Sometimes you want to sail south, but the winds are blowing you towards north. We had planned for two weeks of holidays on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. In the afternoon of the first day on the campsite, a note reached us saying that my father just had a stroke in the public swimming pool, fell into koma and my sister was asking if we would come. It was like a veering of the wind, changing the whole situation.

Next morning, when we were ready to set off, the mobile rang and my sister told us that my father just had died. Through the hot summer day there came a breeze of good-bye, of breaking away of old grounds. Inner and outer scenes flew along during the three days of driving: first at low speed along the serpentine roads through rugged Corsican mountains, then a night on the ferryboat with a beautiful sunrise meditation, the Italian highways and the crossing of the Alps via the pass of the Great St. Bernhard to our home near Berne, where we stayed overnight and reloaded.

Dawn on board of the Corsica Ferry

Next morning further north through Germany, until in the evening we stood in front of the dead body of my father in the mortuary.

There was the apprehension of a matter of fact: His soul had released itself from the body and moved on. The corpse, that wasn’t my father, it was just the case, the cover, not the content. The soul’s continuum of existence became so evident. Death is an illusion, as Eastern wisdom tells us, there is only a change of form, of spheres, not of essence.

Buddha Statue in the family garden

Next day the impact of all the changes of my father’s passing made itself felt. Things became clearer to the feeling which had been clear to the mind. On one inner level, there was the mourning, on another the experience of the fundament of existence on which life was now arranging new patterns. While sitting in the beautiful garden of my family of origin I said good-bye not only to the home where I had grown up, but to a period of my life. Of course there was the feeling of sadness stirred by the passing of my father, but it was about myself, and the present situation was just creating the field of experience.

Seagull

A friend wrote me some days ago that he went through harsh moments, when he experienced strange things in his being. He had done intense spiritual practices and breathing exercises for long hours, experiencing an indescribable serenity, immense joy, and a long mental silence. It was as if he was united with the Supreme Consciousness. But then he had a boiling and pricking sensation in his body and a feeling of an unregulated upsurge of “something” like a swarm of impressions along his spinal column. The more he practised meditation the worse the situation was getting, up to the point where he rushed to a hospital. The treatment prescribed, however, did not relieve him conveniently.

I told him that he might have got an “overdose” of vital energy and that it is important to integrate the exercises one does into a continuous routine and normally not do them over too long a period. Otherwise it is like playing with a fire that can cause serious damages to one’s subtle bodies for a long time. H.P. Blavatsky compared it with jumping into a pond full of crocodiles. I gave him some hints how the fire might come down and the energy re-establish a normal, natural flow.

He then answered that actually he overdid things and that now the “hurricane” has gone over, he feels as comfortable as before. He described the practices he had been doing and said he has now followed my advices, cut down some of his practices and took a lot of fresh water. It was not his first experience in which he tried to catapult himself towards a higher plane, in his eagerness to consciously align with his Higher Self to be a good channel for the Divine.

His eagerness of striving for inner experiences, to align with the higher self, is very understandable. However, on a sound spiritual path it is absolutely necessary to establish a regulated, normal routine of life and not to try to “shoot up” into the higher worlds, to unite with the Divine – at all costs. The orientation should be to train oneself to acquire skills and competences in order to be of good use for a work of service and good will. Personal experiences are regarded as “secondary by-products”, but not as the primary focus. Therefore it is of great importance to balance one’s life and also one’s practices, to have a stable stand in the world and reach out for others. The thing is, you realise the side-effects of unhealthy practices often only years later, when they have done damages. In the positive or less positive way meditation exercises are powerful tools for transformation.

My wife says, the fiery striving is like a big summer fire, which has to be reduced and put into a small oven to be of use for cooking. The big fire would only burn oneself and the others. Spiritual progress is not done by “fireworks” of catapulting oneself towards higher planes, but a work of slow and steady integrating the different fields of life.

Picture of a fire ritual

A friend from California sent me today the following story with pictures, which I also found on different blogs:

“The following pictures are of the same place but taken in different seasons…

There was a man who had four sons. He wanted his sons to learn not to judge things too quickly. So he sent them each on a quest, in turn, to go and look at a pear tree that was a great distance away.

The first son went in the winter, the second in the spring, the third in summer, and the youngest son in the fall.

When they had all gone and come back, he called them together to describe what they had seen.

The first son said that the tree was ugly, bent, and twisted. The second son said no it was covered with green buds and full of promise.

The third son disagreed; he said it was laden with blossoms that smelled so sweet and looked so beautiful, it was the most graceful thing he had ever seen.

The last son disagreed with all of them; he said it was ripe and drooping with fruit, full of life and fulfilment.

The man then explained to his sons that they were all right, because they had each seen but only one season in the tree’s life.

He told them that you cannot judge a tree, or a person, by only one season, and that the essence of who they are and the pleasure, joy, and love that come from that life can only be measured at the end, when all the seasons are up.

If you give up when it’s winter, you will miss the promise of your spring, the beauty of your summer, fulfilment of your fall.

Don’t let the pain of one season destroy the joy of all the rest.
Don’t judge life by one difficult season.
Persevere through the difficult patches,
and better times are sure to come some time or later.

Happiness keeps You Sweet,
Trials keep You Strong,
Sorrows keep You Human,
Failures keep You Humble,
Success keeps You Glowing,
But Only God keeps You Going!

A friend from the southernmost part of Chile, at the Strait of Magellan, who started some months ago to meditate, wrote to me last week:

“You know, during the morning meditations something marvellous is happening. I can recognise the sound of my self, like a heartbeat, like the blood circulation, the different kinds of respirations which I might have. I became aware of the importance that a bit of silence during the daily activities can have. I feel already that this experience is necessary during the day. I can only say that it is magical in every sense, and the most extraordinary is, that you don’t have to look for it neither in the shops nor in the internet nor with friends, for the experience is unique, individual.”

This is a beautiful description of the effect the regular experience of silence starts opening in us. You cannot describe it with words, you have to experience: “Silence is the source of the soul!” (K.P. Kumar, On Silence).

By the way, while we are enjoying summer, in Patagonia it is now very cold and full of snow. A week ago my friend had been with a plane in an area more to the north – Puerto Montt / Los Lagos, which had been colonized 150 years ago by Germans and Swiss – the way of life is said to be still quite European -� and it looks beautiful.

From time to time I get e-mails from friends with certain appeals for help or other curious stories. I normally check them up at Snopes, and most of the stories turn out to be hoaxes.

So I got today an e-mail from Argentina with the photo of a badly burned baby, where there was a call that people should forward this mail so that 0,03 Euro would be donated to rescue that child. I checked it up on Snopes and quickly found that the story was partly true and partly false. And it was already collected there in 2005 – as the case of a real Polish baby.

The perverse thing is: Of course nobody is giving any money by forwarding the e-mail to your friends, it is a sarcastic hoax which only increases the amount of unwanted mails. People misuse the compassion of others with these dirty tricks.

User participation is the big credo in the new online-development called Web2.0. But there are only a few who are actively participating or expressing their opinions.

This week I read an article of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, (Nielsen is a world-famous researcher on usability, the user-friendliness of the web, and Alertbox is his bi-weekly column) where he writes about “Participation Inequality“:

“All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don’t participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background. In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity….

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs….

The problem is that the overall system is not representative of Web users. On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from… Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.”

This participation inequality is a general situation in life: in a school class few pupils are really committed, the same it true in a local community, in politics, in environmental groups – or in a spiritual movement. They set the tone and give shape to a group or a trend.

There is always a big group of passers-by or of onlookers – that’s like things are. They might be interested, but don’t take up any commitment. On the spiritual path people who are just interested stagnate, active commitment is the way to progress: “In every way engagement in duty to the fellow beings fulfils the one in all ways and always.” (K. Parvathi Kumar)

See also the blogpost on “A Child Appealing to the UN to save the Future” as an example for committed action.

Passers-by, City of Berne, April 07

Yoga is in – at least doing physical exercises for training the body. The consumer magazine of the Swiss store chain Migros published in their latest number a photo of “New Yoga York” – Silence in the chaos – over 800 people practising yoga on the Times Square to realise inner silence in midst of cars and staring passengers:

And Swissmilk, the marketing organisation of the Swiss milk producers has just launched a summer campaign: “Swiss Yoga“, about wellness and enjoyment with the cow “Lovely” doing yoga exercises and thus promoting “milk gives you strong bones”…

(More pictures, also as screen-backgrounds you find here.)

The marketeers of course want to promote their milk – but do a humorous promotion for yoga as well. And people might not only get to the wellness aspect of yoga as some trendy body culture, but find a way to the inner world. For yoga means union – experiences the oneness with the Divine, the eternal existence. Thus practising yoga is an inner technique of alignment to the higher self and thus for transformation of one’s life. You may like to read more in “Yoga – the Path of Synthesis” of “Basics of Spiritual Life“.

Yesterday a friend from Canada sent me a powerpoint presentation about the extraordinary story of Shelley Yates and her son. I found it very inspiring. Since the presentation was in French, I inserted the English text from her website. You can download it here, or, as a PDF without music.

Shelley Yates and her son had an aquaplaning accident and drowned in a flooded marsh. She and her son were “dead” for fifteen minutes. During that time she was told by beings of light how to save herself and her 4 years old son. And she was given a message on how to heal the Earth.

On the suggestion of the beings of light she is making a appeal for a global healing meditation on July 17, 2007, at 11.11 Greenwich Mean Time, to come together to be as One and heal the planet just as her son had been brought back to life.

She says about this excellent initiative:

“The time has been set for July 17, 2007 at 11:11 Greenwich Mean Time. I have been given no indication about why this date and time have been chosen, but this date has been told to me over and over again. I have been asked to bring together as many humans as possible, throughout the world from every corner of the globe, to simply sit and pray or meditate for one hour during that time. Hopefully, with your help, we will amass a union of humans, such as the world has never seen. Loving humans with one intention – to heal our planet and awaken our souls to our true propose to become one with our Source of Light.

The light beings use the term “fire the grid” when they speak of the energizing of humanity with divine power, on July 17, 2007. They say firing the grid will accomplish two things. First, it will pulse healing energy into the center of the earth and second, regenerate the core, or the heart of the planet. This planned sitting of the people of earth will demonstrate the love and faith we feel for the goodness of our world and her inhabitants. We are the catalyst to the healing of earth. A true believer has the power of ten fold, so if you only think you may believe, know that the faith of the others will boost your own faith and the power will be intensified.”

You can also read the story and more on her website, which has been translated into many languages. Or you can see some videos with her telling her experiences on YouTube.

Some artists contributed beautiful meditation music (MP3) for free, and there are many groups world-wide who will join.

How big an initiative might be – the spiritual work of inner transformation is an ongoing effort and not limited to a unique occasion. A special occasion, however, might give us inspiration for further aspiration and growth.

Yesterday I participated in a staff forum from my office at Swiss Red Cross. After some staff general information about latest organisational reorganisations – the waves of it will touch me a bit in the next time – we had the occasion to see some “market stands”, where parts of the organisation or affiliated entities presented their activities.

I first went to a presentation of the Humanitarian Aid of the Swiss Confederation, which has its central warehouse in the Red-Cross building. They showed us the activities of the Rapid Response Teams, which has to be prepared to react very fast in emergency situations world-wide such as earthquakes, droughts or floods. Besides natural disasters they have facilities for all kinds of technological disasters such as nuclear, biological and chemical incidents or other man-made conflicts. There is quite an infrastructure behind these rescue activities you normally just see on TV, and a number of trained volunteer specialists is ready-to-go within a short time to assist victims of disasters.

Afterwards I participated in a presentation of the ERU (Emergency Response Unit) of the Red Cross, where the Swiss Red Cross is closely collaborating with a number or European Red Cross societies in their network for Disaster Preparedness. At the beginning they highlighted what they just are doing, while the media report about the monsoon floods, which aren’t in the limelights yet, but have caused about 1.5 million people to leave their houses and have destroyed about 0.5 million homes. Specialists from the ERU have immediately left towards Pakistan to evaluate the situation on site and what and how can be helped. In case the situation is clearer, the members of the different teams immediately start organising the help with a complex network of specialists. They showed pictures of their mission during the floods in Mozambique and explained how they have to set up infrastructures in a situation where the local structures have collapsed or can no longer cope with the situation.

The last “market place” for me was a presentation of the Ambulatory for Victims of War and Torture about group therapies with children in the age of 6 – 18. Many children of victims, who haven’t gone through the experiences their parents had, are highly affected by the effects of the traumatisation of their mother or father. It was impressive to see how in the therapy they are using elements of meditation and rituals together with techniques of building up trust and inner security with the children.

I like these presentations where you can get an insight into working conditions which normally you don’t come much into contact, even if you are working in the same organisation.

Statues in front of the International Red Cross Museum in Geneva, symbolising victims of war

A friend just wrote me:

“I have experienced today something special and would like to share it with you. Our oldest son (he is 8 years old) is quite special, he is challenging us very much. … To some extend it can be very difficult with him. Yesterday was again a difficult day: He kept on quarrelling with his brothers, was teasing them all the time and didn’t feel like doing anything. I gave him a book with a short report about Gandhi and told him to copy it on a piece of paper and take it to school the next day.

After reading the content he started asking many profound questions. Today he took the paper to school and it was put on the wall of the classroom. Since then his disposition has totally changed, very strangely. In the evening I looked with him a short passage from the film “Gandhi“: He hardly could breathe because of his concentration: It was a beautiful sight. I will order the autobiography of Gandhi and read it with him every day during summer holidays. I never experienced something similarly with him. His intensity, his affection were nearly frightening. Tonight he nearly didn’t go to bed and wanted to keep on discussing about it.”

The lives of great men and women, especially of initiates like Gandhi, are inspiring examples, which can awake in the soul the aspiration towards the ideals they incarnated. Therefore it is good to read such biographies to give an orientation to the soul.

Statue of Gandhi in a seminar centre near Hyderabad, India, Jan. 2004