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

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper, NZZ) reported today about a fascinating project of two Swiss artist who developed a method of overcoming the Chinese censorship in the internet. The site “picidae.net” was officially launched last Tuesday and is in English, German, Chinese and Arab. The name “picidae” comes from Latin and means “woodpecker”. The first holes in the Berlin wall were hit by so called “Mauerspechte” (woodpeckers) and gave the project its name: picidae (woodpecker).

They call picidae “an art project, that deals with one’s own horizons of imagination, the image of the world, communication and its hurdles and barriers.” picidae negotiates the firewall (Internet censorship) eg. in China or in the Arabian states. picidae delivers a complete, readable and even clickable image of the censored web sites.

The picidae site is not made up of text and HTML elements (tables, images etc.). picidae delivers a screenshot. The page is visible but not machine-readable. This means the text cannot be searched, marked or saved as a text file. That’s why internet censorship, which reacts on keywords (similar to search engines and correction programs), is not able to detect or suppress picidae pages. picidae is not a centrally organised system and is not be reachable via a centralised database. Every access point and every server runs independently and without description and naming – to prevent censorship and deactivation.

Their definition of picidae as an art project is very close to spiritual concepts of visualisation and going beyond the form, realising oneself as the observer, the I AM, which is not defined by the object he sees: “Art searches for new ways (repetition is in terms of Fine Arts just copying). The new images picidae provides are images of ones own horizon of imagination: images of a global communication and images concerning limitation and overcoming of ones own view. The images are generated in the head of the observer, exactly like in an image gallery. The point is not exactly what is displayed in an artwork but what is inspiring in the sense of Art history and reflection.”

I tested the picidae-server with our good-will website, and it is astonishing how the site is perfectly rendered, as an image. (I tried to put a link to the site, but the url changes, so you cannot link to the picidae-transformed view.)

Hopefully this approach is being used for expanding the freedom of expression and information, to further human relations and not to spread perverse and destructive ideas beyond any sense of discrimination.

By the way, the two artists have earlier launched a site called Zone*Interdite, “a test arrangement that serves as a starting point for individual exploratory tours” into the world of military restricted areas, which they are showing on an interactive map. “Individual imagination and the joy of discovering occurs, i.e. spotting, replacing the patriotic and pacifistic duty of a knee-jerk avowal, and undermining censorship, as well as the restriction of perception.”

Pecking through the great firewall of China and other totalitarian systems

The last weeks my wife and I met several situations with people where in some way or another sexuality was playing a decisive role: young couples searching their common ground and way, partners working on their relation, persons having divorced looking back at the “lessons learnt” and the way they now are going their path alone. One lady, in the later part of her life, was thinking about the different little affairs she has had besides her marriage. It was a matter of keeping up a façade of normalcy, of what to share and what to hide.

Hiding is often closely related to sexuality, especially with amorous adventures, but it seems that when you hide parts of your life’s biography, the tendency of hiding spreads to other parts of your behaviour. The “breaks” in the biography give rise to inconsistencies, and your personality tends to develop in roundabout ways.

When you are trying to take to the spiritual path, inner transparency becomes of increasing importance. If you are transgressing the natural regulations – the “laws of dharma”, as they are called in the east – the flow of your energy gets impeded and causes disturbances in your character – and this normally without your noticing it. This has nothing to do with moral conventions, but is a matter of cause and effect.

Today you can observe much ignorance in society as per these rules and regulations.Talking about it in a natural way is very much loaded with a variety of barriers. Nevertheless it is obvious that the way you deal with partner relations and sex has a deep influence on how your life evolves.

In the book “Mithila. A New Age School Syllabus” there is an interesting caption on dealing with sexuality in the chapter on Money and Sex, which is of relevance for the spiritual path. You might also like to read the Good Will in Action-newsletter on Dealing with Sexuality.

Entrance of an erotic shop in Zurich. This kind of dealing with sexuality creates an obscuration towards the higher realms of life.

We just changed our internet and phone landline to cable networks and had some problems getting online, but now the system is running 🙂 There were also some problems in changing the settings of the router. This morning I awoke with the impression what to do – and it worked! Back to the online-world. This was a good experience, after hours of searching for a solution…

Yesterday I received a parcel from Bulgarian friends: They sent me copies of the Bulgarian version of “Spiritual Astrology” by Master EK (Ekkirala Krishnamacharya). They had translated the book and published it by themselves. It is the first Bulgarian edition of the WTT wisdom books, and though I won’t be able to read it in this language, it was a joy to see the book:

My friends had visited us June last year, and I had given them an English copy. They were so fascinated by it that they started translating and publishing – and this without much financial resources. They also had to overcome other difficulties, but the enthusiasm carried them on.

It was for me a good example that when there is a will and the skill to do something, you can get it done.

The book is very profound and has nothing to do with what you normally get to read or hear about astrology. It deals with the spiritual evolution of man and provides some keys for a deeper understanding of the zodiac and the planets from an inner view. You might like to read an extract on the correspondences between micro and macro-cosmos – or read some of our Letters on Spiritual Astrology.