The US Space agency NASA is celebrating on July 29th its 50th birthday. They are going to launch a website with a tremendous archive about millions of pictures, videos and sound documents. Though it is planned to launch the site  nasaimages.org  officially next days, it is already online. They want to merge 21 collections, which up to now had been dispersed, into this one archive. Have a look at this fantastic site.

Cassiopeia A: Remnants of a supernova. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/O. Krause (Steward Observatory)

My spiritual teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar, sent me a CC of an e-mail exchange with a group member. The question was:

“Next August 8, 2008, some groups are saying that some gates will open (8-8-8).  Is there some truth to that ?”

He answered: “It is true that the human calendar is valid for the humans in the thought plane. We may therefore dedicate the day to invoke the colour of Blue. And meditate upon the Bliss of Existence.”

I liked the answer: Neither did he enter into the bustle of esoteric speculation nor did he deny the underlying urge for spiritual upliftment, but directed the attention to spiritual aspiration. This is always of importance.

Flower blossoming in the botanic garden of near Palafrugell, Spain – a symbol for spiritual upliftment

Some days ago an American friend sent me a beautiful powerpoint presentation about India. It contains a deluge of overwhelming facts about ancient India being the cradle of knowledge and wisdom. The presentation also shows similarities between Greek and Biblical myths, pictures of different landscapes and of the deities of India, basics of Indian (Vedic) spirituality and more. I have transformed it into a PDF for an easy view – though it doesn’t contain neither the beautiful music nor the animation of the powerpoint.

Today I also came across a YouTube site of a Dr. Ramkumar with a number of videos about Shiva, Vishnu or Krishna, mantrams (like Purusha Suktam), illustrated with pictures of deities, with music, or a film about a visit to a sacred cave in the Himalayas. Enjoy.

A statue of Siva Nataraja near Sri Sailam, India, January 07

Of course enjoying the sun, the beach and the free time also got their due…

The beach, reflected in the glasses of our son.

Reading at the beach – Artemis Fowl’s adventures …

… and on the camping site

Beautiful small beaches at the Costa Brava

Boats on the beach …

… and tourists …

… tourists also in the shops, with all kinds of inflatable animals and mattresses

Early morning sunrise on the highway on the way back home

During our holidays in Spain we also stayed for two days with friends in their house near Barcelona. Sighseeing was not our prime interest, but exchange. And this was a very good occasion: A number of other friends from the WTT-Spain group joined us, so we had some interesting talks.

The friend where we stayed is a doctor and a homoeopath. He is the responsible person for the Spanish version of the Paracelsus magazine of the WTT and very open to innovative research in alternative medicine. In his practice he showed us a very modern apparatus for diagnostics and treatments from Russia called Oberon, based on a spectrum analysis of rotating magnetic fields of living organisms. He gave me a diagnostic and a treatment for my chronic ear disease. It was fascinating to observe the process on a flatscreen. The treatment showed certain immediate results, however, they were not long lasting (the treatment would have to go on for a while).

Afterwards we visited the new centre of WTT-Spain in Sabadell which the group had inaugurated about a year ago. It is located in the middle of the city, in the first floor of an old house. The group had renovated the rooms themselves, and they do regular meditation, study and exchange meetings there. It has a serene ambiance, where it is certainly inspiring to do group work.

We also had a tour through Barcelona seeing some touristic spots. The city was bathed in a warm, soft light and there was a certain ease in the air. Here are some impressions, where you feel the city’s striving into space, vertically and horizontally, maybe also inwardly.

View of Barcelona from the Montjuic – a sea of houses.

The Palau Nacional, now a national gallery.

Containers waiting in the harbour

The vastness of the place in front of the Olympic Stadium is intensified through the rows of pillars.

Reaching for the sun – Calatrava’s Olympic telecommunication tower

Or reaching for the divine – Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, full of catholic fantasies.

After the evening pizza we went to a beautiful spot overlooking the cliffs of the Costa Brava where an old lighthouse is shedding its beacon over the country. I had been at the spot a day before at noon time, so you see some impressions from day and from night. The lighthouse is a beautiful symbol for the light of the soul, or the divine light, which is guiding our path when we submit ourselves to its direction.

The lighthouse is a most beautiful place, and Cancer full moon enchanted the entire atmosphere.

Steep cliffs go down some 50 meters to the sea

The cliffs and a boat in the blue Mediterranean

The beacon is like the jewel in the lotus of the soul, a multi-faceted diamond of light

The beacon in the dusk

View from the lighthouse to the city of La Calella – it seems that the light is more guiding the cars than the ships

The beacon and the full moon

Cancer full moon reflecting on the waters of the Mediterranean

The beacon

In the evening of Cancer Full moon we wanted to have a pizza in some village not far from the camping. We came to Pals. Though we didn’t find any pizzeria there (later in another village…), but the place turned out to be a beautiful medieval town. Here are some evening impressions.

Small passages leading up to the church

Tower of the fortress

The bell tower of the church

A lamp in front of the church waiting to be lit

View from the churchyard over the countryside

Tourists shopping

Tintin waiting for the start of his rocket

Angel dreaming in a shop window

Not far from our camping in Tamariú, near Palafrugell, Spain, there is a botanic garden on the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean, and in its middle there is an ancient castle. The entrance and the inner court reminded me very much of the way into the inner temple you experience on the spiritual path. The pictures show the passage from the outer to the inner, to the fountain of life and light.

The holidays are past now and a first turbulent week nearly through. A theme of the first days in Spain with the family seemed to be “volcanic”. The first days I dived into a fascinating fantasy novel of the children, “Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony“, by Eoin Colfer, with sequences about a subterranean island, from where sometimes demons escaped through a volcano tunnel up to the earth.

Then we visited friends in the Olot, a city in northern Spain, surrounded by extinct volcanoes. We first went on a volcano located within the city and later into a volcano which was cut open, since it was used for a while as a stone pit. You can see the different strata of volcanic ashes – a scene kindling the imagination – the whole area full of extinct explosive matter, where in some far future the earth might erupt again.

My friend gave me a “bomba volcanica”, a volcanic bomb – a piece of stone like a pastry with folded corners once pressed out of the inner of the earth, a witness of some telluric catastrophy.

In the evening of this visit we had a talk about some other kind of volcanic activities: Two of our friends have gone through deep psychic crises and are now stabilizing their situation with psychotropic drugs. There is still an inner fire under the surface, from where “demons” might make their way through the pipe up into the outer life. You can somehow feel the echoes of the subterranean fires of karmic effects of the past.

Other “volcanic activities” we can observe where painful experiences of the past slumbering can violently come up with an emotional fierceness not explicable from the present situation. We are living in a volcanic world sometimes sitting on hot-spots without knowing.

An old chimney in the city of Olot, Spain.

Probably there won’t be any blogposts until the last week of the month. When this post is being published, we will be already on the way to Spain, camping with the children…