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.

In the March issue the NZZ Folio magazine reported about an experiment of Albert Michelson, a Polish-born German-American physicist, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1907. The article said that he did “the most successful” failure experiment in the history of science by trying to prove the existence of ether.

He thought that the earth moves through space in ether, and thus he wanted to show the existence of ether by measuring the adverse “winds” of its substance. However, the light rays which he projected through an “interference refractometer” always travelled with the same speed, always with the famous speed of 300 000 km/s. He did not want to accept that the consequence of this result would mean, in the eyes of science: Ether is not existing.

Later, in 1905, Einstein explained this paradox of light with his relativity theory: That the speed of light is always constant and that time passes-by differently with observers travelling with different speed. So the article resumed that for physicists ether was proven non-existing, but the writer ended stating that up to now however, it cannot be explained how a wave can expand in “nothingness”.

I had to smile a bit about this “nothingness” where the light-wave passes through and the so-called “non-existence” of ether. As you can read in the Lunar Messenger on “Space and Consciousness“, that from a spiritual viewpoint there is nothing such as empty space. When manifest, space is dynamic, pulsating, full of subtle structures. Eastern wisdom calls it Akasha, the content or consciousness of space, unfolding through many planes of etheric substance.
And in the Lunar Messenger on “Etheric Existence and Good Will” there is explained: “We live in the ether and are penetrated by it, like a tumbler lying in a big tank: The water is as well in the tank as in the glass, it isn’t locked up in it like in a bottle. We are in contact with the other etheric bodies, it is one ether penetrating all layers. The earth, the sun and the planets float in this big etheric ocean and move along its lines of force because of the movements of this ether. Just like the lines of force of a big magnet control smaller magnets, the ether of our planet arranges and regulates the etheric currents of its living beings and works on them.”

A contradiction to science? Not at all. The wisdom teachings explain that ether, the basis of all formations, precedes the dense forms. So you cannot “prove” its existence with physical means, but with the development of etheric view. Try to see not only the physical flower, but the vital form, or look into the eyes of a vital, living person, then you come closer to the etheric existence.

Withered flowers losing their etheric or vital energy

The Korea Times reports that the Korean venture start-up Xtive has developed an inaudible sound sequence, that is incorporated in games and tells gamers after a certain time to stop playing on their own. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second,” Xtive President Yun Yun-hae said. “Game users can’t recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing. Tests tell us the sounds work.”�

Korea Times says: “Experts point out roughly 10 to 20 percent of high school students can be categorized as Web junkies who need treatment. And many believe that is a conservative perspective.”

Xtive has applied for a patent for the phonogram and wants to use the technology in other sectors, too: “We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential.”

Many teenagers spend too much time playing computer games, not only in Korea – I have two of these at home… Sound is very powerful and is used in spiritual techniques, as you can read in Basics of Spiritual Life on The Power of Sound. However, using subliminal messages to manipulate people, even “for their good” infringes free will – even if the will isn’t that free with game addicts. If people voluntarily submit themselves to these influences, why not. But using them, pre-installed, in games or in other contexts – just imagine shops – is violating our human identity.

Someone must have subscribed me (it wasn’t me) to a newsletter called The Soul Journey, which is published bi-weekly by the Canadian Andrew Schneider. He is an ex-Roman Catholic monk and author of different esoteric books.

Since he receives our Lunar Messenger, I didn’t unsubscribe, and normally have a quick look through the texts, which contain thoughts about different spiritual topics with questions to ponder upon. Here is the beginning of his latest newsletter which just arrived: “The Soul Journey – On Our Teachers”.

“Everyone we meet – strangers too – bring us a particular gift. They do not carry it in their hands, but emanate it from the core of their identity or from the peculiarities of their personality. Their gift is a teaching. Everyone can be our teacher if we are willing to learn.

Because we observe and experience others through our own psyche and soul we filter what we see through our own unconscious identity. Therefore every time we make an observation about someone, positive or negative, we are revealing something about ourselves. And since we are revealing something about our unconscious selves, everyone tells us something that we would be wise to pay attention to. …”

Numerous news sources reported that the French writer Dominique Lapierre and his wife Dominique Conchon-Lapierre had sold in an auction last December the famous black gown of Audrey Hepburn, that the actress wore in the 1961 film ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. The auction brought $825,000.

The dress was a gift of its designer, Hubert de Givenchy, in order to help Lapierre’s schools in India, that had been devastated by floods. The Lapierres are financing with the money from the Hepburn’s dress about 15 schools south of Kolkatta, the first one just being inaugurated. A great good-will activity.

Dominique Lapierre has also written a book with Javier Moro about the Bhopal gas tragedy and its aftermath. At the occasion of the auction, Lapierre said that his book has stopped other ‘Bhopals from recurring around the globe’.

You can see from this page a video from the auction.

Children in India