At the moment Christmas or winter related videos are flourishing, and mails with seasons greetings.

Here is a nice video with a song about the snowman and a boy walking in the air:

And here is a beautiful version of the song by “Celtic Woman”.

Another funny video is “The Digital Story of Nativity” or “Christmas 2.0” 🙂

But if you want to write someone a nice e-card, you find 5 themes on the Good-Will site.

A Christmas tree in our village

A Spanish friend sent this  beautiful story about Shamballa, which I put into English with the help of automatic translation:

“Shamballa is a sacred kingdom hidden in some remote corner of the Himalayas. The Tibetans believe fervently in the existence of Shamballa. In this paradisiac place reigns beauty and kindness, because their residents have reached the illumination transcending suffering. Many consider that it is even possible to arrive at Shambhala, but the road is long and full of dangers. He who has the luck to arrive at its doors – often by chance – should take advantage of the opportunity to penetrate into the Kingdom.

If he doesn’t go it and leaves it, it will stop later on; perhaps he will never again find it. The doors of Shamballa open up a single time in one’s life, and if you don’t cross them you are outside forever.

This myth teaches us something very important that we often forget: “Life doesn’t wait”. Therefore, if we have an aspiration, we should try to make it a reality. If we don’t take the initiative with the first enthusiasm, perhaps we don’t make it again.

It is sad to allow the days and the years to pass by without anything important happening. Those who never take a risk for anything are the first ones that complain about being bored by life. They wait that the change, happiness, arrives like a gift for them.

If the door of Shamballa opens up in our lives, let us enter without doubting. It is preferable to make a mistake several times than to fall into routine.”

The painting “Shamballa” by Nicholas Roerich shows the glacier peaks of the mountain range of Thang-La which reminds of the White Island. The painting stems from Roerich’s expedition through the Himalayas, Tibet, and the Desert Gobi in the 1920s. Many thanks to the Roerich Museum in New York.

Every year the World Teacher Trust-Global publishes an Astrological Diary running from Aries to Pisces. You can use it to go into the qualities of time and to work with them inside.

The Astrological Diary 2011/12 contains the daily positions of the planets, references to important events for the spiritual practice, information about the moon phases and constellations of the moon (Nakshatras) as well as an aphorism of the day to meditate and ponder upon. You find some short information about this inner work in the booklet on Time.

This morning I heard about the passing-over of the mother of Sri K. Parvathi Kumar and a friend asked me to translate an information about it. This made me think of several situations I had met her in India – a silent, deeply spiritual old woman. I remembered a passage mentioning her in the book of Sri Kumar about his father: Sri Sastri Garu – Story of a Disciple:

“Sri Sastry was married to the lady Ramalakshmi, who hailed from yet another family of good lineage. Her father too was in the path of Kundalini Yoga and was also a great Rama devotee. He recorded in a book 30 million times the name of the Lord, as a penance during 30 years! The marriage was an arranged marriage by the elders. Sri Sastry’s father, Sri Jagannadha Sastry, admired the prevalence of yogic path in the family of Smt. Ramalakshmi and therefore decided that the marriage be conducted as between the two. Sri Sastry was 20 years of age and Smt. Ramalakshmi was 14 years when they were married in the Vedic style, at Vijayawada. They set up their family life at Madras, where Sri Sastry was working at that time. As per the job requirements they lived in Salem, Visakhapatnam, Eluru, Rajahmundri, Vijayawada, Anantapur, Cuddapah, Nizamabad etc., the various district headquarters. Smt. Ramalakshmi was a highly co-operative wife in fulfilling the noble aspirations of Sri Sastry; besides, she was also a keen follower of Sri Sastry in gaining comprehension of the Scriptures. Sri Sastry used to explain to her every night the profound concepts of Sri Bhagavatha, after their daily duties were done with. They daily recited the recommended lengthy citations of Sri Bhagavatha for a minimum of an hour.
They were blessed with 7 children during the course of their family life, six sons and one daughter. All were well conceived. There was not a single miscarriage. They lived like friends, with unity in thought, in speech and in action.”

August 2005

Also this morning I came into contact via a blog-comment with a lady living in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland who had been visiting the family in 1980. She sent me two photos and wrote about her deep relation with Master EK who passed over in 1984. It is interesting to note the karmic links leading people together.

The last weeks my wife and I reflected about several situations and one’s own projections. The way you see a story is coloured by your emotions and past experiences. You project your understanding upon others and upon the related situations, and mostly you aren’t even aware that it is just your personal perspective which gives you the way you experience. “How it is for me” I see as the truth but it can greatly differ from how it is for others. The different facets of interpreting lead to very different ways of experiencing. Especially when emotional wounds or convictions are involved the view gets strongly impregnated.

My wife is doing a coach formation in the Tipping method of Radical Foregiveness, and they work with understanding one’s projections. It is astonishing to see that when you overcome your victimhood you also get out of the related pain. You start understanding the situation “as it is” and see it as different from what you have thought it to be.

The following is not a direct example of projection, but of misunderstanding out of the personal perspective out of the inability to recollect, but the effect is quite the same – two stories of Sri Kumar told at the seminar in Altheim / Heiligenberg, Germany last June:

“The ability to recollect is a facility the mind uses. In olden times when there was no recording system and when there is no pen and paper to write people registered what is said much better. Today the ability to recollect is very little. To recollect and to renarrate is not easy unless the mind has the required facility of remembering. What is recollected is generally a distortion of what is said. When there is an improper recollection what is left out is what is filled with ones wrong perceptions. Therefore when it is renarrated it comes out in a different manner. There has been an experiment in management students in relation to communication. In a group like this one student told another a small story and it goes from mouth to ear, and when it comes to the original it is totally distorted. When the original story was related to the heard, it comes at the end totally distorted. The danger of distortion comes from a wrong perception. Mind suffers from inability to recollect. It hears what is not said. The one who said says, I did not say so. Such is happening through mind.

A person asks another person, “Would you like to have a cup of coffee?” If he says, yes, the second persons tells the third person, he wants coffee. Liking is one attitude, wanting is another attitude. If I say, “I like this crystal”, it will come back as he wants that. There is a great difference between what you like and what you want. And what is received and given out with the speech is a distortion. Many times groups invite me to speak to them and what comes out is that I want to speak. This is related to an improper recollection to what is said. There are many things I like, but this does not mean that I want them. This is improper recollections to what we have received. Likewise there are improper inferences from events. I also have such experiences with even very educated persons. I give you two stories to give you the point.

I and my guide Krishnamacharya, we used to go every weekend to a remote place, since we had an idea to develop a model village. Almost regularly every weekend we were there, and later we heard in the city that the two go out to drink alcohol. They thought that others do the same what they do. In our group there was a good friend by name Jesus Diaz. Once I had to go to a group in the north of Spain, where there was one bed to sleep and we were two persons. The group members suggested to my friend Jesus to sleep at a place one kilometre distance to that. It was not practically convenient, so we decided to sleep together in one bed. Six months later I heard that we were gay boys.

How do you deal with that? Today we have so many media which keep on spreading such gossip. When two men sleep in the same bed they infer that they are gay. You develop the wrong logic relating to the two persons. All these inferences they have no basis, number one, and they are unnecessary. If you buy a cuckoo clock, they ask, did you buy it in Switzerland, but you can buy it in Spain or in Germany. These general inferences come when the mind is not clean…”

Mount Kailash, Tibet, reflected in the Manasarovar lake. Mount Kailash is a symbol of Spirit, Manasarovar a symbol of the planetary mind. The distortions of the mind give a distorted view of reality.

Last week I received a nice spiritual story in Spanish containing a profound truth:

“At a remote place in the east there was once an ascetic who reached a high grade of spiritual discernment after long years of spiritual practice. He had a young pupil of 8 years.

One morning the ascetic looked at the pupil’s face and saw that in a few months the boy will die. He was sad about this circumstance and he told the pupil he should visit his parents during a certain time: “Don’t return soon. Stay with them some time.” the ascetic told him because he felt that the boy should be accompanied by his family in the moment of death.

His surprise was very great when after three months he saw the pupil returning. He looked into his face with intensity and he saw that the boy would live until an advanced age. Then he said to the boy, “Please tell me in detail all that happened to you while you were away. ”

The boy told him in all detail what had happened to him –  crossing towns, rivers, fields and mountains. “One day,” the pupil said “I arrived at a stream that was overflowing because of the strong rain in the mountains. While I tried to cross it carefully, I observed a colony of ants on a small mound amid the stream that was about to be swept away by the water. I felt compassion for them, I took a big branch of a tree and I made a bridge from the mound to the mainland, holding the branch strongly until all the ants had crossed. Then I continued my way.”

Then the old ascetic started to understand that this act of compassion was the reason why God had prolonged his pupil’s life.

Acts of compassion can change our destiny for the better, just like a disrespectful attitude towards the Universal Law can have an unfavorable impact on our destiny.”

Photo of a friend

At the right moment for Scorpio time: A friend sent me the link to a video with photos of a cobra in Kumbhakonam, slipping to a Siva Lingam and lifting its hood. This modern time miracle happened on January 15, 2010, the solar eclipse day. At the same time in the WTT-retreat centre in Visakhapatnam we had for several hours a very intense solar eclipse meditation with Sri Kumar.

A friend sent me the following photos of a little miracle Rishi Agastya made some days ago (1st september 10). Rishi Agastya is a sage being with the earth since times immemorial. The first photo shows a poster of Rishi Agastya in the home of seven young devotees:

In the second picture taken during prayers Agastya is then captured opening his right eye:

My friend wrote: “He keeps an eye upon his devotees…” A rishi, being a “seer” looks inside, and from the inside out …

You might read a bit about Agastya in the book by Sri K. Parvathi Kumar: “The Aquarian Master“, which is about Master CVV, being from the ashram of Agastya. Agastya is also called Master Jupiter, the eldest member of Hierarchy, and there is some thing about him also in the book about “Jupiter“, where it says:

“The Master Jupiter is the Avatar of Synthesis who presides over the Aquarian Age. He conducts himself with the triangular force of Neptune, Mercury and Jupiter. He is called the Master of the Nilagiri Hills (Blue Mountains) in the Theosophical Society. He is called the great Sage Agastya in the Vedic tradition. He is the Master whose abode is in Sirius, whose functioning place for our earth is the Blue Mountains of South India. Agastya is the great sage and is the counterpart of the 7 seers of the Great Bear.”

Last week I came across a transcription of a seminar given by Sri Kumar in the Nilagiri Hills in 1996 about Agastya, Master Jupiter. He said that Agastya is very different in profile and in appearance from the other Masters of Wisdom: Whereas Lord Maitreya or Master Morya and Master Kuthumi are described as being of a tall stature, having long hair and a beard, Agastya is small and a bit round, radiating smile, of a golden-yellow complexion, bald-headed without any hair (unlike the presentation on the poster…), being dressed scarcely with a lungi, never wearing anything else. He has great, round eyes, is often traveling with his disciples and loves to cook and to serve. Through serving food he likes to spread himself into the people and thus to adjust any imbalances in the mental, emotional, and physical bodies. In his spiritual activities he never treads any trodden paths, but gives new trends and directions, being full of freshness. His live is always accompanied by will, spreading be-ness and presence. He is very humorous and his teachings are very powerful, but nevertheless humorous, thus uplifting the people.

In the scriptures there is the story that once a group of disciples in the Himalaya had the questions who is the one fasting most, and Maitreya told them, “It is Agastya, he never eats.” They wanted to see Agastya and went to him. Agastya said: „Observe me for three days.”
They were very surprised to see him cooking, eating and serving. He was not missing any meal, and every meal was from our standpoint very excessive in its quantity. After three days the group asked: „We have not understood your way of fasting.” He answered: „Insofar as you don’t feel that you are eating, it is fasting.” He does not think he is eating. He lives in tune with the universal consciousness and in such a tune-up the food is given to all the elementals around him with himself as the channel.

A friend sent me this most beautiful Islamo-Christian composition that was created as a song to religious co-existence by a Christian female Lebanese singer named Tania Kassis, accompanied by two Muslin male singers, Mohammad Shaar and Maen Zakaria who, in addition, frequently sing Christian songs at the mosques and in front of the Sheiks. The arrangement is inspired of an Ave Maria accompanied by the Adhan “Allah Akbar”.

Yesterday was Libra new moon. New moon is the darkest point of the month, also concerning psychic energy. And in spirituality Libra is regarded as the darkest point of the year, where it is more difficult to keep the thread to the light of the soul.

So this time is compared to a bottomless pit into which you can easily fall. It stands for the impermeable Nature causing a veil of illusion. In the east the impermeable Nature is visualised as Durga, the “Mother Impermeable”. Durga means, “impossible to move”.

It says it is very difficult to overcome the illusion of the Mother or the matter, and she stands at the threshold of the illusion of life. Sri Kumar says, “Unless you are in a program of discharging your karma you cannot enter into the inner chambers, and Durga blocks the way.”

Durga is depicted as a lady on a lion, the wild energies of matter. The mantram related to Durga is Dum, or Dum Durgayi Namaha (MP3). The most propitious time to invoke the mantram is on the first 10 days of the ascending moon in the month of Libra.

Last year Sri Kumar wrote, “People interested may contemplate upon the Mother with the lion, with the mantra ‘Dum Durgayei Namaha’. It can be said 108 times in the morning and 108 times in the evening after a shower, putting on fresh clothes and a fresh mind. …. It is an elaborate ritual, which people do not need to pick up. It is enough if they chant the mantra, morning and evening.”

When Durga is invoked, she protects and gives access, we are given the way through.

Statue of Durga in the house of Sri Kumar