Today I got an e-mail from an Indian friend with a link to a scientific study on the effect of fire rituals: “Environmental Impacts of Homam – a Case Study (at Sridevi Veda Vidyalayamu, Srisailam)”, presented by Narayana Rao. M et al. at the “2012 International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology IPCBEE” (vol.30, 2012, © 2012 IACSIT Press, Singapore). Dr. M.NARAYANA RAO (Emeritus Professor,JNT University. Hyderabad A P, Camp Bangalore, India) gave me the kind permission to quote and link it here.

I was particularly interested, since my spiritual teacher, Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar, regularly conducts fire rituals and also has published a book on it – Agni. The Symbolism and the Ritual of Fire. I had previously read about effects of the ritual called Agnihotra or Homa in India, and since 13 years I do a short version once in a week. And in January 2007 I had the good chance of visiting the very sacred place of Srisailam, where the study had been done. Here is an extract of the study:

Experimental studies show that the incidence of physical ailments, sickness and disease are reduced in the houses, where the Yajna (Agnihotra) is regularly performed because it creates a pure, nutritional and medicinal atmosphere. It renews the brain cells, revitalizes the skin, purifies blood and prevents growth of pathogenic organisms. Agnihotra is basically a healing process. ‘Heal the atmosphere and the healed atmosphere will heal you’- is the Modus Operandi. Purification of environment through the constituent electrons of the substances fumigated in the Yajna is an obvious effect of this process. The observation of some distinguished scientists is note worthy in this regard. Sugars present in Havishya have great power to purify the atmosphere. It kills the germs of T.B., measles, smallpox and cow-pox, remarks….

Based on the research of the authors, and the scientific evidences found during experimental field studies conducted at Sri Devi Veda Vidyalamu, Srisailam, during Chandi Homam, the following conclusions can be drawn
• Homa was found to be one of the most economical means of purifying environmental pollution.
• Global effects such as patching up of ozone hole, removal of harmful radiation and radioactivity are proved by scientists round the world.
• The experimental studies conducted at Sridevi Veda Vidyalayamu clearly showed that the emissions during homam are not only non toxic but are beneficial to the environment.
• The ash collected from the bottom showed manorial value and therefore agnihotra farms were developed in some countries.
• The ash has also exhibited medicinal values.
• Zinc Oxide present in the particulate emissions in our experiments has a curative effect on skin diseases. Zinc oxide offers excellent protection against Ultra Violet Radiations (A and B).
• While Lead (Pb) is found to be within permissible limits, Manganese (Mn) is found to be slightly in excess of permissible limits prescribed by Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). This is good because of the health benefits of Mn.
• Manganese ensures healthy bone structure, bone metabolism, helping in building essential enzymes for building bones. It acts as a coenzyme to assist metabolic progression in the human body. Apart from these, there are other health benefits of manganese actively involved in forming connective tissues, absorption of calcium, proper functioning of thyroid, sex hormones, regulating blood sugar level, and metabolism of fats and carbohydrates. Manganese is very important for normal functioning of the brain and nerve areas of our body.

Fire ritual by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar at the WTT-Centre Rajahmundry, 24 January 2013

Three days ago I got a Skype-chat message from a German friend:

“Morning Ludger, yesterday I wanted to go to your Good Will webseite – but I don’t find it anymore at Google. Are you just rearranging something?”

“No, not at all, I see the page totally normal – oops, I see that Google doesn’t show it anymore. I don’t know what to do, I’ll try to check it… ” And some minutes later:  “I really have no idea what to do. You only find just the URL good-will.ch, but no other hints. Google seems to block the site! I checked a big spam-filter page, the site is clean.”

A feverish search started. I went to Google Webmaster tools, reconfirmed my site, checked. Being just an “interested layman” in webmaster affairs, more questions popped up than answers. I did tests, contacted friends, the provider, read online articles … … … It slowly dawned to me that the “Google Death Penalty” had hit the Good-Will website. Silently, not knowing when – I didn’t do any “ego-googling” for a long time, so I didn’t know when Google had taken the site off their search index.

Did the “Google Death Penalty” happen the 8th of February? (Graphic: Google Webmaster Tool, good-will.ch)

This means: No search of any topics relating to the Good-Will site is any longer shown in the search results (I still found some minor text hints on 4th and 12th sub-pages of Google’s search…). With all the topics where the site was best placed in the past, now there was  void. Other sites quoting texts of the site appeared, but never the original site… I became alarmed increasingly.

Searching the site of the Circle of Good-Will – other pages appear, at the first place our Facebook page, at least. (Graphic: Google site search)

The next day I contacted a good friend with web know-how. Together we increased the search for possible causes till late in the night. No clear results. We didn’t find anything wrong with the technical part of the Good-Will website, Google was scrawling the site, reported that no malware was found… I asked my youngest son, who had built the site when he was 16, what could be the cause. He wanted to think it over.

Yesterday evening he came and told me that on the home page he had placed some text describing the site in the same colour than the background, so that search engines who don’t pay attention to the header texts are informed (since the home is just a distribution page for the language versions without further text). This, however, is forbidden by Google. Did they find it and therefore blocked the site? My son immediately removed the text.

In the night I wrote a reconsideration request to Google explaining them what could have been the reason and that I’m not aware of any other possible violation of their rules. There was a reply this morning that the

This morning I saw a reply in the webmaster-tools that they will check the request but that it might take a few weeks.

During that time the Good-Will website is probably in the “digital limbo”. And if they don’t tell what has been the reason for their “digital death sentence”, the pralaya could continue… Google writes: “If it’s been several weeks since you submitted your reconsideration request, and you haven’t seen any changes in your site’s performance, this probably means that your site is still in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines, or it simply is not ranking as well as you’d like.”

No, not ranking at all I definitely don’t like – meaning that all the people searching for the spiritual wisdom teachings on the site won’t find it for the time being.

Saturday 16 February 13, 12 am: A friend from Abu Dhabi just informed me that the site is on the index again yes, it is Thank you, Google.
Tuesday,  19 February 13: Google wrote in the account of webmaster-tools that they didn’t find anything objectionable when looking at the webspam and that there can be fluctuations in the ranking… All the hints they gave didn’t show what was the reason for stopping the ranking (it wasn’t only bad performance…) Now it’s back to normal.

On this site you can zoom through the cosmos and see our galactic neighbourhood of 100 000 stars from different dimensions. So if you don’t know yet how to beam yourself through the universe or have a powerful starship in your garage, this is a good way to travel around.

Google Maps and NASA have just published a new global view and animation of Earth’s city lights. It is a composite assembled from data acquired by a satellite over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA NGDC. Here are some pics on Mashable, and below a video of the pics. You find more on the NASA site.

A fantastic, light-filled view of our dear home planet’s beauty.

The Black Marbe. Credits: NASA

As a farewell-gift when leaving my job a colleague gave me a book about men over 80 telling about their lives. I’m reading it with fascination as a bedtime book, impressed about the variety and intensity of their paths.

I’m just reading the story of an architect / biologist explaining in a vivid way his experiences and reflections about how machines and electronics are controlling us instead of the other way round. He gives examples of  how we subordinate our thoughts and our will-to-form to the conditions of the computer screen, how the connections of the brain-currents in the nerves are cut off from the movements of the hand with a pencil, how a sensuousness gets lost and loud slogans without much content come at the place of deeper content and quality, which are more inconspicuous and self-evident. The way he describes his experiences as an architect when constructing a landscape park in Zurich show that he is a keen observer, a passionate maker and shaper and isn’t just plunging into a critique of the present.

It made me think of how the electronic media have shaped my life and inter-relations. For the last 12 years I have been professionally active in digital communication and have actively taken part in shaping and developing it in my surroundings, with the development of websites, social media channels, the management of digital documents and media, with newsletters and extensive writing. I am handling a lot of communication and inter-relations with these tools – quantities and kinds of relations which otherwise wouldn’t be possible, especially on a global scale.

However, I note that many of these relations are very abstract, confined to short exchanges – a short “hello”, requests or giving some information and help to people, often in some remote corners of the planet. The keyboard is the main instrument, linked to the PC with its screen. There is little physical interrelation. Even the more concrete interactions via phone or Skype are reducing the interaction to an acoustic or sometimes visual transmission. With some persons I feel the presence of their being, even through these channels; they are like physically here. Mostly it is a thin, vague interaction, not even demanding much attention, probably not even with much impact.

At the same time there is such a flooding of information, seeking attention. The day before yesterday I answered a friend who sent me an article from a German newspaper, telling him: “I sometimes don’t know how to help myself with all the many interesting articles, statements etc. I don’t get around to read them; if I would do so, there wouldn’t be any-more time for the essentials. So I got today this long (“wonderful to read”) article, see enclosed. If you like and have time for it, you can read it…” I felt a bit snippy, answering flooding with flooding: “Similia similibus curentur” – curing by using the simile. Does it really cure or is it a “placebo”?

When I hear someone saying “I don’t have time…” I always hear “I don’t want to give my attention / energy to…” So when someone says, “I don’t have time for visiting / phoning / writing you”, it says, “I can’t give my energy to visiting / phoning / writing you.” It’s ok, attention is a rare  source, and there are enough energy-vampires around, making us feel depleted – the whole rush and pressure of our lifestyle. When I put a “like” or a short comment on Facebook, it’s like a surrogate of communication – showing, that I thought of the other, but at the same time keeping it low-level, non-committal. I seem to be there, but without much of my presence. So there remains a void.

There are so many Facebook birthday posts and mails coming in today – my living room would have be full to accommodate so many “friends”. But there is no-one – and it would be difficult with all the cakes…. E-mails often have a higher intensity, and more so real letters do. But the amount of letters decreases – just one came – and e-mails are more easily to dissolve with a “delete”.

How deep is an impact? I somehow sense whether there is a presence behind and how profound it is. Presence is a strange phenomenon, it has to do with energy. When you feel the touch of the heart, then there is the presence. When there is just a digital whirring, it’s just a mask of the presence. Presence and attention seem to be inter-related. I wonder how I will manage the upcoming flood of Christmas and New Years greetings. I decided to invest some time in phone-calls instead of non-committal copy-paste of “warm regards” or Merry-Christmas-postings. The Christmas-marketing in the city and the media will soon be over again. The flame of inner presence hopefully not.

3 birds “twittering” in our garden this morning

A friend send me this morning a link to an article in the German Spiegel magazine about a new discovery of astronomers of a quasar, being the brightest object discovered in the cosmos.

This quasar by name SDSS J1106+1939 from the sign of Leo sends out annually the matter mass of 400 suns into the cosmos with about 30 million km/h. This matter stream radiates about 100 times more energy than the entire milky-way, and it contains about 2 million million times (2 trillion) more energy than our sun radiates, as will be reported in a research to be published in the next issue of the American “Astrophysical Journal”. It is 5 times higher than the maximum energy discovered before.

This stream has been registered by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Astronomers think that quasars are super mass rich black holes, which normally absorb matter, but also throw out a part of the matter back into the cosmos. The quasar radiates 1000 light years into the surrounding galaxy. You find more articles about this quasar on the web, like this one here.

The time of the discovery of this tremendous source of light seems to be in an interesting synchrony with the upliftment of our system at the present moment.

Below is an illustration by the ESO of this Quasar.

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

We all know that the sky isn’t empty anymore but crowded by planes. And we know that radar surveillance works to conduct that traffic and sometimes a plane comes down unexpectedly. But I was much astonished when I saw the website FlightRadar24, where you can see the life traffic in many parts of the world. You see where a plane started, where it’s about to go and at what height and speed it is travelling.

There is a tremendous traffic going on over Europe – like a swarm of birds, but flying in all kinds of directions.

A print screen from FlightRadar24

On their website they write:

“The technology we use to receive flight information from aircraft is called ADS-B. Roughly 60% of all passenger aircraft around the world are equipped with an ADS-B transponder. However, this percentage will continue to grow….

Flightradar24 is a flight tracking service that provides you with real-time info about thousands of aircraft around the world. Our service is currently available online and for your iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) or Android device plus for your Mac OS computer. Read more about our flight tracking apps….

Flightradar24 started as a hobby project in 2006 when two Swedish aviation geeks decided to build a network of ADS-B receivers in Northern and Central Europe. In 2009 we opened up the network, and made it possible for anyone with an ADS-B receiver to upload data to the network. Many parts of the world were quickly covered, but the quest to provide global ADS-B coverage is still ongoing. Hopefully with your support, we will get there….”

So not all areas of the world are covered – where there are no data fed to the network of FlightRadar24, there is no information.

Real-time flight traffic, data from FlightRadar24 (c)

Yesterday morning after breakfast we started from Banyoles to Girona. We we wanted to meet friends at 11 in the centre of the city, at the Plaza Catalunya. We were some minutes too early, so I took some pictures of the river crossing the centre and the place.

In front of the house

Our friend Mar is a physician and a dentist and her husband Josep a nutritionist. A hearty welcome, and then we went up to see their practice. Mar is doing biological dentistry, her practice is the only one in Girona and she also uses some very modern techniques of pain relief, neuro-therapy. There were not just the elements of a doctor’s practice, but also a number of a bit hidden things of their spiritual work:

Angels playing silent music on the wall. The grand-father of Mar had been a sclupturor making these angels, and Mar’s mother had been painting the sculptures of her father.

Master EK besides the telephone

The hands of Master KPK doing a water ritual besides the dentist’s chair

Ganesha greeting the patients at the reception table – they told me that the trunk of Ganesha pointing to the right symbolises support for spiritual unfoldment, while at most statues the trunk of Ganesha points to the left, symbolising material growth.

On the bookshelves between scientific books some symbols of inner archetypes and the OM

Aswani – the name of the practice Sri Kumar had given, named after the Indian twin-gods and healers, the Aswins. They are represented with horse-heads, symbols of the life force. You discover it in the painting. The whole practice was breathing Aquarian energies of the future. But we were also talking about the impact of the presence, the economic crisis in Spain, which hits many persons here and forces qualified professionals to search for a living abroad. Stories of the drama of an entire country in the clutches of economic recession.

Afterwards we went to their home, which was just around the corner in a nearby street, next to the Savoy hotel. First they showed us the lobby rooms of the hotel, for their house and the hotel are in the locations of an ancient monastery and you still can see the vaults and arcs of the ancient halls and cells.

Looking up the wall. The first balcony is from the apartment of our friends

Old wrought-iron decoration on the entrance door to the house

When we went up to their apartment I had a strange sensation which I thought it must have to do with this place. We first had a look around in the different rooms and in the centre a beautiful small covered inner courtyard where there was the meditation room.

Floating pots of fern in the courtyard

Krishna playing his flute in the little flower jungle

There was the feeling of some locked energies around, and we had the impression of the presence of long departed souls who didn’t move on to higher spheres, stuck there since the times of the old monastery. When talking about it we all had the same sensation and we decided to do a little ritual we had learned from Anton Styger for liberating these stuck souls and a space clearing for the remains of low astral debris. This inner work quickly showed a relief and the energy of the place seemed to become lighter and less burdensome. Our friends told us of other experiences they had with the presence of departed souls, but they hadn’t known how to deal with them. And they explained that in the past Girona had been a place of a number of atrocities in the name of religion and persecution – and when the remains of the old energies aren’t cleared away they don’t dissolve just like that; even if many modern people don’t believe in their existence and don’t have a sensorium for these realities they aren’t less influencing.

Afterwards we walked through the old town of Girona to a small restaurant with Breton pancakes and later had some horchata, a typical Spanish drink made with Chufas tiger nuts), and then again we strolled through oldtown alleyways back to our car. Angels were accompanying our way.

A little angel on the top of an old church

A shop window full of angels

An alleyway on the old town of Girona

In the later afternoon we went back to Banyoles, where our friends took us for a beautiful swim in the lake with a golden sunset behind the mountains, followed by a dinner in the garden till dark night.

A friend sent me the link to a video showing cities found deep before the Western coast of India. One of the city traces in the ocean is from Dwaraka, the city which submerged after the death of Lord Krishna. You might like to read about it in the fascinating book of Master EK: Man Sacrifice. Parts of the video are a bit sensation-seeking and fanciful, but the facts found are interesting.

A musical celebration of the concept of Time, by scienceandnonduality., produced by Symphony of Science.

They have also produced other videos like Symphony of Science – “Children of Africa” (The Story of Us): “A musical celebration of humanity, its origins, and achievements, contrasted with a somber look at our environmentally destructive tendencies and deep similarities with other primates.”

or “The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)” (The Poetry of Reality is the fifth installment in the Symphony of Science music video series. It features 12 scientists and science enthusiasts.)

or “Our Place in the Cosmos” – great pictures….