An American friend forwarded to me the following blessing today:

A Prosperity Blessing

May you be blessed with an amazingly abundant day today!
May the clouds break and the heavens pour down upon you more joy, more love, more laughter and more money than you could have ever dreamed of.
May the sun shine its golden light of prosperity through every cell of your extraordinary body.
May you be cleansed today of any resistance or feelings of unworthiness that you may still be holding onto.
May your false illusions of doubt, fear and scarcity gently fall away like soft white feathers on a gentle breeze.
May you be willing, simply willing, to allow the Universe to shower you with miracles today.
May the Angels wrap you in their shining wings of opulence. May the fairies deliver you to their pot of gold at the end of a majestic rainbow.
May your eyes shine with the glorious truth of who you really are and may that truth uplift others in your presence to their own inner knowing.
May your ears hear the sound of perfection ringing in your soul.
May you taste the deliciousness of every precious bite of life as your day unfolds moment by moment with amazing grace, heartfelt love and a bounty of magnificent money.
As this day ends, may you slumber wrapped in an exquisite blanket of enduring peace and profound gratitude.
And may the last words you speak today be Thank You!

NB: The author of this Prosperity Blessing informed me about her copyrights: the blessing is written by Veronica M. Hay, her website is Insights and Inspirations.

A brook in a Jordanian oasis.

Yesterday evening we had the second public evening of our evening themes on Meditation – Experiment and Experience. It was Scorpio New Moon, and the atmosphere was quite different from the first meeting: At new moon times you might feel more more oriented to the inner, to letting-go. So some people let the meetings go, and we were 10 persons, four externals, three of them from last time.

Fitting to Scorpio I spoke about difficulties and hindrances on the spiritual path: So when you start meditating, you might think of beautiful experiences of light, inner silence, expansion, harmony and clarity, but instead you often experience fog, dullness, drowsiness, bubbling emotions, thoughts jumping like monkeys or blocked energy and the feeling that the inner light is switched out. There is quite a lot of personality filth covering the lamp of the soul, and the inner light cannot shine through. In our inner being we are the soul, the I AM expressing through the personality, but living in the personality we get quickly totally lost in activities and all kinds of fancies. We had a look at the 10 obstacles Patanjali explains in his yoga teachings (read more about them here) and how to overcome them with the help of spiritual instruments. However, the work with the instruments such as sound, colour, mantrams, doing activities of good will, isn’t a magic wand giving instant enlightenment such as many hope for and others promise to give.

Afterwards my wife guided the meditation, including the observation of respiration. There was a deep silence present in the room, and the noise from the restaurant was suddenly far, far away.

Afterwards people spoke about their experiences, which ranged from sleepiness to feelings of great expansion and light. It’s always again surprising how in a group generally the meditation experience is easier and more smoothly then when you do it alone.

I today came across an article dedicated to “natural architecture“. They were showing pictures of the book “Natural Architecture” by Alessandro Rocca, an architect and a professor at the Milan Polytechnic.

On the site they wrote: “The natural environment still manages to fill us with a sense of awe and amazement. despite the amount of scientific knowledge mankind has gathered, nature still holds great mysteries that we may never be able to unravel…
There is an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind’s desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment, referred to as ‘natural architecture’, it aims to create a new, more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by exploring what it means to design with nature in mind….
The movement is characterized by the work of a number of artists, designers and architects that express these principles in their work. the pieces are simple, humble and built using the most basic materials and skills. because of this, the results often resemble indigenous architecture, reflecting the desire to return to a less technological world.”

On the German website “Sanfte Strukturen” (Soft Structures) you find more pictures of an art group, which is constructing living architecture with willow sticks, such as churches, halls, palaces. They adapted their techniques from the Sumerian reed-constructions in Mesopotamia and use it for beautiful constructions.

See also our blogpost on “Transforming Nature“.

‘Weidendom’, by Sanfte Strukturen, 2001, from the book “Natural Architecture” (c)

 An American friend sent me today a link to a beautiful video by Amira Zahra called “Ocean of My Dreams”, with verses of the Persian Sufi poet Rumi, the Arab Muslim mystic Ibn Arabi and Amjid Yaseen. The video is a synthesis of 3 of their poems, the text of them is in a free e-book of a Muslim writer.

My friend wrote: “If one has known true love, this video of the incomparable Rumi and others, will make a deep impression. Its deeper message is that if we love life itself, every moment is an occasion for joy, irrespective of the contents of that moment.”

Picture from the video

The last weeks there had been several contacts or situations, where couples were separating, divorcing or going through a crisis, some of them after long years of marriage. Everywhere there was a process of becoming aware that there wasn’t anymore basis for the relation. They had drifted apart or realised that it would be better so end the situation by one of the partners leaving the common flat.

My wife observed: “Over years they had suppressed emotions or closed the eyes to certain situations. It is like putting them into a storage room, or rather putting them into a safe, locking them thrice and then loosing the key.”

But you cannot cut away by means of surgery parts of your life, they start leading a life of their own: In some of the cases unwholesome forms of behaviour had developed, in another there was an emotional ice age freezing certain parts of perception.There remains a more or less subtle feeing of sickness of the situation, and like with cancer, emotional metastases develop. The origin isn’t the metastasis which you perceive somewhere in the relation, but the underlying blockages of life energy.

My wife said, that in the talks with the persons she feels like a mining rescuer going down into the mine with a headlight and bringing miners back to light: “I had to learn not to interfere with the concrete situation by way of giving advices, but by helping them to align to their soul, to the light. When this alignment is gained, they themselves find their way.”

And even if the way seems to be painful at the first look, it is like re-integrating long lost parts of life back into the greater whole. And this has a deep healing impact.

Figure of a troll in a Norwegian museum. Blocked emotions sit in us like in a cellar.

A friend wrote me that she see so much competition and rivalry within spiritual groups gives her problems: “Why are there always so many divisions and splits? Why can’t you just work for a common cause, to express synthesis in practical life?”

She tries to keep contact with the different groups and to get people exchange, but it seems to be a long way. A friend of her is in a deep crisis, because she has just been excluded from a group. She told me she sent her the last Lunar Messenger on “Dealing with Obstacles“, since the text was very fitting.

I answered her that sometimes these divisions are like cell divisions and bring about something new, sometimes old things / attitudes fall off, or people with another vibration frequency separate. I had this experience several times in my life. It is like in the story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who was excluded from his flock only to find a way to groups of a higher order.

Often it is a “clashing of personalities”, which causes groups to exclude members, especially with dominant leaders or with fix ideas about how things should be. Like with an individual, groups also have their personality… Freedom of the individual and ruling oneself and not the other is most important for a good cooperation in a spiritual or good-will group.

Group conflict sometimes end with broken relations….

Yesterday evening we had the first of our evening themes on Meditation – Experiment and Experience. I was a bit nervous in the beginning: It took some time until the beamer was set up and the room well prepared. By an by people came in, at the end we were all together 17 persons filling the small room: members of our group, friends of friends, a colleague, and one person who came via the newspaper advertisement.

When starting to talk, slowly the inner tension dissolved and after a while the words came more like a flow. Using the powerpoint presentation was a good help, though I think next time I will go more to free speech. It was a bit dense: My wife commented afterwards: “You have done a concentrate of a concentrate, it can be a bit less dense. But one could feel that it is a result of long years of pondering, and it was genuinely you.”
The input took 45 minutes. Then, after a little pause, my wife continued with a guided meditation, so that people could experience what had been said before. A deep silence and relaxation entered the room, from far only the noise from the restaurant above resounded. I hadn’t heard my wife do this kind of guided meditation before. It was inspiring, for it gave a step-by-step intro, good for the new-comers.

Afterwards she asked each one, if he or she would like to say a bit about their experience. Some just drowsed away, some experienced relaxation, some a deep silence. One person couldn’t relax due to a cold. So we had a bunch of experiences, reflecting the individual dispositions.
Some points could be cleared: We don’t try to stop our thoughts, yes, it’s ok to sleep, for afterwards you feel refreshed. And don’t try to keep an uncomfortable position… It seemed to me that on the face of a lady a question mark of scepticism, which before meditation was very visible, had dissolved a bit. The face had relaxed and showed a tinge of a smile…

The time was quickly over: People expressed their thanks and slowly left. When clearing the room I thought of the energy expressing through the group. There was a certain coherence, which was carried through by the whole group. It was a beautiful presence, and I felt, it was a gift from higher circles.

An inner experience can be the start for a new direction on one’s path.

Yesterday we had staff trainings on IT security. An instructor showed us different ways intruders try to break into a system and how they manage to change or steal information. Some new security measures were presented, and the head of our ITC services encouraged us to keep an eye on our systems at home, too: “Do at least a monthly scan of the hard disk…”

Well, I thought, I have some active measures, firewall, anti-virus, … I’m on the safe side.

Nevertheless I started a hard disc scan in the evening. Two times it got stuck half-way through and the system was blocked. The third time the scan went on, for a long time, through all the programs and folders. And indeed, somewhere in the system trays different malwares had crept in since the last scan. I don’t know what they’d been doing, but now these little cyber-animals had to give up their pernicious activities…

It reminded me of the subtle noxious thoughts creeping in when you aren’t on your guard. Vigilance and discrimination are very much needed to keep these virus-infections away from your inside.

Today is Scorpio full moon, and secret activities going on hidden under the surface are qualities of this sign. It rules over venomous creatures that try to hide in holes and do their stinging and attacking from there. The worms and bugs stealthily infiltrating the PC and the ones operating with them, aren’t they real Scorpions? You might like to read about the qualities of Scorpio in the “Letters on Spiritual Astrology” or in the book “Spiritual Astrology” by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya.

Keeping creeping creatures out of the system – spider and ladybug on an artichoke.

Today a friend of us, a young student and daughter of a long-time friend, came for a visit. Some weeks ago she started her studies at the university, and one of her subjects is philosophy. In the 70ies and 80ies I had studied philosophy for about 10 years. I stopped reading  philosophy books after my high school teacher graduation 21 years ago, and a head reeling from theories. I felt much more attracted to practical spirituality than to mental concepts, though an inquisitive nature and a joy with words have remained.

A big box with philosophical books had been slumbering over the years  in the basement. My friend was happy to take a number of books, which might help her in her studies, and I was happy that finally there was somebody to whom they could be of help. I felt relieved. Taking the books into my hands, images of old came up – battles of ideas, searches for meaning, discussions, irritations. Giving the books away was like freeing blocked energies in the “basement” of my mind and putting them into a flow.

Waterfall at the Beatus-Caves, Bernese Alps

A bit over a month ago, at a seminar in Montserrat, our spiritual teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar, made to me the proposal to start going out and to speak to interested people about the wisdom teachings, about meditation or other topics.

In the meantime I pondered on it, also in our local group. The impulse worked out to the idea of a series of 4 evening themes on “Meditation – Experiment and Experience”. The title was the outcome of a group discussion.

We then looked around and found a nice seminar room in a nearby hotel. Next was to prepare the announcements, then to structure the content and put it into a good form. Luckily over the years quite a number of topics had been dealt with in our monthly publications of the Good Will newsletters. I had collected photos, also from friend, which I use for illustrating spiritual subjects. So I prepared a number of powerpoint slides on different subjects such as the relation between soul and personality, dealing with thought, the use of sound. It was for me a fascinating experience, a synthesis of many things I had been occupied with since many years. 30 years ago I had participated in a meditation teacher training course, and then taught meditation for some years, before leaving that movement and stopping speaking about meditation.

Looking back, I feel that it was much too early, with too little experience of my own. In the meantime my understanding has deepened over the years, and I’m now looking forward to next week, where there will be the first evening.

Buddha teaching – Ajanta Caves, India, photo of a friend