Last Sunday early morning at a Cafeteria in Zurich Airport: We were sitting in a small round together with Dr. Kumar, my spiritual teacher, who just had arrived from Hyderabad – Mumbay. We were discussing some final organisational and juridical questions in preparation of next day’s general assembly of our organisation helt in Germany. Over the years I had had several occasions observing him how he is dealing organisational matters in a very practical manner, with a great clarity of purpose. He is administering a great number of social projects in India and giving spiritual guidance to people all over the globe. In this meeting again I observed several remarks said seeming casually which gave me a better understanding of the matter. He summarised his attitude saying: “I keep focussing on Spiritual Hierarchy, and from out of this focus I work with the groups and the people. The work for the groups is always not just from the groups, but from Spiritual Hierarchy, and this gives the approach.”
Next day at the assembly I could observe again his practicality in the moderation of the proceedings, to include the different perspectives of arguments. For me his approach is liek a role model in dealing with people and situations. I have learnt a lot by thus observing.

My wife just bought an orange mug saying on one side “I didn’t do it” and on the other “It’s not my fault”. We have often heard these two famous sentences from our children when trying out who did hide the key of the apartment or who was responsible for a new scratch on the wall. But I also observe more subtly this excusing oneself with myself, when something doesn’t work out as I want it to go or when I don’t find an object – where it sometimes turns out that not the children, but myself placed it in an unsuspected corner.
Not seeing one’s own part and involvement in a situation is very far spread. I just observed with a friend how out of seeing the others reactions as cause of her situation causes quite some suffering to her. We don’t like accepting the responsibility for an awkward situation.
The media just reported yesterday that Beirut-based freelance Reuters photographer Adnan Haji had altered some photos from the war between Israel and Lebanon with Adobe Photoshop – and not even very subtly. On one of the photos there was darker smoke coming out of bombarded houses, on another you could see an Israelian airplane throwing “added” bombs. He excused himself by saying that he just had tried to remove dust from his photos… Reuters gave a statement that they immediately terminated their relationship with the photographer and withdrew all photos from their database.
Altering pictures is very common in the “war of the media”, trying to influence the masses. However, it is a spiritual law that manipulators will get manipulated themselves. While excusing is an expression of laziness of mind, manipulation distorts one’s sense of truth and gives with the time a queer perception of reality with a logic of one’s own.
Honesty and openness are the bases for building up a lasting foundation of trust, so that we don’t get entangled in a labyrinth of lies. And it requires truthful living for a long time before you can enter into the more subtle realms of wisdom.

At the annual conference of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Wikimania, just going on at Harvard Law School, the president of the Wikimedia Foundation announced the new project Wikiversity, a free platform for all kinds of educational materials and learning groups. He said that the virtual university will already start this month, at first in three languages, with more languages to follow.

This fascinating international group project will allows people all over the world to have access to education materials and to co-operate – if not a government blocks the access, as it is being done by China with the wikipedia sites. But there is hope that the flow of knowledge finds a way also to penetrate through the great internet-wall.

The multitude of simultaneously existing life-forms on earth is astonishing, and there are worlds next to us of which we have nearly no idea. Can you imagine the incredible diversity of strata of consciousness expressing through these life-forms? And still each is an expression on the background of the unity of existence.
The 11th International Deep Sea Biology Symposium 2006 helt in Southamton, UK, had an image competition in the context of the Serpent-Project. Have a look at these amazing pictures -� of a syphonophore from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, of an alienlike viperfish from approx. 2000 m depth or of a giant leptocephalus larva from the Pacific Ocean, almost completely transparent.
All these are life forms contempory to us, though seemingly very far away from our daily surroundings. At the same time they are giving uns an impression of how life-forms in the hoary past might have looked like and how important it is to guard well the basics for future times -not just the next 10 or 100 years.

Yesterday I read in the German technology newsticker heise online an article about The War in Lebanon and the Infrastructure of Israel, how deeply the war is wounding the people on both sides of the frontline. There were quotes from an Israeli woman in Haifa writing since years about the situation, who gave a statement which touched me:

“My personal opinion is that all of us here are victims: Jews, muslims, druzes, Christians, Samaritans, Circassians, Haha’i, Lebanese, Syrians, Israelis, Egyptians, Jordans, Bedouins, victims of despots, tyrans, terrorists of an area with a mentality abhorring ‘the others’, educating generation after generation to hate and insult ‘the others’, teaching that ‘the others’ cause all calamities, treating women heardly better than objects and proudly and publicly slaughters deviating mothers, daughters and sisters. Wars, hate and bloodshed will continue here until the end of the days. Peace is a western concept, unknown in the 5000 years old history of this reagion. This is the reality of the Middle East. Either you accept it and come to an arrangement with it or you emigrate.”

After one day of publication of the article there were over 1100 comments to it -emotions are going high about the doggedness of the war parties. One cited Mahatma Gandhi saying: “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Learning to see in the other the brother – (br)other – is a deeply spiritual challenge, and only when we learn to focus on the soul, we can overcome the separativeness of “mine” and “the other” – of individuals, groups or nations.

You might have come across in the media about the amazing true story of a baby hippo having lost his mother during a tsunami and got adopted by a tortoise, a story about love and acceptance, which even was published as a children’s book, Owen and Mzee – The True Story Of A Remarkable Friendship.
Even more interesting is the story about the Haller Park, in which this animal romance happened:
In 1952, a Swiss company, Cementia Holding AG Zurich, built a cement factory in Kenya just behind the palm-fringed Bamburi Beach, 12 kilometres north of Mombasa, which became the biggest of Kenya’s industrial giants, and East Africa’s biggest cement producer, but which destroyed the ecosystem of the area. In 1959, the plant hired Dr Rene Haller, a young agronomist from Lenzburg in Switzerland, with the mandate to produce food – fruit and vegetables – for employees of the factory, many of whom were undernourished, as well as spruce up the area surrounding the site. In the 1970s he started a unique ecological experiment, attempting to rehabilitate the limestone quarries scarring the Mombasa coastline. Today he has transformed much of the seven square kilometre Bamburi site from a barren and dusty lunar landscape to an ecological haven. The quarries are now a combination of lakes, wetlands and savannah grasslands, with walking and cycling trails, as well as a Nature Park and Wildlife Sanctuary – nearly 100,000 visitors came in 2002.
Dr. Haller published a book called From Wasteland to Paradise, where he presents the remarkable history of the transformation. Rene Haller recalls “The ugly wasteland expanded annual by tens of thousands of square meters. No plants seemed able to establish themselves. I spent countless hours in the hot dusty barren land, found a few ferns and perhaps half a dozen� grasses struggling to take root� – it was hardly an encouraging environment for tree planting. However one day I discovered in a remote part of the quarry five small casuarina trees . Finally I had found some life which inspired me – a glimmer of hope giving a direction which might be worthwhile following”.
His “Baobab Trust” is a charitable organisation committed to working closely with the surrounding local communities to develop innovative environmental and wildlife conservation practices.

Today the Swiss celebrate their national holiday (you might read my post on the American national holiday…). But there are also other occasions to be celebrated on this day:
I just got an e-mail from an American friend hinting at the festival of Lammas. It says on this site of the School of the Seasons:

“The Celts celebrate this festival from sunset August 1 until sunset August 2 and call it Lughnasad after the God Lugh. It is the wake of Lugh, the Sun-King, whose light begins to dwindle after the summer solstice. The Saxon holiday of Lammas celebrates the harvesting of the grain. The first sheaf of wheat is ceremonially reaped, threshed, milled and baked into a loaf. The grain dies so that the people might live. Eating this bread, the bread of the Gods, gives us life.”

And it goes on: “Bake a loaf of bread on Lammas. If you’ve never made bread before, this is a good time to start. Honor the source of the flour as you work with it: remember it was once a plant growing on the mother Earth. … What’s most important is intention. All that is necessary to enter sacred time is an awareness of the meaning of your actions. Shape the dough in the figure of a man or a woman and give your grain-person a name. If he’s a man, you could call him Lugh, the Sun-King, or … She of the Corn, She of the Threshing Floor, She of the Seed, She of the Great Loaf (these come from the Cyclades where they are the names of fertility figures), Freya (the Anglo-Saxon and Norse fertility Goddess who is, also called the Lady and the Giver of the Loaf), the Bride (Celtic) and Ziva or Siva (the Grain Goddess of, the Ukraine, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia).”

So enjoy the day and celebrate it with thoughts of the life-giving source.

People like telling stories, which don’t necessarily have to be true. Yesterday I got an e-mail from an Canadian friend informing that Mars will pass extraordinarily close to Earth in August 2006. By chance I “googled” it out and found on snopes.com, a website about “urban legends” that this message was a hoax. Also NASA hat already informed about this hoax.
I come quite frequently about such hoaxes, like a message about breast cancer by plastics or certain rain forest appeals. Some reached me several times in the course of years. I have learned to look up things on hoax-sites and not to believe every nice story or claim. Discrimination is a quality of the soul and we have to use it. Nevertheless enjoy the clarity of the night sky with Mars and the other celestial friends looking to you.

Since last sunday the world seems to be no longer the same – at least my computer-world. After a lot of time and energy spent in trying to restore the old PC (even with installing a new harddisk) and a lot of tips from the support team of my office, which I all tried without success, I finally had to agree that the PC-patient was about to die, or better the “lost data-continent” to sink. So I packed everything I could into the ark of a newly acquired external harddisk drive and set off to the new world, a new laptop. (As per the spiritual dimension of such a migration you might read the Lunar Messenger about “Dissolution and Creation“…)

And so the laborious process of the re-incarnation of the data to a new “baby”-laptop started (which however wasn’t tabula rasa, but already filled with a lot of impressions in form of programs.)
Long hours of work and installing the programs from the old PC yesterday ended in a start-up blockage, not allowing me any more to enter the windows program. The freshly burned emergency-CD proved to be unable to render out its data to the PC, only when stopping this process windows decided to give me entry into the new world (not to tell of other problems on the way, with printer, scanner, pdf-program….)
Using the try and error-method with different ways finally lead me to the report page of the laptop-producer, a well-known, world-leading enterprise. First I scrupulously filled out a registration form and error-report, in German, and when at the end I pressed the “send”-button, it turned out that all was done for fresh air: “Page not found”. The system was so kind to lead me to the corresponding English American page, where I started the process again, filling out all about my experiences with the high-tech deadlock of my new machine, hoping that since the laptop is from an American firm (though the machine is “made in China” – of course, the Chinese getting hold of the American market…), the webpage will work better in that language. The result however was the same: “Page not found”. Fine, I thought, this gives you a good lesson of detachment, overcoming my PC-addiction.
But there was the other voice saying: Try it with the support, try it with the support tomorrow, maybe they show you a way back to your pc-paradise. Looking up the stars in the astro-calendar, time seems to be auspicious: Mercury has stopped his retrograde movement yesterday (and when he, the ruler of communication and inter-connection is retrograde, electronics seem to run havoc – my PC at my office also stopped working last week, and I have other experiences of this weird influence, making me nearly superstitious….) and now things should start working again. So I’ll phone them tomorrow – fearing that they tell me to reset the entire harddisk, or to send in the laptop to the service…
If you don’t see any posts in the weblog over the next days, you can suppose me sweating, not from the sun, but from trying to restore the PC…

Back from holidays my PC went on strike – harddisk problems. Even trying to set up a new harddisk and data restoration failed – so there remains no time at the moment for blog posts -� probably until a new machine is installed 🙁