I yesterday got two e-mails from American friends both writing that around them there was Independence Day being celebrated, but that they didn’t feele like going into patriot feelings. With many countries it is a tradition of celebrating independence days, and often it is used to stimulate these patriotic sentiments – launching a space shuttle or waving flags, not only in football stadiums – are instrumental to this.
At its basis it is a good thing to celebrate independence – not just as a commemoration of gaining political self-determination, but the quality of an individual, a group or a nation to find one’s own way and rhythm of living – and to accept that of the others without imposing on others what one thinks is right for oneself. Everybody feels the way he goes is the right one, but it is arrogant to think that there is only one way.
Especially in the spiritual realm the respect for the individual – be it an individual soul or a nation – is very high. When we are in tune with our higher selves, we are thinking more from the perspective of the other and try to find out what their real needs are. This goes for nations, too – no ideological or commercial or violent aggression upon others.
Nations too have to attain to their highest aims and live according to it. Living in the light of the soul we are really getting independent – something worth celebrating.

At the moment I observe a lot of planning and preparing going on around. We are just preparing the coming holidays. Every evening my eldest son is out, planning with colleagues the local scouts’ summer camp. In my office I’m planning the revision of our intranet. Yesterday I studied an architect’s plan for a house, with so many details for the realisation. Some more plans are under way and have to be attended to. Every morning there is a subtle plan of how the day will evolve. If I listen to it, I better understand what is “in the air”.
Normally at the moment of planning the project planned is still invisible in the outer, but there is al lot of mental activity going on, concretising the details and preparing the way. It is such an important work, for if there are mistakes, the whole will work out wrongly. The mistakes may seem to be little, but the effect can be tremendous – and it might condition you for a long time. I saw this with some decisions made with the intranet realised some years ago, which are conditioning different forms of workflow. In the Eastern wisdom teaching it says that even the creator was not happy with his first creation and decided for a new one. What to say about the plan for our lives? If you observe, you may realise that there there are bigger plans and master-plans. Listen to them is important in spirituality (here you find more about it).
Before the plan comes about, there is a seed impulse, an idea. Often it is there slumbering in the soil for long before it starts sprouting. The resulting manifestation is only for an untrained eye something new – there are causes and effects going long back into the past. It is of utmost importance to observe the sprouting and discriminate between seeds and weeds. Or would you like to start again and again, when something goes into the wrong direction?

Yesterday after a swim in the river Aare I had a short look at the art exposition in the park of Villa Mettlen, a beautiful old villa here, where the music school is located (and where my kids are having lessons) and where every three years there is an art exhibition. Last time I was fascinated by some sculptures of Maja Thommen, a Swiss artist living in Italy. Via e-mail we came into contact and one evening, when she was in Berne, she came for a visit with an interesting exchange about art and spirituality. Many of her artworks show a spiritual dimension.
When I went around in the park of Villa Mettlen I was again amused of the banality of a number of pieces exhibited. Rust and oxidation seem to be the favorite elements of the artists, and some show raw or even brute artefacts. Some demonstrated a good handicraft work, others seemed to me like intellectual concepts solidified – dry uninspired, repetitions of much seen forms.
The intellectual plane doesn’t have a connection with the plane of intuition, from where original creativity stems. Although several objects showed interesting plays of forms, only very little did appeal to me through an expression of beauty.
Beauty is a reflection of the sublime planes of the spirit into matter, radiating, and of clear, shining colours, sometimes going into transparent states. In materialistic forms grey and dark, dull colours prevail. Several objects in the expositions expressed suffering and being bound to matter – a real reflection of the dark and heavy sides of our age – “modern” art.
Luckily there is a synchronizity of states, and more lightful expressions of creativity do exist as well.

Yesterday evening I got an e-mail from a friend from Germany asking me to send an English copy of the book Mithila. A New Age School Syllabus, by Dr. K. P. Kumar. She is the head of a group called Dem Frieden dienen (Serving Peace) and they are running a website called Youth Forum Mithila, dedicated to further a spiritual education (I reported about it here). She wrote that since she is getting requests from management trainers and other people working with education, also with some groups in Africa, she is planning to do part of the site in English – up to now it is mainly German, but with some articles in English, just go through the navigation). The website has grown a lot over the year of its existence, encompassing now ethical stories from East and West, little reports about youth projects of different groups (under the title “Learning Life”), about Nature and Cosmos (about� the star constellations of a month or on healing herbs, the mysteries of water or the crop circles), not to forget a section with little mathematical and other games and all the chapters of the above mentioned book on Mithila.
I am fascinated by this initiative, since it gives in a fresh way a lot of inspiration to show to youngsters (and those who have remained young or work with children) how to life a modern life with a spiritual perspective.
Although there are numerous activities trying to approach children to an ethical living – here ethical and religious questions is even a school subject – it is my observation that many children don’t adopt it because it is not really linked to life – their lives. So showing practical examples and living spirituality with children might give them an orientation and help them to cross the counter-currents of today’s mainstream way of life.

Yesterday evening I read in a lecture by Dr. E. Krishnamacharya on Advanced Astrology (Spiritual Astrology), given in Munich 1981, about the evolution of consciousness. We are living in different layers of consciousness. In the animal kingdom, a dog for example is conscious of his environment or his master, but not of himself. In the human kingdom through eons of time self-consciousness has developed. This means, we have the possibility to be conscious of ourselves, of our soul existence. But mostly we are not.
All these routine activities we are going through every day – eating, drinking, running to office and doing all these activities we are normally doing are just a mechanical activity of our intelligence, in which we need not be present fully. Even though we are awake, a part of ourselves is just drowsy. How well I know this kind of drowsyness. Only at certain corners where I have to pay attention there is more awareness.
The spiritual layer of consciousness becomes awake through meditative work, and sometimes we can experience it also in our daily routine, when we do things with more awareness. My experience is that it is a continuous striving and practicing to live in that consciousness and not to sleep away into the half-conscious state of day-to-day routine living.
Routine is such a strong thing. If I try overcoming it, it catches again hold of me in the next moment. Well – consciousness is growing slower than grass, is a saying of Master Morya. So patience is the key, patience and keeping up with the practice.

Yesterday evening we were intensely discussing a family project, going into different details, when my eldest son said: “You can’t sell the skin of a bear which isn’t yet shot.” (No, we weren’t talking about Bruno the Bear who just was shot in Bavaria and against the killing of it Italy wants to go to an EU-court in Brussels, as the news reported yesterday…) It seemed me to be in a symbolic sense a statement about how to deal with speech, not only in regard to the family project – about which I won’t speak 😉
When you speak or write about something, there is often this question of what to say when and how. It is a subject I am very much confronted with – not only when writing in the blog, but also at the office, where I’m responsible for the electronic communication, or in different volunteer works in the context of our group work.
It is of utmost importance to discriminate what and how something can be said and with which words. I very often come into contact with different forms of misunderstanding arising out of what was said, what was heard and what was the resultant. Most conflicts arise out of the dealing with speech, with the word.
In India the word is even considered as a deity, Saraswathi, the goddess of wisdom, and there is the Sanskrit saying, “Satyam bruyat, priyam bruyat” – speak the truth, speak the truth softly. Mastering the right use of the word is indeed a great skill of wisdom.

In the Aquarian Age everything is becoming lighter in weight – the material of houses, the fabrics of clothes, the bodies of people. The keynote of electronics is miniaturing things and getting them lighter. Here a news in this trend:
OmniVision has just launched the smallest camera of the world, just 2,1×2,3 mm thin. It is a camera sensor which a patient can swallow as part of a pill and which then allows doctors/surgeons to navigate to the desired location for a better diagnosis. Science fiction is becoming a reality.

Yesterday I was at a staff forum of my office (I’m working here and I like it). There were several presentations called “market places”, and I was among others at a presentation of two doctors of chiropractic, who spoke about the effects of workplace effects on your body and the importance of micropauses (this is not just what they distributed and showed, but gives you an idea).
I found it an important topic for me – at my office I’m working for hours at the desktop, and in my freetime as well… The idea of interrupting the work from time to time for a micropause, to do some special movements to relax the body and counteract tensions convinced me. This was not new for me, but in practice I’m doing very little pauses. Now I fixed the paper at my workplace at the wall just in front of my eyes – and will do it at home as well – hoping that this will help me to interrupt the work for a micropause here and then.

If you like to see humorous cartoons, have a look at Randy Glasbergens website. The cartoon from monday this week reflects well the “problem” of good-will activity, (see: cartoons from the past seven days) even though it plays in heaven…

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a person to whom I had send the book Spiritual Psychology. He wrote: “May I T U for the last book Sp.Psy …” I first was irritated: ITU? Of course I understood, it was not the first time I got such an e-mail. I know of the no-time-generation using abbreviations as some kind of a shorthand. Ad-language does: “4U”, “B2B”, … Washing away syllables in pronouciation goes into the same direction.
Of course I use in certain contextes abbrevisions, too. However, reducing basic elements of language to cryptic syllables and unclear sounds gives me the impression of a further deterioration of language. My spiritual teacher Dr. Kumar writes in “Mantrams. Their significance and practice“, “Language degenerates as man degenerates.” The degeneration of language is an expression of man loosing himself in the material, and when he re-ascends to spirit, he also develops a sensitive way of dealing with language.