A friend of mine who is teaching at an American university sent me yesterday the following interesting lines:

“I have been cruising the web the past days for material I can incorporate into the class I teach and found a current development in Hollywood circles quite inspiring. It seems that more and more celebrities take action toward a good cause and use their fame and social status to help make the world a better place.

For example, Leonardo DiCaprio has produced a documentary about environmental damage and its effects on our planet titled The 11th Hour. What is most incredible about it is that he and his team don’t leave it there. They have created a website with a lot of information for people on how to make changes and contribute individually.

Another actor who’s been in the media recently for his activity for a good cause is Brad Pitt. He’s spent millions of dollars to help rebuild New Orleans’ homes in an environmentally friendly way.

Someone who is having a great impact on the Native American nation that is close to my heart is Viggo Mortensen. He founded a publishing house where he publishes books about the Lakota Sioux nation of the Dakotas. Mortensen was a published poet and painter already before he landed the role as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Among other books that pertain to Lakota culture, he wrote a book titled Miyelo in 2003 in which he documented the history of the Lakota and the tradition of the sundance. The greatest part of the sales of the book flows toward the Pine Ridge Reservation where Mortensen was welcomed when he learned the Lakota language for his role in Hidalgo. It seems he has found a second home there.”

Doing good doesn’t only inspire Hollywood stars. Today I came across an article about “Silent deeds for a better world”, an ad-campaign of a German soft drink producer (“the official drink for a better world”) who has realised a website called Stille Taten (Silent Deeds), which inspires to do anonymously good deeds to others and gives an occasion to write reports on it. This initiative has caused a great deal of discussion in blogs and the press. Though it is an PR-campaign, it leads people into a good direction.

Another friend from the States sent me today the following lines of H. P. Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine“, which fit very well to this theme:
“Altruism not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but many bad effects. If virtue in distress, and vice in triumph make atheists of mankind, it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own savior and his own destroyer.”

Spreading some sunlight into the life of others

The wisdom teachings say that your character has to be developed and your life firmly oriented towards good will before you can be entrusted with subtle powers or energies without causing harm. Money is a very concrete kind of energy, and it seems that dealing with great amounts of it can have disastrous effects and damage your life.

I read this week an article in the German magazine “Der Spiegel” online about brokers: Those financial pros who shift most money are the most psychically disturbed persons. The “roller coaster drive” of the stock markets causes great stress to the traders. Many bankers, fund managers or brokers easily get into an emotional exhaustion. Studies have shown that rage attacks, depressions, fear or all kinds of psycho-somatic symptoms are very frequent, much more often than in other branches of society. Alcoholism, drug or medication abuse are quite normal, as well as gambling and sexual excesses. The most successful brokers, who control enormous amounts of capital seem to be mentally and emotionally most deranged. The more stress, the more they have a tendency to manipulate and become dishonest. This destructive development often ends in broken marriages or even suicides.

“A lot of these guys have manic-depressive tendencies that are triggered by the volatility of the market. They also lack the insight or the coping skills to deal with the stresses of the market,” said Dr. Alden Cass, clinical psychologist and president of the Catalyst Strategies Group. “As a result, it’s natural to find higher levels of depression amongst them.” Cass’ research found stockbrokers to be at higher risk for mental health problems such as burnout and anxiety disorders than the general population, but they rarely seek help or utilize assistance services. When Cass tried to contact the persons eight months after his study, more than a quarter of the most successful brokers wasn’t anymore at their post – they had been either fired, changed their job or just burned out and gone away: Money makes the world go round – or people…

You absolutely need a solid inner foundation when you are working in such hot-spots of money and power, but also in “lower voltage” contexts. Money is energy, and energy has to be handled with great care. Using money for right purposes helps creating and upholding an equilibrium.

You might like to read the newsletter from “Good Will in Action” on “Money and Good Will“.

Rainbow and tramway current lines, yesterday evening: channelled energy, like money directed into a creative direction.

Last week I read an interesting interview in the NZZ with Theo Wehner, professor for work psychology at the Center for Organization and Work Sciences of the ETH Zurich, about the identity crisis of the work society:

Often in our modern society people don’t succeed in blending work, meaning and fun. In surveys about one third of the persons employed said they would like to stop working if they could. However, two thirds would like to continue, though under changed conditions.

In the 1980ies people said they would like to change their working conditions, in the 1990ies they wanted to have less pressure of time, and now they want more “authority over time” or leisure time.

People however, who lose involuntarily their work are often so much blocked that they can no longer even fulfil their personal duties nor their hobbies. Working is a measure for disciplining and socialising.

It is more and more difficult to find meaning in modern industry and service jobs. Work is being experience as being chopped up into little pieces, and one’s own contribution cannot be experienced within the whole.

Many people commit themselves to voluntary work without payment in charitable or non-commercial activities. They want to do an activity which they like and which is meaningful to them. This is more important than making new acquaintances or giving money for some charitable activity. They found out from their researches over the last years that the main purpose is to do something meaningful, and this is difficult to find in many jobs.

Most volunteers are middle-aged people, where they feel that they want to give something back to society. If they cannot do this, there is the danger of burnout or “mentally giving notice”. Jobless people first want to find a job before going into volunteer work. They found people who after having lost their jobs weren’t anymore able to do their previous activities in an association.

People who had a meaninful life normally can also cope well with the situation of retirement and find something new. The dream of “never working again” seems to be the result of a failed work relation and not a way into freedom.

See also the blogpost on “How to live happy” or the post on The Future of Volunteer Work.

When the old tracks are blocked: Finding a new orientation in work life.

My wife is accompanying several young people in different situations in their lives. It is done very informally, but from her side with intention and not just undesigned. She said to me this morning: “I had been missing such orientation very much in my youth, perhaps that’s the reason why I’m trying to help this way.”

She told me of a talk she had with the daughter of a friend who is about to start her university studies. Since over a year the girl has a committed relationship. The affair seems to be symbiotic, i.e. both feel a passion for each other and want to live together. However, there are differences in attitudes. My wife asked, what the common ground was, and it was not so clear. The girl said, doing projects together, but didn’t exactly know what kind of projects. From the beginning he wanted from her an “eternal commitment”, she felt constricted by this. She was unsure what in these incertitudes was her part and what was from her partner.

My wife loves illustrating inner processes and relations with little diagrams (see here, here and here): A person who is centred within himself is living in a right angle:

and integrated . You might encounter situations or emotions without losing your right angle.

In a relation, you can turn to the other without losing your inner centre. It is like turning your right angle cross towards the other, and the angles meet. The meeting point can be on different levels – on the physical, emotional or mental or even higher levels (represented by the sun). And you can meet on different planes at the same time. When you have a congruence in something higher – common ideals, attitudes, values – it is more easy to find congruence also in other points, like doing a project together. And also to overcome problems and conflicts in matters of day-to-day life and not to get stuck-up. In a relation harmony isn’t always necessary, but if the fundamentals are sound, it is likely to continue as a good relation, where the partners aren’t bound to each other by conflicts.

My wife mentioned: “Some couples just seem to have as a common project raising the children, and when the children are grown up, they separate again.” She asked the student about her higher meeting points with her partner, and the young woman wasn’t sure about them. She wasn’t even sure about her own purpose in life, nor about her partner’s. She felt, she had to ponder on what really is the common denominator in her relation. She surely will find out.

This blog-post has been translated into Spanish, together with some other posts of this series.

A friend wrote me some days ago that she sometimes feels depressed and disappointed and that she has troubles in getting the equilibrium. She had read that this is related with the solar plexus centre: “Although I know it represents the balance between the soul and the body, I don’t know yet how to manage my emotions.”

A short time ago when she was feeling quite bad, she went to a doctor. The lab analysis said that she is physically healthy, and the doctor told her that she has a depression. She should see a psychiatrist or a psychologist. She didn’t want to go to any of them, but decided to go through the process alone with meditation and studying. She also was planning to do some work for needy people to overcome loneliness.

I encouraged her plan to do some volunteer activity, for helping others is a good antidote against solitude and feeling depressed. I have observed that these feelings come when you are not in the flow of life. Life wants to flow like a river, being active for others is like flowing water, being blocked within your own circle like stagnated waters. Meditation and studying alone don’t help in getting into a flow, but activity for others does. For a good flow in life the wisdom teachings recommend the triangle of meditation-study-service, and in this a meaningful activity is very important and must not be neglected.

A rhythmic routine does wonder in stabilising. Having ups and downs is very normal, like high tide and low tide. Especially on the spiritual path these fluctuations can be quite intense for some time. It isn’t a disease, but an integration process. During these processes an academic psychologist might not be the best help.

I told my friend that for stabilising emotional ups and downs the wisdom teachings recommend the use of silver. It is related to the Moon, to psyche, and to the zodiacal sign of Cancer governing the circulatory processes in the body. Silver affects sensitivity, psychic susceptibility and behaviour. It is related to the solar plexus centre and the reactive faculty of the mind. Silver in homoeopathic form (Argentum nitricum) is a remedy suited for calming the solar plexus. You also can fill water into a silver cup in the morning, keep it in a room with a current of air and drink it in the evening. Then you refill the cup, put it to the air and drink the water on an empty stomach in the morning. The water gets impregnated by the quality of the silver.

My friend answered: “l tell you that just today I’ve begun drinking the water which was during the night in a silver jug, and I feel happy, really believe me, I’m feeling well, it’s true. And besides now, nice days are coming and that makes me feel well, too. The sun is so important to me that I can’t explain you the good it makes me.”

At my office at Swiss Red Cross I saw last week the pdf of a poster “Trinconmalee – 4500 Houses”, to be printed soon in Sri Lanka. It showed a picture of many colourful houses, which had been constructed in an area destroyed by the Tsunami of 2004. With the financial help of a “cash for repair and reconstruction“-program people had rebuilt houses themselves – an interesting approach to support them in the rehabilitation of their fully or partly damaged dwellings.

Click on the picture to see the whole poster.

Today I read a news in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) about Tamil refugees exactly in this area, who had to flee, hardly their houses destroyed by the Tsunami had been reconstructed. The article described the violence between the government troups and the Tamil rebels, and the refugees being caught between the front-lines and depending from the help of international NGOs, who are slowly withdrawing from post-Tsunami reconstruction.

It is a tense situation, and it seems that the long list of ongoing atrocities of the civil war, ongoing since 1983, won’t end soon. How much suffering will be needed until people find a way out of ideological obstructions and mutual suppression of opponents until a common ground is found for realising peace?

From a spiritual point of view these conflicts, however bitter they might be, are learning processes, which don’t end just with the present life. Suppressing opponents doesn’t solve the tensions. Unless you learn to settle your conflicts in a peaceful way and to integrate opposing viewpoints, the lesson to see the greater whole is still to be learned. It might take a long time, but Nature is patient.

Some days ago I got an e-mail from an Indian friend searching books of Pythagoras for an acquaintance. I didn’t know much about any books of this great initiate in English, I just have read the excellent book of Master EK (Ekkirala Krishnamacharya), “The Wisdom of Pythagoras“, which for the time being is out of print in English and only available in German and Spanish.

Wikipedia said that no texts by Pythagoras survived, but some relevant source texts from Antiquity deal with his life and teachings and that of his followers. There is even an on-line book, The Complete Pythagoras, containing all survived biographies and Pythagorean fragments. Since my Indian friend has built up a beautiful little Spiritual Book Centre in Hyderabad, which I had visited last January, I tried to find out a bit more about books on the esoteric teachings of Pythagoras and asked an American friend with a profound spiritual background, but he referred me also to Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica, with paid content.

May last year we had been for a seminar on Pythagoras with our spiritual teacher, Sri K. Parvathi Kumar, in Samos, where the great spiritual master was born. He later had to leave his native island to escape the tyrannical government of Polycrates. We had seen the caves where he had lived and I remember a beautiful evening meditation in the harbour of Pythagoreion at the feet of the Pythagoras statue.

Statue of Pythagoras at Pythagoreion, with cosmological and mathematical symbols related to his teachings

View from the cave, where Pythagoras meditated

The cave is situated in a rock face at the north coast of the island.

View from out of the cave

Pythagoras – meeting of cosmic and human wisdom

Yesterday afternoon we went with our eldest son to the cinema seeing “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (see also the previous post). Though I found the film was better than the last one, my son said when leaving the cinema: “I had imagined it very differently”.

A book might give you strong inner images. A film is an externalisation of the imagination of the director, the producers and the public expectations. The Harry Potter-film contained quite an intense visual imagination work, elaborated in the high-tech studios.

Outer pictures superimpose themselves on your own imagining. This is what my son felt, and me too. If you get an overload of outer images, they can drown you and block your own process. But they might also be a stimulant, because they are a concretised visualisation. Visualisation is an important tool for the journey inside.

The last days there had been several encounters and exchanges – at the office, via e-mail, at home – where the topic was something about the spiritual path and spirituality in life. Reflecting on them gave an image how varied the individuals shape their paths.

Some gave the feeling of groping their way through a foggy cloud of aspirations, being attracted by various themes and teachings, but only hazily committing themselves to a routine and a task. There is something like a diffuse light, which has not yet taken shape.

Others seemed to be focused on a path – it was practising and teaching yoga exercises – but somehow with a mental conception learnt from a teacher and a tradition. There seemed to be a rigidity – trying to maintain a purity, which at the same time seemed to lack suppleness and inner connectedness. Their light was like being crystallized.

Again others were taking to commitment and an active search to shape their path. Though still not all-round chiselled, contours could be seen and an inner fire felt. Their path seemed to be in a process of clearing and the inner light to be ready to shine forth with the development ahead.

My wife said that the last days she often had the image of a circle with a point before her inner eye, when she was dealing with people. The point – the inner core, the I Am, or the soul – is like the focus of a lens. It has to become centred in order to gain strength. The fire has to be kindled. This can be done with the help of different means like dedication to a task, the support from a spiritual teacher, a meditational discipline … – or a combination of these.

The purpose remains the same – strengthening the fire, the radiance, the magnetism. In the image of the circle with the point, you go from the circumference to the centre, and then again from centre to circumference.

Photo of a sunspot seen from the side, from the Japanese satellite Hinode, by Nasa Astronomy Picture of the Day, April 2nd, 2007

A friend yesterday sent me a link to the Maitreya Project. I had heard before about the initiative to build a 500 ft / 152m bronze statue at Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh in northern India. Kushinagar is the place, where Lord Buddha passed away, and it is one of the most sacred Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India.

The idea of a huge Maitreya statue for the project is from Lama Thubten Yeshe (1935-84) and its realisation is under the guidance of Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche.

According to Buddhist scriptures, Maitreya is considered to be the next Buddha who will teach the path of loving-kindness to the world. “The very name ‘Maitreya’ means loving-kindness – in today’s world, we really need loving-kindness,” says the Dalai Lama.

About the purpose and vision behind the project they say:

“For thousands of years the world’s enduring monuments have provided powerful symbols, reminders of society’s most treasured values. During the 20th century most of the world’s great buildings and public development projects have been ‘monuments’ to commercial interests: high-rise business buildings, airports, shopping malls, theatres and theme parks. The Maitreya Buddha statue will provide the world with a much-needed and enduring monument to spiritual values, a reminder of the benefits of creating peace at every level through practicing loving-kindness.”

The Maitreya Buddha statue and its throne-building will provide the public with temples, exhibition halls, a museum, library, audio-visual theatre and hospitality services. All will be set in beautifully landscaped parks with meditation pavilions, beautiful water fountains and tranquil pools. The buildings and grounds of the Project will contain a remarkable and inspiring collection of sacred art.
Thus the vision of the Maitreya Project combines charitable, educational and medical facilities along with the enduring spiritual focus of the Maitreya Buddha statue, to directly and indirectly foster whole-community economic and civic development,
both now and for generations to come.

The statue is designed to stand for at least 1,000 years, supporting the Project’s spiritual and social work for at least a millennium. So may the people be guided from seeing a huge beautiful outer statue to experience inner beauty, beyond decaying forms.

(c) Maitreya Project

You might like to read about Lord Maitreya as seen from the wisdom teachings coming from the Puranic tradition, in a booklet from Sri K. Parvathi Kumar. See also the beautiful Maitreya-statue at the Planetary Healing Centre near Visakhapatnam, India