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 🙁

Back from holidays I found today a note about a post in Yahoo answers of the theoretical physicist and best-seller author Stephen Hawkins (“A Brief History of Time”), asking: “How can the human race survive the next hundred years? In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”

The question of the famous handicapped physicist raised an enormous interest, and already 4 days after the posting there were 21.000 answers by commentors. He himself didn’t give an answer to his question. But up to now there are already over 24.600 answers – from jokes to serious replies. Answers are quickly given – but what about applying them?
About 2.500 years ago Pythagoras already gave the central answer, which you find in his wisdom teachings:
“It is the duty of every spiritual student to reduce one fool in this Creation before he dies and that is oneself. He should also see that there is one more wise man on this Earth, and that is also oneself. Afterwards you can do whatever you want. This is the minimum that is expected of a spiritual student.” So if you overcome your foolishness, the world is not the problem.

A private situation had caused quite some activities during the last weeks – clarifications, talks, reflections. At the end it turned out that the whole activity had developed on wrong assumptions and had been “for nothing”.
Wrong assumptions or wrong hopes, caused by subtle expectations can very easily land you in a bubble of illusions. When the bubble burst, I was first irritated. Some family talks showed the different perspectives of the situation, but since some central aspects weren’t on the hand, the mental “castle in the air” could undergo its cycle of construction and dissolution.
It seemed to me examplary to many activities we are entertaining in life, keeping us busy and in tension with illusionary ideas. In Eastern wisdom the whole creation is seen as being based on the illusion of the many parts, letting us forget the truth of the whole. This does not mean that the individual item is unreal, but when you come to experience the underlying truth, you awake from the frantic pace of the “dreamwork” activity.

On March 31st I posted the first blog-entry, not knowing what would follow. Now, a bit over 3 months and 99 blogposts later I’m still fascinated by this medium and by the multitude of facets of “flowers on the wayside”, which every day come “along the roads of good will”.
Normally I write in the early morning hours, fresh thoughts are dropping into a still calm mind. During the daily hustle and bustle there doesn’t remain much time for a meditative reflection, which nevertheless is an elixir of life. So lets drink this elixir to the well-being of the blog. Cheers!

Yesterday I read a fascinating article in the NZZ (New Zurich Newspaper) about the uncalculable vaccum, why empty space racks the brains of particle physicists and cosmologist. After resuming the historical past of assumptions about the vaccuum, the author summed up the opinion of modern physics saying: “So the vaccum is not nothing, but a complicated physical object, in which electromagnetic fields and elementary particles keep on being created and destroyed. From this results that eavery cubic centimetre contains a certain energy: the vacuum energy, to which each virtual elementary particle gives a contribution.”
This statement about the vacuum energy is absolutely in tune with the teachings of eternal wisdom, where creation is described as being a manifestation from seeming nothingness to aparent something. In the Secret Doctrine Helena P. Blavatsky is fighting against the concept of the vacuum as a volume of space that is substansively empty of matter, (as� said in Wikipedia), and she ironically says that “empty space” is only existing in the brains of the scientists (of her time).
In the Vedas there is a formula of creation, “Purna Madah Purna Midam…”. Purna stands for fullness and nillness, fullness as the apparent manifestation, nillness as seeming nothingness. In the book “Mantrams. Their Significance and Practice” Dr. Kumar gives the meaning of the Vedic expression in mathematical terms: “THAT (the unmanifest) is zero, THIS (the manifest) is zero. When zero comes out of zero, zero remains.”
In the NZZ article the author describes latest findings of astrophysics, from observations of star explosions that there seems to be some kind of dark matter having a repulsive energy, which might be associated with the energy of the vaccuum. However, it seems that the ensuing results are such that either the scientists have made wrong calculations and the universe is incredibly exploding, or their concepts of the universe are totally wrong.
He ends up saying that the vacuum is not empty but contains everything which gives a great worry to the scientists.