Two days ago I read a comment in the NZZ-journal: Journalists are eagerly writing with the crisis about Iran – which is refusing control over their nuclear plant programs – that the international community should make a stand against it. However there is no such entity as the international community. There are the members of the UN Security Council, mainly the victors of World War, or the European Community on the one side. And on the other there are a lot of countries who are not against Iran’s programs, and others are indifferent. You see many different positions and opinions. The “international community” is a fiction.
The human brain is creating illusions, where we see classifications, which don’t exist. Not only the “international community” is an abstraction. We keep on blinding ourselves with self-made definitions, about who is an enemy or how can I make best profit out of a situation. Overcoming viewpoints helps us to see the reality.

Last sunday we had been in the Bernese alps at the Aare Gorge, where the river has cut a deep gorge into the rocks for about 1600 meters. The waters coming from the high mountains of the Grimsel massif are powerfully pressing through the narrow passage, while high rocks are covering the crevice.
It reminds of times in life, where you are moving like through a gorge, with high rocks on either side and just a small way through. Situations are pressing with a high energy and it is most important to be alert so as not to get drowned by the events. During these times there is danger of losing oneself in the turbulences. Therefore it is good to train oneself to keep the inner link with the soul.

A private situation had caused quite some activities during the last weeks – clarifications, talks, reflections. At the end it turned out that the whole activity had developed on wrong assumptions and had been “for nothing”.
Wrong assumptions or wrong hopes, caused by subtle expectations can very easily land you in a bubble of illusions. When the bubble burst, I was first irritated. Some family talks showed the different perspectives of the situation, but since some central aspects weren’t on the hand, the mental “castle in the air” could undergo its cycle of construction and dissolution.
It seemed to me examplary to many activities we are entertaining in life, keeping us busy and in tension with illusionary ideas. In Eastern wisdom the whole creation is seen as being based on the illusion of the many parts, letting us forget the truth of the whole. This does not mean that the individual item is unreal, but when you come to experience the underlying truth, you awake from the frantic pace of the “dreamwork” activity.

At the moment I observe a lot of planning and preparing going on around. We are just preparing the coming holidays. Every evening my eldest son is out, planning with colleagues the local scouts’ summer camp. In my office I’m planning the revision of our intranet. Yesterday I studied an architect’s plan for a house, with so many details for the realisation. Some more plans are under way and have to be attended to. Every morning there is a subtle plan of how the day will evolve. If I listen to it, I better understand what is “in the air”.
Normally at the moment of planning the project planned is still invisible in the outer, but there is al lot of mental activity going on, concretising the details and preparing the way. It is such an important work, for if there are mistakes, the whole will work out wrongly. The mistakes may seem to be little, but the effect can be tremendous – and it might condition you for a long time. I saw this with some decisions made with the intranet realised some years ago, which are conditioning different forms of workflow. In the Eastern wisdom teaching it says that even the creator was not happy with his first creation and decided for a new one. What to say about the plan for our lives? If you observe, you may realise that there there are bigger plans and master-plans. Listen to them is important in spirituality (here you find more about it).
Before the plan comes about, there is a seed impulse, an idea. Often it is there slumbering in the soil for long before it starts sprouting. The resulting manifestation is only for an untrained eye something new – there are causes and effects going long back into the past. It is of utmost importance to observe the sprouting and discriminate between seeds and weeds. Or would you like to start again and again, when something goes into the wrong direction?

Yesterday evening I read in a lecture by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya on Advanced Astrology (Spiritual Astrology), given in Munich 1981, about the evolution of consciousness. We are living in different layers of consciousness. In the animal kingdom, a dog for example is conscious of his environment or his master, but not of himself. In the human kingdom through eons of time self-consciousness has developed. This means, we have the possibility to be conscious of ourselves, of our soul existence. But mostly we are not.
All these routine activities we are going through every day – eating, drinking, running to office and doing all these activities we are normally doing are just a mechanical activity of our intelligence, in which we need not be present fully. Even though we are awake, a part of ourselves is just drowsy. How well I know this kind of drowsyness. Only at certain corners where I have to pay attention there is more awareness.
The spiritual layer of consciousness becomes awake through meditative work, and sometimes we can experience it also in our daily routine, when we do things with more awareness. My experience is that it is a continuous striving and practicing to live in that consciousness and not to sleep away into the half-conscious state of day-to-day routine living.
Routine is such a strong thing. If I try overcoming it, it catches again hold of me in the next moment. Well – consciousness is growing slower than grass, is a saying of Master Morya. So patience is the key, patience and keeping up with the practice.

Yesterday evening we were intensely discussing a family project, going into different details, when my eldest son said: “You can’t sell the skin of a bear which isn’t yet shot.” (No, we weren’t talking about Bruno the Bear who just was shot in Bavaria and against the killing of it Italy wants to go to an EU-court in Brussels, as the news reported yesterday…) It seemed me to be in a symbolic sense a statement about how to deal with speech, not only in regard to the family project – about which I won’t speak 😉
When you speak or write about something, there is often this question of what to say when and how. It is a subject I am very much confronted with – not only when writing in the blog, but also at the office, where I’m responsible for the electronic communication, or in different volunteer works in the context of our group work.
It is of utmost importance to discriminate what and how something can be said and with which words. I very often come into contact with different forms of misunderstanding arising out of what was said, what was heard and what was the resultant. Most conflicts arise out of the dealing with speech, with the word.
In India the word is even considered as a deity, Saraswathi, the goddess of wisdom, and there is the Sanskrit saying, “Satyam bruyat, priyam bruyat” – speak the truth, speak the truth softly. Mastering the right use of the word is indeed a great skill of wisdom.

Since some years I am doing a free distribution of English books of Dr. Kumar and Dr. Krishnamacharya, in order to facilitate access to these wisdom teachings, which fascinate me very much. So I get into a contact with spiritual seekers from all over the world.
With some of these contacts I get the impression that the person is trying to intellectually approach the wisdom teachings. Of course wisdom can be approached via concepts, they help to get an understanding, but wisdom itself is a living experience and thus is beyond.
I myself tried over many years to get into deeper layers of wisdom by devouring books. It remained a mental ballast, which I started throwing over board some years ago (there are still quite a lot of containers left…).
I feel with some people how they get trapped into the cage of concepts. Concepts are a cage preventing experience. Wether you are in a golden or an iron cage, it remains a cage. It is absolutely necessary to overcome this trap of concepts and intellectuality – not by denying mind, but by letting it go. Aquarian meditation is going beyond concepts. With practice you learn to stay above concepts even when handling them. You feel free while being surrounded by them.
It seems these thoughts come because we are just in the month of Gemini, the mental sign. The airy Gemini energy is so lively with mental concepts, but new impulses rush in, even before the mind realises what has happened.

Back from warm Samos to cold Switzerland. We had been for a week on the Greek island in the Eastern Mediterranean for a seminar by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar on the wisdom of Pythagoras in the light of Eastern wisdom. It was a fascinating meeting with about 160 participants from North and South America and different European countries.
Pythagoras was born on this island, though he had been most of his life wandering in the East for deepening his knowledge. On the northern side of the island we had been visiting and meditating in the caves, where Pythagoras had lived for a while. On the southern side, a village is now bearing his name, and there is a statue of the famous mathematician-initiate in the harbour of Pythagorion, covered with mathematical and occult symbols from his teachings. We had a beautiful evening meditation with the group around the statue.
I’m now typing my seminar notes, some people told me they were interested in getting a copy…

Yesterday morning we had our little monthly English study circle after morning meditation. We are reading a booklet by Dr. Krishnamacharya and speak about it in English. It is an interesting text and the group members thus gain a better understanding of the language.
Later I had a correspondence with the Russian translator of books of the same author, and the correspondence again was of course English. The author’s mother tongue is Telugu, but he decided to write his works in English. Likewise I decided to do this weblog in English, though it is not my mother tongue. I often have correspondence with people of the Spanish speaking world, and since I don’t speak Spanish, we do it often in English. Here in Switzerland there are intense discussions going on about an earlier introduction of English into the school system, besides the other main national language, French or German. The last hundred years English has become the language of communication between many people in the world.
Dr. Krishnamacharya said that English was chosen by Spiritual Hierarchy as the language of the wisdom teachings, and no longer Sanskrit, to give access to the people. There was a deep inner meaning behind the outwardly aggressive colonialisation policy of the British Empire, laying the ground for this evolution. I don’t see it as a cultural colonisalisation through one language, but as a quality of time by which mankind is getting into a closer relation with each other. There are endeavours to create special top level domain language encodings on the web for non-Latin signs, like Arab, Japanese or Chinese. National languages, dialects and encodings will remain, but the need for a common means of communication is getting more and more a necessity of an interchanging world. In the subtle planes, before a word expresses in language, there is the first impulse sprouting forth, concretising as an idea and then clothing into a thought. In these three stages language as we know in the expressed form does not exist, though differenciation slowly comes in. It is only with the outer manifestation of the spoken word that there is this incredible “Babylon” of languages and cultural encodings gets predominent. Having a means of maintaining a unity of a language within this world of multifold differenciation is an invaluable means for the growing inter-connectedness of our world, until man again ascends to a non-verbal communication on the subtler planes of silence.

A friend from Geneva forwarded me this nice story of an unknown author about gratefulness.

A Full Glass of Milk

“One day, a poor boy who was selling goods from door to door to pay for his hungry stomach, decided he would ask for a meal at the next house. On the way through school, he found he had only one thin dime left and he was very hungry. However, he lost his nerve when a lovely young woman opened the door. Instead of a meal he asked for a drink of water. The woman thought he looked hungry, so brought him a large glass of milk. He drank it slowly, and then asked, “How much do I owe you?” “You don’t owe me anything,” she replied. “Mother has taught us, never to accept pay for a kindness.” He said…”Then I thank you from my heart.”
Year’s later that young woman became critically ill. The local doctors were baffled. They finally sent her to the big city, where they called in specialists to study her rare disease. Dr. Howard Kelly was called in for the consultation.
When he heard the name of the town she came from, a strange light filled his eyes. Immediately he rose and went down the hall of the hospital to her room. Dressed in his doctor’s gown he went in to see her. He recognized her at once. He went back to the consultation room determined to do his best to save her life. From that day he gave special attention to the case.
After a long struggle, the battle was won. Dr. Kelly requested the business office to pass the final bill to him for approval. He looked at it, then wrote something on the edge and the bill was sent to her room. The woman feared opening it, for she was sure it would take the rest of her life to pay for it all. Finally she looked, and something caught her attention on the side of the bill. She read these words…”Paid in full with one glass of milk.” Signed, Dr. Howard Kelly.
Tears of joy flooded her eyes as her happy heart prayed: Thank You, God, that Your love has spread abroad through human hearts and hands.”