NASA just reports that its New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter from both space- and ground-based telescopes including the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are auroras bigger than our entire planet: “Jupiter’s polar regions are crackling with electricity,” says Randy Gladstone of the research team, “and this sets the stage for non-stop auroras.”

Nasa

A bizarre six-sided feature encircling the north pole of Saturn near 78 degrees north latitude has been observed by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This image is one of the first clear images ever taken of the north polar region as seen from a unique polar perspective.

Nasa

“We’ve never seen anything like it on any other planet,” says atmospheric scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure.” The hexagon is twice as wide as Earth encircling Saturn’s north pole. Here you see an infrared photo of the structure, which might be explained by geometric shapes like triangles and hexagons forming in water when rotated at a high speed, as Nature reports.

In the same way the geometric patterns of the energy vortexes in the etheric body of man called the chakras might be explained. They form to 4, 6, 10, 12, 16 and more petalled patterns governing the energies structuring the body. And the Jupiter photo reminds you that the etheric head and base centre of man correspond to the north and south pole of the planet, and are electro-magnetic phenomena like the auroras on Jupiter.
See also the beautiful pictures of A. Lauterwasser created by water exposed to sounds. And the blogpost on “Saturn – Seen from New Perspectives“.

Yesterday I was at an Office 2007 and Sharepoint launch event of a Microsoft partner agency, for my job. At first there were high-flying slogans about a colourful future with “wow”-effect by a Microsoft official (“Empower the people with the right tools and softwares and there is nothing they cannot do…”), decorated with video-clips (WMF streaming), which didn’t run that well as the promised future. After a presentation of functionalities (the best presentations are not much usefull when you forget that beamers have other colour resolutions than laptop screens, and a big part of the texts wasn’t readable) and a practical example of complex group co-ordination, there was a fascinating talk about “Increasing Productivity in Information Work” by a collaboration researcher:

The number of people who don’t collaborate face to face has been tremendously increasing during the last few years, and they had done researches on the impact of these changes on new ways of collaboration at distance. I don’t want to go into details, only 2-3 thoughts:

A few years ago everyone was happy with more features available in a program, today the difficulty is to sort out and reduce the complexity to what is really relevant to the people. This sorting-out is mostly done with our head and not by the softwares available.

Most workers in our society are brain workers, but this is nowhere noted in the assets of an enterprise. A major part of our business activities isn’t organised along the needs of creative work, but of a work environment structured differently, in old patterns. In the knowledge work 90% is not visible and only 10% physically visible work.

For the tremendous changes going on in society new forms of collaboration are needed. I was thinking of the collaboration not only at work, but also in the different good-will activities I’m in. Our monthly Lunar Messenger for example, a small project, involves people not only here in Switzerland, but also in Germany (the French translation), Mexico and the US. I’m working in other projects involving also Belgian, Spanish, Argentinian co-workers. It needs quite a lot of co-ordination and brainwork, but the outcome is fascinating, and all are working for free. All this is a group collaboration going on at distance. So also “Good Will in Action” on Cooperation.

In collaboration good networking is important. Cables, Bhutan

After many years I yesterday wrote again a letter to the editor, to the Swiss NZZ. There was an article by U.J. Wenzel about “The more or less thinking hull – Is the internet the medium of unification?” The author wrote about Teilhard de Chardin’s “quixotic vision” of the noosphere – the total of a global sphere of human thought, with an evolution towards an ever greater integration, some kind of a supra-mental plane. (I was fascinated by Teilhard de Chardin’s thoughts during my study of philosophy some 30 years ago.)
Wenzel said that some “enthusiasts” see in their phantasies the internet with its covering of the earth as an expression of such a “collective consciousness” – while for him it is more like a filthy film of pornographic and violence glorifying pictures. Chats are full of gossip, blogs repeat thoughts of others, and the web spills over with copy-paste replicas… For him the trend goes towards plagiarizing the plagiarisms.

Isn’t the filth in the web just a reflection of the state of the mind, mainly of the masses? Like in society, there are many spheres, many different forms of expression.
From a spiritual point of view the evolution of consciousness is a very slow process, going on over eons. However, in the present time the speed of life has lead to an ever-increasing inter-linking in the world. The dangers of this development are countered by a tremendous upsurge of new initiatives and efforts. Especially the web, for example with its growing open-source communities, is part of this trend.

We are living in a dualistic, or more precise: multi-faceted world. Seeing meta-trends beyond the range of an intellectual mind however needs a broadenend awareness.

A long way up to higher evolution: Cloud over a mountain near Mykene, Greece

Though I’m more interested in journeys into inner space than stories about visits from outer space (by the way, what is outer and what is inner?), I found this interesting:

The media reported that Geipan, the French UAP (unidentified aerospace phenomena) research and information group has opened its archives on March 22nd, after 30 years of collating sightings and field investigations. Geipan (Groupe d’études et d’information sur les phénomènes aérospatiaux non-identifiés) is a national agency belonging to the CNES – Centre national d’études spatiales.

Most of their observations are normal phenomena, like thunderbolds and clouds, but among the over 1 600 observed cases with about 6000 reports, there is quite a number (about 28%) which cannot be explained and remain enigmatical. Here is a French description of some cases.

In Paris, at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie they have an exposition until July 07 – Alone in Space – From Fiction to Reality. At the entrance of the site there is an alien with whom you can make an intergalactic conversation, you can ask questions – a funny game.

USA Today reported that IDC researcher John Gantz has done a study on data, estimating that 161 exabytes of digital data – or about 161 billion GB – were generated in 2006 alone. This is equivalent to 43 trillion digital songs. Datas are stored by privates, businesses, governments, for photos, documents, music, films…. Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President of EMC, a data storage giant, says: “We are creating more digital information than we can store.” Finding the right information in the huge heap of digital data is like finding the famous needle in a haystack, and the problem is getting worse…

Beginning of March 07, a study of the Carnegie Mellon University reported that storage media are much worse than what was thought. And thus customers have to replace their drives far more often: The mean time to failure (MTTF) of a disk drive is about 13 times higher than what vendors say. The researchers have observed about 100 000 disk drives in data centres of Google.

So while you might think that what you have in your computer is save, it is like storing the data on melting ice…

The Eastern wisdom says that knowledge is structured in consciousness, not in outer devices. This wisdom-knowledge is not more and more data. It comes when you have integrated knowledge through living experience, leading to a transformation of your existence. You might like to read the Lunar Messenger on Awareness and Thought.

A “data storage” on the walls of the Ajanta caves, India.

Two Australian scientists, Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi, have invented a computer software that distinguishes a beautiful face from a less attractive one. They use a software that measures faces and relates them to images of models, actors and about 200 women from around the globe, from different ages, levels of attractiveness and ethnic backgrounds. When you give a photo of a woman’s face into the machine, it returns a beauty rating between 1 and 10.

In their paper in the International Journal Of Human-Computer Studies they explain: “Potential applications exist in the entertainment industry, cosmetic industry, virtual media and plastic surgery.” Dr Piccardi says, one danger of the software was that it could fall into the hands of adolescents or others sensitive about their looks and harm their self- image.

Another danger might be that you believe what the device is telling you …

The wisdom teachings tell us that beauty is the Divine aspect of form being veiled by a beautiful shape. This is meant with the saying that real beauty is within and not without. No technical device will ever help us finding it. We see beauty through forms, but not as the forms. A lightful form lets the inner beauty radiate through more easily. Read more about it in the Letters on Spiritual Astrology on Taurus, Nr. 1.

Mongolian woman. How to measure the inner beauty of a person?

In the March issue the NZZ Folio magazine reported about an experiment of Albert Michelson, a Polish-born German-American physicist, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1907. The article said that he did “the most successful” failure experiment in the history of science by trying to prove the existence of ether.

He thought that the earth moves through space in ether, and thus he wanted to show the existence of ether by measuring the adverse “winds” of its substance. However, the light rays which he projected through an “interference refractometer” always travelled with the same speed, always with the famous speed of 300 000 km/s. He did not want to accept that the consequence of this result would mean, in the eyes of science: Ether is not existing.

Later, in 1905, Einstein explained this paradox of light with his relativity theory: That the speed of light is always constant and that time passes-by differently with observers travelling with different speed. So the article resumed that for physicists ether was proven non-existing, but the writer ended stating that up to now however, it cannot be explained how a wave can expand in “nothingness”.

I had to smile a bit about this “nothingness” where the light-wave passes through and the so-called “non-existence” of ether. As you can read in the Lunar Messenger on “Space and Consciousness“, that from a spiritual viewpoint there is nothing such as empty space. When manifest, space is dynamic, pulsating, full of subtle structures. Eastern wisdom calls it Akasha, the content or consciousness of space, unfolding through many planes of etheric substance.
And in the Lunar Messenger on “Etheric Existence and Good Will” there is explained: “We live in the ether and are penetrated by it, like a tumbler lying in a big tank: The water is as well in the tank as in the glass, it isn’t locked up in it like in a bottle. We are in contact with the other etheric bodies, it is one ether penetrating all layers. The earth, the sun and the planets float in this big etheric ocean and move along its lines of force because of the movements of this ether. Just like the lines of force of a big magnet control smaller magnets, the ether of our planet arranges and regulates the etheric currents of its living beings and works on them.”

A contradiction to science? Not at all. The wisdom teachings explain that ether, the basis of all formations, precedes the dense forms. So you cannot “prove” its existence with physical means, but with the development of etheric view. Try to see not only the physical flower, but the vital form, or look into the eyes of a vital, living person, then you come closer to the etheric existence.

Withered flowers losing their etheric or vital energy

The European Union just decided about obligatory measures for climate protection in the fight against global warming. The president of the EU commission, José Manuel Barroso, was asked by journalists about his personal commitment in this fight. He is driving a German luxury car as well as a big cross-country vehicle, known for high CO2-outputs. He answered that he doesn’t want to do without his cars, that it is not a matter of moral role models, but of political solutions of Europe.

Where does arrogance start? It seems to be normal that politicians take their liberty of living in contradiction to their official opinions. Nations too take their liberties to behave against their declared positions: Many EU-countries are far from reaching their own Kyoto-commitments. If these will really be effective remains a question. Nations are made of individuals and thus often behave like unintegrated personalities.

On the spiritual path these discrepancies between a behaviour out of outer compulsions and different inner attitudes are quite dangerous, for tensions arise. If we want to behave in a good way, we should do it for ourselves, to be truthful towards ourselves. Then only we can come to an integration of the different areas of our personality and fill the gap between knowledge and action.

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.

Mitchell Baker, head of the Mozilla Foundation, just published in her blog The Mozilla Manifesto where she describes 10 basic principles for the internet, such as: “Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust”, or “Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.” If you enlarge the focus of the principles over the focus on the internet, you see that these are principles for co-operation within and between groups in a participative manner.

So you read (brackets viz. additions in brackets are added to enlarge the focus): “Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences (on the Internet).” “(The Internet; read: The group activity) should enrich the lives of individual human beings.” or “Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences (on the Internet).”

To know more about this topic, you might like to read the Lunar Messenger on Groups and Group Consciousness.