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.“

I yesterday got from a friend a short video file also posted on Google Video, “Driving in Russia“. It shows car accidents in a tunnel seen from a monitoring camera. The kind of driving reminds of video-games like Need for Speed etc., but these are real people causing real accidents and not just bumper cars.

Seeing the video you might laught or shake your head. In reality it’s quite sarcastic what you see when you think of the consequences.

The traffic rush is an expression of the hectic pace of today’s life, which is stimulated by an overactive mind. It is also a metaphor for the stream of routine action just running on through a tunnel of focus. You often keep going on even if something comes crossways and throws you off the line, where it would be better to stop for a while, observe the situation and go on slowly, with more attention to the “traffic” of events. Stopping the routine traffic of daily life through interludes of silence is an important part of spiritual work.

Last week a friend sent me pictures of amazingly grown trees. I found out that they were originally grown by Axel Erlandson (1884-1964), the son of Swedish immigrants in Central California. He shaped his trees for over 40 years and created the worlds most outstanding examples of Arborsculpture. He would create designs on paper first and then plant in the specified patterns; pruning, grafting and bending them. When Erlandson was asked how he got his trees to grow like this, he would reply, “I talk to them.”

Later the trees were put into a park to attract people to the Tree Circus.

What we call our character can be cultivated in a similar way. We can transform our nature through loving attention and long-lasting focus. This process of cultivation of character through right thinking and living has been beautifully described by Thackerey in his words:

“Sow a thought and reap an action; sow an action and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap character; sow character and reap destiny.”

The effort to control one’s lower impulses needs repetition, until it becomes a habit, a second nature. When a new habit is established, the repetition needs no effort after a certain time. The habit will be engrafted, like the grafting of a tree. When you keep a branch of a tree under soil for some time, the branch begins to send roots into the soil, making it an independent tree, so that you can cut off the branch from the parent tree to make it an independent plant. So a new habit should become independent of the old, unprogressive habit, and cutt off from the old one.

This is the purpose of repetition in learning new things and especially in spiritual training. See also the Lunar Messenger on “The Power of Habit”.

Last week an article in the Swiss newspaper Der Bund about “What managers can learn together in a zoo” presented the trainer Lorenz Nufer who uses animals as metaphers and mirrors for managers. In the zoo they study different forms of behaviour and organisation: Wolves have extreme forms of hierarchy and baboons have a lot of conflicts, where you can study how they solve them. Enterprises are not just like zoos, but the way man and gorilla hordes are showing off resembles a lot. Watching animals helps to get a distanced view on one’s own behaviour. Discussing about behaviour forms of animals helps getting blocked forms of communication go again. Behaviour-oriented learning can leave deep traces, but you have to deal with it in the right way and not just like a funny experience. A transfer has to be done in order to get to a deeper understanding. The event of an excursion into a zoo is only an instrument and not a solution by itself.

Many executives react on increased challenges according to the motto “try harder”, and they make increased efforts, which are neither useful for the individual nor for the organisation. Bot the persons concerned don’t get out of that pattern. With an exercise which they cannot solve alone they can be empowered to realise that they have to look for help and not to go on trying by themselves. Those who have really experienced the need for help are likely not to repeat the old patterns.

In spirituality animals are also often used as examples to illustrate the behaviour of man or his different faculties. So the mind is normally compared to a monkey jumping around and very difficult to be controlled. In the Book of Rituals Dr. Krishnamacharya writes: “Since man has crossed the consciousness of all the living beings on this earth during his course of evolution his consciousness contains the association (Vasanas) of all the animals in his behaviour. This is the only possible explanation of the animal behaviour of man.”

Apes playing in an Indian temple.

Today I got an e-mail from a friend telling that for some month she was together with a man who had had much to do with drugs and alcohol. During that time it seemed that her problems were increasing while many things seemed to be going on very easy for him. She suddenly realized in meditation the reason for her present situation, she felt like being contaminated from his energies. She then decided to get her energy back, and from that day on the other one seemed to encounter only crosscurrents. People were now less friendly with him and everything he tried to do didn’t work.

From a spiritual perspective what my friend experienced is called vampirism of energy. It is the complete opposite of the true, harmonious, mutual exchange of energy. The excessive use of alcohol and drugs destroys the subtle tissues of the body and cuts the person off from the natural supply of psychic energy. So he might suck his supply from other person’s stock.

People do not want to understand that all kinds of alcoholic drinks, drugs, smoking, and so many other poisons decompose the human nature and that they infect space with their poisonous breath. In the book ”New Era Community” # 97 of the Agni Yoga series it says about such people:
“As a result of being with them, enormous fatigue is felt. They not only do not think about others, but even their own instinct of self-preservation is becoming dim.”

To a certain extent it is possible to counteract such violent selfishness. For this it is important to keep in contact with your inner resources and to try to have no dealings with people who absorb one’s energy uselessly.
If people learn the importance of exchange and cooperation, then they will also deal in a constructive way with energy.