Today I read an article in the Heise.de newsticker about the “Free and Open Source Developers Meeting FOSDEM” helt last weekend at the Free University of Brussels. The article characterised the participants as follows: “Long-haired male developers with t-shirts were the majority of the participants, followed by short-haired developers with t-shirts, who were built a bit more bulky. Two developers in tailor-made suits really attracted attention. They turned out to be Russian software engineers … ”

It is fascinating to observe the dress codes of different social groups. People might think they are free to dress as they like, but it is like strict dress regulations: Whosoever oversteps the unwritten rules of a peer group is irritating the social classification system. You observe this with professional as well as with leasure time dress codes, not to speak of special social group codes.

At my student times I used to play with the code when I was going with short hair, tie and suit to the university where the style of the co-students was quite otherwise. A few years before I used to wear long hair, an echo of the hippie times. According to the outfits the reactions were very different…

Seen from a spiritual standpoint, dresses are wrappings around the body and the body is a wrapping around the soul. We normally identify ourselves with the habits and forget that they are just envelopes. You might read more about the “envelopes” in the Lunar Messenger on “Body and House“. See also the blogpost on Dress Codes and Normalcy.

Sadhus in Northern India – imagine them sitting in a western bank.

In an article about work efficiency of managers in the Swiss-German newspaper “Der Bund“, Heike Bruch, professor of Leadership and Human Resources Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, stated that their research has shown: “Normally a manager just works seven minutes running.” Only one out of ten managers has enough energy and focus to do effective work.

Often when difficult decisions have to be made they tend to do substitute acts. Many lose themselves in daily business and as a consequence their focus is suffering. They entertain many interactions with co-workers and customers instead of concentrating on long-term or strategic tasks. They prefer working like fire extinguishers. Although they often have the choice of setting their priorities, many find it difficult to do so. The very efficient ones mostly show a predilection for one or two projects on which they focus with all their will-power and leave other things aside.

At St. Gallen university they have done energy profiling for different sections or whole enterprises: There is a direct correlation between the measured energy level in an enterprise and its economic success. When the energy level is very low, a short term strategy is “killing the dragon”, basing on the fact that an external menace releases energies. If an enterprise is in a crises, the heads do well to show to the employees how serious the situation is. If all are pulling into the same direction, a turnaround can come about. But “killing the dragon” doesn’t work as a long-term strategy. For this leadership and innovation are needed on all levels, not only at the top.

Killing the Dragon – Scene on the wall of the Münster at Basel, Switzerland.

In spirituality the dragon is a symbol of wisdom or energy enchained in matter. Killing the dragon means, overcoming the conditioning of personality to get back into contact with the soul. From there the energy will flow in. Through a re-alignment of our lives towards higher goals we get energy and inspiration. In management language this is taking to the “leadership” of the soul and the “innovation” of a re-oriented direction of life. As per the symbol of the dragon see the Lunar Messenger on “The Mystery of the Serpent“.

The problem of not being able to focus on one thing for a longer time or getting lost in daily business has to do with an overactive mind. It is an experience that people used to regularly exposing themselves daily to periods of silence by meditating calm down the “overdrive” of mental activity.

Two days ago we were at the concert of the school big band of our son, where he is playing trombone – an impressive performance entitled “Noche de Salsa”. One of the two conductors mentioned that for the orchestra there are life cycles like waves, with ups and downs, and this was just the crest time, having been built up over months of rehearsals. A wave trough will follow in summer, when over 10 students will leave the college.

This is a very common movement of living systems going through time cycles, be it a product life cycle, a trend, periods of an individual life or on a bigger scale of enterprises, of nations, of cultures. When you are experiencing the top you easily forget that the drift might change and other currents come in.

On the spiritual path it is most important to observe these subtle changes in the quality of time cycles and watch out for favourable or crosscurrents. It is very useful to combine this with an observation of the changing planetary rhythms. You can read more about the way to deal with time cycles in the Lunar Messenger on “Working with the Key of Time“.

Waves at the Gulf of Bengal in India, January 07.

A friend from Reno, Nevada, US, sent me a copy of a little article on the lessons learned from the “Donner Party.” The Donner’s were a German family who helped organize a wagon train to travel to California 150 years ago. Of the 90 souls who set out to go West about half of them died in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at a place that is called Donner Lake today. The story of the Donner tragedy is very familiar in the Western USA. Some of the party, in order to survive starvation, ate the remains of those who had died.

Frank Mullen, author of the book “The Donner Party Chronicles”, writes: “They were like us because we make the same mistakes. Nothing has really changed. They are us in every way. Their hopes and dreams. Their desire to be heroic. Their ‘watch out for number one’ attitude. In a sense we haven’t learned anything from history. I think we seldom do. We make the same mistakes. We allow the same divisions of class, race, national origin, and wealth to keep us apart. We act the same way, except maybe in a big flood like the one we had in Reno last year, where we saw homeless people filling sand bags beside casinos bosses downtown. But you see it in most cases of adversity in general life and in politics especially, where people blame each other instead of working together.”

“It’s really a human story. And when you see the human personalities in the Donner Party, when you see how people reacted to adversity, you realize you know people like Donner, Reed, Breen, and the others. We really know these people because they haven’t changed much in 150 years. … You see this with environmental problems and what to do with the homeless… Prejudices tend to lump people together and say, ‘Let’s get rid of all of them.’ But there’s something wrong with the logic of that. It doesn’t work.”

Read the article if you have time.

Gobi Desert

A friend from the States just sent me a link to the website of photographer John Hyde, on “Wild Things“. Enjoy the beautiful pictures of Alaska:

A friend sent me the following photo, which was commented: “This table was for sale on eBay. How can you tell it is being sold by a man? Can you solve this little riddle? First look and guess. You will find the answer below, but don’t cheat!”

Don’t just laugh, when you solve the riddle. The comment said: “Look at the picture in the mirror. And remember, if you are posting a picture on the world-wide web, wear clothes when taking the picture.”

From a spiritual viewpoint the situation is very symbolic: As souls we are naked, the pure higher self. We reflect ourselves in the mirror called mind and “look” through the camera of the senses. Observing the outer we get identified with it and forget ourselves, forget about the reflection. When we realise again who and where we are – the I am clad for a while in a body – we might smile about our funny personality.

You can read more about reflections of existence in the Lunar Messenger on “The Play of Illusions“.

A news in the German IT-newsletter Heise.de reported games developers are sure that in 2 years characters in computer games will have photo-realistic faces with authentic facial expressions, expressing emotions. These human-like characters should be difficult to distinguish from presentations of human beings. Ian Livingstone, from Eidos, the producer of the “Tomb Raider“- series even says: “We will be able to play with the emotions of the people – we can make them laugh or cry, we can make them sad.”

Digital life is more and more mingling with real life, the boundaries are getting more and more blurred: A whole parallel universe is developing on the platform Second Life, a virtual 3D internet world with over 3 million gamers. Here nearly everything is like in real life – shops, banks, enterprises – and above all entertainment: Chatting with friends, going to parties, creating your own fantastic outlook or surrounding – in a city or on an island of your own.

The virtual life is also a bonanza for making money or marketing. So it is no wonder that the “real” world is penetrating the virtual world with big enterprises like Mercedes or IBM opening branches there. Sweden has opened an “embassy” there and the big German media house Bild.T-Online is publishing an English second-life magazine called The AvaStar, reporting only about events in the virtual world, of course available only electronically. The title is a combination of the words “star” (and everyone in Second Live wants to be a star) and “avatar”, the virtual personality – and in spirituality an incarnation of the Divine.

The virtual second life reminds of the etheric plane or more subtle planes of “first life”, which you might contact in out-of-body experiences or about which people with near-death experiences report: After having shed the body and before passing on to higher planes the soul stays for a while in a world of subtle forms called kama-loka in Eastern wisdom, the world of desire-forms. You can get stuck there – very much like in the virtual world of electronic games. The headline of The AvaStar: “Newbies Lost in Grid Chaos – confused newbies suffer first day nightmares in Second Life” could very well refer to the experiences of a person arriving in the world of near-death experiences. Have a look at the Lunar Messenger on “Etheric Existence and Good Will“.

A friend sent me today a link to a YouTube-video about change of lighthouse crews, with the words:

“On those days when you think you’ve hit every roadblock possible, or you think the hurdles to get the service activity done seem insurmountable, think of the lighthouse crew.”

The scene is not just a video-clip, but is full of deep spiritual symbolism: The waves represent the turbulences of outer life, the ocean the totality of the background existence. The boat can be seen as the man who is steering his way through the waves. The lighthouse is a symbol of the higher self, the soul, giving illumination. There is a gap between the boat and the lighthouse, which is bridged by a rope, via which the crew ascends and descends. It says that between the personality and the soul, resp. between the higher and the lower mind there is a gap, which has to be bridged on the spiritual path. Read more about this in the Lunar Messenger on “Building the Bridge“.

So contemplating on a situation may give you a deeper understanding than just watching the outer scenes

Inspired by spiritual topics dealt with on the Good-Will website people sometimes write questions. So a person asked a few days ago: “What about apparitions of Jesus Christ, of his personal messages? Messages of the Holy Virgin Mary and angels in dreams? Or about certain masters or just dreams about the god Thot?”

Sceptical people with an intellectual attitude generally mock such experiences or rationalise them away, whereas esotericists indulge in fanciful hypotheses. There exists an ocean of channeled messages, and many people flock to supernaturalist phenomena like moths to the light. However the “livecycle” of their interest is generally just a few months or years, before other things occupy their attention. There is not deeper transformation of character happening.

The answers the wisdom teachings give belong to neither of these two parties. They might be desillusioning to those who are attracted by a craving for sensation. However, they might also give explanations to an agnostic, but open mind in search of a deeper understanding.

The teachings say that there are many persons claiming to have contact with Jesus, Maria and all kinds of masters and that each strong concept forms a thought form on the mental plane. People can contact these thought forms loaded with a lot of devotional emotion when they have a certain affinity and sensitivity, this also during sleep hours. This has nothing to do with a certain degree of spiritual development, but with the openness of certain subtle energy centres. The mental plane is full of imaginations created by man, and on the spiritual path it is regarded as some kind of a “cinema”, which might be fascinating, but mainly illusionary.

The real inner contact with masters of wisdom or other sublime beings happens in silence, without publicity, and expresses in an inspiration for a work of service to the well-being of mankind. It demands a cultivation of character, a purity of the personality. If someone has visionary experiences, in dreams, meditations or during the wakeful hours, it is good to observe them and note them down in a diary, and also to observe their quality and impact on one’s life. This way you feel what this “gift” is telling you – and you leave away all kind of proselytising others.

If people claim having certain visions or contacts, the best is to observe them and their character without any sensational attitude or curiosity, but with a good sense of discrimination. The energy of a “message”, of a dream or a possible apparition is the proof if the underlying impulse is a genuine spiritual one or a cloak for more or less subtle personality glamour. Running after phenomena leads nowhere except into the jungle of opinions and irritations. Genuine spiritual experiences blossom from an impulse received in one’s inner being.

Yesterday a friend sent me the Open Letter of the vice president of the European Vegetarian Union, Renato Pichler, to Mr. Barroso, president of the European Commission in the context of the ongoing destruction of our world. He invited him to initiate an objective and open investigation about vegetarianism as a compassionate lifestyle and about the benefits it delivers in view of fighting against the global climate change.

The letter cited the statement of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that global climate change is “very likely” to have a human cause, and the FAO-warning that “livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.” The European Parliament even alerted on 31 January 2007 that `Fighting climate change is about “saving civilization”‘.

In this it has to be considered that vegetarians do not have any share in the raising and killing of many billions of sentient animals. A vegetarian diet has to do with Good Will, for with a meatless diet we contribute to avoid not only violence against animals but also a better use of the agricultural resources.

You might like to download our free brochure: “Ideas and Recipes for a Lacto-Vegetarian Diet.“