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

Yesterday a friend from another country informed that he had to withdraw from the presidency of a voluntary aid organisation, which is doing substantial good-will activities for people in difficult social conditions, especially immigrants. I was fascinated by the way they had been doing a great scope of service activities since I came to know about the project some years ago.

The organisation had been created 10 years ago and grown quite a lot since. The founding members, however, who had been committed to the project in the beginning, had dispersed with the time. He had now been the only one who had remained for running the management of the organisation, with several helpers in the activities.

He told me some months ago that it was increasingly difficult for him to keep on running the activities. He wrote now he had tried to cope with all the deficits, to do the work that nobody else wanted to do, but had reached his limits: “We all have had other things more important to do or we have found some reason to avoid it.”

Burnout – even with a lot of good will you have to see and respect the limits of ones forces. Sometimes, however, a phoenix might come out of the ashes.

The news touched me, for I felt how much my friend had been committed to the work and the pain of his decision. It needs courage to say no, when a certain limit is reached, even with a good cause. And even if one work disintegrates or collapses, there is the hope that other people take up the challenge or start something new. You should never fall into the trap of thinking that you are indispensable or that a good activity which exists now will go on forever.

See also the blogpost on “Burnout or Burning” with some thought about compassion fatigue, your the beautiful little booklet by K. Parvathi Kumar”On Change“.

A new tree growing out of the stump of a cut tree.

We yesterday had a walking-tour with our little local meditation group to the Kien valley, a beautiful alpine valley about 30 miles from here. Following the river there were some art sculptures dispersed between the rocks and bushes, forming a beautiful accentuation of the natural ambiance. Like nature spirits they were hiding along the river.

After a lake we arrived at the valley basin where waterfalls were coming down from different sides. We went up the “white water way” along some roaring rivers and cascades. At times the water went through very deep gorges where you could bridge the gap from one side to the other, but didn’t see the river below, because it was lost in the depth.

Above the cliffs we arrived at the Griesalp, where a few houses at the foot of still higher mountains. One of the houses built in the traditional chalet style was decorated with calligraphic decorations of wisdom aphorisms, which reminded me of Paracelsus or of Eastern teachings like those of the Bhagavad Gita:

” The purpose of action is not the result, but to become the eternal bliss of God.”

“Everything perfect in word and deed comes from the depths of eternal silence.”

“Everyone of us has still a million lives on earth ahead – so why this haste, this noise and this impatience.”

“In God’s providence there is no evil, only good and its preparation.”