I yesterday got a call on Skype from a stranger, which I didn’t answer (I have marked in Skype that by principle I don’t answer directly calls from strangers, but ask them to contact me first via e-mail), but switched over to the instant messaging mode. The following is the translation of the session log from this strange conversation:

X: I would like to talk with you about the Avatar of Synthesis.

Answer: What do you want to know?

X: Whether you know already the recipient of the Avatar of Synthesis, for I suppose I am the recipient of the Avatar of Synthesis. I want to prove it. I hope I can do this. I also have a prophecy.

(Here he sent me a link to a web IP-address, where he had published his ideas. I found them a bit disconcerting and confuse.)

Answer: According to my understanding, the Avatar of Synthesis has many recipients, that is all who call on him.

X: Mhh, o.k. … as you think. But I have directly received these 4 things, which can be found in the basic knowledge of esoterism.

Answer: Many people receive many things and relate them with the mental conceptions they have.

X: I have searched for a long time on the internet for my extrasensory perceptions. Do you want to have a look at the website?

Answer: No, not necessarily. There is so much junk on the web, I don’t have the time to view it all. I better concentrate my energies on something constructive.

X: O.k. – you don’t really believe in the Avatar of Synthesis.

Answer: I only notice that we have a rather different understanding of the Avatar of Synthesis.

X: Yes. I would like to be able to convince you.

Answer: I don’t want to convince you.

X: You don’t want to convice me?

Answer: No. On the spiritual path it is not a matter of convincing others according to my understanding.

X: I will give you a prophecy, but not today.

Answer: Then I feel myself compelled to interrupt here the dialogue, sorry.

X: In some months something will happen. I even have the exact date.

Answer: It doesn’t interest me.

X: O.k., ciao.

Answer: Ciao.

I my life I have come across several persons claiming to be spokesmen for sublime beings. It all sounded to me like big ego-boasting, creating confusions with people and distorting spiritual conceptions. The genuine teachers I have come across never did such boasting and never were proselytising.

For me the Avatar of Synthesis is a most sublime concept of a profound energy and being working for the transformation of life. You might read a bit more about it in the Lunar Messenger on “Meditation for the Aquarian Age“.

Synthesis – A view of the dome of the Dali-museum in Figueras, Spain.

Some days ago I got an e-mail of a person in search of the next stage of his spiritual journey which he is pursuing over many years. He had been with a South Indian guru for 12 years, then switched to a North Indian teacher who had passed over about 10 years ago. He now came into contact with the path I am going, which he had contact with some 20 years ago. The cause of his changing from the South Indian guru was related to the feeling that there were some manipulative energies, maybe even an infringing of personal freedom, for he had sometimes the feeling of energetic “grabbing”. This was also hinted to him by another teacher.

Inner freedom, freedom of choice is the most important and sacred aspect for spiritual evolution. Many systems – spiritual, political, social – don’t respect this and want to hold members in their grip. It often needs a long time until you sense this grasping and feel strong enough the urge to go away, to search for another direction and to leave the “security” of the old group. This is not easy.

I felt a subtle “irritation” in his search, which I have also been through during different shifting periods of my spiritual “career”. I was reminded of similar experiences which had caused me to change teachers and systems. It is something like marrying and divorcing and leaves traces.

For finding one’s path logic doesn’t help. However, a good sense of discrimination is very important, and you have to be very careful. The best is to ask within for guidance. It is the inner master who is calling you to the path, which expresses through the outer path /teacher, no matter which form you chose. When you listen deep within, you will sense whether there is a call into this direction or not. And then follow that call, wherever it might lead you. The subtleties of the path reveal only with the time you are practicing, you cannot understand them by mere reading or reasoning.

The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society WDCS has just launched an interactive web banner of a life-size blue whale, the largest animal ever to have lived on earth. It is part part of WDCS’s Stop Bloody Whaling campaign, and highlights the growing danger to great whales from a cruel and increasingly aggressive commercial whaling industry.

“The banner is both a fascinating impression of this gigantic animal, the blue whale, and a key reminder of the very real danger of commercial exploitation faced by this and other great whales should pro-whaling countries succeed in overturning the ban on commercial whaling.” Says Nicolas Entrup, spokesperson for WDCS. In the Antarctic alone, between 1904 and 1978, 1.4 million whales were killed. This number includes the 350,000 blue whales taken by whaling fleets during that time.

See also our blogposts on “Earthlings” – Dealing with Animals, Vegetarianism – A Contribution to Fighting Climate Change and Ideas of World’s Most Brilliant Scientists for the Future.

When I’m looking at the statistics of the good-will website, I’m always astonished that the most frequented pages are those of the background images or wallpapers.

I’d put them in just for fun – but it seems that changing the desktop background is quite a favorite pastime of many. Today I came across a site with beautiful free wallpapers, where you find hundreds of motives from nature:

In spirituality the word “background” denotes what is at the background of our being – the pure existence, which continues to be there, whether we are awake, dream or sleep. Without this background you wouldn’t be back next morning to get up. You can’t call that a “wallpaper” – it’s not only the wall, but the space into which the wall is built…

USA Today reported that IDC researcher John Gantz has done a study on data, estimating that 161 exabytes of digital data – or about 161 billion GB – were generated in 2006 alone. This is equivalent to 43 trillion digital songs. Datas are stored by privates, businesses, governments, for photos, documents, music, films…. Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President of EMC, a data storage giant, says: “We are creating more digital information than we can store.” Finding the right information in the huge heap of digital data is like finding the famous needle in a haystack, and the problem is getting worse…

Beginning of March 07, a study of the Carnegie Mellon University reported that storage media are much worse than what was thought. And thus customers have to replace their drives far more often: The mean time to failure (MTTF) of a disk drive is about 13 times higher than what vendors say. The researchers have observed about 100 000 disk drives in data centres of Google.

So while you might think that what you have in your computer is save, it is like storing the data on melting ice…

The Eastern wisdom says that knowledge is structured in consciousness, not in outer devices. This wisdom-knowledge is not more and more data. It comes when you have integrated knowledge through living experience, leading to a transformation of your existence. You might like to read the Lunar Messenger on Awareness and Thought.

A “data storage” on the walls of the Ajanta caves, India.

How to describe the magic arising in a profound conversation? Last weekend I came into a room, where my wife was talking with a friend. The topic was about attitudes, about identifying with ideas and ideals and thus losing the contact with others. The background was a concrete situation which isn’t “bloggable”. The atmosphere was somehow enchanted, and quickly I was caught by the spell of the talk.

It was like the opening of a sphere, in which all three of us participated. Barriers of mental “bricks” were dissipating and there was a strong flow of energy between us. In this subtle ambience things could be expressed, which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. Somehow the ground was fecundated by mutual attention, respect and tenderness of attitude. When the time was over, we felt that something had changed within. The experience left a deep impression with all of us.

I remembered one of my philosophy teachers speaking about “kairos“, how the Greeks called such auspicious moments, a “time in between”. It is different from chronos, the flow of sequential time with its changing qualities. Kairos is like a door into the deep space within, a meeting place of an uplifted encounter.

“100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time.” This is the title of the 10×10 (ten by ten) site designed and developed by Jonathan Harris. It gives a snapshop of our world as a picture postcard window. 100 different pictures are taken hourly in connection with the most used words in the top ten news of several international news sources, such as Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, New York Times International News. 10×10 just shows what the system finds, without any politics nor any secret agenda. It runs without human intervention.

10×10 says: “When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we’re lucky, gives us pause to think.”

The photos here below show the momentary “snapshop of the world”.

Another “picture that defines the time” you will get when you meditatively work with time cycles, observing the changing pattern of planetary constellations, pondering on the cosmos within. You find more about it in the Lunar Messenger on “Working with the Key of Time“.

Two Australian scientists, Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi, have invented a computer software that distinguishes a beautiful face from a less attractive one. They use a software that measures faces and relates them to images of models, actors and about 200 women from around the globe, from different ages, levels of attractiveness and ethnic backgrounds. When you give a photo of a woman’s face into the machine, it returns a beauty rating between 1 and 10.

In their paper in the International Journal Of Human-Computer Studies they explain: “Potential applications exist in the entertainment industry, cosmetic industry, virtual media and plastic surgery.” Dr Piccardi says, one danger of the software was that it could fall into the hands of adolescents or others sensitive about their looks and harm their self- image.

Another danger might be that you believe what the device is telling you …

The wisdom teachings tell us that beauty is the Divine aspect of form being veiled by a beautiful shape. This is meant with the saying that real beauty is within and not without. No technical device will ever help us finding it. We see beauty through forms, but not as the forms. A lightful form lets the inner beauty radiate through more easily. Read more about it in the Letters on Spiritual Astrology on Taurus, Nr. 1.

Mongolian woman. How to measure the inner beauty of a person?

In a showcase of a shopping gallery in Berne I saw some doll houses done in most minute details – replica scenes of paintings of Carl Spitzweg like his famous Bookworm or the Poor Poet, but also models of an old blacksmith’s shop or street scenes. A fascinating model was that of a bank robbery in the “Swiss National Bank“, where the robber had tied up the clerk, and in the underground there was a partner carrying away great sums in a miniature wheelbarrow:

I asked myself how much time the constructor had to invest to build these doll houses, to sew the clothes, to prepare the bundles of money. The doll houses didn’t look like toys for playing, but like models you just put somewhere, where they will collect dust. A Sim City of another time…

Though the robbery scene isn’t that peaceful like the others, the doll houses somehow look funnily playful and the “actors” lost in their little worlds.
Not only the semi-realistic pattern reminded me of our tiny worlds in which we live. When you look at them from above, from an inner distance, you have to smile how easily we lose ourselves in games with “little toys”, seeming so important to us. Doll house scenes.

A friend wrote a me a few days ago that at the moment her children are all going through an intense flue. On my inquiring about a remark she made she mentioned that she has gone through difficult times in her life. She has experienced a miscarriage and a death of a child at premature delivery. Also at her own birth she nearly had died. She wrote: “These are deep, far-reaching experiences, some kind of an acid test in order to change a dimension.”

Many people would feel washed-out and would quarrel with destiny, when they have to go through such blows of fate. She wrote: “I went so deep that I wanted to die.” The crises shook her and mobilised her energy. Thus they helped her to awake and to activate her aim in life. “Now I am thankful and full of joy for having lived this life.” Her energy is really impressive and inspiring, and she is expressing a deep, practical sprirituality.

I have encountered several persons in my life who said it was only through a deep crisis that they opened up to the spiritual dimension in life.