Good will and service have to do with skill. You need the aptitude to do something, otherwise you cannot help. Sri Parvathi Kumar, our spiritual teacher, just spoke about this in a seminar in Spain saying:

“You think it is a service to adopt a child, but there are business houses who adopt whole countries. In India there are business houses that run hundreds of schools for free. How much time it takes for an individual to run so many schools for free? The same thing a business house does faster and better. They are the able ones. The ability when it turns to service does a lot. So business can be service.

What government can do is not comparable to what an individual can do. If the government takes to goodwill, the impact is very high. If business turns to goodwill, the effect is much better than of the individual. It is only a reorientation. I say this, because the ability to do service can do better than the inability to do good. Inability has to be transcended to gain ability. Groups have to gain ability besides goodwill. Without ability there is no effective service. Ability and goodwill have to be together.”

Last week I read a media communication by The Business Humanitarian Forum located in Geneva. They want to foster the positive potential of the private sector, they “seeks to encourage private sector support for economic and human development in post-conflict areas and poor countries where investment is needed.” They want to “bridge the gap of understanding and promote cooperation between humanitarian organizations and private business, encouraging both sides to work together to solve complex development problems.” A very encouraging approach.

Bridging the gap between ability and good will

We yesterday had a visit of a friend. Part of our talk was about the way to deal with rules and rigidity on the spiritual path.

For years my wife and I had been involved with a group where we followed quite strict rules. There was the feeling that if you don’t stick to them you will lose the path to the light and get lost in the wilderness. This was coupled with a feeling of fear and guilt – and some more subtle psychological catches. We finally revolted against it, left the group, transformed concepts – and felt well. We got guidance in this, which helped us a lot.

My friend, too, had observed these mechanisms with different friends and groups where she had been involved in. It seems that these patterns are quite common:
You are striving to lead a good live, and you develop concepts about what this is all about. Others also tell you what should be done and you adopt to what you hear, especially from people of whom you think that they are wiser than you are. And you adopt things which you take over without discrimination, or what is worse, with a logic explaining why you should follow this way.
You think, this will lead you to enlightenment, to salvation or whatever you think being the goal of your journey. And you follow – follow like a sheep, not knowing or seeing better.

There will be no harm if the one whom you follow is a real guide, knowing the path and its whereabouts – but mostly he, and you, just imagine it. You get caught in a loop. A prison of your own concepts and convictions.
My wife compared it with Luther revolting against the Catholic church, which was deciding about sin , forgiveness and salvation, this resulting in the reformation. The wisdom teachings say, there is no sin, just ignorance and the results of your acts out of not knowing better.

People can be very “piously” follow their concepts to the point of torturing themselves. There are parallels to anorexia, where individuals afflicted by it think of polluting themselves by eating. The self-destructive tendencies become obsessions very difficult to overcome. These grips you find in many contexts of convictions, especially with religion and spirituality, but also in politics: You think you are following “the right way” – and rigidity is the shadow of your conviction. It has to do with the “Power of Habit“, and here you can read a bit more about it.

Reflections of reality – a Norwegian fjord

The last weeks the clock in my computer went slower and slower – and sometimes stopped. The e-mails and files got the wrong dates, I kept on arranging the clock, but I had to realise: Already after one year the life cycle of the inbuilt battery seemed to have ceased.

Ten days ago I rung up the support of the computer company, the world’s biggest. After a long automatic intro on the phone I finally got a person from the support team. No problem, he said, we’ll send you a battery. And he explaned how to change it.

Two days later an express parcel brought a battery from England. When I tried to put it into the PC, I realised it was the wrong type. Again a call to the support team. Another supporter: No problem, we’ll send you a battery, it’s easy to change.

Last Tuesday I received a big parcel again from England – 20 batteries, but of the right type. Enough until the end of my or my computer’s life cycle, I thought.
I put in the battery (I had to take away the little board of the WLAN) and tried to restart the PC: Window started and crashed, started again and back to black.

With the help of the support team (in the meanwhile I found out how to short-cup the long automatic sermon on the phone, with pop-music in between), we saw from the bios check that the harddisk was still o.k.: You can try to do a soft recovery, this will keep your software on the PC intact.
I tried to to the soft recovery with the recovery DVD, but there was no choice, only: “This will delete all data on your PC”. Ooops.

Again a call to the support team: There seems to be no other way. Luckily I had done regular harddisk backups with a famous backup software, I thought, so I can restore everything.

The backup-restore software showed that the backup was fine, but the system didn’t activate the drive, though it showed up. I tried, tried, tried. No result. The famous software didn’t help in the case of emergency.(I later found out that the secure zone of the software might not start from an external drive, as it said on the web.)

Luckily I have done at least other regular backups of my own files plus the essential software on another harddisk, I thought. So I started the destructive recovery. It took some 4 hours. At the end, windows started. And I was happy. Too early. The software installation procedure went on and on and on. I let it go throughout the night. When I woke up at 3 am, I saw a message: There has been a problem with the installation, it could not be completed… I sighed, stopped the PC, and wanted to ring up the support as early as possible. When in the morning, after some restless sleep and a turbulent meditation, I started the computer, it came up well…

Now the work of reinstalling all the softwares was ahead. The graphic driver gave some problems, so again a call to the support team, and finally, with some new drivers, the screen was fine. Then the MS-office installation gave error messages. A long call to the Microsoft support, searching through the registries. It ended up in reinstalling the software again, and finally it worked. Many other softwares and data had to be restored, my head reeled in the end: The backup of the addresses of the mailing lists of my mewsletter hadn’t worked, I only found an old functioning backup.

So there is still a way ahead to control the many addresses and add all the missing ones from the last year, in order that the next Lunar Messenger newsletter can go out. I hope, without too much delay….

A lesson learned, I thought: A lesson in keeping my head and my nerves calm.

Today I came across the site “Life through Time” (go to: start the journey) by the famous wildlife photographer Frans Lanting. The show Life through Time contains most sublime photos and is “a lyrical interpretation of life on Earth from its earliest beginnings to its present diversity.”

You can read more about him on his website, where it says:

“As a child he identified closely with the hero of two children’s books by the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof, a boy named Nils Holgersson, who, after being shrunk by a magician to less than half his original size, joins a flock of wild geese and becomes an accepted member of the animal world. At one point the leader of the geese tells him, “If you have learned anything from this journey, Nils, you might no longer be of the opinion that man alone should rule the world. See, you people have so much land just for yourselves, so perhaps you could leave some marshy lakes and swamps and sea cliffs and distant forests to us. That way, we animals can live in peace. All my life I have been persecuted and hunted. It would be a good thing if creatures like us could find a refuge somewhere.” …

“He believes that, like Nils Holgersson, he plays the role of a “mediator” between humans and other species. “I stay with wild animals, and then I come back to my own people to tell them about life in nature,” he has said.

Since his pictures are copyright-protected, here is one of a cactus flower from a nearby botanical garden.

Today I came across the very beautiful website of the ongoing art project Ashes and Snow (English, Spanish and Japanese) by Gregory Colbert. Over the course of fifteen years, he has made more than forty expeditions to India, Egypt, Myanmar, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, the Azores, Borneo, Belize, and many other locations to photograph interactions between man and animals, which he calls “nature’s living masterpieces”.

The Ashes and Snow Project weaves together film, photographic works, art installations, and a novel in letters on the relationship between animals and man. The site is of a mystical, dream-like beauty, where people and animals seem to move in a cosmic dance.

Ashes and Snow was first revealed to the public at the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, in 2002. To date, more than a million people have visited the exposition. It will open next in Mexico City in early 2008, and it will travel indefinitely to ports of call around the world.

Since the artist didn’t allow the use of a photo for the blog, here is a beautiful photo of a ruin in Mongolia (thank you Miquel).

At the online marketing forum I attended a few days ago a presenter spoke about the phases of turning people into customers: 1. Awareness, 2. Interest, 3. Consideration, 4. Purchase. At the steps 1-3 many persons turn away, especially at the moment of ordering or payment.

This funnelling of people to customer sometimes takes long time and has to do with the channelling of attention and focus. It reminds me of the long process on the spiritual path, where an individual very slowly awakens to the inner direction.

It might take many years between the awakening of a general awareness of the existence of subtler dimensions and the focused commitment. Many people get stuck at phase 2, where they are interested, but don’t step on to a regular, rhythmical practice. And even then only a few go on from considering many ways to the way and dedicating themselves to focus their energy in one direction.

At one point or the other you have to overcome the split attention, sort out the side-ways and set forth in one direction. This has nothing to do with getting blind towards other things, but with the inner urge to grow in depth. As long as you are fascinated by the many side-tracks, the main track remains vague or veiled.

There is an increase of joy related to the increase of focus, and this is independent of outer situations. You stay in tune with your self even in the onrush of other impulses.

Road in Iceland, a photo of my brother

Today I was at the Online Dialogue and Marketing Forum ODMF in Zurich Oerlikon. About 200 marketeers – representatives of enterprises and marketing agencies – in black suits and with sober faces had assembles in a conference centre to hear about innovations and methods of web-related marketing – search engines, website-optimizing, e-mail trade… An aura of smartness surrounded most of them, you could nearly grasp the ambience of intelligence focused on “seducing the prima donna”, the consumer, as one of the presenters called it. One of the first speakers introduced the distinction between the “digital immigrants”, those born before 1980, who had grown up in a world without internet and electronic media, and the “digital natives”, the afterbornes, who take the new media as a natural part of their lives. I belong to the immigrants, though I feel quite well in the new world…

It was interesting to observe these condensed thought energies of marketing specialists, ready to sell their services to whatever has to be marketed. The online market has other rules and mechanics than the traditional media market, and the behaviour of the people, too, has changed with the online world. Customers have become more independent, volatile, deciding themselves about where to stay and where to click. An enormous creativity from the side of the specialised agencies has brought about fascinating approaches to capture the attention, and award-winning examples were presented.

The energy of marketing can be directed into all kinds of directions, but normally its master is money, not man. When the energy is steered towards life-supporting products and attitudes, this will surely have a great impact on mass consciousness. It is a matter of good will to use the instruments for the general well-being and not for manipulation, may it go to realise goals of good will.

You might be interested to read the blogposts on Vampires of Attention, or on Marketing and Commitment.

Direct marketing on the market

Last weekend my wife and I made a short trip to Spain. At Montserrat, a famous monastery located about 50 km from Barcelona, our spiritual teacher, Dr. K. P. Kumar, was giving a seminar on “Service – The Path to Wisdom”. A friend from the Spanish WTT-group picked us up at the airport and drove us all the way up the mounting with its peculiar rock formations. The monastery is a magnetic spot, many visitors – pilgrims and tourists – flock to it to see the Black Madonna with the child. We also paid them a visit before the start of the seminar.

Friday evening the seminar started with the evening meditation followed by an introductory talk by Sri Kumar. Saturday and Sunday morning there were further talks, and Saturday and Sunday afternoon presentations of service activities of the groups. In between we had exchanges with friends and a little excursion on top of the Montserrat mountains. A highlight was the Sunday morning fire ritual. Here are some thoughts from the lectures:

“It is impossible to escape from service. You find it even with minerals, plants or animals, and also with the higher deva kingdoms. When the service is done with goodwill, it helps cleaning the mind and purifying the heart. So the intention to dedicate one’s activities to the well-being of the surrounding life is the basis for all growth. There is no end to service, the will to serve is therefore most important, so that service becomes a ways of life. In this we should not look for recognition and recompense, but to see how we can serve better in a humble way.

You can do service on many different levels, not only physical, emotional or mental, but also from higher planes. In the process of serving you come to forget your own needs, and nature starts taking care of you. Service gives a value to life, otherwise it has no value. Selfish service can be disguised as selfless service, if the motive is wrong. If you give preference to service economics also grow with the time.

Many have not time for service, because their daily life is full of non-essentials. They think they are already doing much, but it is wasting time. We have to distinguish between essential and non-essential activities. Don’t engage in activities which are not useful for others.

Many think they are doing the activities like business for themselves, but the truth is, they are doing it for others. They have to satisfy customers, employees, pay taxes, insurance, machines, materials, the cost for the rooms, electricity. From the remains of the money you pay for clothes, shoes, food. Even the food is not for us: The tongue takes it and gives it to the stomach, from there it goes to the intestines. It has to be passed on. If you see it or not, all is for others. What remains for us is the experience. If you don’t have the sickness of looking for you, you are healthy. When you think only of yourself and hot of others, you get bound by your actions, but even then you are doing it for others.When you reorient to service, you will get fulfilled.

Don’t see service only as small acts we do. A good idea helps many people, it can be all kinds of activities, making music, writing, working. All is service when you think of the people who benefit through your work.”

Saturday after the morning meditation Sri Kumar invited me to come with him for a little walk. He spoke a bit about the lectures he had given in Toledo and Madrid. Then he made some proposals for our local group of the Circle of Good Will, that it would be good starting to go out and to speak to interested people about the teachings, about meditation or other topics which the people might be interested in. We haven’t done so until now: If we done this before. He gave several inspiring suggestions, and now we are thinking of how to put them into practice.

You might like to read the Good Will in Action on “The Value of Service“.

Two pictures from last Saturday’s morning walk with Sri Kumar at Montserrat

In the last blog on Mood Infections I wrote about some experiences with clouds of moods coming, where you might be receptive to an energy wave, which isn’t originating from you. A friend sent us the following reply:

“I was amazed to read about both your experiences, because I had a similar one this past weekend! On Tuesday last week, my aunt left her physical vehicle for this time, and I was trying to cope with my feelings of guilt for not being around my family during times that I know for them to be difficult. It took me a couple of days to find my inner balance again, yet even after being back to a more grounded state I was still quite open and vulnerable. More so than I was aware of:

On Sunday, I met with my ex-boyfriend for supper and a chat. Because of past experiences, I usually meet him with my guards up so not to be affected by his energies. The meeting was fairly pleasant, except for a few comments he made.

When I came home, I had a heavy headache and my sinuses were stuffed as if I’d developed a full-blown sinus infection within the past three hours. On Monday morning, I could barely get out of bed because my lower back was aching so much. On Tuesday, I still wasn’t my full self. I was lacking in energy and felt overall very weak. However, by then I had realized what had happened. My ex-friend had intuitively picked up on my openness, and clawed his hooks into me just like he had done for many years during our relationship. And just like back then, he was sucking energy from me again. The moment I realized it, I cut the energetic connection off and I felt better immediately. But when I started to develop a pain in my left shoulder that sent shooting nerve pains into my jaw, I knew I needed outside help because that was his symptoms. For years and years, he’s been having those problems with muscle tensions in his left shoulder that affected the nerves that run up to the jaw line.
he has a constant toothache in his left back teeth. Now I had that too!

I called a friend of mine, who is a wonderful Reiki master and massage therapist with a lot of experience in energy work. She worked my back for over an hour. It took some work and meditating together until I was in tune again and felt like myself again. I guess I could have accomplished that myself, but I had only half a day until the semester started and I really wanted to be on top of things for that. I recall that Torkom Saraydarian calls this negative psychic energy that builds up through negative thought forms and actions, Imperil.”

In the book on “Agni Yoga” (§ 15) you read about imperil:
“Imperil, which attracts danger, is the poison resulting from irritability. This poison, a quite substantial one, is deposited against the walls of the nerve channels and then spreads through the entire organism.
If modern science would try to examine objectively the nerve channels, giving heed to the astral currents, it would encounter a strange decomposition of the astral substance during the passage of that substance through the nerve channels—this is a reaction to imperil. Only rest can help the nervous system to overcome the dangerous enemy that can call forth the most diverse irritations and painful contractions of the organism.
He who is afflicted with imperil must repeat, “How beautiful everything is!” And he will be right; because the flow of evolution follows immutable law, it is beautiful. The more refined the nervous system, the more painful is the deposit of imperil. This same poison, by the addition of one ingredient, may contribute to the decomposition of matter.”

Water and lightfall in the Himalayas, photo of a friend

Normally during the day many different strings of themes and activities are inter-weaving. Some are more on the side of the ongoing activities, others touch deeper chords of relations, still others go to still deeper areas of attitudes, ideas, existential questions. Most of them come and go in a certain movement, a rhythm – daily exchanges, incoming mails, household, children, etc. Some are coming in a subtle, nearly imperceptible way, but nevertheless give a change to the tinge of the flow. It needs attention to recognise from which sources the streams are coming, and this is sometimes not easy.

My wife and I have observed the last days several situations where there were clouds of moods coming in, which weren’t originating from ourselves, but from other people. Here I can give only a rough outline of the stories.

I had a phone-call with a person, where afterwards I felt somehow depressive, questioning myself. On the surface the phone-call had not at all been moody. But the life situation of the person isn’t easy, and I suppose there were deeper undercurrents of irritation, which had come to me via the phone without my realising.

My wife just told me that she yesterday was for some time in a room, where some hours before a friend had been working, who has gone through a deep crisis and is still not well settled. Without realising, my wife had picked up the mood cloud and somehow felt very tired, exhausted, when she came home. It took a night with some strange dreams to digest. This morning after meditation and some yoga exercises she felt being herself again and the weariness was gone. She realised that some “mood infection” had gripped her, and that it took some time to dissolve the clouds again.

The wisdom teachings say that psychic energies get stored on articles or in rooms through the thoughts and the quality of character of a person. Also places get impregnated through the thoughts that are being cultivated regularly there – think of banks, supermarkets, psychiatric hospitals, meeting places of druggies…

You create an aura which is impregnating the surrounding. And when you are in a passive, receptive attitude, you more easily get influenced by others. When you are active or focused on something higher, there you are immune to lower influences. It is recommended to take a shower or at least wash your hands when you have come into contact with energies which dragged you down. It is also good to wash the food you buy in a supermarket to clean it from etheric impregnations. You find some hints about it in the Lunar Messenger on Symbolism and Use of the Hands.

A subtle net of influences