Yesterday the family of a friend made a stop-over here on their way back from ski holidays. Since the two sons (16 and 19) had some posture problems in their shoulder region, my wife showed them a few yoga asanas. Then the younger one asked her if she could also tell him how to meditate. He had heard several times about meditation, but had no idea how to do it.

So she showed him a simple method – just observing the respiration. Afterwards she asked him how it was. He answered, he could not say. She told him, that’s just as it is, you cannot describe it, you have to experience.

Both of them go to college – you learn a lot of things there, but you don’t learn how to connect with your inner. You might have a look at the extract from the book “”Mithila” on spiritual education.

Meditation in the Planetary Healing Centre, Visakhapatnam, India.

A friend from Spain sent me a link to the YouTube video on “Spiritual Reality” by Basically Shetai. It is a film about the journey of spiritual evolution through meditation, a journey towards the self. They are visualising with computer animation inner experiences of meditation, healing, pyramid power, astral traveling (out of body experiences) and going through the different stages of life and beyond.

A fascinating attempt to give an understanding of subtle realities. However, you have to use your discrimination not to take it as a 1 : 1 representation or guideline. Otherwise you get the wrong impression that the spiritual path is just “meditation” as a miraculous magic wand. Don’t space out and forget your practical day-to-day activity and doing something useful to others 🙂 . You might like want to read the Lunar Messenger on “The Journey Inside“.

Inspired by spiritual topics dealt with on the Good-Will website people sometimes write questions. So a person asked a few days ago: “What about apparitions of Jesus Christ, of his personal messages? Messages of the Holy Virgin Mary and angels in dreams? Or about certain masters or just dreams about the god Thot?”

Sceptical people with an intellectual attitude generally mock such experiences or rationalise them away, whereas esotericists indulge in fanciful hypotheses. There exists an ocean of channeled messages, and many people flock to supernaturalist phenomena like moths to the light. However the “livecycle” of their interest is generally just a few months or years, before other things occupy their attention. There is not deeper transformation of character happening.

The answers the wisdom teachings give belong to neither of these two parties. They might be desillusioning to those who are attracted by a craving for sensation. However, they might also give explanations to an agnostic, but open mind in search of a deeper understanding.

The teachings say that there are many persons claiming to have contact with Jesus, Maria and all kinds of masters and that each strong concept forms a thought form on the mental plane. People can contact these thought forms loaded with a lot of devotional emotion when they have a certain affinity and sensitivity, this also during sleep hours. This has nothing to do with a certain degree of spiritual development, but with the openness of certain subtle energy centres. The mental plane is full of imaginations created by man, and on the spiritual path it is regarded as some kind of a “cinema”, which might be fascinating, but mainly illusionary.

The real inner contact with masters of wisdom or other sublime beings happens in silence, without publicity, and expresses in an inspiration for a work of service to the well-being of mankind. It demands a cultivation of character, a purity of the personality. If someone has visionary experiences, in dreams, meditations or during the wakeful hours, it is good to observe them and note them down in a diary, and also to observe their quality and impact on one’s life. This way you feel what this “gift” is telling you – and you leave away all kind of proselytising others.

If people claim having certain visions or contacts, the best is to observe them and their character without any sensational attitude or curiosity, but with a good sense of discrimination. The energy of a “message”, of a dream or a possible apparition is the proof if the underlying impulse is a genuine spiritual one or a cloak for more or less subtle personality glamour. Running after phenomena leads nowhere except into the jungle of opinions and irritations. Genuine spiritual experiences blossom from an impulse received in one’s inner being.

Today I got an e-mail from a friend telling that for some month she was together with a man who had had much to do with drugs and alcohol. During that time it seemed that her problems were increasing while many things seemed to be going on very easy for him. She suddenly realized in meditation the reason for her present situation, she felt like being contaminated from his energies. She then decided to get her energy back, and from that day on the other one seemed to encounter only crosscurrents. People were now less friendly with him and everything he tried to do didn’t work.

From a spiritual perspective what my friend experienced is called vampirism of energy. It is the complete opposite of the true, harmonious, mutual exchange of energy. The excessive use of alcohol and drugs destroys the subtle tissues of the body and cuts the person off from the natural supply of psychic energy. So he might suck his supply from other person’s stock.

People do not want to understand that all kinds of alcoholic drinks, drugs, smoking, and so many other poisons decompose the human nature and that they infect space with their poisonous breath. In the book ”New Era Community” # 97 of the Agni Yoga series it says about such people:
“As a result of being with them, enormous fatigue is felt. They not only do not think about others, but even their own instinct of self-preservation is becoming dim.”

To a certain extent it is possible to counteract such violent selfishness. For this it is important to keep in contact with your inner resources and to try to have no dealings with people who absorb one’s energy uselessly.
If people learn the importance of exchange and cooperation, then they will also deal in a constructive way with energy.

Two days ago in the evening my eldest son came back from a ski camp and yesterday he had a strong cold with fever, so that this night he was sleeping in my bed together with my wife and I slept in his bed. In the night I woke up from a dream of which the last fragments I remembered were about Harry Potter and packing books to go to school. Did I pick up thoughts hanging around the corner of this bed?

I sometimes feel like picking up thoughts, impressions or feelings which pop in but don’t belong to me. They seem to come from another person or a situation, and they fade away again when the person is out of “sight”. It’s not just with physical encounters, but also via a phone call, a letter or an e-mail. There is a taste of a quality of the person – it might be joy or sorrow, anger, desire or some power play. Sometimes I mistake these “visitors” as belonging to me, sometimes their echo goes on for a bit longer before dissipating again. If I remain an observer, it helps neutralising the influence. Otherwise I get lost in it for a moment.

I just read in the booklet “On Change”: “Observing change is the means to stay afloat. Non-observation of change drowns you.”

I experienced an anger with an e-mail I received two days ago. In a subtle way the anger was with me until my wife and I spoke about it that the ordering tone in the e-mail had made me protest. There were complex feelings related with it, which, when observed, faded away, and I realised that, without excusing myself, the problem was not with me but with the other person. The feeling then faded away.

In the wisdom teachings the mind is described as the moon reflecting the impressions on its surface. For this you might read the Lunar Messenger on The Play of Illusions. The picture with the reflecting moon is from Tamariu beach, Spain.

Back from a deep and soul-stirring time in India at the group living of the WTT the last 3 weeks. Though I returned already last Friday night, it still takes time to digest all the many deep impressions and also the “change of levels” between very different worlds. It’s hard to describe to “outsiders” experiences from inward and outward processes and events. Just some short extracts from the “Impressions” I wrote for the people who had participated in the meeting, to give you some taste of the ambience:
Early morning the sounds of the nearby temple – wooden trombones, cymbals singing of mantrams – mingled with the counterpoint of barking dogs – created the unique familiar melody of morning awakening….

From the visit of the Simhachalam temple: The bus stopped at the place where nearby a huge banyan tree is spreading its branches and roots over a little sanctuary at the end of the stairway coming up from the valley. Then the stairs lead us through rows of colourful shops with all kinds of devotional articles, along rows of beggars, to the entrance of the temple. We were admitted through the great main entrance and went through the yard into the inner temple. There the atmosphere was filled with the vibrations of age-old recitations of mantrams and of rituals. We approached the innermost of the temple, where a lingam is worshiped, symbol of the creative power of God….

First the road lead us through the immense city of Hyderabad, along mosques, colourful ad-posters of all kind and busy life in the streets, then through a landscape with strangely formed rocks, standing and lying in unlikely positions, like remnants of ancient cities of giants. Then we came through an area with hills and macchia-like shrubs. We had lunch at a little shrine on the wayside where monkeys tried to snap bananas and other food. Finally we saw Sri Sailam lying on a hill, but had to go nearly for one more hour down into the valley and around a dam of the river Krishna.

… After breakfast we mounted an old bus, which slowly climbed up the road for a place about 5 km away. We were told not to take any food or cameras etc. with us so as not to attract stealing monkeys – though this time none showed up. We descended a stair for about 300 meters to a most sublime and picturesque place: There was a shrine with a statue of Adi Sankara, who is said to have meditated here and anchored a great spiritual energy at the place. In earlier times also Lord Maitreya had meditated at this place. A little waterfall came out of a rock wall of about 70-100 m height, protecting the place. At the side of the paved place, directly near the water, there was a huge, old banyan tree with several stems and many air roots hanging down. … From time to time pilgrims came to have a look or Sadhus to take a bath at the waterfall. … The sounds of the mantrams reverberated in the air, uplifting all, purifying the inner. In an exhilarated mood we afterwards mounted up the stairs to the bus bringing us back to the pilgrims’ centre…

Two days ago I got an e-mail from a friend from Minnesota, USA. She is a graduate student in the English program of St. Cloud State University studying creative writing. Since several months she is doing the English translations of the Good-Will “Lunar Messenger” and cooperating with the editing of the Paracelsus- Health and Healing magazine.
She now wrote that she is just celebrating her first publication as a managing editor with the Kaleidoscope, a literary arts publication with a multicultural theme It is annually published through the Write Place at St. Cloud State University, and now for the first time in print and hyper-text. Each year, a graduate student takes charge of the publication, and this year it was her turn. She has contributed some poems and the editorial.
Though German by birth, a few years ago she went to the States. Her shamanist affinity and her reflects her deep inner bond with nature and in part of her poems or the editorial – echos from previous incarnations?
She is an intense searcher and worker, striving towards a sensitive, soul-filled attitude in life. For a long time she has been working to overcome shadows of the past – this motives are also echoing in other poems. On the spiritual path, when the light of the soul is growing, these graffiti-like imprints on the walls of the inner nature are slowly being washed off, so that the pureness of the original state can start shining forth.