We are living in speedy times. If you like to speed it even up, here is a tip, from a newsletter which I received today at my office:

If you want to read long texts faster than before, you can try Spreeder, a free onlinie speed reading service. You just have to copy the text into a field, put the setting of the WPM (Words per minute) on a value between 250 and 300 and click “play”: Spreeder now sends the single words of the text one after the other onto you screen and you can read the text without having to move your eyes through the lines. With a little concentration you can thus read the text faster.

Whether you also understand faster, or even deeper, remains a question to be solved. Depth doesn’t come from speed, but from growth of consciousness, inner silence and a good balance in life.

In the cockpit of a glider, April 2007

This morning, when I came into my office, there was a big parcel lying on my desk, sent anonymously from a town near Zurich. I didn’t expect any packet. When I opened it I saw a chequered bag filled with nuts and sweets, sent by a web-marketing agency with whom I’m working. I thought, nice greetings from Santa Claus and distributed the content in our office (of course I took also some sweets and realised again that I’d better not…).

Then, in the afternoon, I even caught a short glance of Santa Claus: He was walking through the church garden past my window, followed by some people. I quickly took a shot of him.

Beyond all commercialisation – his inspiration of sharing with others is a genuine message of good will.

I sometimes get English e-mails signed “Love and Light”… Now a South African friend sent an e-mail with a signature, which pleased me very much: “Love, light and laughter” 🙂

A photo of a friend, from Bali: The elephant-headed god Ganesha wishing you good luck !

A friend yesterday sent me a video which I also found at YouTube and others on the web. There was the following description in the e-mail:

“This woman in the video found this lion injured in the forest ready to die. She took the lion with her and nursed the lion back to health. When the lion was better she made arrangements with a zoo to take the lion and give it a new and happy home. This video was taken when the woman after some time went to go visit the lion to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her.”

This heartiness is really a true leonine quality!

My wife yesterday said that she had observed something like a “love leakage” with several persons: They seemed to be unable to go into a nearness to a friend or a partner, and it seems that it had to do with a feeling of not being accepted themselves. With some there was a problem with their father or mother in the past and one didn’t have a father. Though many years since their childhood had passed they tried to avoid closeness or expressing affection. This strategy of avoiding somehow spills over into different areas of life.

My wife described how some “miraculous” changes happened, as soon as they started establishing a conscious contact with their soul, the higher self: On very deep levels there were transformations happening, and they started coming into a flow. In one case the changes were quite dramatic. Psychiatrists and psychologist who had been involved in a related crisis hadn’t been able to reach to the point. The “magic” of the soul, however did.

It needed accompanying and guiding the persons to themselves, to get confidence into their own inner essence. The problems couldn’t be changed from outside, but from within.

Master EK says in his Spiritual Psychology Meditations: ““Have a friend in yourself, be a friend to others.” And Master KPK beautifully describes the power of love, which is the power of the soul, in his booklet On Love: “Love heals. It needs no intellectual techniques… Love transforms… Love is the sleeping energy in every being. When Love awakens, there is no self-control! The SELF flows…”

White-waters in the Pochtenschlucht in Kiental, Switzerland

Last week I had at my office an online demonstration with telephone conference of an international web-analytics enterprise: They wanted to convince me to implement their tool (up to now we have another solution). One person had prepared the contact (and he was a bit pushing), two others were on the phone showing me all the advantages of their system. I nearly had no time to say anything nor did they enquire what our needs were. They showed me many features of their tool in all details – the only thing was, that these weren’t relevant for us.

After over an hour the presentation came to an end. Before the second person could go on with some more explanations, I found a second for objecting, “Our situation is different from that of a business enterprise, and the tool has so many possibilities of web tracking, which nobody in our office would be interested in.”

They were a bit consternated, then excused and asked what our needs were. I explained. Indeed, their system could cope with these needs, and in an easy way. At the end they excused for not having asked in the beginning. I said, it’s o.k., only we have to meet each other’s understanding and requirements before we can proceed.

I don’t know yet if I want to change to this analytics-system or not.

Tubes without connection leading nowhere…

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has just completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online, as a press release communicated on November 27.

The project was initiated in 2002, and now anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library. The Million Book Project represents the world’s largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free. As per the countries engaged in the project, most of the books are in English or in Chinese. However, more than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world’s books.

Though the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available online for free, about half of the current collection remains under copyright. Until the permission of the copyright holders can be documented, or copyright laws are amended, only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed at no cost.

“Knowledge is structured in consciousness”, says an old Eastern wisdom saying. Digitalising is an important step of making books virtually accessible to all, but only what you have integrated into your live becomes part of your living – no matter how many books are the outflow of the mental activity of mankind over the centuries.

A bookshop in Berne. In a virtual library you can’t just take a book into your hands and start turning the pages.

Last Wednesday I had a “business-lunch” with some executives of the IT-agency, which is realising the new intranet of my office and where I’m the project manager. During the talk one of the members told me that two years ago, from 05 to 06, he had been on a one year’s journey via land to India. I was astonished: In my youth some of my friends had been hitch-hiking to Goa, India, but I had thought that because of the geo-political situation it wasn’t anymore possible or at least dangerous to go via land. The IT-engineer said, that they had a very smooth journey, without any disturbances.

They had gone via Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan to India and Nepal. They never had any problems at the frontiers, and also during the journey there weren’t any burglaries or accidents. He told me that the most cordial and hospitable people he met in Iran. He was impressed that even on the country people were very open-minded, very hospitable and well-cultured. At home, the women weren’t wearing the chador and joined talks. People felt quite distant to the official rulers and openly spoke about it. It reminded me of my talks with an Iranian colleague, with whom I had published a series of documents about Iranian and Muslim culture, for Swiss social workers working with Iranian refugees.

The IT-manager said the only uncomfortable situation was during their passage through Balochistan, where they joined with other travellers to go through undisturbed. He further spoke about his experiences in India and Nepal. There, even during turbulences with the Maoist opposition which blocked them for a while, they hadn’t experienced any adverseness. I asked him how they could manage to drive through the partly chaotic traffic in India: They just took it slowly and went with the general flow. Only in the villages they had sometimes to stop and somebody had to climb on the top of their car to lift up the electric wires…

When I asked him how he could manage to be away from office for such a long time, he said that the management of their agency, of which he is a member, started with the agency during their studies, and since they didn’t have much free time the first years, now one after the other takes a longer time of vacation to go around the world – to see other cultures and to experience very different ways of living.

A jeep at the coast of Senegal, photo of a friend.

The third evening of our series of evening themes on Meditation – Experiment and Experience yesterday evening happened to be around Sagittarius full moon time. Two newcomers popped in, some returned from the previous meetings and then there were members of our local group – all together we were 13 persons. The atmosphere was very different to the last time, a Scorpio new moon. There was a good presence and resonance in the audience, and I felt a continuous flow of thoughts around the topic popping in. Before I felt like being empty, but after the alignment in meditation before the meeting I felt like being “plugged in. During the talk I was more calm and settled than the first time, and more energetic than last time. It was a good experience.

After a short repetition of the last meetings I started with the powerpoint slides of this evening, mentioning some fundamental things about spiritual practice: “Make haste slowly”, as the saying goes. There is no need of wanting to get enlightenment the other day. It is a long journey. Then we touched the topic of food and drink and the importance of service for a spiritual evolution and came to the main topic of this evening, the Path of Yoga. I spoke about the subtle bodies of man, the etheric existence and the bridge between the lower and the higher mind, between soul and personality. We had a look at the subtle energy centre, called chakras or lotuses and the kundalini.

The people were very open, and the meditation, starting with the singing of 21 times OM quickly established an energy field which most of them experienced as a deep inner silence. A newcomer said that she never had such an experience before. It was inspiring to see some seeds of inner growth sprouting.

Energy field – a statue by Swiss artist Maya Thommen

Some time ago we heard that in our settlement all flats will be given notice within the next two years, so that the apartments can be renovated and rented at a higher price. So we started looking for a new flat.

Two and a half weeks ago we saw an old, but charming flat in a neighbour village, where the price wasn’t that much exorbitant like the normal level here in the area. The building manager showed it to us, it seemed that we had good chances to get the apartment, and so we applied for renting it. Some friends with a “penchant” to clairvoyance confirmed: “Yes, you will get the apartment, I’m sure about it.”

Our imagination started organising the rooms and the removal. Inwardly there was already a feeling of saying good-bye to the old flat – until yesterday morning: A letter returned our application saying that they had given preference to someone else… So the bubble burst.

Again it was astonishing for us how a desire can create an illusionary feeling of a mock-reality. We said, o.k., something else and even better might come. And will there also be some other flat-bubbles?

My wife added: “I had talks with a friend who was very much convinced that then man she met was her future new husband. I asked her how they deal with resolving problems, and she answered, that it is going very good – until half a year later the relation bubble burst: She somehow had totally suppressed the difficulties in the relation and tried to live on the easy side.” Life, however, easily gets us back out of the rosy clouds, down to earth again.