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…

I yesterday got an e-mail forwarded by a friend. It was about the American dream, on the occasion of Fourth of July, the national US holiday, being this year the 232nd birthday. The original mail said:

“Our American Dreams have been built and realized on the bedrock of faith, freedom, hard work and sacrifice since 1776. As part of the industry that has brought The American Dream of Homeownership to more families than any other country in the world we stand proudly beside you in shouting – ‘Happy 232nd Birthday America!’ ”

I first wasn’t sure if the “Dream of Homeownership” was meant ironically – in view of all the news about the real estate crisis in the USA caused by the present lifestyle on loans. Also some Swiss banks had been drawn into the maelstrom…

My friend from Texas had answered: “Yes, the American Dream is a strong motivator to work hard because here merit does get rewarded. However with time, the Dream itself needs upgrading since many have found that even after its realization in its present form, they remain unsatisfied. This upgrade should be in the realm of human development in the currency of life – consciousness. The present Dream is wealthy in the currency of material welfare – dollars, but very poor in the currency of life, which is why we struggle with life because the demand is greater than our ability to cope.”

For an onlooker there are other strange scenes coming into the dream, making it somehow a nightmare. There is the feeling of collective fear and a crave for security – the “right” to have guns and the related killings, the “border control syndrome” in the wake of 9/11, and the US having also forced other countries to launch new biometrical passports in the name of “security”.
Outer security can never replace the inner feeling of security, which has also to do with right action or the karmic results of wrong actions. The “victim” of aggressions is likely to become a future aggressor, also in the case of nations.

A small observation about security: For several months reconstruction work was going on with a house and its surroundings at the corner of the street in which my office is located, about 150 meters away. Since one month it is now the seat of the American embassy in Switzerland. The security preparations created some kind of a fortress – especially deep anchored fences, steel bollards along the road, entrances with security screening buildings. At the place where the old embassy had been, a street had to be blocked in order to avoid any approach of dangerous vehicles. The same is done with the street of the Israeli embassy. Other embassies are less “high security zones”, some with fences, some just houses along the streets.

Yesterday preparations for the celebration of today’s Fourth of July were going on in the garden of the American embassy. When I went home I saw soldiers of the guard screening someone bringing articles for the party. Tonight the party will start, this afternoon the street is reserved for the guests.

A contrast to this “dream of freedom”:

When I go home with my bicycle I come along the front of the Swiss “House of Parliament”. It is in the centre of the city, a few hundred meters from my office. No special fences, direct access, though at the entrance there is some screening. Directly in front of the building there was the party zone for the Euro08, and two times a week the place is used as a market where farmers sell their products. Sometimes I see members of the government, ministers, walking around in the city, just like other people do, without any security guards around. A feeling of normalcy with politics, not much fuzz about it, no high security ghetto.

May the 232nd birthday inspire the Americans to awaken from the “Dream” state of separativity into a higher awareness of oneness, of integrating into a greater life, sharing the needs of the greater whole and behaving on a friendly basis also with other nations, which don’t share the same sets of convictions. This certainly will create lasting security, based on the unity of existence.

The American embassy in Berne, this morning.

I today got the link to a Buzzword-Generator: Whenever you come across some high-sounding technical expressions, they might come from this generator: “Bussword can create over 1 million buzzwords that mean nothing but sound impressive.” So when you read something about “Stand-alone coherent function” or “disintermediate logistical access” or “total responsive implementation” – these are just outputs of the generator. So have a try.

Hopefully this is not just a bussword generator: My laptop keyboard.