Do guerilla marketing and spiritualily fit together? I am fascinated by creative examples of this kind of marketing, that create great effects with unconventional ideas and a minimal budget. Of course, good will activities, inspired by the light of the soul, flourish best in silence without ego-marketing. The eternal wisdom, the light of the soul, does not reveal itself by running after things, but by silently applying it in daily life actions.
On the other hand water needs someone constructing the pipeline to your house, and for having access to inspiring wisdom teachings there needs to be an infrastructure to reach interested persons. Our Lunar Messenger newsletter or the good will postcards are instruments of a viral marketing, where people inform their friends of the existence of the good-will website and thus the wisdom teachings availabe there. Every month after sending out the newsletter new subscriptions are coming in, showing that these persons probably have been informed by their friends. But it is the persons themselves who need to show their interest.
Guerilla marketing would take one step further to create attention. One good example: The story of Mary Woodbridge, and elderly English lady of 85 years of age went through the media. She told on her uk-located website as well as in forums that she is planning a Mount Everest expedition together with her dog. She said she got the idea when she bought a certain outdoor jacket, and now she is training an searching sponsors to finance her expedition. On her website she published photos of her training, of expeditions, of letters to and negative answers from sponsors. This created much discussion in the media world-wide. It was only months later that a Swiss outdoor clothes manufacturer outed himself as originator of this hype, with placing a warning on the website of the lady, that their clothes can cause a loss of common sense, because they are so good…
This prize-winning activity uses surprise and discussion in the target-groups as a means of marketing their products. At the same time it was a warning of the many hobby-mountaineers, who each year are rescued in the Alps or in other mountains.
Using pretences and illusion are not the adapt means of promoting good will, but getting people involved in activities for the common welfare and in inner growth are objectives worth while using also uncommon approaches.

Two days ago my son installed a free program on my laptop changing its outlook from a Windows to an Apple – with the design transformed in all nooks and corners of the system. Even the start/shutdown button is now decorated with the biten apple, new sounds, and the programs coming dancing down from a new toolbar.
It looks nice – a real metamorphosis, a butterfly from a caterpillar. Oh, the inside stayed the same, even if the apple shows up at the startup and the explorer has other folders – it’s just a label change much like when you take to a new body at birth, where the label changes, but the being inside has the same core reincarnating.

Already since several years you can see photos in virtual reality on the web, which give you the impression of looking around in 360 degrees.
Now you can get your body even scanned in a 3D way and get a counterpart of you, either in polymer gypsum, metal or marble. “3D Culture” has developed a high-tech 3D-scanner “Scanguru” which digitally seizes the surface relief of your head or your body. From this the laser-scan is processed to a 3D data model, then a computer-controlled machine makes in many hours a gypsum-blank out of the 3D-model, from which at the end an artist might form a stone scupture in the classical way.
On the site you can even get 3D-pdfs where you can hover around in all directions.
Though there is still quite a way to beaming oneself from one place to the other, it is an interesting approach of combining hightech and art.

At the moment Astronomers are holding their 3 year’s international conference in Prague, where experts from 75 countries are discussing about a universal definition of what constitutes a planet and whether Pluto really belongs to this list. In 2005 a rocky object called 2003 UB313 was discovered which is far bigger than Pluto and which would be the 10th planet – or another number according to the definition.
Spiritual Astrology looks at planets as the visible vehicles of spiritual principles and says that there is a higher number of planets which are not all on the dense physical plane, but, like the human soul, might be for times exist on subtler planes of existence, coming down and going back in the cycle of creation. Whether the astronomers define Pluto a planet or not is arbitrary, the spiritual principle expressed through it is known much longer than since 1930, the year when Pluto was discovered. In the East it is called Yama, the Lord of Death or the principle of deepest transformation. This principle will hold true, even if Pluto is discarded from Astronomers’ list of planets.

P.S., 25th August 06: Pluto has just seen his status as a planet rejected, which is very typical of the qualities linked to him in spiritual astrology – hidden not perceivable powerful influences. He is degraded to be a minor planet, together with other candidats to this group. You see how powerful our mental conceptions or definitions are – they decide of the categories into which we classify things.

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 -Â 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.