I frequently observe that similar topics come across my way at home and at my office. It is some kind of synchronicity, which superficially seen seems to be accidental. Of course it is not identity, and there are many strings of themes and activities quite different from each other.

In the last months the relaunch of the intranet system at my office kept me quite busy (I wrote a blogpost 14 months ago and another in October 07, when the project officially started). I’m the project manager and have to coordinate the internal processes with the external agency. At the moment we are in the process of finalizing detail concept, and the new intranet hopefully will be launched in October.

At home I’m working since some months – besides other activities – at the relaunch of the Good-Will website. My youngest son, 15, is helping me with the technical side, and I do the content migration and photo layout, scanning etc. It took a long time until finally the project started. My son needed overcoming technical, but also motivational obstacles. But since some weeks the fire has got him and we are making good progress. I hope that in a few weeks we are through.

I started the old site in 2000 and re-worked it a bit with the site layout 2 years ago. It grew over the years, but the coding, done by a WYSIWYG-editor, is full of mistakes. Since I’m a “layman” as far as the technical side is concerned and don’t have much time to go deeper into it, I wouldn’t be able to do the relaunch myself. Now we have a very good co-operation, where I can realize quite some ideas which my son is adapting into the techical side. You’ll see more of the results in the near future. Also the blog will be integrated into the layout and structure of the new site. Here is a screenshot of the English page on “good will”.

This morning my moped suddenly started to roar – the rust had eaten a hole into the mouth of the tail-pipe. With a lot of noise I continued to my office. On the way home in the evening I took the direction to a motorbike mechanic. When I crossed the bridge from the old town of Berne to the other side, I saw an old steam engine tramway going along, an extra-ride blowing white steam into the air.

The tram was quite slow, so I could easily double it with my moped. I stopped and took out my camera, but it passed by a bit too fast. I drove on and made some shots from the moped and then a last one from the side of the road, here they are.

On the plate of the engine you can read it’s from 1894. I thought about the incredible speed-up of technical evolution in these 114 years. In esoteric parlance this is a result of the starting Aquarian age – though in mainstream society they are laughing it off and give other kinds of explanation concepts.

A few minutes later I arrived at the motorbike shop, where just 2 ladies were returning from a test drive with latest models e-bikes – a new generation of city transport means getting quite frequent here.
And in the newspapers and on the web I saw today pictures of yesterday’s show of the “fusion man” – a Swiss pilot who, with small airofoils and little turbines on his back had given a demonstration for press people, flying at 300 km/h over the Alps – another air of the Aquarian wind.

Friday I was in a suburb of Zurich for a meeting with the web marketing agency with which we are cooperating in my office. On the way back I had a short stop at Zurich main station, where I had a look at the work of art about which I had read in the American tech-blog Engadget (and about which I had heard before…)

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH has installed in the main station hall a huge 3D LED display for its 150th birthday. There are 25,000 bulbs containing each 12 LEDs which are constantly changing colours and patterns. The project is called NOVA and wants to give the travelers a new visual experience: In a surrounding where people are flooded with visual stimuli they want to appeal the people emotionally, remembering them of dreams and visions. The NOVA-team has a fascinating website, which you can also explore with different shapes and colours.

The structure reminds me of group relations not only in technology, but also with human beings. When their patterns harmoniously cooperate, a beautiful lightful structure can appear.

Some days ago I read in the NZZ Folio-Magazine an article by Luca Turin on “The sound of impossible objects” (also translated into English). It is about William Sethares, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (“Each of us plays several roles in life. Some of my favorite are: researcher, teacher, and musician”) .

Sethares did experiments where he electronically stretched the musical octaves and observed what happened with the chords: Some combinations sounded very dissonant, while others produced an astonishing consonance. Some scales he used were more harmonious for the ears than others. So in 19-tone, the “octave” on the keyboard is a fifth larger than the normal one.

Sethares calls this “Xenotonality” (from the Greek word for “strange” combined with tones). The results are described on his website as “strange and somewhat eeri. The effect was so different from the tempered scale that there was no tendency to judge in-tuneness or out-of tuneness.” Some of the songs sound quite normal, some leave an alienating feeling.

You can listen to some example from his CDs, like Incidence and Coincidence. I got a strange feeling from these sounds, like being a bit “off the track”, and the effect lasted for quite some time afterwards. It is not just the kind of vibrations I would love to expose myself to over a longer time, but and interesting transgression of the boundaries of the sound-range of physical instrument. In this context see the next blogpost on “Silence, Speech and Sound”.

Loudspeaker in a little forest ashram in Andhra Pradesh, India

Today I was in Geneva at the office of the UNHCR, the UN organisation for the protection of refugees.

Together with Google Earth they launched for Switzerland the new online mapping programme, Google Outreach (up to now it is only available in certain countries), and at the same time unveiled the outreach programme for the UNHCR:

“It’s absolutely fantastic. The potential for us and the potential to serve our interests and to serve the refugee interests round the world is quite substantial and we need now only seize the opportunity and move ahead with it,” Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone told more than 250 staff and invited guests at a launch ceremony in the atrium of UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters. Johnstone said the pilot UNHCR layers, which are now live on Google Earth Outreach and available from the UNHCR-site, made it possible to zoom in on specific refugee situations

L. Craig Johnstone

And indeed, it was very fascinating to see the the scope of possibilities this new technology offers. Rebecca Moore, manager and founder of Google Earth Outreach, gave an insight into the new application, showing different examples already realised.

Rebecca Moore from Google

With layers you can place information and media into Google Earth (a downloadable program) and Google Maps (online version). Now Google Earth Outreach gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources to greate maps and virtual visits to projects.

This way you can directly show people what is at stake at a place and not just speak about it. You thus can raise the awareness and reach a broader audience – at the moment there are more than 350 million Google Earth users world-wide. You can use the tool to educate people, inspire action and influence decision-makers.

To show the impact of photos to sensitize people to what is happening in other parts of the world, Zalmai, internationally reknown photographer, born in Kabul and and refugee himself, who had just returned from Afghanistan, showed very impressive pictures of the horrible living conditions of internally displaced people there.

In the afternoon there was a tech-session to explain how the magic works, and a a manual for developers (pdf) was handed out. And we did some experiments with the spreadsheets to create information for Google Earth – it’s really not difficult to use.

Google also just launched an initiative together with “The Elders” – a gathering of world leaders coming together to guide and support the people – called “Every Human has Rights“, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Google is now placing the 30 Articles of the declaration into the download version of Google Earth, so that you can see them at different parts of the globe, where they are at stake. This way also the knowledge about the human rights is spread all over – a very inspiring initiative.

At my office we are already using Google Maps to show the areas of world-wide activities. And since yesterday the Circle of Good Will can also be found on Google Maps. But I don’t know yet whether in my office or privately Google Outreach will come to a use… Nevertheless it is a great tool for inter-connecting the world and thus bringing in a fresh air of the Aquarian age.

You now can surf with Google through the galaxies and discover planets, nebula or supernovae with the web-browser, without any other software. The Argentinian programmer Diego Gavinowich from Buenos Aires was a finalist in Google’s Latin America Code Jam and won a 3 months internship at Google headquarters in San Diego, USA.

Google writes: “You can search for planets, listen to Earth & Sky podcasts, watch some beautiful Hubble telescope images, or explore historical maps of the sky from the comfort of your browser.”

Seeing the pictures of the cosmos reminds me of the “Conclusion” of the Critique of Practical Reason, where the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant writes:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (written on his tomb)

For moral law we today might say the subtle inner worlds you discover on the spiritual path. You find more about “Meditation – Experiment and Experience” here.

Google Terms of use – free for private use.

I yesterday read about the Microsoft online service “Windows Live SkyDrive“, an online storage system, which now has 5 GB storage space for free. This service is not yet available everywhere, but at the moment in 38 countries.

I thought, oh, that’s practical as a second backup, I can access to my files without having my laptop with me – at the office or while travelling, and this even without a memory stick.

So registered and uploaded a number of files. It worked well. (Accessing at another time had some difficulties, the login page didn’t open for half an hour – so there are “limits to the sky”.)

Of course this isn’t a sure way of storing and transporting data, for others can easily read them while transmitting. But I have no top security files there. It’s another step into “virtually everywhere”. I wonder what are the strategies of Microsoft for offering these services for free – normally business people always have a “second thought”.

Another kind of a sky drive: start of a glider near Berlin, April 06

I today read an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about the discovery of certain findings indicating that there had been a sunken continent in the south of the Indian ocean, near the Antarctica. An expedition of researchers of the Alfred Wegener Institute to the area of the Kerguelen plateau in the contexts of the “Plates & Gates” programme of the International Polar Year wanted to find relations between continental drift and climate. They found in the depth of the oceans structures with silicone stones of continental origin, which is supposed to be part of an ancient continent having expanded much more to the north.

This fact is very interesting, for main stream scientists up to now have dismissed the theosophical doctrine of sunken continents such as Lemuria as fiction and explained the evolution of the globe with plate tectonics. The age indicated by the Plates & Gates-expedition for the sinking of the continent, supposing about 120 million years, doesn’t fit with the teachings of Blavatsky, but these are gigantic periods of time, and maybe some tectonic movements a few million years ago turn out in future as bridging the gulf between occult and mainstream science.

Not just sunken continents…

A friend from Mexico sent me the following lines with an article about New Science and Technology, and she writes:

“I’ve found this article about the Correas, pioneering in Science as Nikola Tesla did before, for infinite source of clean energy available – aether – that is what we now need for the transformation of the planet. This also relates to Keely’s motor refered by HPB in the Secret Doctrine.”

H.P. Blavatsky writes in the Secret Doctrine (Vol I, p. 555f):
“Mr. Keely, of Philadelphia, was, and still is, at the threshold of some of the greatest secrets of the Universe; of that chiefly on which is built the whole mystery of physical Forces, and the esoteric significance of the “Mundane Egg” symbolism. Occult philosophy, viewing the manifested and the unmanifested Kosmos as a UNITY.
For the etheric Force, discovered by the well-known (in America and now in Europe) John Worrell Keely, of Philadelphia, is no hallucination. Notwithstanding his failure to utilize it, a failure prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first, the phenomena exhibited by the discoverer during the last few years have been wonderful, almost miraculous, not in the sense of the supernatural* but of the superhuman. Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds as easily as he reduced a dead ox to the same condition.”

There is a book on “Experimental Aetherometry, The Discovery of the Aether Motor (1): (Re-)Discovery of the Orgone Motor”, by Dr. Paulo Correa and Alexandra Correa. See also here about their inventions.

Not quite etheric energy: Steering Wheel of the bus that drove us yesterday

Technology has become an unquestioned part of the ceremonies here: Cameramen build up their tripods plus big cameras directly in front of the dais, while the jumble of cables is running along the floors. Of course, since years big loudspeakers belong to the necessary equipment to transport the voice through space. Here you partly see very old-fashioned loud-speakers. But now also the latest beamer technology with screens is helping to transport the view to the rear lines, and on a side-table there are laptops for registration and online-transmission of the functions and the lectures from this remote village to groups in other parts of the country. They asked me if we should give also access to the Western groups, since the main language used here is Telugu, I said it wouldn’t be of much use.

Here, though we don’t understand what is being said, it is very fascinating to participate: The ambiance is very uplifting, and hearing the melodious flow of the voices and being in this serene atmosphere lets the mind “chill out” and get into subtler planes. A deep inner rest settles, and even occasionally falling asleep helps increasing the experience.

Trying to capture the thrill of the spiritually charged ambiance

Cameramen in front of the dais during a talk of Sri Kumar

Small and big photographing the fire ritual…

… while others are registering the sound, sitting in front of a canvas with a waterfall