Last week I read an interview with the Swiss professor of art history, Johannes Stückelberger, about the relation between art and religion. He is teaching at two universities in Switzerland and will start teaching at the National Taiwan University in Taipeh (see link). In the interview he remarked that in the last years famous artists have started decorating churches with glass windows or art expositions are being held in churches in a way which was impossible some decades ago: Artists would have ruined their reputation: Religion was considered to be something private, and the churches were turned more to the inside. Now they go out again into visibility and understand their buildings as public places.

This thought is very fascinating: In other cultures religion or spirituality are much more part of public life. When traveling through India you see signs of the religious attitude of the people everywhere along the roads or in cars, at home or elsewhere in public. I have seen offices with pictures of gods and gurus in a way you would never show here in the west. Though at my office several collegues have little pictures of either a spiritual teacher or a representation of the Divine –  a little statue, a flower – it is quite uncommon at other places. The Christmas displays are more of a decoration value then of a declaration of one’s beliefs. The head-scarf, however, has here quite clearly a religious connotation, coming from a cultural background which didn’t go through the process of secularization.

I myself feel it is more natural today to speak about spiritual activities than it  it was some years or a decade ago. There seems to be a change towards a greater openness, and artists seem to experience this opening towards subtler spheres of perception, in their search for new ways of interpreting the reality. A sign for the growth of the Aquarian age?

An angel in front of a café / bar in Engelberg.

Christmas is the time for business partners to exchange standardized, automatic greetings, often void of any deeper sense. A few of these also arrived in my office. Some want to impress (or bribe?) partners by the value of their gifts, while others give their gift to a social institution. One card I got was of a different kind saying that instead of Christmas present they prefer giving the money to micro-credit institutions financing grass-root economics in developing countries.

Another agency sends every year very interesting small Christmas greetings. This year it was a little self-made booklet entitled “Money – Magic, Mathematics, Soap Bubble?”, together with a bill of “One Talent“, an alternative currency of the Initiative for a Natural Economic Order INWO in Switzerland, inspired by Silvio Gesell.

Besides some short sketches of fairy-tales involving remuneration like that of Mother Hulda or The Star Money, the role of money in different religions and the development of money and digital money, the booklet containes a very interesting visualisation  of the momentary financial crisis:

To save the UBS-bank, Swiss government has given 66 billion Swiss francs. As a pile of hundred Swiss Francs bills, this is a pile of 79.2 kilometers height. For fighting the crisis in the States, the government has promised 8 trillion US$. This is an 8 with 12 zeros, or a pile of hundred dollar notes towering to 9.600 kilometers height (or about 6.000 miles). This sum is without the recent money promised to the automobile industry… An incredible financial Tower of Babel.

Quite impressive, but not the height of the towers of money – the TV-tower in Barcelona, Spain.

This morning while doing some shoppings in the city of Berne I discovered some nice shop window scenes. I love these “kitsch as kitsch can”-sceneries. The Indian Gods on tour in Swiss shop window decorations – what a colourful meeting.

Reflections of reflections – passers-by and display dummies

Non-attachment in the shop display: The Buddha meditating

The child Krishna playing, accompanied with some Sarasvathis, and Durga listening in the back, on a tiger

Hanuman between some vases – ready to serve

Shiva and Parvathi with Ganesha between the storage racks

Shiva sitting on a lotus, with his drum and kamandulu (bowl), surrounded by serpents (symbols of time), blessing the photographer.

Krishna playing flute, with Nandi at his feet.

Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman in a boat, surrounded by white horses

Sarasvathi, the Goddess of the Word and of Wisdom, sitting on the white swan (symbol of respiration), playing veena (instrument with 7 strings, symbolising the 7 planes, the music of creation).

Another statue of Hanuman, in deep devotion

Enchanting Krishna, playing the music of the soul

Riding through the ocean of shopping illusions

Melancholic angel: When shall I be redeemed from this boring shop existence?

Harlekin pondering on the mysteries of commercialism

Yesterday friends sent me a powerpoint presentation called “Seasons of Life“, with beautiful winter scenes and music.

The story is about a man who sent his four sons to go and see a tree and come back to describe it. He sent them at four different seasons, and each one described a totally different tree. So you also cannot understand the life of a man when you just have a momentary view of a part of his life. Nice thoughts – a good digital present for Christmas…

Sunset glow, last Sunday afternoon

A few days ago an Indian friend sent me the following humorous story:

God was in the process of creating the universe. And he was explaining to his subordinates, “Look everything should be in balance. For example, after every 10 deer there should be a lion. Look here my fellow angels, here is the country of the United States. I have blessed them with prosperity and money. But at the same time I have given them insecurity and tension…. And here is Africa. I have given them beautiful nature. But at the same time, I have given them climatic extremes. And here is South America. I have given them lots of forests. But at the same time, I have given them lesser land so that they would have to cut off the forests… So you see fellows, everything should be in balance.

One of the angels asked, “God, what is this extremely beautiful country here?”

God said,”Ahah…that is the crown piece of all. INDIA. My most precious creation. It has understanding and friendly people, sparkling streams and serene mountains. A culture which speaks of the great tradition that they live. Technologically brilliant and with a heart of gold.”

The angel was quite surprised: “But God, you said everything should be in balance…”

God replied, “Look at the neighbours I gave them.”

The fountain of Justitia (justice) in the City of Berne, blind-folded and with the sword and the balance in hand.

Two days ago a big parcel from the WTT-centre in Einsiedeln arrived, with books we will take to India in January. One of the copies, however, was for us – a beautiful hand-bound book on “25 Years The World Teacher Trust – Global”. Our friends in Einsiedeln had produced it in a limited edition. Last August we had been at the celebration, where a first copy was given to our teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar.

The book now has been enlarged with photos of the celebration and texts of the talks. I went a bit through the volume and was deeply impressed by all the work which had been done by Sri Kumar: 27 pages were filled with titles of talks and seminars given all around the world during these 25 years. I had the good luck of participating in a small number of these, and they had left a lasting impact on my life. And I’m looking forward to the next seminar in January.

I’m always amazed about the deep wisdom pouring out of him, with a tremendous range of spiritual topics. The book contains a lot of photos from the sacred places  he had been visiting all around the globe – and some places evoked memories in me. There are also some photos with our children, from a ceremony of introduction into writing and another ceremony of introduction into the wisdom teachings. Many groups have contributed reports on how they met the Master and the teachings, and some of the service activities were portrayed. Among these there is also the article about our group, which, with his guidance and inspiration, slowly but steadily had evolved over the last years.

Through all these cumulated contents and pictures you get a faint impression of the enormously powerful, but very silent spiritual impulse which is manifesting through this work.

The sign of the WTT on the cover of the book symbolises the wings of the work of Spiritual Hierarchy uplifting humanity and the life on the Globe, thus creating a progressive movement.

Last Saturday the sun was shining from a brilliant blue sky and reflecting in the fresh snow. I went to the nearby Villa Mettlen to take some winter shots. In the villa there is the music school of our town, it is surrounded by a beautiful park.

Boxwood balls with snow-caps

The Villa – snow magic

A natural Christmas tree in the park

Old hut in the little forest

Another enchanted hut in the cold sun rays

The sculpture of the Black Sun

The boxwood dance around the winter fountain

Angel’s Spring

Sunrise over the boxwood globe

View through the old terrace window

Dwarfs’ greetings

Ducks in the river light

An old hermitage chapel

Christmas bells in front of the town hall

Yesterday I felt a great relief: At noon we had the launch of the new intranet of my office. We had been working for the launch for over one year – and the whole process took more than two years. (I had mentioned the project in a number of posts.)

About 2 months ago we saw that part of the project had to be taken out into another project: The document management, which shall replace the file explorer, turned out to be more complex than we had thought during the concept phase, so it will be developed in a second tranche of the project – again me as the project manager. We will start when I’m back from January’s holidays in India. It seems that this will again be a long project, we will start with a pilot.

Being the project manager I had a lot of trouble with instructing the team, finding and describing mistakes and cleaning the system. The last weeks we had been working on the migration of the content from the old intranet into the new system, and the team of our info-managers had done a good job, but – mostly out of ignorance – also created several “crises” by trying to adapt things in a “try and error”-way. I sometimes was reminded of Hercules fighting with the Hydra: Having cut off one head, two other heads appeared. The mistakes of the system didn’t seem to take an end.

Hercules fighting with the Hydra. Image of Antonio Pollaiuolo, from Wikimedia Commons

And then the launch – the director giving congratulations, the head of the agency speaking about the pioneer work and me about the team-work and the surprises of the process –  happy faces all around.

An hour after the launch new problems popped up – no safeguarding possible with different pages, strange way of presentation of the news in one of the news aggregators. This morning some other questions popped up…. The last months my patience has been tested a lot – and quite some times I failed. It seems that my personal testing phase isn’t over yet.

An old sewing machine – not so complex than a modern web collaboration technology, but also helping to stitch different matters together.

Friday I’ve published some e-Christmas cards. The motives I shot last week in the city of Berne. So when you want to send someone a Christmas greeting, here you find the selection.

The Christmas tree in the centre of Berne, next to the Federal government building. It is the second tree erected last Thursday (the photo I shot Friday morning), after a storm had broken the first one.

The lights and the stars of Christmas remind us of the greater Light of the soul.

Last Friday evening there was the third and last meeting of our series of public evening themes on „The Call of the Soul“. We were a group of nine persons, most of them members of our group a a few newbies. Before the meeting I felt quite groggy, for the last week at my office was very turbulent – the final sprint before the launch of the new intranet next Monday. But hardly we had started singing an invocation to the unity of all existence, all fatigue was blown away and the thoughts came flowing in.

I had prepared a powerpoint presentation on “The Fellowship” – a play with the title of a volume from the trilogy Lord of the Rings, but of course with a quite different content. It is about the persons and things coming across our way on the spiritual path. At a first glance it might not be obvious what this has to do with “my spiritual path”, seen in subjective individualistic terms, but the theme is of great importance, especially in the long run:

On the journey we don’t walk alone, we move in a group, in many groups. There are countless groupings travelling on the planet and they are going through their path of development. We are surrounded by many kinds of groupings, with which we connected and which accompany us. Very rarely we select the people with whom we are together on our journey, but it is no accident who the fellows are. They come together according to the law of resonance: We learn together and from each other. We learn to cooperate, to support or receive support.

When the taste of subjective living grows, the spirit of being together becomes stronger and the power of the lower nature decreases. Each one adds his stone to the building of a group, and an energetic temple is being constructed, where with a a loving understanding the hearts can meet.

Have a look at the presentations of this series.

A mosaic in Corinth, Greece – a beautiful representation of the energy field of relationships.