whould take more serious the language, which influences also our perception and our feelings.”

On the path of spirituality, this power of the word is something you have to learn.