Last Friday I was at the Annual Assembly of the Swiss Red Cross (SRC), in commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the SRC, hold in the town hall of the city of Berne. The subject of the assembly was the role of volunteer work.
After a talk of the Swiss federal minister of finance, Hans-Rudolf Merz about the indispensability of volunteer work in today’s society, there was an interesting presentation of futurist Georges T. Roos of ROOS Office for Cultural Innovation, a private futures studies institute in Lucerne and member of the World Future Society. He spoke about “Does Volunteer Work have a Future? – What will move people tomorrow”. He sees individualisation as the central trend, that everyone is looking to his own “salvation”, and there is no more a higher sense generally obliging. Central values are, everything has to be easy and convenient, with mobility in all aspects of life. At the same time many people want to make a difference and stand up for bettering the world – they want to do good deeds, because it gives you fun and experiences and you meet people.
Subjectively people have much less time for volunteer work, there is a competition with sport, entertainment, friends and family. However, there are new kinds of recognition. Volunteer work gives you experiences you cannot buy with money and enables you to have a growth of self-awareness. You find the presentation (in German) on kultinno.ch.

On a genuine spiritual path volunteer work for the benefit of others is of great importance, together with meditation and study of spiritual texts. Without serving others or life in general, you cannot progress. (Have a look at Good Will in Action on The Value of Service.)
From a spiritual point of view a major future trend is the development of group consciousness through service. It helps overcoming the excessive individualism and integrates you into a greater whole. Working together as a group creates a flow of energy uplifting and inspiring all.

The 29th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies just has agreed to incorporated the emblem of the Red Crystal as a new symbol of protection for war victims and humanitarian workers. The new emblem won’t replace the old emblems, but can be used by countries who don’t want to use the other two symbols, which are supposed by certain people as having a religious connotation.
So the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement has accepted the Palestine Red Crescent Society and the Israeli Magen David Adom (Star of David) into their rangs, the latter can now include into the crystal their sign of the double triangle. Hopefully the belligerent parties all over the globe also accept the humanitarian message of rescue and help – often nowadays these are groups not respecting much of common values.
The message of the new emblem as a symbol of neutrality is interesting from the view of the wisdom teachings: a square stands for matter, standing on the top the rhombus is overcoming the heaviness of matter – if you look at it, it feels upward directed and lighter than the square – and a crystal also stands for matter purified. The cross is an ancient symbol of man fixed into matter, even from pre-Christian eras, like the Eastern Cosmic Man, the Purusha, fixed onto the cross of matter.
In the emblem we use with the Circle of Good Will and which you see on the top of the blog page – the upright square encircling a cross and encircled by a circle – the circle symbolises eternity, into which the material creation is manifested and hold – all the parts being integrated into a greater whole. May the message of synthesis and universality of good will also inspire the good will workers working under the signs of the red cross, red crescent and red crystal.

On June 19th the United Nations inaugurated the new Human Rights Council at the Geneva Headquarters. To remind of the 19th Article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers“, the Swiss watchmaker Swatch launched a “Human Rights Watch” in UN-blue, the Swiss federal minister Micheline Calmy-Rey proudly showed it. May it be used in the double sense of the word “watch” – a real Human Rights Watch.
Hopefully the new council becomes an effective instrument of furthering the human rights and not degrade it to a discussion forum for the interests of particulars. The “superpower” USA however felt their concerns (or power?) not represented enough in the new council, so they preferred to stay apart – as with many other international concerns.
The United Nations do an incredible job in so many fields of life, without this institution the state of the world would be defitinely worse.
For groups supporting the UN from a spiritual side you might read this blog entry.

At work I heard yesterday afternoon a chorus of horn sounding over the city of Berne. A quick look into the internet showed the reason: Switzerland had won 2:0 over Togo at the Football World Championship. Football seems to be the only occasion where emotions are publicly going high in this country where showing emotions is not seen as a virtue. Already since the beginning of the championship a big poster is decorating the Bundeshaus, the Swiss House of Parliament, (which is wrapped in the moment because of renovation) humorously saying “Foodball is governing”.
On my way home there were a lot of hooting cars where people were holding Swiss flags out of the window. Over the place in front of the Bundeshaus there was a a cloud from fireworks and below a dancing and shouting reddish-white mass, and the colour-symphony went over to the red traffic busses, which were stopped by dancers with football shirts in the national colors. They were also tapping on passing-by cars. With my motor-bike I drove on the pavement in front of the Bundeshaus and thus wavingly escaped the commotion.
I had to smile. It was such a beautiful picture of childlike hilarity, which is so easily passing over to the opposite at the next occasion. It was like a symbol of man under the swing of emotions, keeping him in sway over a long part of his spiritual path. (“Man” also includes woman – or better: “wo-man” includes man, since the word comes from Sanskrit “Manushya”, meaning the mind-endowed being. However the masses of fans were mainly male…)
Man is caught in the pairs of opposites (: and football is a play of opposites par excellence, a beautiful example of the play of human life). Until man gains the bliss of the inner equilibrium the quickly changes of happiness and depression hold him in sway.

In today’s issue of the Swiss newspaper “Der Bund” there is an article on punishment as a win-win situation. In the canton Berne more and more criminal offenders are doing work serving the public good instead of being sentenced to prison. This helps the society to save a lot of money and has a motivating effect for the offenders.
There is a number of social institutions to which offenders can be sent, according to the need of the institutions. The offenders are doing unpaid work, which otherwise could not be done. If there are problems with the delinquents, they are sent to another place or to prison.
Some time ago I read that in California they are spending much more money for prisons than for education and that the prisons are overcrowded.
Here in Berne there have been in general very positive results with this initiative of putting criminals to welfare work, helping to save millions of Swiss francs and also helping the delinquents – a real future-oriented solution.

At yesterday’s breakfast table the talk with our spiritual teacher, Dr. Kumar, came to the topic of the letter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, wrote to George W. Bush, the president of the United States.� (Even if you are not interested in politics, it is worthwhile reading this very interesting letter.) In a very polite form, which must be even more poetic in the farsi language of Mr. Ahmadinejad, he asked quite number of deep and important questions to Mr. Bush, pointing out the right of the Iranian people for self-determination and the contradictions in the American politics.
Sri Kumar referred to India’s fight for independence and auto-rule against the British, which was seen by them as illegal, but that now, as a strong and independent nation they are respected in the world. The respect in the world toward America was much higher in the past, and in many countries the people ask themselves similar questions about the right of the behaviour of the United States.
People and nations grow in independence and freedom, and respect toward each other has to come from respecting the other’s right of another position, which might be complementary to one’s own.

Yesterday afternoon when my wife and I were returning from a little walk, we met near our house a bearded young man, clad in long white robes and with a white cap cordially greeting us.
I hadn’t seen him before, but my wife explained it was the eldest son of an Afghan origin neighbor family, who is living somewhere else. We have a good contact with the family and the children are regularly coming to us for some homework help etc. While the rest of the family is clad totally in a western style, this son is showing his cultural and religious attitude in a way quite uncommon here in Switzerland. My wife told me that the father wasn’t happy about his son expressing his creed in such a way.
It was a strong and for me at first irritating message, which made me think of dress codes and social “normalcy” in our society. It is similarly strange here to see orthodox Swiss jews in a certain quarter of Zurich You can also easily recognize certain kinds of anthroposophs or ladies from certain free evangelical sects by their way of clothing. Not to speak of the different dress codes used in youngsters circles or with bankers and business men, where a necktie and a dark suit are obligatory.
I also was reminded of my dressing during my student times, while I was a meditation teacher of a then well-know movement and how I had left these codes with leaving that group.
We use clothes as costumes for certain roles, and by habit we identify ourselves with these roles, thinking them to be “ourselves”. We forget that it is just a role we are playing in a theatre play, and that when we take on another role we take on another outfit, but remain the same. We are not the outfit, but the inner. Through meditation you get more accustomed to experience your Self as being different from the outer layers of the social and cultural encodings, of the body, emotions and thoughts. You get detached from these layers and experience them just like coats which you put off and on according to the situation: I am not the coat, but the I AM in the sheath.
We learn to be ourselves in whatever role we are and to be normal. “Normal temperament” is a keyword on the spiritual path, not clining to any strange attitudes and behaviours.
See also the blogpost on “Dress Codes and Judging People“.

I just got an invitation for an internal discussion group of the New-Jersey based Aquarian Age Community. It is a group working working on the base of the Ageless Wisdom Teachings and especially dedicated to support the work of the United Nations from a spiritual side. They conduct meditations in support of the United Nations and organise conferences on like topics.
In the New YorK building of the UN, there is a Room of Quiet, “devoted to peace and those who are giving their lives for peace”. In the middle of the room there is “a symbol of how, daily, the light of the skies gives life to the earth on which we stand, a symbol to many of us of how the light of the spirit gives life to matter.”
Inspired by this Room of Quiet, there is a Room of Silence (Raum der Stille”) in the Brandenburger Tor in the middle of Berlin, next to the Reichstag of the German Government, which we had visited some weeks ago. Silence in the core of all our activity, and it is good that people are reminded of this also at places were global politics are made.

I yesterday read an article in the Swiss Coop consumer-magazine about the film “Our Daily Bread” of the Austrian producer Nikolaus Geyrhalter (pdf). It is a shaking, award-winning documentary film, without voice-over commentries, about food production in Europe. You can see pictures or trailers from the website. It is a ilm about why the food today is so cheap, whil in other fields the prices are rising. He shows how plants and animals are instrumentalised and integrated into a production process in a totally dehumanized form. While the hygiene in the enterprises is high and the production processes are very efficient and standardized, they are entirely inhuman, just oriented towards keeping the costs low.
They have filmed in about 20 companies in many countries of Europe, but don’t mention the names, since the processes are similar; many companies had refused to cooperate, while others were proud to show how they work. The film is not judging, but just showing the actual work situation, providing enough space for reflection and sensibilising for where our food is coming from.
Some time ago I had published an issue of Good Will in Action about “Food and Drink” to show the importance of a right dealing with food on the spiritual path, hinting at the dimension of the food production. I think it is of utmost importance to be conscious of what we are doing and which are the consequences thereof. Through our individual decisions which food we buy and how we consume we can contribute a bit for a change.

We yesterday had our monthly Mithila-meeting with our youngsters and those of a close friend (age 13 – 17). To impart our children a spiritual education is very important to us. Since neither the education system nor the churches are doing this, we started some years ago with regular sunday morning meetings with our children and to speak about spiritual topics, inspired by the book “Mithila – A New Age School Syllabus” of Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar. We do a short meditation, speak about basics of spiritual life, or some experience-related topics. We have also read some books together, such as Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or now a renarration of the Ramayana.
Though the youngsters are still participating with interest, it is not easy to cope with the strong currents coming from the society in which they are growing up. They are intend not to be regarded as “strange” by their comrades, and they lead a very normal life. They won’t follow our footsteps in their lives, but we feel they have the strength to follow their own paths into a good direction.
Friends of us are running a website called “Jugendforum Mithila“. It is a good impulse of giving children access to spiritual values via the web.
We observe with our children and their collegues, that again new qualities are ripening in them. They will unfold with time and start shaping the next generation’s wave.