We yesterday had a visit of an American professor of engineering of Indian origin with his wife. After having given some lectures at a Swiss university they were doing some sight-seeing and I have shown them the old town of Berne. Afterwards they stayed with us at home till the evening.

We had some fascinating conversations. He was telling events from his youth time in India, coming from a poor family, how he started on the one hand his spiritual path and on the other his technical career, which by now made him head of the engineering department of a big US university. We both have a certain similar background with the same spiritual teachers, though my wife’s and my socialisation took place in Europe, while his one started in India and continued in the US. He told us about some so-called super-natural or miraculous events he had been a witness of during his youth in India, from our present teacher’s teacher, Dr. Krishnamacharya. I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the stories, for I heard parts of them from another side before.

He said that through these experiences and the spiritual teachings he had overcome intellectual barriers in his mind. In the West, however, he normally keeps silent about his experiences and practices, because the people in his surroundings don’t like getting out of their materialistic belief system. Through his life in the States he has come to a much deeper appreciation of his spiritual roots than he would have had if he had stayed in India. There was a gap of about 20 years between the beginnings of his path in India and the focused continuation in the West. Seeds might germinate for a long time in the ground before sprouting and giving rise to a powerful tree.

Buddhas meditating in a western shop – a picture from yesterday’s sight-seeing.

I got an e-mail from friends about dolphin massacres in Japan and a petition to the Prime Minister of Japan:

“Dear Friends and lovers of the ocean. Sometimes the ocean needs our help, and this is one of them To view the video is very disturbing, to not act in stopping such behaviour would be a travesty … At the very least please sign this online petition. Lovers of the ocean and it’s inhabitants – this is a clear call to action. To do nothing is to approve of it.

Please take the time to look at the video and sign the online petition. From little things, big things grow…….. And then send it on to as many like minded people that you know. If we build the numbers, we will be heard eventually and things will change, one way or the other. Please help! We must change the way people think about their oceans and inhabitants for the good of us all.”

See also our blogposts on the killing the baby seals, A Glimpse of a Life-Size Whale, “Earthlings” – Dealing with Animals, Vegetarianism – A Contribution to Fighting Climate Change and Ideas of World’s Most Brilliant Scientists for the Future.

In the last times I witnessed a few cases where friends came into a burnout. Certain patterns seemed me to be similar: Over a long time there had been quite a commitment to a voluntary activity. With the time the work load had increased, and they felt responsible for running the activity they were committed to, and also for the general situation around the activity. Were there signs of a “helper syndrome”? Difficulties were overcome with enthusiasm, which, with the time, mixed with frustration and exhaustion. Suddenly they drew back from their commitment and the related contacts. I suppose, followed by a crisis. A case of compassion fatigue?

There is an underlying structure: A pendulum in motion swings from one side to the other. An over-activity leads in the long run to an under-activity. Only an inner equilibrium can also create an outer balance. In the wisdom teachings, such as those of Pythagoras, the over-activity is called an acute angle:

the under-activity an obtuse angle: and the well-balanced activity a right angle: When you are in the acute angle, you tend to overdo things, even with a good motive. Aggression, haste, nervousness cause a state of tension. When you are in the obtuse angle, you tend to be late in doing things, being slow in understanding and acting or reacting. Both angles are counter-acting. In the right angle, you find the middle path of an adequate reaction. In order to be balanced in a stable way, you need to be well aligned vertically, meaning in a stable connection with your inner, the soul or the higher self, and active horizontally, into the world. In the sign of the equilateral cross you see four right angles, having a stable stand in the world:In this position you are unlikely to fall victim, even of a burnout. A burnout means that before you have burnt. The burning fire is the symbol of life force. At Easter they use to burn fires as a sign of new life coming with spring, or with the resurrection. The following picture of a fire ritual is a beautiful illustration of the fully burning vital force.

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

A San Francisco company has taken the idea of microfinance, which has become popular through the� Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus,� and upgraded it for the Web. Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence.

Thus Kiva is using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously very expensive. The individuals featured on the Kiva website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals to lend them money.

Sponsoring Small Businesses to Help the World’s Working Poor Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back. From there you can cash out, or lend it out again to another person in need.

Kiva, which means “agreement” or “unity” in Swahili, would allow people with a little bit of extra cash to use their credit card or the online money transfer company, PayPal, to lend directly to African entrepreneurs. Kiva got its start a little more than a year ago in Uganda, where it forged partnerships with local microfinance institutes so that each business would be vetted and approved before being posted on the site. It has given out more than $400,000 in loans. And what started in one small village in Uganda has spread to 11 other countries just in its first year.

Here you can see a video on the project. Since everything has more than one side, there are also people criticizing the approach of Kiva by pointing out that other microfinance organisations take loan interests to cover the costs and that Kiva with their interest free loans is destroying the local banking organisations.

There are many theories how the Great Pyramid of Giza (Cheops) has been constructed, but it is still a mystery. The French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has now presented a totally new theory with the help of a 3D computer simulation, that a ramp had been built mainly inside the pyramid. He asked Dassault Systèmes to help him realise a demo of the reconstruction. They now have online a fascinating journey through time and space in real-time 3D. You need however install a plugin for you browser. Spiegel.de online has some photos of the presentation. You can also download a pdf about Jean-Pierre Houdins project.

Dassault Systems

The pyramidal structure contains many spiritual principles which help reorganising our energy patterns.

The last days I had several experiences in e-mail conversations where the first impression I got from a situation modified with further clarification. My impulse to react on the first impression was not wrong, but only showed a partial aspect. The answers I got enlarged the picture and made me put things into another order or context.

I cannot go into details because of the nature of the topics, just in one case where I wrote a blogpost on “A Case of Spiritual Confusion“.

Yesterday the person “skyped” me again, and when talking to him he turned out to be a seeker who had had some times ago certain psychic experiences and who is on the way of working out his path. He thought of himself as an advanced person, after 5 years of search, though it seemed to me it was still in its infancy. He reminded me of my erroneous searching some 20, 30 years ago. I still feel myself very much a beginner, having to learn a lot.
He was quite open, reflective and trying to overcome traditional ideologies through his own way of understanding. These are promising qualities with the potential of a good growth.

Barbed wires in the head are blocking new ways of thinking. Figure on the hoarding for the renovation of the Swiss Federal House.

NASA just reports that its New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter from both space- and ground-based telescopes including the Chandra X-ray Observatory. There are auroras bigger than our entire planet: “Jupiter’s polar regions are crackling with electricity,” says Randy Gladstone of the research team, “and this sets the stage for non-stop auroras.”

Nasa

A bizarre six-sided feature encircling the north pole of Saturn near 78 degrees north latitude has been observed by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. This image is one of the first clear images ever taken of the north polar region as seen from a unique polar perspective.

Nasa

“We’ve never seen anything like it on any other planet,” says atmospheric scientist Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure.” The hexagon is twice as wide as Earth encircling Saturn’s north pole. Here you see an infrared photo of the structure, which might be explained by geometric shapes like triangles and hexagons forming in water when rotated at a high speed, as Nature reports.

In the same way the geometric patterns of the energy vortexes in the etheric body of man called the chakras might be explained. They form to 4, 6, 10, 12, 16 and more petalled patterns governing the energies structuring the body. And the Jupiter photo reminds you that the etheric head and base centre of man correspond to the north and south pole of the planet, and are electro-magnetic phenomena like the auroras on Jupiter.
See also the beautiful pictures of A. Lauterwasser created by water exposed to sounds. And the blogpost on “Saturn – Seen from New Perspectives“.

Yesterday I was at an Office 2007 and Sharepoint launch event of a Microsoft partner agency, for my job. At first there were high-flying slogans about a colourful future with “wow”-effect by a Microsoft official (“Empower the people with the right tools and softwares and there is nothing they cannot do…”), decorated with video-clips (WMF streaming), which didn’t run that well as the promised future. After a presentation of functionalities (the best presentations are not much usefull when you forget that beamers have other colour resolutions than laptop screens, and a big part of the texts wasn’t readable) and a practical example of complex group co-ordination, there was a fascinating talk about “Increasing Productivity in Information Work” by a collaboration researcher:

The number of people who don’t collaborate face to face has been tremendously increasing during the last few years, and they had done researches on the impact of these changes on new ways of collaboration at distance. I don’t want to go into details, only 2-3 thoughts:

A few years ago everyone was happy with more features available in a program, today the difficulty is to sort out and reduce the complexity to what is really relevant to the people. This sorting-out is mostly done with our head and not by the softwares available.

Most workers in our society are brain workers, but this is nowhere noted in the assets of an enterprise. A major part of our business activities isn’t organised along the needs of creative work, but of a work environment structured differently, in old patterns. In the knowledge work 90% is not visible and only 10% physically visible work.

For the tremendous changes going on in society new forms of collaboration are needed. I was thinking of the collaboration not only at work, but also in the different good-will activities I’m in. Our monthly Lunar Messenger for example, a small project, involves people not only here in Switzerland, but also in Germany (the French translation), Mexico and the US. I’m working in other projects involving also Belgian, Spanish, Argentinian co-workers. It needs quite a lot of co-ordination and brainwork, but the outcome is fascinating, and all are working for free. All this is a group collaboration going on at distance. So also “Good Will in Action” on Cooperation.

In collaboration good networking is important. Cables, Bhutan

We all get frequently confronted with news pictures or situations about people in need, with an open or hidden appeal to help. Where do you act? Where do you withdraw? Where does a “compassion fatigue” set in?

In their new blog “VoxBlog online debates“, AlertNet (the humanitarian branch of Reuters press agency: alerting humanitarians to emergencies) writes:

“Reading your morning paper, two articles catch your eye. One is about a new study that finds almost 4 million people have died in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. The other tells the story of “little Mary”, a 12-year-old Ugandan girl whose lips were cut off by rebel fighters. Which story makes you react?”

They take up the discussion from an interesting article by Paul Slovic in “Foreign Policy“. A short extract:
“A recent study I conducted with Deborah Small of the University of Pennsylvania and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University found that donations to aid a starving 7-year-old child in Africa declined sharply when her image was accompanied by a statistical summary of the millions of needy children like her in other African countries. The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim.
Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group… When writer Annie Dillard was struggling to comprehend the mass human tragedies that the world ignores, she asked, “At what number do other individuals blur for me?” In other words, when does “compassion fatigue” set in? Our research suggests that the “blurring” of individuals may begin as early as the number two.”
(Paul Slovic studies risk and decision-making and is professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. )

When I’m being flooded by calls for help or donations, I sometimes ask myself, where does compassion lead me – or others – to action? With certain themes I have a clear decision, but there remains a blurring area, where to help – and do it. Beyond the individual decision there remains a general impulse of good will, even though physical action is only possible in certain situations.

A swami begging in front of a temple in Simhachalam, India.

Today one year ago I set up the blog software and started blogging from March 31st, 2006 on. Looking back I’m astonished about the evolution it has taken, the multi-facetted spectrum of blogposts. The idea however, is still the same: Creating links between everyday experiences / information and the experiences / information from the teachings of eternal wisdom. This is for me a very interersting dialogue – and it seems for blog visitors, too 🙂

Little angel trumpeting over the city – the inspiring genius of this blog? Girona, Spain, July 06