An Indian friend sent me today a beautiful powerpoint presentation (here as a PDF) about faith, from a text of Loren Cunningham. It is about a French acrobat , Charles Blondin (1824-1897), who crossed the Niagara Falls several times on a tightrope, with a wheelbarrow, blindfold, in a sack etc. Fascinating pictures of the Niagara Falls. The presentations compared the feat of Blondin with the firm faith in God, not faltering at any step. A good parable.

Charles Blondin, carrying his manager over the Niagara Falls (copyright expired)

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I went for our Sunday afternoon walk to a forest directly north of the city of Berne, the Bremgartenwald. She wanted to see the Glasbrunnen, a source in the midst of the forest said to be a power-spot. First I was a bit skeptical, for the ring highway goes along the forest and I also expected lots of city people going for a walk there.

Stone cat near the forester’s station

However, after having crossed the highway bridge the sounds of the cars soon faded away. We passed along a “duck pond” full of duck weeds, but without any ducks around (only a heron).

We crossed another parking for the larger part of the forest. At the entrance there was a signpost telling that this forest is now also a “peace forest”, a “Friedwald“: There is an initiative to create places in forests, where the authorities permit that you place the ashes from cremations. The foresters reserve part of the forest, and when you want they mark a tree for you where you can have a tree of your own to bury the ashes and have a memorial place. They guarantee that the place will be kept intact for several decades.

A very good idea, though not cheap, but they use the money for the forests. There are now 60 peace forests in Switzerland. Friends of mine had just buried the ashes of their father just in a “normal” forest, in an early morning ceremony…

On the way to the Glasbrunnen we saw people with bottles or jerrycans coming from the source. And the folks I had expected: Joggers or Nordic-walkers running with strained faces, i-pods in the ears to close out the silence of the forest. And cyclists on racing bikes, eyes straight ahead – using the forest as a substitute for a racetrack: “Sport is good for your health, sport is good for your health, sport…”

The source itself is located in a little vale with a brook running through. Children were playing at the creek and dogs were having a bath in the water trough, but jumped out when we came. There was a magic spell around the place, with the high trees and the murmuring well. Someone had put flowers over the spout, like from a little water ceremony:

We drank some water, it tasted very fresh and soft. We sat on a bench for a short meditation. The evening sun sprinkled spots of light through the trees, and sometimes there were steps from people filling their bottles with living water.

Some days ago a friend sent me the link to a German website named “Seniors’ Circle Active” (this way) about different topics concerning nature, art, culture, with the motto: “Who changes, remains”. The site is a bit aphoristically arranged, but there are beautiful photos and finds, for example about spirals: Spirals a a basic principle of nature, and a picture shows how the clockwise and anti-clockwise spiral together have a heart form in the middle: “The universal principle of movement ends in the form of the heart”.

So you find spirals in the forms of the DNA as well as in flowers, shells, fingerprints, water vortexes, tornadoes, galaxies (whirlpool galaxies. There is a link to the Phyllotaxis-website “An interactive Site for the Mathematical Study of Plant Pattern Formation”, with a lot of photos of spirals from the plant kingdom. There you also find an applet for the exploration of all possible spiral lattices and their organization.

The spiral is the symbol of time, of Kronos-Saturn, who limits us with the downward spiral when we go deeper and deeper into matter, and the upward spiral on the path of light, leading to ever lagers rounds until we get out of the binding circumscriptions.

Corinth, Greece: Symbol of the Divine Man in the centre of the spirals extending from the centre to the circumference, with a ring of waves – symbolic of the ethers of space – around the centre.

Some days ago I came across the site dotsub.com, where you can add sub-titles to videos. I found there a beautiful animated film, “L’homme qui plantait des arbres” (The man who planted trees), based on the short story of Jean Giono from 1953 and produced by the Société Radio Canada in 1987. It is now a public-domain film and short story. The film is in French with sub-titles in many languages, also in English.

It is the story about a shepherd who planted over many years, between World War 1 and 2 trees in a remote region of France and thus transformed the whole area. I read it about 20 years ago and like it very much. Though it is a fictional story, the message had a great impact. and there are many who feel inspired by it, like the UNEP Campaign to plant a billion trees.

Scientists from 79 countries have just published the first geological map of the world, onegeology.org: “Making Geological Map Data for the Earth Accessible”. (The technology still has some difficulties and the application doesn’t support the latest Firefux 3, only 2 and IE 6 and 7).

The site will officially be presented tomorrow in Oslo at the 33rd International Geological Congress. It is the first online map of this kind, and it is the biggest geological mapping project with data from more than 15’000 geo-scientists. They hope more will join, for the countries involved cover about 70% of earth’s surface, but from many countries the information isn’t easily accessible and of the latest quality.

The information they want to provide isn’t visible from space like those pictures Google Maps shows, but of the different kinds of stones or the shiftings in the crust of the earth. Especially in these times of climate changes a sound knowledge of greater interrelationship is highly needed. So the map should help preventing risks like floods or landslides and easily transfer the knowledge to those who need it.

One Geology shows the earth without any political boundaries, like one earth, for geology doesn’t know boundaries. So it helps gaining an understanding of the greater whole.

It would be very interesting if one day a map could be created  not of the stone structures, but of the major field or levels of consciousness. It could be measured by the kind of content published on the web, for these reflect the mental activites though not of all, but of great groups of human beings. So the map could show how many sites show content belonging to the lower strata of attention (of the physical and emotional realm, like sexual or criminal activities), of the different kinds of entertainment and daydreaming, of the activities driven by possessive instincts of gaining money and power, of humanitarian commitment and of selfless intelligent services for the upliftment of humanity. It would be quite a multi-coloured map of the consciousness of the world.

A view of the world created by NASA photos ©.

A map of central Europe with the major geological formations, by One Geology ©.

The US Space agency NASA is celebrating on July 29th its 50th birthday. They are going to launch a website with a tremendous archive about millions of pictures, videos and sound documents. Though it is planned to launch the site  nasaimages.org  officially next days, it is already online. They want to merge 21 collections, which up to now had been dispersed, into this one archive. Have a look at this fantastic site.

Cassiopeia A: Remnants of a supernova. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause (Steward Observatory)

In the evening of Cancer Full moon we wanted to have a pizza in some village not far from the camping. We came to Pals. Though we didn’t find any pizzeria there (later in another village…), but the place turned out to be a beautiful medieval town. Here are some evening impressions.

Small passages leading up to the church

Tower of the fortress

The bell tower of the church

A lamp in front of the church waiting to be lit

View from the churchyard over the countryside

Tourists shopping

Tintin waiting for the start of his rocket

Angel dreaming in a shop window

The holidays are past now and a first turbulent week nearly through. A theme of the first days in Spain with the family seemed to be “volcanic”. The first days I dived into a fascinating fantasy novel of the children, “Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony“, by Eoin Colfer, with sequences about a subterranean island, from where sometimes demons escaped through a volcano tunnel up to the earth.

Then we visited friends in the Olot, a city in northern Spain, surrounded by extinct volcanoes. We first went on a volcano located within the city and later into a volcano which was cut open, since it was used for a while as a stone pit. You can see the different strata of volcanic ashes – a scene kindling the imagination – the whole area full of extinct explosive matter, where in some far future the earth might erupt again.

My friend gave me a “bomba volcanica”, a volcanic bomb – a piece of stone like a pastry with folded corners once pressed out of the inner of the earth, a witness of some telluric catastrophy.

In the evening of this visit we had a talk about some other kind of volcanic activities: Two of our friends have gone through deep psychic crises and are now stabilizing their situation with psychotropic drugs. There is still an inner fire under the surface, from where “demons” might make their way through the pipe up into the outer life. You can somehow feel the echoes of the subterranean fires of karmic effects of the past.

Other “volcanic activities” we can observe where painful experiences of the past slumbering can violently come up with an emotional fierceness not explicable from the present situation. We are living in a volcanic world sometimes sitting on hot-spots without knowing.

An old chimney in the city of Olot, Spain.

Not far from our home there is a beautiful site where the river Aar runs fast, but for a while without much turbulences. The water was turquoise-blue and great for swimming. Yesterday the river had 16° C, and today it was 18.5°. There is a public swimming pool with much warmer water, but the water in a pool is stagnant and without the vital force a flower water has. It feels like dead. The eastern wisdom teachings know this since long, but here people usually don’t have an understanding of the energetic background.

I had two short swims yesterday, the cold made me breathe fast, so I didn’t go in for a longer time. But today it was great, very refreshing. I walked up the river for about 500m and then went in. You have to do some quick strokes to get into the middle of the river, and there you can let yourself carry forward by the stream. You only have to see that you stay in the flow.

There is a lot of pranic energy around, I always feel in the river that all tensions in the body are quickly washed away. The prana force of the sun adds to this, if it is not too strong. Many waters are polluted and you can’t dare swimming in them, so it is a good chance that here is a river where the quality of water is still good. Though the airport isn’t far away and starting jets make some noise from time to time, the nature now is abundant and I hope that the weather will stay well – some minutes ago there were dark violet clouds and thunder and lightning.

Swimming in the river Aar in Berne City, not far from the Federal Government

The river Aar in Muri, near our home, at another time of the year.

A friend sent me an e-mail with photos from Dubai about the architectural gigantomania. I found them also on the web. I saw a bit of it from the plane at two stop-overs on the way to India in January 08. Have a look at the pictures, it is really impressive what they do with investing all the petro-dollars – in view of the high gas prices (see the very interesting statistics from CNN), or with some illustrations, as I got it via e-mail.

Inside Dubai Airport, January 08