A Californian friend just sent me a heartwarming news video clip about the friendship between a man, his dog and a Canadian goose in Michigan by the name of Daisy Kare. It is fascinating to see how this friendship goes beyond the boundaries of species which normally keep them apart. An inspiring example for living together with differences.

You can see the short clip either in a rather bad quality from YouTube or, if you have Windows Media Player, as a streaming from here.

Last Friday the Catholic Church celebrated the World Social Communication Day. Pope Benedict XVI gave a media communication on Educating People to Truth, which can be underlined in the light of an understanding of general good will:

He pointed out: “While the print media struggles to maintain circulation, other forms of media such as radio, television and the internet are developing at an extraordinary rate. Against the backdrop of globalization, this ascendancy of the electronic media coincides with its increasing concentration in the hands of a few multinational conglomerates whose influence crosses all social and cultural boundaries.”

He further went on saying that internet too “has opened up a world of knowledge and learning that previously for many could only be accessed with difficulty, if at all.” “On the other hand, it is also readily apparent that much of what is transmitted in various forms to the homes of millions of families around the world is destructive.”

“The responsibility to introduce and educate children and young people into the ways of beauty, truth and goodness is,” he said, “a grave one. It can be supported by media conglomerates only to the extent that they promote fundamental human dignity, the true value of marriage and family life, and the positive achievements and goals of humanity. I appeal again to the leaders of the media industry to advise producers to safeguard the common good, to uphold the truth, to protect individual human dignity and promote respect for the needs of the family.”

When we met yesterday with the family of a friend on their stop-over, our friend reacted quite astonished when we told him that we don’t constrain our youngest son (14) to tell us where he is going. The friend said that he is clearly expecting his sons (16, 19) to inform him or his wife about their wherabouts, and that they have to come back latest at a pre-fixed time.

Of course, they are living in a big city in Northern Germany and we in a small suburb, and there are no serious dangers around. But there is something more about it. My wife answered him: “Unlike the older son, the younger one has a great urge for freedom. When he feels restricted, he shuts himself up on a subtle level. When he feels I am trusting him, he experiences I am supporting him, and he keeps open towards me. For me this openness also in the subtle is more important than trying to check upon him. And up to now nothing has happened.”

Our son doesn’t like telling us what he is doing. When we ask him, he answers “data protection”. And when he wants to know something particular from my wife or me, we retort: “data protection”.

Yesterday the family of a friend made a stop-over here on their way back from ski holidays. Since the two sons (16 and 19) had some posture problems in their shoulder region, my wife showed them a few yoga asanas. Then the younger one asked her if she could also tell him how to meditate. He had heard several times about meditation, but had no idea how to do it.

So she showed him a simple method – just observing the respiration. Afterwards she asked him how it was. He answered, he could not say. She told him, that’s just as it is, you cannot describe it, you have to experience.

Both of them go to college – you learn a lot of things there, but you don’t learn how to connect with your inner. You might have a look at the extract from the book “”Mithila” on spiritual education.

Meditation in the Planetary Healing Centre, Visakhapatnam, India.

The European Union just decided about obligatory measures for climate protection in the fight against global warming. The president of the EU commission, José Manuel Barroso, was asked by journalists about his personal commitment in this fight. He is driving a German luxury car as well as a big cross-country vehicle, known for high CO2-outputs. He answered that he doesn’t want to do without his cars, that it is not a matter of moral role models, but of political solutions of Europe.

Where does arrogance start? It seems to be normal that politicians take their liberty of living in contradiction to their official opinions. Nations too take their liberties to behave against their declared positions: Many EU-countries are far from reaching their own Kyoto-commitments. If these will really be effective remains a question. Nations are made of individuals and thus often behave like unintegrated personalities.

On the spiritual path these discrepancies between a behaviour out of outer compulsions and different inner attitudes are quite dangerous, for tensions arise. If we want to behave in a good way, we should do it for ourselves, to be truthful towards ourselves. Then only we can come to an integration of the different areas of our personality and fill the gap between knowledge and action.

My wife and I yesterday were at the vernissage of an exposition of Hugo Lizandro Godinez, a Guatemalan painter living in Switzerland, whose wife is a colleague of mine. The exposition exhibits watercolour pictures of old alleys in Antigua and Berne. The beautiful paintings show houses, flowers, water reflections, painted in subtle, but luminous colours full of different shades.

Though seemingly painted in a realistic manner, they have something dream-like, and though luminous, not only the titles indicate an ambiance of solitude and yearning. Some titles are “Melancholy”, “Reflections of Sadness” or “Lonely Wanderer”. The pictures are nearly all without any persons. The paintings reflect the undercurrent mood. The alleys are like symbols of search – old and lonely alleys. The painter is not old, but old might be the soul’s wandering.

My experience from my own youth time as well as from observing others is: This feeling of yearning and sadness results from an inner urge, which has not yet found the direction. This might cause restlessness, but also frustration and depression. You somehow sense that there must be a higher light, but you don’t know how to get there, how to find the way out of the cocoon of personality. You haven’t yet realised that there is the cocoon of the caterpillar blocking.

People might stay in this stage for very long, or they search in outer or erroneous directions, like drugs, workaholism, adventurism. When, often through crises, you have taken to the path of the soul, the higher self, you feel like getting replenished from within. The “reflections of sadness” of the lonely wandering dissolve into the fresh flow of energies: The wanderer has come home.

I got an e-mail from Maja Thommen, a Swiss artist living in Italy, inviting for an exposition which will be in the garden of the Parkhotel Delta in Ascona, Switzerland (the vernissage will be on April 13th, 07). (I had already written about her in a previous blogpost.) Here is a picture from this new exposition.

Though she told me that she is not working with a spiritual background, her work breathes a sensitivity for subtle perceptions of etheric structures and social relations. So see her “Little Emotional Medicine Chest“.

This photo I took at an exposition here in Muri/Berne 4 years ago could be a presentation of the incarnating soul enveloping into the dense physical tissues. You might like to read about “Etheric Existence” of the Good Will in Action-series.

As Heise.de reported yesterday, Bloggers have found out that Google Maps can give pictures in a much higher resolution than available with normal zooming: You zoom to a place, take the URL saying “Link to this page” into the address field of your browser. There is a parameter with which you can direct the zoom, which normally only gets to 19, to much higher values. So if you put in a higher value, you can zoom in much more – though not at all places. Here is a picture of a place somewhere in Africa with the zoom factor of 23, where you can even see the face of people looking upward, as if seeing the satellite observing. Here you have more sites with photos from space. So be careful when you are outside lying naked in the sun at a lonely beach – they might be watching you.

This zooming to places somewhere on earth reminds of what you can do with visualisation and the power of imagination. You can read more about it in the book extract on “Intuition” from the book “Saraswathi – The Word“, by Dr. K. Parvathi Kumar.

The UN has published a computer game called “Stop Disasters” in order to sensitise people how to prevent natural catastrophies. There are scenarios of measures against conflagrations, tsunamis, hurricanes or floods. The goal of the game is to save the population in dangerous areas. This free game is a way to bridge the digital divide between the so-called developed world and third-world countries.

The UN World Food Program has also launched a game where you can help to satisfy the world hunger: Food-Force. There you not only have the game, but also information about the reality, a blog as well as a possibility to donate. And another game entitled: “Darfur is Dying” uses the means of the web to call for help stopping the crisis in Darfur. Very interesting new ways of informing about disasters and entertaining. And a great way to motivate people for goodwill actions.

A friend just sent me a spectacular powerpoint presentation entitled Blue Beauty – beautiful images of our earth seen from space – especially impressive are the photos of nightfall. (1.7 MB). Enjoy