A friend sent the following joke:

Conversation with God

Man: God?
God: Yes?
Man: Can I ask you something?
God: Of course!
Man: What’s a million years for you?
God: A second.
Man: And a million dollars?
God: A penny.
Man: God, Could I have a penny?
God: Wait for a second.

Man phoning with God at the Wailing Wall, Jerusalem. Photo: Wikipedia

Boxes are piling up in our living room – end of the month we are moving to a new apartment and, before leaving to India end of this week, we must be ready with the biggest bunch of materials…

Sunday evening I took down the mirror hanging at the entrance, a beautiful mirror with flowers painted on it. The story of this gift came to my mind – over 22 years ago an elder friend gave it to us on the occasion of our wedding. And there was another story behind:

The mirror

Easter 1984 this friend invited me to his house in Canadel at the Côte d’Azur in Southern France (Google street view from the place). He was a British-German architect who was constructing a very nice villa mainly by himself, and I spend about 3 beautiful weeks there helping him.

One day he asked me, “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I said, “No”. – “I’ll get you one.” – “You are crazy.” – “I will see.”

Some weeks later he was at a spiritual seminar in Switzerland where he met a couple with their daughter. He told her that she should get to know me. She was curious and didn’t have a friend at that time. So he invited her and me to another seminar in Switzerland. I was living at that time in Northern Germany and told him, “No, I don’t come.” However, he invited me for another visit in Southern France for the time of the following New Year and I accepted.
I wasn’t aware that he also invited her, I didn’t want to be made a match, but that way I came to meet my future wife… We had four days together, and that was the beginning.

The only occasion I met our friend again was 3 years later when he came to see us in Switzerland – I had moved there in the meantime – to bring us the mirror as a wedding present.

We lost sight of the man. Time ran by. About 15 years later we were camping with our children near that place at the coast and had a look at the villa – it looked different. There was a French name at the premises and there was no sign of our friend. Some years later I googled his name, but there was a number of persons, none from the place in Germany where they lived.

Yesterday I did another search and came across a newspaper article about the 80th birthday of our friend, who in the meantime was living near Lake Constance in South Germany. This way it was easy to find his address and phone number. I rang him up yesterday evening. The voice at the phone was a bit surprised but sounded the same like 26 years ago. We quickly entered into a vivid conversation. He said he had sold the house to a Frenchman from Lille years ago… He still was working with geomancy, dowsing, experimenting with energy fields and air ionizing. He told me about his experiments. And he wanted to know more about what I’m doing now.

I told him that last summer I had been on a seminar of our spiritual teacher just in his neighbour village. He was astonished and we quickly found out that he knew 2 of my friends living very close by with whom I had been in India last year. He was about to meet one of them today. A small world.

And he told me: “There are guardian angels,  who do in the world a largely unknown work of protecting and connecting people, of weaving links of light. They had woven the link between you and your wife, and I just got the idea to bring you into contact. I tried to do it with other people, but it never worked.” Probably because it was his trying and not the work of the angels.

He added: “A clairvoyant person just told me that today would be a bad day for me, with negative influences.” (By the way, it was the night of no-moon, just before the solar eclipse of today.) I answered, No, I will do my prayers, and they will overcome all negative influences. I had a very good day, and your phone call was just the top of it.”

I smiled and thought, yes, the guardian angel has done a good job to reconnect us.

Read here a follow-up of the story and a later continuation.

An angel in the house of a friend in France.

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.

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

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 tonight a nice text in Spanish. I translated it with the help of a translation software and some “polishing”:

There was once a student who asked his teacher: “Where should I look for enlightenment?”
Teacher: “Here”.
Student: “And when will it take place?”
Teacher: “It is taking place right now.”
Student: “Then, why don’t I get it?”
Teacher: “Because you don’t look.”
Student: “And in what should I look for it?”
Teacher: “In anything. You simply look.”
Student: “To look what?”
Teacher: “Anything where you settle your eyes.”
Student: “And should I look somehow special?”
Teacher: “No. It will be enough the way you usually look.”
Student: “But don’t I always look usually?”
Teacher: “No.”
Student: “Why?”
Teacher: “Because to look you have to be here and now, and there you ‘are’ hardly ever.”

To meditate is to be aware of what is happening at each instant, without judging it, with a total acceptance of each present moment. It is to learn how to see that that “it is” as it is, simply. We don’t realize, but when we look to the world, we don’t see it such and as it is really, what we see is what “we think” of it.

Reflection of the sun in water. Our mind is reflecting the reality and so we don’t see it as it is, but as we perceive it with the mind.

An Indian friend sent me this nice story about the importance of helping others in need:

“A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” The mouse wondered – he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”

The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The pig sympathized, but said, “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse, but  there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured you are in my prayers.”

The mouse turned to the cow and said “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!”
The cow said, “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”

So, the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the house — like the  sound of a mousetrap catching its prey.

The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness she did not see it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.
The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital, and she returned home with a fever.

Everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.

But his wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.

The farmer’s wife did not get well; she died. So many people came for her funeral, the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide enough meat for all of them.

The mouse looked upon it all from his crack in the wall with great sadness.

So, the next time you hear someone is facing a problem and think it doesn’t concern you, remember — when one of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

We are all involved in this journey called life. We must keep an eye out for one another and make an extra effort to encourage one  another.

One of the best things to hold onto in this world is a friend.”

Rats at at feet of a Ganesha statue. The Rat, symbol of the clever mind, is the vehicle for Ganesha, symbol of wisdom, using the mind for its expression.

A little anecdote from the seminar with Sri Kumar in Einsiedeln two weeks ago:

The Master had given a talk for over 4 hours the story of Parikshit from the scripture Bhagavatam and the beginning of Kali Yuga, the dark age (on request I can send you my notes). We were all thrilled and totally out of time, the story was so captivating.

Afterwards Ramana, who was doing the video recording and transmission, told me he was astonished that the battery of the audio recorder hold out the whole time, it normally only keeps up for 2.5 hours.

Next day at breakfast Ramana and I were sitting next to the master. Ramana mentioned to him the point with the batteries. Sri Kumar smilingly remarked: “In other spiritual groups they would have made a miracle out of it, like with all the stories in Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. I could tell 10 times more stories like these.”

In the evening the master proposed to us to see the DVD of the movie Angels and Demons, with Tom Hanks and playing in the Vatican. He said that in the film you find a lot of symbolism which H. P. Blavatsky also speaks about, and you can see parts of the Vatican where normally ordinary people don’t have access.

We sat in a leisurely round and from time to time Sri Kumar stopped the film to give some comments. He knows quite a lot of movies, and also at seminars in India we enjoyed seeing movies with him.

Sri Kumar, cheerful in front of a sweets shot in Brussels, last weekend, photo of a friend

During the journey to the seminar in Germany last week we were hearing the whole time an audio book a friend gave us for the trip: The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. I hadn’t heard of the book before, but when listening to it we all were thrilled. At first I felt skeptical because the topic promised to be heavy stuff, and thus it was, but very fascinating.

Since we couldn’t finish the last of the 9 CDs during the journey, yesterday afternoon my wife and I went with our car to a beautiful place in a nearby forest. And while the sun was dancing on the foliage and the cobwebs, we dived into the novel. The story is playing in the Afghanistan of the 70 until 2001. It is about causing and bearing one’s guilt.

I don’t want to re-tell here the captivating story, but it stirred a number of situations in my own life related with it: In 1994, while I was teaching German in a refugee integration center I met a young man, an Iraqi  Jew who was “killed” and buried alive in the 80ies by soldiers of Saddam Hussein, who wiped out the whole village. It was just incredibly good luck that he escaped, flew via Iran and Pakistan until he was admitted as refugee to Switzerland. He was eager to learn violin. I organised for him an instrument which years later he brought back, when he had bought a very good one of his own. Then there was the Syrian  collaborator in my team, from the Iraqi border, while I was head of an inter-cultural counseling centre in the 90ies. He was a refugee himself and a great story teller, and together with him I wrote some of his stories in German. And then there was the Iranian colleague in the same team who had been an archaeologist and had done field work in Afghanistan in the 60ies and early 70ies. Together with him I published a series of writings about the cultural backgrounds of Muslim refugees from the Middle East. He also could tell stories of the great past of this part of the world for hours. And there are our neighbours from Afghanistan with whom we have good relations. The husband was a minister in the Afghan government supported by the Russians in the 80ies – and living since many years in Switzerland as a refugee without finding any employment. The past is quite lively with them…

But most of all the story stirred events from my own life, especially the final part of the novel, where Amir, the first person narrator, was struggling hard to re-gain the confidence of the young Sohrab, his seriously traumatized nephew. His struggle seems to be in vain, and even in the end it remains open whether he could build it up again or not. It reminded me of an encounter I had in the last months where I also tried to re-gain the confidence of a person, not successful up to now, and the final outcome remains open. My wife told me that the situation reminds her of The Horse Whisperer and of a frightened horse. So when I’m thinking of the person I’m calling her the timid foal.

The Kite Runner story contains very deep lessons on karma and it reminds me of the story of Angulimala which I told my children with a comic strip when they were small. Many don’t want to face the dark sides of their lives and try to bury them inside, avoiding any contact. It might take a long time before your are ready for entering into it. And the roots might even go back before the limits of the present incarnation. But when you go through the fire of rectification and have learned your lesson, you feel deeply relieved. This I experienced the last weeks, and also Amir felt greatly relieved in the end.

The cornfields are ready for harvest.