From Hamburg a one-hour drive brought us to the house of a friend and his wife living at the outskirts of a small town. Sitting in the garden, surrounded by flowers, we spoke about different stages of our spiritual journey through life, while our wives were exchanging experiences in the living room. Later we joined together.

For years my friend had had a spiritual bookshop and a publishing house for spiritual / astrological books. Later he sold the shop and focused on publishing as well as on managing the production of nice jewellery with spiritual symbols, in Asia.

In his life he showed a great love for freedom from limitating structures and a great aspiration towards cosmic depths. He is much interested in creating a space for people to meet in freedom. He told us of a round table group of men with different spiritual backgrounds and with an intense inner journey which a friend of his, a publisher, had formed a year ago where. They meet every 6 months for a weekend of exchange, contemplation and reflection. Our friend is planning to launch a free meeting with friends of our spiritual movement for next year, and he showed us his draft of a concept.

After evening meditation we continued our drive eastwards to meet a friend near the Baltic Sea.

A wind mobile in the garden of  our friend

Buddha meditating in the garden

On our tour through Belgium and Germany we are now in Hamburg. Yesterday and today were filled with lively conversations and exchanges. It is very fascinating to have a look into biagraphies and to get a closer feeling for the steps of  experience people have walked. These are all friends with a long spiritual history and a deep search for light, a committed expression in their surroundings, integrating spiritual living with professional life.

Yesterday afternoon we joined the group meeting of the WTT group of Hamburg, where after many years we met again the old lady at whose house they meet since many years. In my exchange with her we realised that very often in our past our paths had been touching very close points. She gave me insights “from the other side of experience”, and I could share with her information, insights andexperiences from my side, about joint companions on the path. It was very touching and heartening to see how we had been strolling our ways in zig-zag movements and had observed many an event in a similar way.

Other friends had joined the meeting, and there were many impressions shared in a short time.

These talks have a great intensity, which I enjoy very much.

Path to the light – staircase in the house of our friend, where we stay at the moment.

Buddha-statue in a house of a friend we visited yesterday

Herb garden on the roof, veranda-impression

On our journey we went eastwards to Germany. In Bonn we had a short but intense encounter with young friends. Then we drove on to Wermelskirchen, to the center of WTT Germany. Our friends gave us a warm welcome. the next morning we joined the fire ritual in the garden of their house, in an enchanted ambience. There is a beautiful statue of Krishna in a little pond, where dragonflies come out of their larva skins to start a new life in the air.

Later some group members assembled for a morning study group with a lively exchange on spiritual topics, where we fellt much at home.
But in the early afternoon we already set off again norhtwards for our next visit, in the direction of Hamburg.

Little Ganesha–statue at the entrance of the house of WTT-Germany

Krishna-statue in the garden, in a little pond

Master CVV was known to have expressed fullness of life by regularly celebrated great dinners with many people, serving numerous courses. I was reminded of this during our visit to the Belgian group of the WTT, where we had beautiful meals in the garden, with lively conversation – besides enjoying meditations, fire and water rituals together. We had the good luck that our visit here co-incided with the birthday of a friend and with the national holiday of Belgium, so that our friends had time for exchange and for havinng joy together.

We particularly enjoyed the visit to the house of a younger member, where other young group members joined. After lunch she showed us her horse, a dear friend since many years. The mare was vividly greeting us and jumped over the field. She seemed to be pure energy, and she expressed joy seeing her human friend.

We later had a walk through the countryside, along golden fields of wheat and through a forest speckled with sunlight. It is a beautiful time of fullness and cordial exchanges. Today we will continue our journey to Germany.

Lighthouse at the Belgian coast

Candlelight on the altar

On our holiday journey to different groups of our spiritual movement of the WTT we stay for some days with the Belgian group in the surroundings of Brussels. It is a very cordial encounter. Sunday after a morning fire ritual and brunch a group member drove with us to the city of Brussels. On the way he described how often when entering into the city images come to him of the many layers of the city’s history. The past experiences are not gone, but stored in the subtle realms of space, impregnating the qualities of the area.

He showed us different places of Belgium’s historical past, of the urge of rulers striving towards grandeur through pomp and displays of power – on the background of utmost cruelties towards colonialized people who were exploited by force. The karmic waves have backlashed repercussions to the society, causing instabilities and social changes.

In the city we saw signs of occult work from olden times (free-mason) on the walls of several old houses, or other symbols with a spiritual meaning, which the passers-by don’t notice, silent messages without a receiver? In some side-road, where our friend had a house, we saw an old underground passage,  which had been used for transporting prisoners – a strange relict symbolising the imprisonment of man deep down in matter. The towers of the EU administration or other signs of present day’s rulership are thus mixing with undercurrents which escape from the rational mind.

Shop-window reflections of different layers of reality

View to the sky along the front of the town hall of Brussels, on the top of which there is a statue of St. Michael.

Fortune on the wheel with the horn of plenty

An angel trumpeting a silent message over the noisy crowds of the central place

Don Quichote and Sancho Pansa fighting against the nightmares of modern life

For over 6 months I was in a coaching group for project managers. It was a small group of 3 persons with a very experienced process consultant with whom I’m in contact since about 16 years. We had 6 sessions together and today was the last one. It was very fascinating for me to have here a space for reflecting the dynamics of complex processes in our projects. The general experience is that situations who seem to be clear tend to do into some kind of diffusivity. Quickly the landscapes change, and situations or agreements which seem to have been clear are getting uncertain or silently enormities happen which you tend not to note at first hand: The commitment of team members changes, the external partners have another understanding than oneself, and though it seems that it has been clarified on paper and in contracts, the clarities tend to diffuse. The process consultant today gave us a paper with the sentence: “With the time every project starts living lies”. You must be very truthful, careful and attentive to see the subtle changes and, if necessary, to do the needed interventions.

The last weeks I had been writing poems (condensed thoughts) – in German – in the early morning hours about observations and experiences. One of them reminds me of this morning’s topic of the coaching group, so I translated it into English:

Where the path might lead me today?
Questioning I stand at the threshold
of a new morning.
Every day opens, related to
the previous one
and embedded in old tracks,
but there are always
new wanderers waiting
and even the seemingly old companions
enter every day
into a new landscape,
where the sceneries keep on changing.
Often a friend seems to hurry ahead
or fall behind
or take to another way
and slips away, mostly unnoticed,
but frequently also only a cloud
or a bend hides the view
and the closeness remains nevertheless.
The community of
those striving to the common goal
gives protection and strength
in dangerous times.
For suddenly the way might lead
through rough areas
and besides it open abysses
of incertitude, irritation or
poisonous clouds of fear,
or there is
a fight against fatigue and
weaknesses and
threads to the body.
It is good to have
a skilful guide,
whose leading hand
gives strength and shows the direction
and sees that the
group of wanderers
stays together and always
keeps the eye on the
star of the goal.

Marzili bridge, today at noon time in Berne, on the way home.

I just came across an inspiring story on The Web of Hope, called “The Flamingo Story”. It starts with a quote from Robert F. Kennedy:

’Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the life of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and those ripples, crossing each other from a million different centers of energy, build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’  – Robert F Kennedy

“An ecologist studying flamingos on Kenya ’s Lake Nakuru has noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every year, when the time comes for migration, a few flamingos start the process by taking off from the lake. Since none of the others take any notice, they soon turn round and come back.

The next day they try again. This time a few others straggle along with them but, again, the vast majority just carry on with business as usual, so the pioneers return to the lake. This trend continues for a few days. Each time a few more birds join in but, since the thousands of others still take no notice, the migration plan is aborted.

Finally, one day, the same few birds take off again. This time however, the tiny increment to their number – maybe just one extra flamingo – is enough to tip the balance. The whole flock takes flight. The migration begins.

Various terms have been developed to describe this process – ‘critical mass’, ‘the tipping point’, ‘the hundredth monkey’. Modern biologists talk about the ‘butterfly effect’, suggesting that a butterfly flapping its wings in Sumatra can start a tornado in Idaho . The insight, from Chaos and Complexity Theory, is that tiny incremental changes within the dynamics of a complex system can lead to very dramatic effects further down the line.

If we apply this concept to our current predicament, it gives rise to an immediate sense of empowerment. Rather than dismissing a small action – ‘what difference will it make?’ – or the role of the individual – ‘what can I do about it?’ – we see that change is actually always propelled by the individual, or that a small action can be an instrumental part of the significant changes that arise through complex processes.

Seen from that perspective, we are the ones with the power – the power to cast ripples into the pond and become active nodes within a global network; the power to make positive change into a contagious impulse; the power to help build the sort of world we want for our children.”

The “Web of Hope” is an inspiring initiative of education for sustainable development. Their motto is: “We can show you that the answers are here today – and they are being created by ordinary people like you and me doing extraordinary things…”

They are also running project with a website called: “The Waste Ed Roadshow- teenagers changing rubbish attitudes“; it is an 80-minute performance designed to educate teenagers about the waste we create and attempt to dispose of. You find a trailer on YouTube.

Flying Flamingos, from MarioM, Wikipedia.

The last weeks in my office had been filled with a lot of intense new developments. Last Tuesday I was in the management board of my office (Red Cross) together with a colleague presenting ideas for launching social web activities for making our activities better known besides the main website. Three years ago, at the time I started this blog, I had tried to convince the officials to open up for blogging, but there had been a lot of reservations. Now the time had changed. The International Federation of Red Cross Societies has given out recommendations to the national societies to actively take part in Web 2.0 and they just had run a campaign around the celebrations of 150 years of Red Cross (Solferino) accompanied by a lot of activities  in blogs, Facebook, and the like. Our management board was now very open, and the new director very much in favour. So we got a green light for starting activities, of which I’m now in charge. Wednesday I set up a blog at the Google blogger platform, but it only will become more active in the later part of the summer. Then I started a Facebook account for my office.

Personally I’m very reluctant about using such a platform: a month ago I got an unrequested invitation by Facebook – spamming me – to join them. The wrote: “Hi… The following people recently invited you to be their friend on Facebook: (and there were six names of persons from my mailing list contacts all over the world, who had sent me invitations in the past, to which I had not responded)…

And then: “Other people you may know on Facebook:” and there were 6 names I all know, from South America, who never had contacted me about Facebook. So they are profiling my contacts, though I never had entered into any contact with Facebook. A very aggressive web 2.0 marketing strategy. Of course they mentioned, nearly illegible, in grey letters: “This message was intended for xxx@good-will.ch. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe.” I never had asked them to subscribe me.

On the insistence of a colleague from the ICT of my office I had joined some weeks ago the professional contact platform Xing, because there is a Swiss MS-SharePoint community and I’m in charge of the SharePoint-based intranet of my office and document management. Hardly had I registered in Xing that I got a phone-call from a web agency offering me support services. And a information technology courses provider contacted me several times to get me into their mailing lists or on some courses. I declined these contacts…

I’m very much interested in good, relevant contacts, but at the same time very selective as per what is relevant. Friends are not gathered the fast way the social webs promise with “friends” and “followers”.

Last Wednesday I was at a presentation in our office about the latest Microsoft Fast data search technology. Fast had been acquired by Microsoft in 2008 and will be part of SharePoint from 2010 on. A specialist from Munich gave us an introduction into the working of this most modern search engine with a lot of fascinating features. Since I’m just running a pilot project about document management together with an external agency to implement a new system, this was particularly thrilling for me to see. The ways we had been searching up to now require quite a lot of work from the staff to relate the documents with so-called meta data. Now this new search engine promises to extract the meta data automatically. We will set up in August/September a test environment to compare the different solutions envisaged. By October we will decide which way will be the most viable…

Reflections on the globe in the court of the Cité des Sciences at Paris, photo by a friend.

Some days ago a friend from Canada sent me a text with pictures about Mudras, the subtle art of hand position, which I also found on the web.

I looked up my seminar notes and found something my spiritual teacher Dr. Sri Kumar said in a seminar about White Magic, Arosa 2001, about mudras / the hands (my notes):

“Holding the hands is a science by itself, the science of mudras. There are many ways of holding the two palms of the hands: First establish the necessary purity and second the power of thought to direct the energy and third the use of hands for direction of energy….
When not used, keep the hands locked, in whatever way. When it comes to the posture of Namaskar, it is to bring the left and right energies together. The posture of Namaskar is to offer oneself to something higher then you. Holding the right in the left, the right by the left, meaning, you are looking for ascension, higher energies. The contrary is to bring down the energy. There are 16 mudras used in higher states. The right hand relates to the soul, the left to the personality. In any posture the thumbs have to join. In Namaskar the bottoms of the thumbs have to join. Many other usages can be learned later. All postures will be taught, when you have really begun. For the time being, use to close the hands and offer them to acts of good will. Mental, emotional and physical cleanliness and purity is necessary. Be aware of the power of the hands and hence keep them clean. … When we gain the necessary energy, the other postures can be given slowly. Also the eyes. First we work with the throat, which speaks of the personality. Normally we speak flattering ourselves and critical of others. We speak from the personality standpoint. The speech is constructive. The energy centres related to the hands relate to the throat. You speak with the hands. Many people do a lot of dances when they speak. First working with speech, silence, OM. Stop speaking about the personality, about oneself. Normally you speak about yourself much more as you are, about others less than what is there. These distortions must go. The true work of healing will come when man has learned how to speak and think: Thinking from the heart, not from the solar plexus.
Many of the group members lose energy for nothing. It would be helpful to join the hands or close the legs or feet. If you sit open, the energy flows out. When we are habituated to keep ourselves closed while not at work, the rest of the process can be safely explained.

Buddha with teaching mudra, Ajanta, India. Photo of a friend

Last week I went to North Germany, for a seminar with my spiritual teacher, Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar and his wife, Kumari-Garu. For 2 weeks they had been on a tour visiting all groups of the World Teacher Trust in Germany, and the WTT-Group of Bünde, North-Rhine Wesphalia, had invited me to come to the meeting with the Master at their. They had worked a lot to beautifully prepare the house and the garden. In the evening of June 18th, Sri Kumar and Kumari Garu arrived, travelling from Berlin via Hamburg and Bielefeld.

After a hearty welcome we had dinner together. Next morning after meditation there was a question and answer session with the Master.

One question was about healing: “We want to work with healing, at the beginning we decide to first heal ourselves before working with others.”
Sri Kumar answered: “First healing ourselves and then healing others doesn’t have to be like that. In our effort to heal others we are healed. You can think of difficult situations on the globe where people are suffering, that can be our patient, where there is suffering on the globe. That is the object for healing. Then you feel that the healing energy is all around. That is the truth. There is the healing energy and then you are there, you can receive into you and transmit to the object of healing through the triangle. In this we don’t use any name, so it can be given to the people also. We relate to the God energy, healing energy. God is omnipotent, so healing is also omnipotent. You can call it healing energy or healing nature or God, whatever. That can enter into you with the view to receive. So you receive into your heart, you transmit it to the object of healing and also link it up to the healing energy. So it gets into you, the energy is transmitted to the object of healing and he is also connected to the healing energy. You can connect to the triangle. With every inhalation you receive, with every exhalation you transmit the energy, and in the gap before you breathe in again, it leads the energy . Like that you can do it 12, 18, 24 times, and later you can link it to the energy and come out.”

After breakfast the Master and Kumari Garu conducted a fire ritual on the terrace of the house. At the end the fire was brought around the house as a blessing. Later the Master gave some consultations, and in the afternoon we departed to Bad Essen, where the summer solstice seminar was taking place.

The group living started with a beautiful candle ceremony, followed by a short lecture about summer solstice and evening meditation. Later in the evening a group member gave a jazz concert with his saxophone.

Next day and Sunday morning the lectures continued:
“What is the magic that happens around summer solstice? The magic is true to some, as true and tangible as our eating breakfast. To some it would be an illusion. These are the dreamers who dream that they have had breakfast. Every question carries its answer in it. Some put themselves into an imagination and feel the related relief, and then they feel much about themselves, but the one who as eaten know those others who have eaten, because they are all around. When the dreamer says, I have eaten breakfast, those who all had breakfast know that he hasn’t eaten breakfast, but is dreaming. Imagination can lead to illusion, when there is no activity of service.
So there are those who experience it really, there are those who experience it through their own imagination and those who carry it as information into their head. They only speak of it to others. Let us experience the visit of the solar Lord in the heart. By tomorrow this time the solstice is around a quarter to 8 European time. This preparation should lead us to re-orient firstly to service, to help the suffering humanity even in a very small way….”

It was a heart-thrilling encounter, with many good exchanges. Filled with inspiration and joy we afterwards returned back home.